14 “En mi pobre rancho, / vidalitá, / no existe la calma, / desde que está ausente, / vidalitá / el dueño de mi alma.” These lines, along with the stanzas that follow, are Argentine folksongs. The chorus line Vidalitá comes from the folk genre vidalita, typical of the northwestern region of Argentina.
15 “Amalaya fuera perro, / mi palomita, / para no saber sentir, / ¡adiós, vidita! / El perro no siente agravios, / mi palomita, / todo se le va en dormir, / ¡adiós, vidita!”
16 “Una vieja estaba meando / (y adiós, que me voy) / debajo de una carreta / (¡cuál será su amor!) / y los bueyes dispararon / (y adiós, que me voy) / creyendo que era tormenta / (¡cuál será su amor!).”
17 “De arribita me he venido / (la pura verdad) / pisando sobre las flores / (vamos, vidita, bajo el nogal): / Como soy mocito tierno / (la pura verdad) / vengo rendido de amores / (vamos, vidita, bajo el nogal).” Marechal collected and/or invented many more folkloric ditties such as these for possible inclusion in his novel. See Marisa Martínez Pérsico (147–96).
18 The idea was propagated (invented?) by Leopoldo Lugones, who in El payador (51) spoke of an Andean Sea and even claimed to have found fossilized clam shells in Covunco, Neuquén (51n).
19 Florentino Ameghino (1854–1911) was an Argentine paleontologist and anthropologist whose book La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata (1880) sustained the thesis that humanity originated in the Argentine pampa. Bernini, the character based on Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, will espouse his thesis shortly. His father, Pedro Scalabrini, was also a paleontologist who worked closely with Ameghino (Galasso 16–17).
20 Gaetano Rovereto [Cayetano Roveretto, in Argentina] (1870–1952): Italian geologist, paleontologist, and theoretician of evolution, whose investigations in Argentina resulted in his book Los estratos araucanos y sus fósiles (1914). Paul Wilhelm Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905): influential German geologist. Hugo Obermaier (1877–1946): German paleontologist and anthropologist who worked in Spain, author of El hombre fósil (1916). Josef Bayer (1882–1931): Austrian anthropologist and archeologist who worked with Obermaier.
21 Even today, the avenida Corrientes is lined with bookstores of all kinds.
22 El Peludo was the nickname given to President Hipólito Yrigoyen (1852–1933), given his predilection to stay holed up in the Casa de Gobierno and avoid interviews with the press. His populist presidency in the 1920s marked a major shift in Argentine politics and the emergence of the hitherto unrepresented popular classes. That he was “the delight of the Muses” can be read in two senses. Barcia (380n) indicates that Yrigoyen was a favourite theme for the popular payadors. But the martinfierristas were also enthusiastic about him. In the lead-up to the 1928 presidential election, a group of them formed The Committee of Young Intellectuals for the Re-election of Hipólito Yrigoyen, with Borges as president and Marechal as vice-president. Macedonio Fernández, among other writers now canonical, participated as well (Abós, Macedonio 135–6).
23 Located in the city of La Plata, this natural science museum was cutting-edge at the time of its inauguration in 1889 and a source of national pride.
24 The War of Paraguay, or the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), pitted Paraguay against Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. This triple alliance was supported by British capital, which until the war had been economically shut out of isolationist Paraguay. The war literally decimated Paraguay’s population and drastically reduced its national territory.
25 The daily existed from 1928 until 1967. At the invitation of its first director, Alberto Gerchunoff (see 639n22), Marechal worked as a journalist there for some months. It was there that Roberto Arlt became known for his column “Aguafuertes porteñas” (Andrés 29).
26 The literary conceit of the talking Glyptodon was invented by Enrique González Tuñón (1901–1943) in his vignette “Mi amigo de la prehistoria” [My Friend from Prehistory] in his El alma de las cosas inanimadas (1927).
27 In Spanish, a verdad de Perogrullo or perogrullada is a truth so trite or obvious as to be not worth saying. Perogrullo’s uncertain historical existence dates back to thirteenth-century Spain.
28 Navascués (AB 278n) notes that the notion linking aboriginal America with Atlantis goes back to colonial times, at least as far as the Dominican friar Gregorio García’s treatise Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo (1607).
29 Winca means “Christian, white man” in the Araucano language spoken by the Ranquel Indians. The abuse of the gerund (matando, “killing”) in the spoken Spanish of the aboriginals has been picked up from Lucio Mansilla’s Una excusión a los indios ranqueles (1870) [A Visit to the Ranquel Indians]. Marechal’s personal copy of this book is very well thumbed and full of underlined passages, an indication of how much his fictive excursion to Saavedra respectfully parodies Mansilla’s famous book, not only in this passage, as Barcia notes (387n), but throughout the chapter.
30 As noted by Mansilla, gualicho means “devil” in Araucano.
31 The invented name combines the Greek morpheme paleo-, “ancient” with the Araucano term — curá, “stone.” The historical Calfucurá was for decades until his death in 1873 the most powerful Aracauno chief in Argentina.
32 Barcia (388n) notes that the image comes from Marechal’s poetry, but cites only “Didáctica de la Patria,” a poem written much later and included in Heptamerón (1966). In an earlier poem, “Gravitación del cielo” in Poemas australes (1937), the architectural metaphor is applied in a different sense to the nation’s beginnings: “¡Oh deleznable arquitectura, / oh bondadosos arquitectos! / Con tierra frágil nuestros hombres / edificaron su morada” (OC I, 181) [O negligible architecture, / O good-hearted architects! / With fragile earth our men / built their dwelling]. It seems that the later Marechal made poetry out of his novelistic material.
33 Marechal did in fact know this man in real life. His poem “A un domador de caballos” in Poemas australes (1937) was inspired by him. Gustavo Fontán includes a short sequence with Liberato Farías in his documentary film Marechal, o la batalla de los ángeles (2002). The name of the narrator-protagonist of Marechal’s second novel, El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965), is a variation on the domador’s name: Lisandro Farías.
34 Schultz’s comment echoes the position of Leopoldo Lugones, first enunciated in his lectures on the gaucho in 1913: “[The gaucho’s] disappearance is a good thing for the country, because he contained an inferior element in his partially aboriginal blood” (El Payador 83).
35 The last two paragraphs are a pastiche of the first Canto of “El alma del payador” [The Soul of the Payador], in Hilario Ascasubi’s poem Santos Vega (1885).
36 According to one popular version of the story, Santos el Payador (anonymous), which circulated in print in the late nineteenth century: “Santos Vega se murió. / Y fue porque lo venció / Luzbel, sin decir Jesús” (qtd. in Prieto 89) [Santos Vega died. / And it was because he was defeated by / Lucifer, without a mention of Jesus]. But in another version belonging to the oral tradition, Santos Vega met and defeated the Devil, only later to be defeated by a payador from the North (Prieto 104). Adam is championing this version.