No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (10 page)

And though a guest were to arrive, expectedly or unexpectedly—or not, since an absence, expected or unexpected, was always welcome—solace remained his constant companion (“his mutual consul,” they said, mockingly, of Dickens), a friend that eased the dyspepsia of too much living, enabling him, without guilt of pride, to etch—for any guest, any companion—a portrait of himself that were as crude as a silhouette or complete as an incarnation. Without guilt of pride, yes, but pursuant to what he believed was his legitimate hatred of the real and its eternal trappings. Thence, on that particular August afternoon, at the hour when the demiurge oft goes handing out empty promises—so many trappings—he resolved, with aristocratic disdain, to ensure his reciprocal and utter destruction.

Back Cover sent by Eiralis to D. Julio

Christmas Eve on which the wolf howls

Fernando Tapiols

Circumstantial Island in Claveplana is an enchanting paradise in the middle of the Mar Izquierdo [which is hidden behind Basílico Bay]. [Those] responsible for maintaining its high standard of luxury are Iris Oratoria and her [twin] half-sister
,
Mateluna
,
[who’s] the bellwether of a flock of [hard-working
,
enigmatic] girl-scouts. Everything is going splendidly until Saverio Onofre Trápaga arrives on the island
,
[a] taciturn writer with dirty fingernails who drafts [imprisons] the girls into literary workshops with the apparent intention of re-educating them [morally] for the job [his ulterior motive being to corrupt them]. This is the story that Isabel Semiramis Errázuriz writes in the Hohenzollern mansion [castle]
,
near Darmstadt
,
while her half-sister
,
Hildegarda
,
tends to a flock of Jewish girls in Zagreb
,
although using a whip instead of a staff
,
and with the help of Abravanel
,
a black German Shepherd of uncertain origin
,
who studies the Pentateuch. (Important details: the custodian of the land on which the Jewish girls pasture is an unscrupulous Brazilian magnate from Manaus
,
Ouroboros [Kniebolo]; a worm that grew into an anaconda during the rubber boom.)

This is the tale written by Matilde Moura
, nom de plume
of Matildo Amancio Miura
,
an old pederast who shares a room with Medellín
,
a young Latin American boy (the suspicion he may only be Peruvian limits his prostitutional prospects)
,
who maintains a long-term relationship with Don Federico Loane
,
a vaguely Argentinian man of mainly French-Basque origin who is writing a novel on the side. This novel plagiarizes Fernando Tapiols (a Chilean writer living in exile in Barcelona
,
“disgruntled by failure”)
,
to keep the most vocal detractors of the junta
, Pedestrian Square Root,
happy. Tapiols is the author of a vast oeuvre
,
the highlight of which is an epic poem
,
“Christmas Eve on which the Wolf Howls,” a merciless chronicle set during the Christmas of 1974
,
written in
nona
-metric lines [distichs] of variable feet
,
a metrical pattern devised by Tapiols in homage to Nicanor Parra and to commemorate the passing of Pablo Neruda
.

Annick Bérrichon was one of the most prestigious literary critics; (which is the only reason why) Nicasio had been greatly interested in her. Besides this, she was also a professor of Balkan literature, although no one knew how she obtained the title or with what institution she was affiliated. But this last mystery is what piqued Belisario’s interest. Annick’s friendship with Elena soon led to her being introduced to the most prominent committee members of
Agraphia
, including Nicasio. One afternoon in June, almost seven months after Eloísa’s death, they met with a medium in the house on calle de las Posadas (
not
the one on calle de las Piedras).

Miss Bérczely’s face was a grotesquery of warts and other excrescences, an especially nasty case of what Elena termed “lunarism.” She spoke with what sounded like an imitation German accent with a hint of French in the guttural. Everyone pretended to understand what she was saying.

Those present were Dos, Oliverio Lester, and someone else who came with them; Elena had dragged along her best friend, Sofía Sarracén, who was even more superstitious than she—a pianist with certain mediumistic talents, who brought along her fiancé [Eloy Armesto: Lupanal …]—a student of Bérrichon’s—to introduce him to the rest of the group.

At last, Nicasio arrived. His system of responses resembled those adopted by Elena to translate Blevgad: quibbling, nibbling, double negatives—disagreeable in any language—delivered in the passive voice …

As it was a commemorative date—June 23, launch of
Oxyrhynchus—
the committee was hoping Hilarión Curtis would attend (who not only owed the journal answers, but also his fellow Argentine citizens).

According to the more or less reliable testimony of those present—particularly Sofía’s fiancé—the first to induce a fit of histrionics and table tapping was a confused little girl who was communicating with the medium on the subject of writing. Suddenly, the medium began coughing and choking, perhaps because there was a change of … “visitant,” or because someone had taken off their shoes … [???] A high pitched voice then spoke in impeccable Castilian: “I am Zelda Bove, grandmother of Benkes, and the legitimate proprietor of his falsehoods …”

Annick Bérrichon’s spiritual ancestry has been discussed in an essay by Eloy Armesto. Suffice it to say the literary critic’s grandfather—whose
nom de plume
, Belén Mathiessen, is better known to the uninitiated—had been complicit in the activities of Dunglas Home, who had duped many nineteenth century positivists. Today, we can conclude that Annick Bérrichon and all her pseudonyms—so suited to
Agraphia
—was born, as Blevgad prophesied, to unpack this piece of history, although her [personal] activities would succeed only in blurring the chronology. Her grandfather died in a pitiful way, although not as Luini described—nobody will ever know if her account precedes his—in both “Lemurids, Cheiroptera, et Cie” and
Sherbet Aria
.

Two weeks later (after this encounter), Elena is elected (with respect to this story) as the keeper of secrets. It’s funny how little time it takes to become accustomed to risks; perhaps because they’re not truly risks, or perhaps there are no such things as customs. Nothing can be a custom that has a habit of perishing. Antúnez Irrusmendi’s lover (of six weeks), who’s the patron of Irene Picabea—Nicasio’s lover—confirms and displaces a crass fantasy of the servile novelist. See the disadvantage in the following light: Elena and Nicasio were, on this occasion, made the victims of this bungling demiurge who used them as theatrical doubles. The obvious correspondence condemned them not so much to the gossip of associates but to the twisted commentary of biographers and other forgers of their destiny.

NO

Bourgeois squabbling disguised as intellectual pride: they’re capable [CF, above all] of explaining away anything, even a gift …

Exercise in baffling symmetry

Moving up or down in an office building (after an initial humiliation). Hesitantly, he carries the photocopied documents to a nurse who is leaning from the balcony holding a less burdensome charge (a joint). It soothes and comforts. But then the horrible process of forgetting. For it’s necessary to: summon the elevator without success, climb and descend the stairs, check the baffling symmetry that prevents them knowing what floor they’re on, what level of negotiation their colleagues had reached, casually enter the disabled bathroom, offload the burdensome artifact, send it the way of dead goldfish …

F.’s anecdote about McLaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas in an elevator. Bad memory.

Eiralis to Don Julio:

[I went to the bank to try cashing the check, the one just around the corner from the house in which I’m now writing this. Two fat heifers told me the bank didn’t cash checks, and that I’d have to go to the head office or a parent company. I went to the head office or parent company, or whatever it was, where, after waiting in a long queue, an employee even more clueless than I told me I couldn’t cash the check, that I had to deposit it into my account. But as you very well know, I don’t have my own account.

NO

Cryptodermia / Kleptolalia. Insist.

The precursor’s mission, the successor’s mission

The letter ending on a semicolon

Rejected.

Weariness. Self-indulgence

Luckily, nobody noticed the allegorical didacticism in
El Carapálida
. Charlie had instructed me (nobody suspected the narrator’s name, Leboud, was an anagram of Double; no critic noted the ingenious cipher). And although political readings abounded in my favor, and superficial ones even more so, I have to be the one (
after
Eliot, Deniz and Empson,
after
Feiling) to throw light on the
backstage
so they comprehend the
miscast
and staging.

I understand the resistance—the animosity—of readers and critics to texts that are conceived and arranged by tendentious principles. But just as the reference to Ph. Holland in “The Aleph” is a clue to be pursued, there is nothing in Argentine fiction to indicate where to go next, it is at an impasse: of mere storytelling, straightforward narrating, having lost sight of that profundity of vision that inclines one to the implicit, to allusion, elusion, paraphrase, and veiled quotation.

If literature is strengthened by its referential commitment (if we love Latin literature because it is derived from Greek literature, if Spanish and English literature occasionally surprises us with profound evocations, invocations of other literatures that informed them),
El Carapálida
presented, according to the author’s plan, a practical dilemma (practical because it offered two modes of inquiry) between the carelessly written potboiler and the Thomas Mann approach (profundity, difficulty, their consequences … )

The two masters were leading the pack: Ricardo Neira and César Quaglia.

In contrast to the weight of those initial sesquipedalian surnames—Beaumarchais, Bauvebrouillard—the pungent brevity of the biforked: Piglia, Aira.

NO

There was something evasive, annoying about Inés Maspero. Firstly, her protrusive eyes—that askant gaze—secondly, her mismatched teeth (the left incisor broken on the right side), thirdly, her taking care to always maintain a standard of inelegance, fourthly, the coarseness of her knees, and lastly [definitively], her bad manners. When Inés Maspero opened a packet of cigarettes, it was like watching a ravenous lioness quarter an antelope [Ogden Nash, in “Dead Aunt’s Diary”].

Spanish translation

Foreground anything to do with taste (other poem of Ogden Nash), if there is anything.

NOt found. The account:

The poem says a
gourmet
challenged him—O.N.’s “lyrical him”—to eat, god help us, a piece of rattlesnake meat, assuring him that it would taste like chicken.

And O.N. (or the “lyrical O.N.”) ate it. Now he (“the lyrical he”) says he can no longer eat chicken since it reminds him too much of rattlesnake meat.

Lead with the poem which has a part called “question of taste.”

Inés Maspero was the kind of person no one imagined [being in love] falling in love, the kind of person with whom no one had wanted to fall in love, the kind of person with whom everyone fell in love. One morning, or perhaps it wasn’t the morning, at least one person discovered they were not in love with her.

Or was it she who believed this and so everyone around her was led to believe it too?

If there were reasons, some were perhaps of her own making—with the rabid elegance of an Egon Schiele, who for a time completely forgot about the love angle, the rectilinear lines of the Viennese baroque, its
serpentine
effect. It couldn’t have been because of Nicasio’s influence, because no one knew he was the second person that didn’t love her. The truth is, it was a long process that clearly entailed some psychological manipulation, but which also needed a little magic—the elusive and unhappy process described in “Returns”—at the end of which the insignificant skivvy of the reception desk had become—by the intervention of her Pygmalion and Svengali—Eloísa Betelgeuz[s]e, the inspirational muse of
The Place of Apparitions
and inspired poet of
Chrysalid Simulation
.

Inés Maspero (
ci-devant
Eloísa Betelgeuse), who died in a variety of ways, all of them tragic, all anthologized in at least four stories in this book, died by accident (as one of the survivors liked to stress to the protagonist’s father), after ingesting alcohol, a lot of alcohol and medication (since she never referred to them by name), more than likely—according to a reliable witness [Dos]—an un-prescribed and dangerously high dose of Tryptizol (the suicide hypothesis should be discarded for the sake of a reasonable alternative …)