No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (27 page)

Lie. She’d been ugly from birth, and only became intelligent long afterwards. Ugly as sin. As she discovered when she looked in the mirror and saw her distorted features and lamented the fact they were immutable as stone, and afterwards, sought the intervention of these animistic powers that now beleaguer her, imploring them to make her literary hobby a cosmetic and prosthetic veil—to make a covenant, a pact with her: that they allow her, at least in part, to be someone else, to be their half-sister (they didn’t have a sister, but she suspected there would be a temporary easement of parental divisions). Her ugliness had moreover two aspects, one distinctive, the other alarming: together, they aroused sympathy in no one except herself. It wasn’t the consecratory effect of the whole that made others recoil, but a meticulous examination of each part. For example, her eyes, her nose and her mouth had each been considered ugly
per se
: one had to get used to seeing them in combination to appreciate the coherency of the whole.

So it was perfectly understandable why the animals approached her, [then and now,] curious about something that wasn’t very different from themselves. Unseen, timid, ignorant … without a theory!

Another of the friendly, filthy zoomorphs had landed on her left shoulder, biting her [corresponding] ear. It didn’t hurt very much: a mere pinching sensation incident to the mechanics of mastication. A sensation that bordered on pleasure, an act that seemed to solicit from her a [reciprocation] reciprocating gesture. Something she was unaware of because of her age—78 years—as she was of many things except the things she already knew. Her vast knowledge of Balkan literature, for example, brought her great renown. But, in compensation, Annick Bérrichon knew nothing about Malagasy fauna. In compensation, indeed, because, in that ultimate or penultimate hour, all her experiences seemed to vanish, evanesce before all those snouts and muzzles, the beaks and claws surrounding her—the sudden intervention of a gifted imagination, or the chance effect of light on the surrounding scenery. What a pity! Otherwise, she’d have known the imperfectly penitent occupant of her sinister shoulder was actually an aye-aye.

Atrius Umber (pseudonym of Belisario Tregua), “The Dreadmist.”

“The Dreadmist”

And Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was
.

Exodus XX, 21

God was, and Annick Bérrichon also was. They weren’t speaking. Madame Scardinelli was searching in the dark for those diurnal creatures that a long night’s digestion had caused her to imagine. Madame Obstreperous had learned to cross herself far from the mirror. She did so that no one but God would notice. And the preponderant maki on Annick Bérrichon’s left shoulder, which unlike the owl that hung upside down, could not see the future, but both cried in unison: “We can’t get out.”

Side discussion with Cornelius Sacrapant (Wynthrope-Smyth)

—I could hear them on your shoulder—said Cornelius Sacrapant—although it just struck me that they speak with great authority about something they know little about.

—You mean about the mysteries of the sects and French songwriters?—I asked.

—No, no, about English Literature.

—Do you think you know more than we are ignorant of?

—The question isn’t well phrased. You are ignorant of far more things than I happen to know. Don’t take it the wrong way: You ignore without knowing you do so.

—Then please give me an example.

—If I take yours and your Argentine friend’s taste for naturalism seriously, I’d have to point out the fact that, of all the practitioners of the genre, you omit the only names that are actually worth mentioning—said Sacrapant [smugly, pointedly].

—I don’t believe we mentioned any names, but how about …—so I ventured—Ford Madox Hueffer, also known as Ford Madox Ford?

—Nonsense—dismissed Sacrapant—. That’s [logically] the one name I’d expect one of you to say. An outstanding exponent of international modernism, his reputation’s been challenged a thousand times over, but he never seems to go away. A kind of walrus carcass, long since emptied of its innards, which the ingenious hidalgos of cultural journalism float to the surface every now and then. So eminent is he, that they suppose him—not that I’m changing the subject here—the “discoverer” of D. H. Lawrence. (You can imagine that “discovering” Lorenzaccio wasn’t the most difficult thing in the world, true?) No, not Ford Madox Hueffer, nor his cognate.

—Then who?—I asked in mock reverence to conceal my dudgeon.

—Hubert Crackanthorpe, for example, a matrilineal ancestor of mine, or George Egerton. I know erudition is misleading in every language, and the sea in every language is deaf, but have you heard or read anything about them?

Without saying a word, I admitted no. But [I must say in my defense that] the gesture of admitting denial isn’t an easy [simple] one.

—Well, I won’t be too hard on you; after all, your cases aren’t exactly unique. Many things were obliterated in the Great War [as, for example, proper instruction on methods of reproach], but I have to find at least one book on which I can speak with the same authority.

—What about this Terry Eagleton fellow? Do you think you’ll be able to get a copy of his book in Cambridge?

—Eagleton is just plain Terry, whom I sure you’ve already met. Egerton, like the other George—Eliot, Mary Evans, as you’ll recall—is a lady: Mrs. Golding Bright. As in my case, remember the dash [between the two surnames].

—I see, I see …—I said, nodding.

—As regards your Argentine friend’s favorite subject, the metrical arrangement of Spenser’s
Mutability Cantos
, it wouldn’t hurt to consult T. S. Omond …

—He consults it regularly—I said, trying at least to preserve his honor.

—The Oxford edition or the mutilated new edition?

—I don’t know—I huffed—I wasn’t paying attention …

—How odd, you being an editor and all …

It was impossible. I’d read somewhere that the number of English surnames with a hyphen was seven, and, after a day, I’d already found three in my notebook.

Zi Benno (and his collected series of novellas that can be read as one very long novel) and Edgar Alan Meaulnes (and his very long novel that can be read as a garbage heap of literary scraps, both his own and those of others) persuade me. NO

Eiralis?

Writing a masterpiece isn’t something anyone can do, only he who heeds blindly the prediction concerning his fate to be alone on a tiny stage or in a cramped laboratory, an exclusive space where exclusive work is done, has any hope of writing one.

Mirceau Eliade’s unease at the proselytizing propaganda of Jim Joyce. Scruples of the artist corrected by the superstition of impersonality—never of anonymity—that lends to his art a link / vehicle that’s functional, inconsequential, invidious, equinoctial, marketinero.

I think I copied this way of writing from Girri. Marketinero, NO.

[In preparation]

And don’t dare enlighten them; it’s best if they continue as they are, in pursuance of something we’re not sure we know ourselves, something we may ourselves be ignorant of; if we do in fact know it, we haven’t been told what good it will do to communicate it to others; if we’re ignorant of it, then perhaps one day, your Excellency, we will come to know it. Nevertheless, let us prepare ourselves since they do not: when the truth overtakes them, memory and volition will give way, melt into one another and evaporate, and the [luminous] day and [certain] night will also cease to be. I’m here to tell you that it’s better if, in this world, they remain in obscurity and confusion; I’m here to tell all of you that it would benefit the pack if the light of civilization never dawned on them.

Francisco Aldecoa Inauda, from the letter to Saavedra Fajardo

(original epigraph of “The Imitation of an Ounce”)

As the editor-in-chief and publisher of [responsible for] the irresponsible literature we produce at
Agraphia
, it’s left to me to apologize [rhet.
Captatio benevolentiæ
]. It was difficult converting the anesthetic [set of] abstractions they believed [was] to be literature into something readable. Although I tried my best, it suffices to read “The Mass in Tongues” and “Lycergical Glossary,” both of which were printed in those forgettable notebooks, to see I did not succeed. The collaboration with Victor Eiralis added very little: he was a jealous and inexorable defender of the same [abstruse and elusive] esthetic. I often say that whoever’s responsible for a literary journal has two jobs: keeping up appearances and bridging gaps—tasks more worthy of a [suicidal] theologian or [inhibited] geometer than a publisher. As to “keeping up appearances,” this basically demands that the one responsible uses his moral scruples to present to the reader a coherent [and consistent] intellectual pattern in the publications; and for “bridging gaps,” that risks must be taken with every literary adaptation, accepting that there can be no fixed model or approach for doing this, or if there is, it must be unintelligible. Of course, I was far from perfect in executing these tasks, but I am grateful for the interest, goodwill, and counsel of those individuals who helped me to exhibit the results.

César Quaglia,
On the Effects of Delay
,
Reflections on Distance

[
Reflections from Afar
,
on the Effects of Delay
[
Distance
]]

Time suspended in the real-time of “Diary of Xochimilk”

#10 [in Liturgies]

It was the moment for which all other moments are either altered or bartered. It was my turn to answer. “Was it true about Nicasio and Elena in Spain?” It was true, insofar as they refused—or didn’t bother—to deny it, though they were all too familiar with the
enemy
rumor
. Yes, she was pregnant by another—the late fifties, it was—and yes, it was because she had taken a
risqué
stroll to the bohemian corner that beckoned them with promises.

Adventure of the sun [Gastr del Sol], revenge of the solstice. A ray suddenly—I suddenly exclaimed—fretted Aída’s divine [marmoreal] thigh and magenta shorts … And was it true what they said about us, that no one paid attention to us, that no one—to put it bluntly—“gave a damn” about us? That we were the writers without a legend or story, that all we ever did was read? Lies, Lies. Not entirely. It so happens that the books arrived—our books arrived—in the editorial hands of someone who wanted, in short, to take his revenge. Someone, a bigwig in the editorial department, whose wife had cheated on him with Nicasio or Remo—or perhaps it was both—a good man, a gentleman, the boss of the supplement, who said to his employee, an unpaid employee, an intern: “Look, I want you to fuck this book up. And don’t worry about the consequences. The author’s an imbecile. I don’t know if you’ve ever met him. He used to go to all the cocktail parties. Morally, he’s retarded; but intellectually, he’s a survivor, and of nothing resembling a battle or a tragedy …” And I heard all of this first hand, because I’m practically invisible.

Another source?

I saw, from a great height, the tiny dot of our boat, and I prayed to return to myself. I prayed to return to the group. But the supplication was to no avail, [the] my prayer was quenched in the utterance. The jungle was stretching in the distance, water lapping the shoreline. Old gray god. Capybaras in the pampas transformed into [a herd of] neutrinos. And afterwards, from the same height, still presbyopic, I squinted at a little bark where four people were tirelessly rehearsing sham civilities, and the fifth, forcing himself to cooperate in the farce
in situ
—a dissimulation that would be obvious to anyone [else] (especially to someone remote [like me])—which would seem less ridiculous with repeated exercises in loyalty. [Then,] once again, I was peering at the telltale oval of my watch before once again trying to rejoin the [lost, niggardly] conversation. It was sixteen after twelve: a prosaic piece of information that makes one forget about the adverbs of time, as I used to say in my palefaced infancy.

The specular soup
[vision]
is the saline solution of the imitation of an ounce
.

As a result of an involuntary sacrifice, the effects of the drug that only one of us had consumed—nothing less than the specular soup—we were floating on high, manning the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. We? So I thought, at first, but none of my companions were actually with me. “Come on, Phileas dear, tell the truth, tell me about that friend of yours, Nicasio Urlihrt, you so often mentioned in conversation … What did he do, what did he create?” It was my late Chilean friend, Onofre Borneo, a ghost summoned out of death, out of absence, out of a change of custom. “Urlihrt was a difficult man,” I said, “very difficult.” We flew to a cruising altitude of at least two-and-a-half thousand feet above sea level. It was late, very late. “In the final days, he left Elena Urlihrt all on her own, and she was dead before he died afterwards. But she started doing the same after she met Bindo Altoviti—standing him up on dates—and he was dead not long before she died on her own. And she was doing the same earlier when it was Remo Sabatani, not Bindo Altoviti, who frequented her place.”