No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (3 page)

Although I’m not really a writer, I’ve had many things published in my name. I knew others who did the same: Marina Ipousteguy, for example, who spent the summer writing, living with a man who wrote. As soon as she stopped living with the man who wrote, she published a book of poems; the man who wrote is still writing, but now Marina lives with an architect who reads. The whys and wherefores of all this escape me, as they would anyone. But I’m not writing this to resolve them.

We’d been friends for quite a while, so, at Marina’s request, I happily agreed to write the foreword to her book. Due to my interest in encyclopedic trivia, the more esoteric the better, I made reference to a seventh-century monk by the name of Cosmas, and his having written a book inspired by scripture, entitled
Christian Topography
, in which he denies the sphericity and oblateness of the earth, describing this heresy as a pagan superstition, and proposes instead a world shaped like a parallelogram, having one side twice the length of the other. Who knows where I find my factoids. I compared Cosmas’s opus, which I’d never seen, to Marina’s unavoidable [all-too-urgent, all-too-assertive] book … its exhausting pursuit of so much as a single idea. I wrote that Marina’s book, entitled
The Estate of Heaven
—in which there wasn’t a word that couldn’t have been dispensed with—was a groundbreaking work, for it described on the verso and recto of each page a twofold world, a contingent rather than a necessary world: a cosmogony very like the one described in the
Topography
; that for Argentinian writers (having no choice but to implicate myself, since I’m a member of that tribe)
Heaven
would become an unavoidable point of reference. I also replied, in passing, to a comment made by Insúa Alvizur to the effect that our generation (the observation was a general one, but I took personal umbrage) would be condemned to merely aping our predecessors, to producing crude imitations of what others had done before us, if better … To making faces, as Insúa Alvizur put it: to putting on masks, not the least bit unsettling, because everyone’s seen them before. I used as many quotations as could reasonably be included in a foreword (for, as we used to say, in order to shed light, we have no option but to cite). Whatever space I had left was devoted to the ever-shrinking world of Argentinian literary criticism, into which I take credit for introducing, in this piece, a vastly important term: “vestigial.”

As soon as I sent in my contribution, I waited … waited, having sacrificed any last inclination toward fairness or sincerity, for Marina to call and say thanks. But she never did, so things went on as before.

All the characters from R.E.’s stories gather together in the end for the naming (of the story). What about the poems? A dilemma.

The stories of Francisco Eugenio Répide Stupía were written by a literary virtuoso in a style that betrays the recklessness of an apathetic plagiarist. Marina’s betray the same quality of listless intensity, the better to conceal all evidence of her poems having been written in a shitty apartment complex in a city she liked to call “a principality of proles.” Marina’s primary preoccupation seems to have been with choosing words that sounded
nice
(and she had no trouble finding them—how acoustics betray us!), without regard for their definitions or the context in which they were to be used. If anything redeems them—their only saving grace—it is a certain stubborn elegance, what Charles Tomlinson called the
principle of gentility
, a certain exaggerated sophistication that persists despite all the solecisms. In the eighties, or anyway the early eighties, Marina started out—like so many of us—translating the poems of John Ashbery for this or that poetry journal. And, you know, it’s still going on: for at least fifteen years now, no journal or review can call itself literary without printing at least one translation of a John Ashbery poem. Funny.

Marina’s English, fortified by her years in East Anglia, Urbana, and Ann Arbor, where the various jobs she’d held had only helped fortify her ennui, proved a useful tool in translating all that imprecision, suspicion, and vagueness into an even vaguer Spanish, worthy of the local literary magazines, who are wont to applaud these qualities, mistaking them for ambiguity and semantic richness. Luckily, I got to know her while she was still free of those parasites of prestige, while she was still a perfect, irresistible ape of idleness, the sort of person Shakespeare (on whom, like so many others, Marina thought herself an expert) warned us about. If pleonasm is the soul of offense, at least I know when to shut up. For dignity’s sake, if nothing else, I won’t bother to spell out what anyone can imagine. Today, early became too late.

Répide Stupía’s stories in
Accents
deal mainly with quotidian matters, trivialities, and yet no one seems to have noticed this. Peculiar: neither too French nor too Anglo-Saxon, neither too lyrical nor too narrative. The intention seems by and large to be the invocation—or evocation?—of an epic of dissimulation, a paean to the unheroic. Stupía’s aesthetic: a parsimonious late Baroque, like Faulkner’s Dixie Gongorism. There’s a sequence in his book entitled “Surnames,” among which is this mysterious poem: “The fewer words you seed by
your
design, / the more I’ll cede, distort to fit my own. / I clothe my thoughts in lies, but halt, recede / each time I think our thinking coincides. // I’ve sealed our pact without your worn insignia …” etc.

Kilgore Trout, the Abe Lincoln of fictional characters. Vonnegut.

Basilio Ugarte / Belisario Tregua

Répide Stupía: called
Répide
simply because it’s a name that’s stuck with me since my days at the National Conservatory of Music, and
Stupía
after the artist Eduardo, of course. Basilio reports someone once called him “Rápido escupía!” (“swiftly spat”)! Onomastic autonomy.

(Titles)

Accents

The Estate of Heaven

The name of Elena Siesta’s (Cora Estrugamou’s) father’s company:
Ziggurat
.

The book is called
Accents
because Répide is preoccupied with the idea of “dramatic meter.”

Other related organizations: Blamires, Haedo and Haynes (Hayms). Memi & Memi. Memi & Wuhl. Arrowsmith & Babbage. Babbage & Arrowsmith?

The law firm on Viamonte Street—Memi & Memi—employs someone’s little sister: a scribbler of bucolic poems in her schoolgirl penmanship, which, to the law firm’s embarrassment, have actually been published.

Marina Ipousteguy.

Friends: Judith, Honorata. Clarissa. The Death of Clarissa and Hudson.

At one of their homes, a touch-me-not, which bristled about you,
feeling
your presence, hemming you in. The first overtures of a carnivorous plant.

Perhaps a pitcher plant.

Marina. The way she speaks on the telephone. The way she laughs.

[Morecambe & Wise: their way of walking: like Robert Mitchum, John Wayne. Ladies’ day: every Wednesday at the National Palace with my mom and sister. The Puig-like gayness or queerness I should try to include—because … etc, and then we’ll have more culture (cf. Gerardo Deniz). A narrative. Norman Wisdom.]

Ways of looking at a blackbird. Ways of smoking in a literary salon.

What made me think of the day Inés died? I’d been up to her little roost many times, as had Dos, although I didn’t exactly approve of her work. I liked her, or I liked that she didn’t care as much about Nurlihrt as he liked to boast. No one (not even me in my foreword) ever mentions that she had a little mascot. In his diary, Nurlihrt wrote (with a nod to Chekhov) that it was a “paranoid Pomeranian.” As if he could tell the difference between a dachshund and a mastiff, the old hypocrite! My sister said it was actually a Chihuahua, and she’s known Inés a long time, having befriended her back in the old days of discotheques and pool halls. I myself think it was a Pekinese. Besides, Luini and I are the only contributors to the journal who know anything about dog breeds. The thing’s name, though, escapes me.

Still, how could people neglect to mention the dog—be it a Pomeranian, Chihuahua, Pekinese, or even a Yorkshire terrier, for that matter—when her apartment was just a single room? There’s nothing so indecent—as Pepe Bianco never tired of repeating—as rhetorical questions.

I’ll never forget it. The first people the police allowed to enter were Dos and me—along with Nelly of course, her mother. Wilson, the doorman, let us in; he stayed on the threshold. The place was a temple to narcissism. There was a series of photographs taken by Richard and Charlie at Villa Gesell in which Inés is shown playing the coquette with everyone present—not only the two photographers, but also D.H., who just happened to be visiting the seaside village with a “friend,” and then another of her in a Citroën, posing with the dog. The best photo in the apartment didn’t feature Inés, however: it was a snapshot of Christopher Niaris, taken in motion, capturing the glowing snake trail of the cigarette perched greedily between his lips, evoking the beauty and cupidity of a man who couldn’t be more different from Nurlihrt. Christopher Niaras was also featured in the largest picture we found, enshrined in a vanity cupboard—a black and white shot,
masterwork
of Calixto Mazzeloth—showing Niaras in his characteristic pose, pouting like a dandy Don Juan, though he was never interested in women; after which we were treated to a photo of a man who looked to be in his late fifties, with a profusion of white hair, wearing very thick glasses, behind which his farsighted eyes seemed full of his then-recent if premature diagnosis of cancer [colon].
Meanwhile Sofía was sleeping with Scacchi
,
Eloy was sleeping with Niaras. Oh
,
God
.

The dog was running around with its tongue hanging out, moaning and groaning; Eloísa called such behavior—when Nurlihrt was out of earshot—
convulsions of canine delight
.
Entre nous
, her exuberant flaunting, her canorous bays, are they not in fact … symphonies? All of us are prone to exaggeration. Soon, Schnabelzon, her psychiatrist, arrived. We’d met on a number of occasions, because he was something of a bohemian, or anyway liked to seem like one, if only until, like Cinderella, the clock struck twelve. Dos was fawning all over him.

a) It was summer. She waited until midnight, as for [adultery, ennui, self-denial?], before taking a non-prescribed dose of Tryptizol, and smoking a joint, or as she used to say, “killing her daemon”: the servile attitude she used to have as a writer, the ignorance she once flaunted; her anxiety as to how future generations might view her works—the links of her life as irregular as the beats of a headless dactylic line. “Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes” (Jimmy Rodgers). Bags packed, opaque. She went to bed thinking something would interrupt it, this filthy business; that Nurlihrt would call and wake her. The noise of the phone, the next link in the chain, the dream that would in fact go on without her.

The certainty of being disturbed:

[
That the sound of the telephone would still be heard through death’s muffling hands. That something would eventually wake her from her sleep. Nurlihrt
,
the telephone
,
whatever. That there would be another link in the chain. That the sound of the phone would be louder even than death. Yes
,
louder than the sudden
,
if expected
,
vertiginous
,
deafening hands of death
.]

b) She’d fallen asleep listening to a song by Laura Nyro: “And When I Die” … How obvious! If the so-called experts had paid attention, or at least understood a little English, they’d have realized it wasn’t just the note that indicated Inés’s intention to die.

The dog was running around. On the nightstand, some books: Dickson Carr’s
He Who Whispers
, Marguerite Duras’s
La Vie tranquille
—in a Spanish translation by her Avellaneda school friend—Henry Miller’s
The Colossus of Maroussi
…

[
The Woman Who Rode Away
, by D. H. Lawrence. A Corso or Ferlinghetti anthology.
L’âme romantique et le rêve
, by Albert Béguin.
Pale Fire
, the poorly bound South American edition, with an inscription furiously scribbled in HB pencil: “It’s no use, I feel sorry for N. and the kids, but I just can’t read it.”]

The lessons Nurlihrt had intended to give her weren’t enough. Nothing is for so short a life. Inés persisted in reading the worst translations, forgetting all the French she learned at the Lycée, her enthusiasm for Charles Trenet and Jacques Brel. In the typewriter was a page on which was written what one would have to consider a poem—hardly a last will and testament, since it had line breaks and didn’t respect the margins. [It was difficult to remove: four carbon sheets were in the way]. Having torn it out, I compared the contents with those of the letter that was brought by the youth. The Hermes Baby typewriter had a font that imitated the childish curlicues of a schoolgirl’s penmanship—but this was typical of Inés. Nurlihrt was the one who showed me her final drafts.

Of life
,
The Illness questions death

And someone says: Of nearly all there is of life …