13 In “the fiery sunsets of Villa Ortúzar” A.M. Zubieta (118–19) sees an allusion to Borges’s poem “Último sol en Villa Ortúzar” [Last Sunlight in Villa Ortúzar] (OC I, 71); and, less convincingly, in the game of truco in the phantasmal general stores an allusion to “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires” [Mythic Founding of Buenos Aires] (OC II, 81). The well-known poems belong, respectively, to Luna de enfrente (1925) and Cuaderno de San Martín (1929), books in which Borges, like Marechal in this passage, was working with topoi drawn from Evaristo Carriego’s poetry and tango lyrics.
14 Marechal’s family melodrama is a pastiche of Evarista Carriego’s La costurerita que dio un mal paso, a classic of the literature about suburban Buenos Aires. This cycle of eleven poems, mostly sonnets, tells the story of the sister gone astray, the effects on the family, her return and reconciliation with the family. Also referenced in this chapter is Carriego’s posthumous La canción del barrio), in particular the poem “El velorio” [The Wake]. Borges’s essay “Evaristo Carriego” (1930) dedicates an entire chapter to La canción del barrio (Borges, OC I, 130–41).
15 Gabino Ezeiza (1858–1916), a.k.a. “El Negro Ezeiza,” was a famous Afro-Argentine payador and author of popular criollista or gauchesque literature; e.g., Colección de cantares and Cantares criollos, both published in 1880 (Prieto 57). He continually toured rural Argentina and Uruguay in circuses and appeared in theatres in both Buenos Aires and Montevideo. He was a champion in the poetic “counterpoint” contests known as payadas, in which two payadores would compete by improvising on a given theme.
BOOK FOUR, CHAPTER 1
1 Viento del este, / agua como peste. Popular saying in Argentina. (Literal translation: “Wind from the east, water like the plague.”)
2 The payador Tissone seems a generic representative of many entertainers of Italian descent who participated in the final stages of the criollista/gauchesque genre. On the other hand, there was indeed a tango singer, Herberto Emiliano de Costa (1901–1935), known in the business as Príncipe Azul or Prince Charming, though this historical figure does not seem to be the basis of Marechal’s character of the same name. (When international tango idol Carlos Gardel died in a plane crash in June 1935, American impresarios saw the handsome de Costa as a possible replacement. On his way to the United States in September 1935, he died of a sudden illness in Trinidad.) Likewise, in the mid-thirties a group called Los Bohemios, directed by Mario Pugliese, was doing musical comedy as well as radio shows.
3 Globe trotter: in English in the original.
4 Giovinezza: “youth” in Italian. Navascués (AB 347n) notes the probable allusion to the Italian Fascist anthem so titled.
5 Vino de la Costa or vino chinche is made from a hybrid grape, a cross between the indigenous Vitis Labrusca and the European Vinifera, and is grown on the coastal area of Buenos Aires Province.
6 The magazine El alma que canta (1916–61) published tango lyrics and popular poetry. Barcia (482n) disparages it as cursi (vulgar, kitsch).
7 “La pampa tiene el ombú / y el puchero el caracú. / Sacudíme la persiana, / que allá viene doña Juana. / Cinco por ocho cuarenta, / pajarito con polenta. / ¿Quién te piantó de la rama, / que no estás en el rosal?” I have translated this doggerel verse freely.
8 Adam’s discourse takes up ideas expressed by Alfonso Reyes in his influential article “Jitanjáforas” published in the one and only issue of Libra (1929), a review directed by Marechal and Francisco Luis Bernárdez: “Putting together two names of objects which of their own accord don’t go together, the poor objects cannot but obey the magic spell, and end up tied together by the word: hence centaurs, mermaids and dragons have been born, the same way as Morality and Metrics” (Corral, ed. 14–15). Reyes goes on to cite Paul Valéry: “No discourse is so obscure, no fable is so absurd nor conversation so incoherent that we cannot in the end attribute some sense to it” (15). Reyes did not take entirely seriously his playful exercise in avant-garde nominalism, unlike Adam, who effectively presses this nominalism into the service of a pious philosophical realism. The allegorical, symbolic, moral, and anagogical he mentions are the four levels of interpretation in medieval theory and mentioned by Dante in his Convivio. Adam’s poetics combines Thomist theory with twentieth-century avant-garde poetics (see Cheadle, Ironic Apocalypse 63–7).
9 “Y el amor, más alegre / que un entierro de niños.” (Note the slight textual variation between this version and the first citation of these verses, which in Book One, chapter 1 exactly replicate those in Marechal’s original poem.)
10 “En el pingo del amor / quise jinetear un día, / creyéndome que sería / solamente escarceador.”
11 The model for the ensuing conversation is the Platonic dialogue, in particular The Symposium, where philosphers are seated around a table. The ideas expressed by Adam were earlier rehearsed by Marechal in his essay “Descenso y ascenso por la Belleza” (1933 and 1939), which elaborates a form of Christian Neoplatonism.
12 Borges, model for Luis Pereda, attended the Lycée Jean Calvin in Geneva as an adolescent.
13 In his hagiographic essay “Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima” (1943), Marechal begins Chapter V: “The saint is an imitator of the Word in the order of Redemption… Santa Rosa de Lima, more than anyone, gave herself over to the terrible imitation of the agony of Jesus Christ; and her mortifications were so severe that their mere description both amazes and frightens” (OC II, 381; my translation). Navascués (AB 371n) considers the analogy between poet/artist and saint to derive from Jacques Maritain’s Neo-Thomism. Marechal possessed the 1927 edition of Maritain’s Art et scholastique (1920).
14 “Aparcero don Tissone, / ya que me lo pintan franco / dígale a este servidor: / ¿Por qué el tero caga blanco?”
15 “Caga blanco el tero-tero, / ya lo ha dicho el payador, / porque, de juro, no sabe / cagar en otro color.”
BOOK FOUR, CHAPTER 2
1 Perramus was and continues to be a brand of high-quality, Argentine-made gabardine coat. A perramus (naturalized as a lower-case noun in common Argentine speech) was a status symbol. I am grateful to Professor Raquel Macciuci (Universidad Nacional de la Plata) for this information.
2 C.P.G. likely stands for Compañía Primitiva de Gas, established in 1910 with British capital.