No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (13 page)

After his aunts—who always repeated the same not very bookish stories—dates and people seem to have evaporated from his life. Perhaps it was because the people he met made his aunts seem bookish by comparison. But, some fifteen years after his first class at the Balmoral, and fifteen years before Enzo Nicosi’s death, certain anecdotes, like suspended whispers, began repeating themselves in places suited to abuses such as repetition (Kingsmill). A mascot, an English Setter—named Bramwell—was given to him as a thank you gift from Mr. Netbro’s [T. Lebron’s] daughters, and not only did it become his pet, but it was perhaps the only living creature about which he ever spoke with true affection. The fact is, he was going through a phase, whether he knew it or not, of wanting to be part of an English tradition (Ackerley, T. H. White). That symmetry, marked not so much in geometrical terms or by the equable disposition of objects in space, but temperamentally, as in the feeling of surprise one gets in discovering hidden objects [treasures] after years of searching, and seeing they are located at equal distances away from two equally terrible catastrophes; somewhere herein lies the indemonstrable [indescribable] artistic temperament others persist in attributing to him.

A game of tennis is perhaps the only way to see it in the open, one without a commentator. He’d learned to play in Lobos with his aunts, and his playing was—according to those who witnessed it—a perfect testament of that apprenticeship. A witness told the story many times [Bioy
père
,
El matrero
] of when he played a game of doubles and tried handicapping his opponent—one of the accountant’s daughters—by aiming for her ring finger, specifically the sovereign in the ring her godmother Barriole gave her for her confirmation. He and his partner—a young man who had also been taking lessons—were winning emphatically (
score
: ?), and it was one of those happy occasions he’d later recall with avid boasting. But the accountant’s daughter wanted to quit before the second set, convinced her side would be routed; whereby he, her instructor, had to suffer, earlier than he expected to, the absence of his favorite pupil; and so, for the length of an entire weekend, he was divorced from her, separated from the ring that betokened her, the only seal that approved his existence, the only emblem that secured his identity. According to entries found in his only known diary, the separation resulted in, by turns, nights wracked by insomnia and sleep wracked by nightmares. The following entry records his bewilderment: “
The ring
,
not the book
. But I wake up groping, knowing they’re the same. That I’ve kissed her, not him.
The atrocious derelict
. What made me kiss her. The hope of a result is the strength that gives us a weakness for rejoicing. Mutual.”

He kept vigil in one of the college classrooms

The latter was the first instance where reference was made to a person without naming him, at least openly, a man who would remain anonymous, despite his cultivation, his supposedly great intelligence and learning, refusing to be honored at every opportunity, or to be the subject of some discourse or panegyric: it is the result, some say, of his timidity; it is a stratagem, others say, of his inordinate pride, a form of display in the refusal to display, a show of the romance of seclusion. It was to him Miss Aserson alluded, indicated, and pointed when she spoke of the many times they colluded together in a Brighton bar—he with a dry martini, she a gimlet—and despite having learned by then to remove her moustache with minimum violence, she retained the aspect of a doll, trembling, irreal, one who only came alive in the hours she was with him (Kleist) … At the end of her talk, she had the bad idea of recalling the secret conversations they used to have in English—confessing [honestly] that her English, which she learned from a Welsh aunt, was abysmal—and then citing from memory a wicked remark of Nicosi’s about Eliot that was in a style that parodied his verse [true].

The murmurs that followed him weren’t intimations of dispraise, nor were they intimations of immortality. They were, as one might expect, murmurs of relief, of good riddance. All were a little weary of the legend by then, which held but little fascination, little relevance, considering it propped up what was now a faded old gentleman, who, even in his youth, was never very handsome, and now—to top it all off—he was dead, which was a reprieve, for he would have continued to fade further and further into obscurity, thanks in large measure to Nicosi’s devastating slur: “If it is not exercised, permitted to fall,

To recover “The Old Bachelor”

to soften or die—with a dying fall—is going to be [will be] his unbending ally in all his defeats. I’ll have you all know I’ll not give in to silent defeats. Come little ones, you know what I mean. It’s not a matter of guessing. It is on the tip of your tongue[s]. Say it.”

Je renonce
à
Satan
,
à
ses pompes
et
à
ses oeufes!

Paul Verlaine

Lugones, “El Solterón”

Swinburne,

Betjeman,

George Herbert

Ater Umbrius
, De Quincey

Faulkner, The Bible, Aeschylus (Alter)—book of David, Christopher Smart

Pedro Leandro Ipuche; invented source, Clemente Colling

Superstitions

If a man succeed at completing another man’s Librarie
, he shall surely perish

Worries mount as volumes of Books
,
so that it bee common-place in the lives of Men that loss of cares occasion newer ones. For Men are such vain and deceptible Creatures that many will fain embosom Misery who are loath to suffer injury of Pride
,
as certain Schollers
,
whose Pride of intellect causeth them to hurry after wind
,
seeking augury in the disposition of figures in Holy Books
,
or mathematique patterns in absurd Chronologies. Such Men are but slow discerners of the Truth
,
since that even Children quicklie learn that Books and Calenders are but the fruits of our unperfect Wit
,
which hath never procured unto us a perfect means of reckoning Futurities
,
but only useless Prescriptions and Formulae that touch not our salubritie
,
nor inform us on which day we breathe our last
,
but indicate only the passage of Years
,
the assurance of Infirmity
,
and of our absumption unto Death. Nor should we reckon the years to come by historical deductions
,
since that even Janus seeth not the same Symmetrie twixt the Future and the Past. Thence the great Mutabilities of Time must needs be recorded as they transpire
,
for Vanities adulterate Remembrance
,
and Errors multiply with each Recollection. So Man should remember only his Negligibilitie
,
and heed not the sophisticall advisos of Prejudice and Superstition
,
since that Time’s vengeance is to render these as mutable as Bone and Flesh. For upon His long Journey between Diuturnities
,
Enlightenments accend but rarely
,
as the fabulous adjections of succeeding Ages
,
the heroical deeds of singular Men
,
or the life of the mortallest reputation
,
since that all are but the flickerings of cressets
.

After the style of Sir Thomas Browne

Instill

There were some snatches of English poetry translated by commission of Benigno Uzal for the Ur anthology, Nurlihrt’s first publisher. Poems by Dylan Thomas and George Baker, Philip Larkin and Anselm Hollo. And a poet with the pseudonym: Gabriél Donovan. Donovan was his mother’s maiden name.

His name was Gabriel Sebastián Lubriano [Cecchi] [?]. Donovan was his mother’s name. Sebastian Birt [via
Concluding
] …

[But some began suggesting it was jinxed:
Trib
]

On a trip, Bambi falls for him [???]

I remember they divided the translations between Belisario Tregua and me [“him”]. “I got to know Belisario the same day I got to know Nicasio …”

The narrator has a book belonging to the old bachelor. Read the highlighted parts, the annotations.

Inventing the book

He’d thought about leaving with his books. Or rather, he’d never have thought to leave without them. The forgotten, the unread, everything was a pretense of death as the two of them read in the same room together without acknowledging each other. And they did so with neither a show of reverence or nonchalance, as they would have done in the presence of their enemies [solicitous, smug, thought themselves ahead of everyone]. Sometimes a general overview is all it takes. After which, one discovers—he discovered—how many victims could be disinterred.

At some point, after all the trials, the stumbling blocks, [and mostly] all the anger and frustration, he finally attempted to make a record of his experiences as a bibliophile. But there is little left of his notebook; in fact, all that remains is a single inscription, brief but desperate, which perhaps cannot be properly conveyed in the indirect style we’ve adopted here (and which he’d also adopted). On one occasion, the loss of a very precious collection—the five volume study by P. Uslar on the libraries of Jesuit missionaries: source, P. Pastell, who succeeded in reducing the number of volumes to four—obliged [forced] him to commit a “surreptitious crime.” For him, it was a point of honor that he never stole a book without first consulting the price tag, and fortunately, when he got to the bookstore, everyone was too distracted by the man who came to sign Uslar’s collection to notice the indiscretion. Everyone, that is, except Birt, who was standing three paces behind him, with a look of irritation that quickly developed [distorted] into an expression of outright disgust, as he watched the incident unfold. The judge of appearances residing in him [Birt] disapproved of the ostensible buyer [shady fellow], who was neither a collector nor a noted bookseller but one of those fatuous men [and adventitious] who was, perhaps [at best], only a very distant descendent—the genealogical branching, formalist in design, blessed Uncle Toby—of P. Uslar or Pastell.

Where was he wounded?

Shandy, not pointing to the anatomical ubicity of the wound [the groin], instead disclosed the geographical ubicity (or name) of the battle …

It wasn’t so much the loss of his precious books that distressed him, but being deprived of his closest companions; he felt as if he lost an entire kingdom. The irrevocable absence in his library spread like a contagion in his person. He spent days in mourning. He neither bought books nor consulted his own. He was content to read only those he carried in his briefcase (never fewer than four). But neither penitence nor abstinence could repair the gaping wound [left by the loss of those precious books] of his ravished library.

Anecdote in “Early” and “Replicas”

Many years later, he was horrified when one of the boys who wrote for the school paper—being alerted by an older boy—referred to him as one who had been “investigating with gloves on.” And he answered: “I’ve never done [carried out] any investigating whatsoever. And that’s not to say I don’t fear infection, [
au contraire
, I know all about the terrible diseases one can contract …] and for that reason, I never felt the urge to investigate. I fear the gloves are only used by arrivistes. The seeker doesn’t need to rummage or even touch anything: he need only look in order to see. The spines of books are like tombstones. Even the least discernible ones, those with faded inscriptions, will not escape his notice. And as regards the ones stacked on desks or piled on floors, they are detected, as tiny pebbles in a dense forest, through the gaps between leaves. Even what is imagined, what has never been seen, is anticipated by those spaces that are yet to be filled …”

It was the longest answer he gave, and the most emphatic, for the written questionnaire. He’d even tried to find the first fake editions he’d done [for Frederick Prokosch (
NYRB
)] to make the answer more exhaustive.

He came across some publications of Edith Wharton—the ones with those illustrations by Maxfield Parrish she’d rejected …

He looked with familiar disdain on the books from his last trip, still wrapped in a Galigani bag.

He had on his wall a photo of Arthur Waley playing the flute, or something that could be translated “flute” as a penultimate punishment [
reed
]

[And although he was a big fan of Hollywood movies, and especially Westerns, he was cautious about making sweeping generalizations. It’s true he liked Hitchcock, but he felt that when his movies were bad, they were horrid. But the director whose films he really couldn’t stand was Brian de Palma. He far preferred a conventional movie with a strong cast, directed by someone like Adrian Lyne, to some florid art-house adaptation of the
Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe
. He advocated films like Karel Reisz’s
Sweet Dreams
, because, for one, he loved K. Reisz generally (the first time I saw that particular flick, at an open-air cinema in the provinces, he spent the whole time raving about
A Suitable Case for Treatment
), and, for another, because there’s no film that succeeds so well at divesting myths of their splendor, he said: not by censoring them, but through a stripping away of the rich patina of common belief to reveal the underlying pith]