No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (28 page)

Subtraction after subtraction, I remained in the wicker basket. I thought my disappearance—sorry, my absence—would make them miss me down below. Make them feel relieved, I immediately thought. I was reminded of
Tom Sawyer Abroad
, when the Negro, Jim, believes he sees Virginia because he once saw it colored pink on a map. While traveling by balloon. Then time dissolved, and I saw the map of my past, in monochrome at first, until a few colors began appearing here and there. And I saw myself arriving at the first meeting of
Agraphia
—me, still wearing glasses—when Remo Sabatani was still at the journal. And nearby, in a kind of rhombus of ochre hue, another scene, the famous black mass at the house on Giordano Bruno Street. And then a mad rush to the present, to Hilarión Curtis’s wake at the house on Piedras Street, Eloísa’s house in Avellaneda. And, symmetry goes, symmetry comes,

Semblance
[
A Russian Tale
]

There are people who wait for us and those who disappoint us. They come to us without us having to go to them [reciprocity], as if these encounters happen for the sake of only one of us, as if they’d been randomly or deliberately [premeditatedly] set in motion to range across the world searching for the one among us, the only one in the world, who is equipped to tell their story. Or maybe not, maybe these are in fact the most predictable of encounters, and we, although we’ll never fully accept it, are perhaps for them as shadowy a group as they appear to us. As long as we cling to our consciousness [conscience], I suspect we’ll never know [[if any of them talk of reciprocity.]] They are difficult people to keep inside the head, beings whose lives are only imaginable because they reside in the suburbs of our memory: imaginable but obscure, because these suburbs skirt the frontiers of oblivion—that which cannot be imagined—so that they’re only capable of being recalled, evoked, by a formula that sometimes works, but more often does not. If it does work, then the story begins to emerge, although the character, the protagonist, remains shadowy. So it was in the case of Velemir Dimitrovich Pachin. It matters not that we came to learn about him during our wanders in exile. It matters not that the unwavering dark forces of the imagination enveloped him until someone came along and announced—or shouted, rather—
Attempt
. Suire’s [Sartre’s] work was the password that unlocked it, and the pretext for telling the following tale. So although the premiere was so long censored, confirmation of the rumored plot was leaked by both major and minor actors alike, and Velemir Dimitrovich finally became a part of the permanent cast of characters in the shadowy opera buffa of memory.

Velemir Dimitrovich Pachin didn’t attend the meeting at Elena Fiodorovna’s home because his coat was frayed. For years he’d treated it with neglect: an old-fashioned serge doublet with beaver skin lapels that his uncle on one occasion had brought him from Oslo or Helsinki. [[On one occasion, he forgot it … and managed to retrieve it a year later. But that’s another story.]]

Velemir Dimitrovich had no virtues to speak of, but neither had he any vices, unless his proneness for distraction could be considered a vice, or his neutral stance concerning all things good and evil, complemented by an expressionless face—somewhat comic, adorned with one of those Russian noses that provoke teasing in childhood but, in adulthood, becomes a harmless, unflagging instrument—accorded him the virtue of being a good actor, a consummate actor. Yes, although his nose had been a cause of much affront and inconvenience to others, he, Velemir Dimitrovich, was completely lacking in that quality which, in the vaguest terms, is called intuition. When Olga Fiodorovna invited him to stay one October afternoon in the gazebo beside the train station, Pachin said yes, he would go. The winters in Berlin are less bitter than those in St. Petersburg, although the bitter unhappiness of temporary exile would make the sojourn bittersweet.

Two days afterwards, three before the reunion, he was sitting on the bunk in his quarters at Frau Heise’s boarding house, wondering what the devil to wear to the party, complementing the rumination by quoting gravely, aloud, some of the more dramatic speeches from Suire’s opus. (He’d read the work in haste, as was his wont, but thanks to his prodigious memory, he was able to quote all his character’s speeches and interjections, as well as those of others.)

Now then, he thought, none of his friend’s coats ever came close to fitting him, so he couldn’t entertain the notion of squeezing into any one. Night was falling. Pachin heard a droplet fall from one of Frau Heise’s taps, all firmly shut the night before by the silentious Giuseppe, [who always got back after ten]. Darkness flowed over the enemy city, a city in which no one had a spare coat for him. He heard the fretful stridulations of the tram as his eyes rested on the partial images drawn on the glass of a car on which someone (himself, the night before) had scrawled a word now almost erased. “Perebredev,” he spelled out. “Perebredev,” he then said, pronouncing it properly. He’d encountered him the week before in the market. Luckily, providentially, he hadn’t escaped his notice.

Perebredev was the least trustworthy person in the world. His reputation as a conman spread well beyond the frontiers of St. Petersburg. His misdeeds, his contagious lack of discretion, once transmitted through the ear, infected the mouths of all. To make matters worse, Pachin had rehearsed with him a sketch of one of Perebredev’s misdeeds, hoping Nemerov’s company would perform it. All the same, Perebredev had a magnificent trenchcoat, and his smile was as welcoming in Berlin as it was in St. Petersburg. So he wouldn’t have a problem loaning his trenchcoat, because Perebredev was at once proud, amiable, and affirmative in attitude, always ignoring—as everyone knew—the deflationary “no.” He was born to say yes, born to allow his curiosity [proboscis] probe every nook and cranny of other people’s goodwill and confidence. Perebredev was [[a man]] as tall as Pachin, perhaps a little taller. Pachin had scribbled [[the fantasmal, fleeting]] Perebredev’s address and kept it in the only pocket of his only coat, the one from Oslo or Helsinki, [[the one he retrieved after once forgetting it]]. Pachin’s coat was hanging on the only chair he had in his room. So it wasn’t difficult, even for Pachin, to retrieve.

No core narrative in these short stories
,
more like referential
,
allusive
,
flashes of information. And this won’t make for an easy novel. Moreover
,
I can’t simplify it (without altering its nature)
.

As for me, life below always seemed to me excessively laborious. All that editorial drudgery [and muckraking], that urge to do something worthwhile, something significant, and all those egos so different from my own. I like being up here, which is to say, deep down within me; although, I’d like to be higher, of course, and without the aid of a balloon or wicker basket.
My splendid art
,
my sad profession
. My swarthy self, morocho, always full to rupture with either darkness or splendor.

We all tried speaking differently and we all spoke the same. To write differently and we all wrote the same. Broken logic: we all started differently and ended up the same. No, it wasn’t about stylistic exercises, as some believed. Literature isn’t done by mechanically arranging syntactical and grammatical clusters, it must achieve buoyancy, drift on the air like music. And there is someone down there who understands this. Who elects, who chooses to hear this. It would be better if he listened.

Zi Benno,
The Epsilom

Federico Prosan,
Xochimilco Diary

Mexican Journal

Music. Pessoa. Contra Verlaine, contra Mallarmé:

“For vague sentiments that resist definition, there is an art, music, whose end is to suggest without explicitly stating. For those sentiments that are perfectly defined, so that it is difficult for emotion to reside in them, there is prose. And for sentiments that are fluid and harmonious, there is poetry. In a healthy and robust age, a Verlaine or Mallarmé will always emerge to write the music they were born to write. They would never be tempted to try and utter in words what words will not suffer them to say. I asked the most enthusiastic among French symbolists if Mallarmé’s ability to move them was no better than that of a vulgar melody, or if Verlaine’s want of true expression sometimes reached the same want of true expression we hear in a simple waltz. They said no, and to this end, they meant they preferred Verlaine or Mallarmé’s poetry to plain music, which is to say, they preferred literature as music to plain music. But in so saying, they’re telling me something that has no meaning outside the meaning it has for them.”

(Fernando Pessoa, 1916?)

“As we strolled home, Iris complained she would never learn to cloud a glass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready to put up with her deliberate insularity but implored her to cease announcing
á la ronde
: “Please, don’t mind me: I love the sound of Russian.”
That
was an insult, like telling an author his book was unreadable but beautifully printed.”

V.N.
Look at the Harlequins!
1974

The quote that justifies the laziness of the author (Revol, Cortázar)

The burden of publication

Sharing a defeat is one of those human weaknesses this book intends to lambaste; I therefore share the triumph of this failure with my companions of the ear: Duncan Browne, Emitt Rhodes, Fred Neil, and Tim Buckley.

For the characters’ getting together in order to die: the
Alegretto
from Beethoven’s Seventh.

Adrogué, June 23, was thinking of
Oxyrrinco
, Hilarión Curtis’s journal

Don Julio:

I was in the busiest bar (say the local newspapers) in Androgué with my niece (and goddaughter) and that friend of hers I told you about, the one that showed up at Quaglia’s place (Quaglia, who’s a local). The friend reminds me a little of Sofía Sarracén, because she has an outstanding [thick] mole or beauty spot on her thigh. Speaking of thighs, she spends a lot of her spare time on my brother-in-law’s, imagine! Among other things, I told her there are no holidays without love. We could barely understand each other. That’s what’s tragic about getting old, believing we’re interesting when we’re just another group of foreigners. She barely understood what the words meant, I mean words in general. I won’t bother giving examples.

She answered me no. She, who didn’t want to know what the words meant—but why didn’t she want to know?

What a shock, Don Julio. My niece’s friend performed a horrible gesture, a gesture replete with that very substance, disdain: she raised her hand to her face, as if it was a telephone, with her thumb as the receiver, her pinky the transmitter, and her remaining fingers clenched between. And, with her other hand, she tweaks the air with quotation marks, a gesture I already explained to you. She must have picked it up from some nocturnal instructor when socializing. Then she says “no,” sounding the space between the quotes.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that [my niece’s friend—her second-best friend] is a good-natured girl. I’d almost forgotten my intention to invite her to the warehouse [the hangar / warehouse discussion] on the night of my sister’s twentieth wedding anniversary. The happy couple decided to celebrate it at a restaurant in the center of town—alone (I don’t want to make myself seem important, but the reason was probably me). Lorena was at her best friend’s house; her second-best friend wasn’t to know. In the stories published by [the journal]
Agraphia
, of which I was the editor-in-chief for twenty years, both blemishes and beauty spots abounded. Women with moles. The moles were arranged [with rare beauty] around a shoulder that resembled an isthmus, or upon a long continuous esplanade of flesh (
the white giant’s thigh
). Nurlihrt swore by this anatomico-geographical convention of mythmaking—his dictum, everything lasts that becomes legend—until he himself realized the damage.

Luz—she’s called Luz—has another mole in the lumbar declivity of her alluring, provocative back. A stunning back, the star to a footnote no one could ever fill. [That consequently would be filled with evidence of wrath and frustration—detritus, old-fashioned words, isoglosses, deltas of Venus, making us lose our footing; that molehill that continues to grow when expressed in her language, the second-best friend’s, her English, outdated, worn. All the rest is secret, darkness, delight. Hidden in nooks and crannies.] Although she said even the tungos (the boys who hang around the markets here) were lavish with their praise. Not that any of these ruffians could do her back any justice. Luz described what one of them said as a miracle of efficacy, exaggeration, devotion, lechery, among other words, of course. My goddaughter’s second-best friend didn’t ask me for explanations, until—exhausted—I myself seemed to request that she ask me. She turned around with elegant curiosity (because the dorsal session had persisted for some time, without variation) and said:

—Isn’t that the way men your age like it?

—Men in general—I said, defensively.

—Why?

—I don’t know
why
, exactly—I said. Unlike in written prose, in spoken prose, I was able to avail of more adverbs, [I grant my fallacy of arguing from my own authority]. With determination, she thought me the variants “toboggan” and “stake,” and I didn’t object to them as variants. When we’d both then moved from our respective positions, Luz was close enough to breathe on my chin through her nose. I kissed her. My thin, firm lips, acquainted with lies but not repentance, an answer to those thick, full surgical lips (kisses in the penultimate dark). She said she had a good time. She said, for the sake of my goddaughter—who was Luz’s best friend—we should try to avoid such situations in the future.