No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (26 page)

Dr. Angelicus. Dr. Sublime. Dr. Sardonicus. Dr. Zhivago. Dr. Atl. Dr. Scholl. Doctor No.

The Mass in tongues by Remo Sabatani

Quote Poe, Ivor Winters

—Is this a tribunal?

—Don’t get your hopes up, friend: it’s only a social gathering.

—The Pole told us it’s Sircular Cymmetry—said Mardurga. It was recorded as such in the Club Maguncia logbook.

—Sircular Cymmetry expelled us.

—Nefelibata—someone sneered.

—Tungsteno—sneered another.

—Tusitala.

—Barbelognostic.

—Sircular Cymmetry.

—Sircular Cymmetry is the way for expats to die far away from here, too far to make their way back home. Sircular Cymmetry is nature’s way of distributing ash in the cartographical game of chance. Hazard. Azure.

—You must have seen it—interrupted the Basque—but if you haven’t, here’s the test. Place the remains of a loved one on a stable, uniform surface—smooth and flat, like language. Not a carpet or rug, please. They’re not in the same category [“stable”]. They tend to move, travel: from Tripoli to Beirut, from Baghdad to Missolonghi, from Algeciras to Istanbul. Then, in this rapacious situation, force yourself to a helping of the divine air so small its inhalation doesn’t add to your cultural malaise, or its exhalation blow a single annoying diptera away. The [vegetal] rustle of a pubic hair, [or] the baritone bellow of an irregular verb.

Hell came freely through the narrow doorway of the monastery. All doorways lead to Rome [which is precisely where you won’t find it (La Haya)] …

The world is purely rhyme, conjecture. He enters dressed as a gallows-bird, a maimed cowboy in spurs who walks with the mien of a prince consort in front of the gardener and makeup artist, who take turns as his manservant. For the Spaniard, at least he does the favor of treading loudly.

Mock-Tudor house in Kenwood, in the abbey of exorcism, far from the first instance of excess—or abuse?—that didn’t even come close to leading us to the palace of wisdom. Or would it be a basilica? It makes the ship stink to high heaven. The Angels have reached the foothills crawling on their knees. The smoke, swamp fumes. Moreover. Cloister without threshold, shadow of an ash cloud. From here his beloved left, and his circumflexed spirit, and from there it will depart. Repeat undirected. Repeat undriven.

And later it left for good, departed. And gone was the interval between departure and return.

[Everything seemed better.] Help us, Urbain Grandier.

But no. Once experienced, the sea air up in arms or an orbit around Saturn,
the rest goes back to the black caviar cave of the inevitable return
. Or the inevitable path. For the unshod. For the odd ones. Now nothing preoccupies us. Now we’ve seen that justice will collapse through abuse of hendiadys. The critic of art through calumny, the white wisdom of her bones, the brush of a fly. Capellane. Toe cap. And next, an epigenetic phenomenon, the
retinto
ally of both. And the Episcopalian Italian, incidentally, gasping for breath. And all multiple forms: the snail, the Holy Bible, the landing strip …

A son of Aberdeen of two Hereford males.

—
I can’t leave
—said the starling.

—Sircular Cymmetry, yes. The inversion was the tangential formula—continued Madurga. That’s to say, the tangents of his religion, the thurifers, the censers [none other than the progenitors of the epsilom]. And there were even secret tangents, well-rounded symmetries. The tiger he spoke of was Sumatran, which, I’m not sure if any of you noticed, has a crazier aspect than any other tiger. It was said he was to come bearing justice. He was surely something like what Blake saw between the bars of his art before writing of that “fearful symmetry.”

—Yes, yes … —said Seregni who, for the first time, seemed interested.

—The tiger belongs to a narrative tradition we’ve ignored. Gobeluncz knew this, although he was as ignorant as we in every other respect. We had to accept the blame—he said—never the punishment. The incorrigible God, he said. The collector of prepuces.

Gobeluncz knew things we didn’t know by his cold nose, his borrowed nose, because he was a European, because of his extensive reading, and because, unlike us, he didn’t work in an office. The preputial bridle. He invented a type, a category—many ways to classify us. Those who came on Thursdays—which included our group, for we came to this very place to play billiards—he called Jovellanos. Those who came on Wednesdays, a group none of us had ever met or even seen, he called barbelognosticos. But rest assured, there’s no need to fret, I’ve already made inquiries. I never encountered any of them but I did discover this much: it seems, the barbelognostics were a Christian sect whose members—at the end of their ceremonies, their rites— … drank … semen. It wasn’t thought unchristian, but something divine, a mandate or commandment.
Thy statutes will be my songs
.

—The whimsical heifer used me so the rebellion would go unnoticed. The nuptial colloquy above leaves me more eager than before. Not because we competed [by the whim of the heifer] but because we won. The proof is in this scapular. The sestina and chalk drawing thrown in for good measure.

—Where did you make your inquiries? asked Seregni, firmly.

—Not far from here. There’s a subsidiary nearby … a branch, I suppose you can say.

—You mean a parish. I’m a member. And now all of you …

—To pretend you were born earlier, you use a monocle and take snuff … —said Madurga, erroneously.

—No sir, no gentlemen. I’m Gobeluncz—said he who sought to remove Seregni’s mask—. But don’t deny me—he continued—the punishment I deserve.

Lie. Like a good Christian, like a modern, a good Pollack, he preferred punishment to guilt. He’d rather die with his eyes open. He’d rather die. Genteel petit bourgeoisie.

To please him, Angus and two others pounced on Seregni. One of the two was he of the nasal passages [giant nostrils]. With the effort of the three, he was, as they say, subdued. And although it wasn’t a fair fight, the result wasn’t exactly a foregone conclusion. The fray resembled a certain hand game that consists of putting one hand atop another, the other hand atop that one, and so on successively. But the lack of manual parity between the two teams made it a fiasco. Moreover, the game isn’t suited for a lot of players because the number of bodies gets in the way of all the hands. Another failure imputed to the lack of bilateral symmetry among featherless bipeds.

Gesu Bindo was the last to throw himself upon the body of Giordano Bruno Seregni, after Angus had already exhibited the mask in triumph. In that moment when he was thinking (when Madurgo and I, when I thought) the worst—that we weren’t going to be able to make it happen, make the seregnate follow the gobeluznate, vicars of power, exemplary dictators—we heard the overtures of morning. Muffled overtures.

Peal of bells. Treat yourself at the close with a brief [zealous] beat.

The feral beasts—by reputation for truthfulness or a slavery to thirst—are often wary of discarded rotting flesh, flesh they themselves discard, flesh that is generally discarded. Some, schooled by boredom and disgust, even shun [it] (although it’s been often witnessed that they crave it: odd parity of the times). This is also called (in another world, another circumstance, another latitude) Sircular Cymmetry. Cymmetrical like
surgery
, sircular like
seismic
. Gobeluncz said everyone on Earth is at fault for having a limited vocabulary. How quickly they putrefied in that strip of garden, the zen Serengi and the basque Egozcue!

It wasn’t easy negotiating the entrance to the library, which seemed impassable as a Schliemann obsession. The feral beasts had swallowed the custodian almost without chewing and continued onwards. Their subjects, however, halted long enough to lick her makeup. The beauty of these posthumous acts derives from the skin that’s marked with a sacred rubric, as that arbiter of taste, Osberg, once divined. Streaks, ocellations, grooves. The martial monotony of death is always distant, always behind.

Everything went well, as the feline [feral], ferocious troop advanced, as the regiment invaded the temple, the workplace, the factory, as the accursed, white giant’s gastric requirements were sought. As they made their way upright. As they asked for the whereabouts of the principal equine body.

Such are the factious fictions, the apocryphal affiliations. Such are feral beasts.

But for the sake of symmetry, we will stop here.

Lalo Sabatani,
The Debut
or
The Mass in Tongues

(unexplained in
Lycergical Glossary
)

#21 Again: Giordano Bruno, John Florio, Philip Sydney

Shortly before getting out of bed, Annick Bérrichon perceived that the animals that smile in the dark were absent from room 103 of the Maria Cristina hotel in Mexico City. If it was true, then she must’ve been somewhere other than the Maria Cristina Hotel in Mexico City, because, though they were invisible, she sensed they were very near her. How strange! She hadn’t been afraid of the dark before, while she was very afraid of the animals, but now those fears were reversed. She tried calming down by thinking that it was only a result of her being in a strange place … but what place, since she wasn’t certain where she was?

Dark is the way, light is a place. Who’d said that? Which of her poets? Or had it been uttered in seventeenth century Spanish by one of the creatures in her room, a room that may or may not be in the Maria Cristina Hotel in Mexico City?

She extended an arm. Instead of finding the switch, her fingers brushed against the wing of one of the creatures hanging from the ceiling (they weren’t all of one species, but she had to somehow identify them), which caused a disturbance that from initial stirrings led to shrill and raucous protestations [that infected the others] and, in effect, multiplied the noise into a clamor, a general uproar [although fleeting and retractable] that, in effect, multiplied her fear. They seemed to flicker in and out of view, their eyes blinking, searching in the darkness. Their laughter illuminated them. Her memory must have failed her to not find some justification for this nightmare.

A.B. had recklessly abandoned her studies of Balkan literature … And besides, this horror has been going on the past two days! The interminable journey, her proud and condescending peers always near her: a nightmare on terra firma. It’s not that she [Annick Bérrichon] lacks the courage to insult them and be free of them. She doesn’t do so because they’re her “colleagues,” and together they form a single body, so that any insult would only bleed [spread] like a lacerated organ; indeed, any repudiation, calumniation, would only redound on her, lacerate her, multiply her fear. They didn’t matter to her personally, individually (although they’re all her “colleagues,” they each belong to different species), it was the group that mattered, the corp. The historical fact. It was the collapse of its reputation she feared.

That the creature hanging near her left shoulder (she recognized the general design and principle parts of its corporal vesture) was a female, she was in no doubt. She’d learned from Sister Juana’s
First Dream
that bats are birds without feathers. Of all the obscurities to unveil, [for God’s sake]! Incubus / Succubus:
taenia saginata
. She was well acquainted with the delay, the docility, the asthenia: for whole semesters she’d been afflicted by self-reminders of her corporate guilt. Orphaned girls in rags, scribblers of theses and dissertations, of papers and
ponencias
, like the ones she read on campus, safe offerings, inspiring clumsy harmonic and acoustic reverberations by others, avoiding all the risks she herself had taken. Behind mirrors. Behind the mirror of the stand-in poet’s indrawn conceitedness, of the cheiroptera’s tremulous [trembling] voice that whispers near her shoulder (on which she believed it was now perched) a soft interjection that through impatience would grow into a peremptory demand. And this will be the last straw, provoking her, Annick Bérrichon, to an angry boast about having never been corrupt, about having never stooped to be a quadruped, about having acquired as much knowledge as she needed. For she knew everything. And yes, she was female.

And how strange [it was] to be [so] exposed, so visible! At her age! [During the course of her long life,] she continually shed her coquettish vestures although she continued to make them the butt of her jokes. Even now, with her wrinkles, her involuntary whistles, her sudden outbursts, her habit of praying, and her occasional lapses of memory, she’s managed to retain her peculiar style.

How long it took to impose it on the others! Almost as long as it took her to adopt it herself. An ugly old crone who became well known for her wit and wisdom. What seminal moments in her life [or her biography] vindicate this reputation? None. They were foisted on her all at once, as if she’d lived her whole life in a daze until, one day, when she was ugly and old, she awoke and found herself famous for being witty and sage.