No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (14 page)

NO

He was raised by two spinster aunts in a large [and cavernous] house in Lobos. The Donados [the Vieytes] [Chola Quaglia: Barriola, Fanfarlo, Arribalo], his
FATHER’S
sisters, were known for their euphemisms, which although frequently incongruous, seemed to leap from their mouths with such éclat … “part the shutters so Phoebus’s rays can unsettle the Lord’s diadem,” said Soccoro to her younger sister, Milagros, when she wanted her room to feel less like a monastic cell … // “Milagros, narrow the shutter, so Phoebus’s rays can wound …” [Chloe Quaglia, las Barriola] As for the eggs in their henhouse—and eggs in general, for that matter—they were called “homemade abortions.” And Gabriel was content to recall their turns of phrase, the majority of which were taken [extracted] from Don Quixote or the Vulgate … “Either Sancho is dreaming, or Sancho is lying,” is an example, and also “Tomorrow, God will bring back the sun and we will prosper,” and “see you remove the mud from your feathers after swooping on serpents, and if you can, be sure to trim your talons].”

And: “No manna, no manna …”

And, on one occasion, he heard: “Look, here they come … the belfry owls …”

[But] he had a good childhood, thanks to his orphancy, and he has many fond memories of playing outdoors with other children, or alone in the garden with bugs—earthworms, beetles, and smoking toads. And if the world was made up entirely of earthworms, Doctor Natchez once said to him, it would suit him to the ground [find in
Book of Merlyn
]. When he hung out with other boys, they were either at school or bathing in the lagoon. One time, the bonetudos stole their clothes from the branches of the trees that circled the lagoon. It was on a sunny afternoon in November, before classes had finished. A surprise attack, for no one expected the bonetudos to be on duty until later.

There were [public] outrages committed behind the carnival mask. And indeed, it was a grotesquery of disguises—tall hats, stilts, shiny pants, and feathered masks—that ensured the malefactor’s anonymity. For the carnival time is when small offences are forgiven, crimes encouraged, and outrages lavishly rewarded. [At sixteen, he was very precocious,]
The foregoing was about Firpo
.
The brisk night air was riven by howling. But he vowed to stay silent
,
and he did
.

Before going to study in La Plata, Gabriel got to know the first and last names of some of the bonetudos. It was one of the most astounding discoveries he’d made in his life up to that time; but after two months in the city, it seemed the most banal. How strange it is to live at the mercy of time: before he died, and just before he found the Forbes Mallacombe edition of the Progresse of Sicknesse in Rubio (bookstore), GD recalled the name of the boy who found the clothes (it didn’t matter that they weren’t his clothes) close to Fiñuqui’s property, nearly two miles away from the lagoon. Finnucan [
surname
].

When he got back to the house, the Donados …

Three days later (so begins the anecdote), on Holy Thursday [?], Gabriel went with Socorro to the market to lend a hand. The market … “maritime or fluvial?” enquired his tutor. And Gabriel recognized the voice of his benefactor [masked, lacunar] hoarse after shouting from the kiosk: “twenty for a pair.” She was his first love.

At his fiancée’s insistence, he went to see a psychologist.
“Your motivation is your salary.”
Adelaida’s suitor had given her a gift of stamps (
Antigua
,
penny
,
puce
). In
El Carapálida
’s lycergical glossary (I forgot the codes), Patrick Hamilton and the postage stamps they gave him

Suite of names

Wanda Landowska. Conlon Nancarrow.

Vivant Denom. Bonomy Dobrée.

Include the scene in A. de Mayo’s bookstore.

He couldn’t think about them without remembering a certain epistle of Lope’s, and he couldn’t think about this without being reminded of Lugones’s poem, “The Old Bachelor.” He’d pocketed these anecdotes in order to share them with others he confided in, the people he most wanted to impress. He’d repeat them frequently to those who’d already heard them, but in changing certain details here and there, his interlocutors got the impression they were hearing them for the very first time

In the town, Pondal [Pividal] used to call them “belfry owls”

Until he was sixteen, he never went a day without seeing them. After he left, he only returned home after hearing of Alina’s death, which happened the same spring he went to study in La Plata. They died in the order they were born, although Lourde’s sickliness seemed an omen of her passing not long after. They bequeathed to him many memories and stories, but also a strange uneasiness he always felt while he was living in the house, which others felt as well while under that roof: a feeling each of them provoked, and which was only enhanced when the two were together.

(…) In the period before he left, when he was at the cusp of adolescence, Lourdes used to request it whenever she was in the shower. He’d gotten used to seeing his guardian through the frosted glass partition, but he’d yet to grow weary of seeing her youthful body. When she knocked on the glass screen, he understood it as a request to regulate the water heater. Once, she drew the screen too soon and he was able to catch a full-on glimpse of her for the very first time. Her body looked more youthful in the vaporous brisk air than it did through the opaque barrier. She seemed flawless, her skin, a marmoreal pallor rarely violated by the sun. And although the image lasted but a second’s glance, a glance he tactfully removed before she felt it, it left an impress on his mind he never lost.

Alina, he recalled at the wake, was more than just a stockpile of euphemisms and abstruse paraphrases: she’d been the one to instigate his habit of collecting, beginning with words and sayings in various languages. And she, the weaver of his destiny from the following day onwards, was responsible for uttering what he deemed an unrepeatable insult: “Mr. Mies has his quincunx aspect badly disposed.”

Later, when he was moving in more lofty circles, pushing his luck amidst the movers and shakers of the Buenos Aires elite, Gabriel Donovan would often repeat the story, but censored himself from uttering those secret foreshadowings his overactive infantile brain once associated with that word, as if the uncertain and the certain had, in the intervening years, become equally demonstrable, equally representable, as a blank page and a written page; or an arrangement of dots and an exhaustive interpretation of those dots. So he presented the story as a comedy of errors, and his vaguely astrological quincunx took on the significance of a Jewish prepuce, his sexuality cold-blooded, reptilian, for there was a weakness in the susceptibility to derive pleasure from a woman’s body, immorality in that for which he was once grateful, now the quincunx became a
shibboleth
he couldn’t pronounce, a goddamned reminder of his former self … [a reminder of the one that held the sword above his head] Reread Cavafy

Mr. Mies was a Dutchman who stayed in the barn at the back of the Donados’ house (which, GD found out years later, was also where the bonetudos kitted themselves out [where they stored their facemasks, their wagons]). The first time he saw him he was chewing on the bit of his bubble pipe

He was amused that his close friends were so amused by his “bad quincunx aspect,” although they were guilty of their own blind superstitions, which was reflected in the books they read, books by authors as important to them as any on the university curriculum (Arendt, Sontag). He himself enjoyed a semester under the saturnine influence of various authors … There was an astrological clique emerging in his circle of university friends, and he felt he had no choice but to go along with it. “Saturnine” is a reference to the editor, Saturnino Calleja. But it wasn’t really a case of peer pressure. He always reserved a hint of admiration for those who can spell and who respect the basic rules of grammar.

They interrogated him about the bonetudos and he gave them away. Now that he’d moved up in the world, he didn’t care. He also wanted to know the names of those involved in the conspiracy against D.

Before going to bed, and before making what he called a “moral choice,” he recited “Prayer Before Birth,” by Louis MacNeice

Anagrams, pangrams, double acrostics …

[Arribalo, Barriola, Donado, Ventimiglia] the Andovers’ residence with his girlfriend, a young woman (daughter of Ventimiglia Donceles, the singer—remember?) who was very much in love with him, and an avid reader of everything he wrote. And he wondered, but refrained from asking aloud … How could she be in love, the only condition for which reciprocation isn’t a law … ?

Combine hearing / / Conversation

—She’s in love with him because he writes.

—Does he write so well?

—For sure. She reads everything he writes.

And then he asked himself …

Conversation with the
editor
.

—It’s Balmóral, everyone pronounces it wrongly. I’m surprised at you.

The aunt. Everyone was living in a state of shock. Shock that overrode the fear.

After returning from his last trip, he saw his door had been forced open. He was [NOt]

surprised at what was taken [by those freaks]. He knew what they were looking for.
Honor among thieves
.

He stepped over the threshold and tripped over the books from his last trip, still wrapped in a Galignani bag. Jet-lagged, he moved through the house with a weary contempt of the all-too-familiar. He was humming a song.

In the bathroom, he found the dog-eared though still unread journal he bought on the train from that youth who reminded him of
George
.

End of P, bad marriage to an awful girl. Chesterton’s biography of Chaucer: William Morris’s edition of Chaucer’s works. The smell of cat piss hit like a brick wall. At least other urine smells only erect a semi-permeable barrier. And having some way through is always better than having none. He had to get rid of his slithering, reptilian comparisons: repudiate them. And he was here.
There
.

A not-unexpected death begins the story (disease, obviously)

The three factors. The conversation in which we learn: X is the accountant’s daughter’s boyfriend. The house broken into during a trip to Europe. The angelic girl in the Pallemberg bookstore. Passing by a poster of Belgrano in Peru (“The House on calle Piedras,” “Replicas”)

A lengthy tribunal negotiation (on the same day Luini saw him) concerning the movement of the inheritance southwards, which couldn’t happen until after July 9 …

[Eiralis sets the date … in the preface or the letters?]

Luckily he liked walking …

So that he went down, as he liked to say, as he liked to believe, for Esmeralda, then he got to Piedras—with the cars and buses before him, daring him—and he got as far as Carlos Calvo, at which point he doubled back.

Include the booksellers in “Early”

Accents
has the original strip of paper [a valuable addition to my bibliophile’s treasury], which contains a false enthymeme or [involuntary] syllogism:

“A completely original work that will endure in the memory: all its readers will be friends of the author and one another and so complicit in ensuring its endurance.”

I’d already managed to acquire some gems in that unassuming bookstore with its unprepossessing old proprietor. Most were on the tables with the other cheap books, but, occasionally, there were one or two great volumes to be found on the shelves. Of course, they’d remain there unsold for several months before being demoted to the plebeian tables. Some of my best friends were witness to the regularity of this process. The most observant of them called the period of caducity “the fall,” and he’d usually announce its arrival out loud. But it was still the middle of spring. Behind me, the two sisters and heirs of the establishment were conversing—a pair of redheads who looked like they came out Dante Gabriel Rossetti via Zwi Migdal or the Warsaw Ghetto. They were speaking in intricate detail about some family matters. But there was an anger or furor in their voices (perhaps they were just being loud) about information one wouldn’t expect two siblings to disagree about. The indirect way they related that information didn’t help, but any auditor would find it hard to believe that two sisters who spent nearly every waking hour together for the better part of fifteen years, would be ignorant of their father’s eye color, the ages and genders of their cousins, or the fact their mother was bald. But I swear that this was the nature of their exchange.

That day, each of them discussed how much they disliked the noise and heat of their respective houses, in the process of which they gave away not only their addresses, but how long they’d been living there, how many rooms they had, the location of the television, etc.

I thought that if this absurd display was practiced, merely an exercise of redundant communication intended for the casual listener, then I should demand a refund for those four issues of
Accents
I bought (the most recent hidden under the ponderous weight of a copy of Papini’s
Final Judgment
), the contents of which were lame by comparison; but if they weren’t practiced, intentional, then I regret having admired their pleonasms and redundancies for as long as I had, which seemed to go on for as long as I’d been in possession of a mortal coil.