were obliged to ask me for dinner. Naturally, I took advantage of that lucky
precedent. In 1934, I arrived, just after eight, with one of those large Santa Fe
sugared cakes, and quite matter-of-factly I stayed to dinner. It was in this way, on
these melancholy and vainly erotic anniversaries, that I came into the gradual
confidences of Carlos Argentino Daneri.
Beatriz had been tall, frail, slightly stooped; in her walk there was (if the
oxymoron may be allowed) a kind of uncertain grace, a hint of expectancy.
Carlos Argentino was pink-faced, overweight, gray-haired, fine-featured. He held
a minor position in an unreadable library out on the edge of the Southside of
Buenos Aires. He was authoritarian but also unimpressive. Until only recently, he
took advantage of his nights and holidays to stay at home. At a remove of two
generations, the Italian “S” and demonstrative Italian gestures still survived in
him. His mental activity was continuous, deeply felt, far-ranging, and — all in all
— meaningless. He dealt in pointless analogies and in trivial scruples. He had (as
did Beatriz) large, beautiful, finely shaped hands. For several months he seemed
to be obsessed with Paul Fort — less with his ballads than with the idea of a
towering reputation. “He is the Prince of poets,” Daneri would repeat fatuously.
“You will belittle him in vain — but no, not even the most venomous of your
shafts will graze him.”
On the thirtieth of April, 1941, along with the sugared cake I allowed myself to
add a bottle of Argentine cognac. Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it
“interesting,” and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern
man.
“I view him,” he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, “in his inner
sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs,
phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries,
timetables, handbooks, bulletins...”
He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our
twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain;
nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed.
So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition,
that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn’t write them
down. As might be foreseen, he answered that he had already done so — that
these ideas, and others no less striking, had found their place in the Proem, or
Augural Canto, or, more simply, the Prologue Canto of the poem on which he hd
been working for many years now, alone, without publicity, with fanfare,
supported only by those twin staffs universally known as work and solitude. First,