37 This is Rafael Obligado’s version of the story in Part 4, “La muerte del payador,” of Santos Vega. As Prieto writes, this version could be, and was, read as propaganda in support of progress, or the advance of “civilization” over “barbarism,” in the terms of Sarmiento. The debate over the story is not over. In his 700-page history and anthology of gauchesque poetry, Fermín Chávez completely excludes Obligado’s poem, alleging its lack of “gauchesque spirit,” its “pessimism,” its symbolic message of “frustración criolla”; he prefers instead an oral version from Paraguay in which a Guaraní Santos Vega, mounted on a white horse, defeats the “infernal spirit” (Chávez 35).
38 Cocoliche was a late nineteenth-century vaudeville character who imitated the Spanish spoken by Italian immigrants and came to symbolize them, denoting as well the dialect spoken by Italian immigrants, some terms of which passed into the lunfardo argot and then later into the common language of Argentina.
39 “I came to Argentina to make America [make my fortune]. And I’m in America to make Argentina.” The chiasmic pun plays on the Italian idiomatic expression fare l’America “to make or seek one’s fortune.”
40 “I work the land. We eat bread thanks to me.”
41 The glorified or glorious body refers to the Pauline doctrine of the body’s ressurection: “[The Lord Jesus Christ] shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” Phillipians 3:21 (KJV). In medieval teaching, a saint’s corpse has the “odour of sanctity.”
42 Behind the obvious allusion to the Christian saint, Martin of Tours (316–397), lies a veiled allusion to General José de San Martín, known as the “Saint of the Sword” (cf. 634n30 and 636n1). Marechal works this poetic conflation in his later poem Canto de San Martín (1950).
43 All are birds indigenous to the Argentine pampa.
44 All traditional folk dances from various Argentine provinces.
45 The “ditch” would correspond to Medrano Creek as it passes through the farmland of Luis María Saavedra, today occupied by the soccer field of the Club Atlético Platense as well as Sarmiento Park (Piñeiro 75).
46 The Frogs, trans. Dudley Fitts (Aristophanes 93).
47 Barcia (400n) points out that the two paragraphs sung by the Chorus are full of allusions to rural Argentine folklore.
48 Navascués (AB 241n) notes the allusion to the French expression Cherchez la femme! — that is; look for the woman of you want to get to the bottom of the matter.
49 “Yo soy la muchacha del circo, / por una moneda yo doy.” First lines of the tango “La muchacha del circo” (1928), music by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez and lyrics by Manuel Romero. The circus girl is a trapeze artist who, in exchange for a penny, shares beautiful illusions. On her precarious trapeze, she is like a white dove anxiously leaping heavenward.
50 Two popular superstitions, according to Barcia (410n). The Pig, a.k.a. the chancho de lata or Tin Pig, wears chains that rattle metallically. The Widow is a ghost who chases young lads and robs them.
51 A further send-up of the Spirit of the Earth (see 650n32).
BOOK THREE, CHAPTER 2
1 Barcia (413n) explains the process: an enclosure or pond of mud would be made; horses would be sent in to work the mud with their hooves and then haul it out for making bricks.
2 In the originaclass="underline" “¡Traga santos y caga diablos!” [Swallow saints and shit devils!], meaning that they present a sweet image but their words or actions belie the appearance.
3 Villa Urquiza: a barrio in Buenos Aires bordering on Saavedra.
4 Emilio Salgari (1862–1911), Italian author of adventure novels, especially the pirate stories whose protagonist was Sandokan.
5 During La Semana Trágica [The Tragic Week] in January 1919, a series of strikes inspired by Anarchists and Communists were brutally repressed by the Argentine Federal Police and the National Army with the help of paramilitary groups, leaving hundreds dead and thousands wounded. The violence of the repression got out of control and spilled over into attacks on Jewish establishments.
6 La Brecha. No such daily seems to have existed but it is a likely name for an anarchist publication. The phrase abrir brecha means “to break through”; firme en la brecha “to stand firm” was a militant watchword. Chilean author Mercedes Valdivieso titled her 1961 feminist novel La brecha. In Montevideo, Brecha has been a left-wing weekly since 1985, when it succeeded its forerunner, Marcha, shut down by the Uruguayan dictatorship in 1974.
7 The issue of cremation was indeed controversial. Roberto Arlt was cremated at his death in 1942, in accord with his express wish. But Arlt’s friend and mentor, the Boedo writer Elías Castelnuovo (1893–1982), regretfully recalls visiting with Arlt the crematorium at the Chacarita Cemetery where the director, a medical hygienist and “fervent believer” in cremation, convinced Arlt with “catechizing propaganda” to sign up for cremation upon his death (qtd. in Saítta 297). Castelnuovo, a progressive socialist intellectual, apparently harbours the same cultural conservatism implied by Marechal’s satirical treatment of Zanetti.
8 “Olas que al llegar / plañideras muriendo a mis pies.” “Waves that break and die / plaintive at my feet.” Verses from the Vals sobre las olas, a waltz in the Viennese style composed in 1888 by the Mexican composer Juventino Rosas, who died in Cuba in 1894. Popular in Europe, the waltz was illegitimately claimed by many European composers. The Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) recalls that during his students days spent in early-twentieth-century Spain the visiting Spanish-American students used to sing this waltz in order “to distinguish and affirm our collective personality.” Thus, he continues, the Vals sobre las olas came to be “a sort of hymn of the peoples of Spanish America vis-à-vis the foreign contingent; it did not cease to be a pleasurable dance, but it became as well an expression of nationalist and regionalist resistance” (Ortiz 18).
9 Juan Moreira: see 649n28.
10 “El Choclo” [The Corncob] is an old chestnut in the tango repertoire, first performed publicly in 1903.
11 A.M. Zubieta (120) considers that the taita Flores is Francisco Real, the murdered protagonist of Borges’s famous story “Hombre de la esquina rosada” (in Historia universal de la infamia [1935]), who has resuscitated and retells his story “with changes.” In Borges’s story, Francisco Real is murdered, secretly, by the sly first-person narrator (Borges OC I, 331–6). Zubieta’s thesis, though she does not say so explicitly, implies a subtle literary duel being waged between Marechal and Borges.
12 “Cascabel, cascabelito, / ríe, ríe, y no llores.” From the tango “Cascabelito” (1924; lyrics by Juan Andrés Caruso, music by José Böhr). In the following paragraph, as Barcia (450n) indicates, several other tangos are referenced: “Milonguita” (1920), “Flor de fango” (1919), and “Mano a mano” (1923). Marechal’s pastiche is based on the popular stereotype first coined in Evarista Carriego’s posthumous La costurerita que dio un mal paso [The Little Seamstress Who Took a False Step] (see 659n14). It came to be emblematic of tango culture, directly inspiring, for example, “No salgas de tu barrio” (1927) [Don’t Leave Your Neighbourhood] (Gobello Letras de tango, vol. 2, 125). Osvaldo Pugliese closes the cycle in 1934 with a tango without lyrics titled “La Beba,” the title alone invoking the pathos of the neighbourhood girl who went astray. The stereotype reflected the burning social issue of young working-class women who, in search of economic independence, often fell into prostitution. Manuel Gálvez’s widely read novel Nacha Regules (1919) represents a middle-brow treatment of the theme; a film version was made in 1950 by Luis César Amadori.