No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (31 page)

Tears shed for the profession

Hilarión Curtis on the quantities and the disasters

6.

Urlihrt lived by his insomnia. The perfect work Nicasio had promised would be divided into two parts, each part in turn divided—like the
Goldberg Variations
—into thirty-two fragments. Now, the first sixteen chapters would proceed as if up and down eight steps, each step having its own peculiar signs that are met first on the way up, and again, but in reverse, on the way back down. Now, although the number of fragments left by Urlihrt far exceeded the stipulated quantity, no one—not even Lester, Luini, or Urlihrt’s daughter—could make them [that accumulated heap] appear like an orderly collection … The excesses of symmetry lead to the desert of boredom.

His diary ended: this has set its seal upon the age

The old bachelor pays a visit to the dead poet’s library

Soon after publishing my first fictional piece in the journal,
Change
(“Misery of a Realist,” first extract from
Finesse
), I was thought to have risen high enough in the disordered hierarchy of the literary world to be called upon to judge my first short story competition. I read more than a hundred; there seemed to be no end: none were displeasing, but all were unmemorable, except for one, which I remember because I particularly disliked it. It had a title something like, “Diphteria of a Cereal,” and it was a perfect parody of my first piece. I felt the same way I did that time in fourth grade when I entered the classroom and caught L(eporello) imitating me. I never saw myself like that before, but now I saw myself perfectly as I was. There’s something in an imitation, however foolish, that always supersedes the model: imitation is the only advantage left to the featherless biped whose evolution left him with a paltry handicap for racing against any of the quadrupeds. The progress of our steps is always backwards. Barefooted humiliation. Why we can’t justify Bates’s outrage
after
Maclaren-Ross; or comprehend the spit in the eye that so annoyed Carpentier and Lino Novás Calvo
after
Cabrera Infante (despite his stating explicitely “Parodio no por odio”).

Look for Ivor Black in The H., V.N.)

Ravel

In defence of the stories, though, one can invoke an extraneous though irrelevant detail. When Oliverio Lester—who’d won various prizes by that time—was judging a short story competition for which he had to read “almost three hundred stories,” he arrived at a curious and exasperating conclusion. All of the stories were populated by similar characters following neatly constructed arcs in neatly constructed fleeting unrealities. As if the contrivance were an instrument or toy for imaginations dominated and constrained by outdated modes, so the arts and trades, occupations and situations described in those three hundred stories Oliverio Lester had read were the same arts and trades, occupations and situations he’d read about in stories from the forties and fifties. The first mawkish scruples prevailed in the realistic narratives—gatekeeper grandfathers, office lovers, tenement suicides, miserable prostitutes with guilty consciences, miserable narrators with guilty consciences, and just plain misery by the bucketload. But even the fantasy tales—encounters with aliens more clever and civilized than ourselves, discoveries of old documents that have a modifying impact on the present time, predictable suspensions of reality for unwelcome forays into the oneiric—arrogantly flouted any implementation, insinuation, or hint of the modern.

So he was determined—roughly a decade ago—to publish a collection much like the one the reader will encounter here, but with a mere exemplary, didactical intention. But then other issues distracted him.

#6 C
ALUMNIES

Elena Siesta, “Sestina of Departure”

What did our detractors mean when they said “without stories” … ?

Nicasio Urlihrt,
letter ending on a semicolon

Letter ending on its tippy-toes

What did they mean to say, Don Julio? They meant to say that no one understood what in the world they were talking about or writing. What do they mean to say? They mean to say that all of them, all are just gazing at their navels with the kind of smug self-satisfaction that others find repellant. See, for example, if anyone can understand a word of the discussion regarding
Agraphia
’s aporia in “The Mass in Tongues”: there is so much understatement, so many baffling interpolations and obscure references, it would exhaust most normal readers’ curiosity and patience. To know that Duchamp’s nine malic molds correspond to the thirty-six family doctors, and that the number of ocular witnesses weren’t in fact four but three: north and south; that 646416 was the magical cipher in the arcane numerology known to the initiated. One must become familiar with automatic formula for the anagrams and pseudonyms and use it to share ones devotion to cryptic books …

Victor Eiralis, idem

#24

Carelessly, I got used to the idea that paradoxes themselves were acceptable to everyone, and often mentioned them in passing, though I saw no signs of support or even sympathetic smiles around me. But, occasionally, when I was alone, I indulged my superstitious sense of self-importance. Thence, ready to begin my narrative about the cult, or the legion, I remembered that my two favorite stories in English are about sects or lodges: “False Dawn” by Kipling, and “The Primate of the Rose” by M. P. Shiel. But then I realized, after thinking a while about these stories and their themes, that I was wrong: neither of them have anything to do with sects or lodges. Sebastian Birt,
Lenten Diary (Diary to Elena)

#8 F
AREWELLS

[#27]

Before closing the door on the previous day

[Shortly before Elena sneaked into the background with Bindo, quietly and deftly, so they wouldn’t hear her speak about them, she left a note that was, in both style and substance, the very opposite of a suicide note.]

By doing it so badly, maintaining my distance and calm, and because Remo was there, and because his languid liquid stare made me nauseous. For this and because of my rough and narrow throat (almost all we ever did was smoke). For this and because I knew about Allegra Siri, all of those characters, so to speak, placed at yours and our mercy. Dos, Pimpernel, whoever. And I see I must carry away a flock of adjectives (“every ewe with its mate”). Except they’re not ewes but lemmings. The edge of
Agraphia
’s fjord placed by you over there so we don’t fall.

(…) All the stubbornness, the foolishness, the constant betrayal, and the pride—especially in his case. My constantly aching molar seems unjustly to be at his temperament’s disposal. Without justice of divorce, you’ll say. I don’t deserve it when he’s the one to blame. He’d like to be the next presbyobe, the one who pays no attention to the details—not I, the one who stays at home.
La plus cruelle absence est celle que l’on peut toucher avec le main
. Toulet, apt, isn’t it, considering our arrangement? Remind her of it, whoever she is. The drafts are still there [in Vidt]. If, at some point, Teode wants them back, it’s
your
duty N. to return them to her. Also, give her those books you merely hoard without bothering to read them.
It would help if you collected books instead of women
, they said to CC. I [on the other hand] feel incapable of doing either: I have no contempt for books or women, but I’m quite indifferent to collections of them. I only lately understood the impulse: collections, collections.
I’m an irregular verb
.

[There are things that surround us, that abound in great numbers, that slither or crawl, and yet, today, they don’t matter. The monkeys are clamoring above our heads. I assert, I insist:
I’m an irregular verb
.]

Note of farewell by Elena Siesta / Laetitia Pilkinghorn

Shortly after the last throes of
Agraphia
, justified because of the password “after the first death, there is no other” [Dylan Thomas bromide], and after the latest babbling in search of a scheme or pattern [“Specular Soup,” “Early”], the group had been reduced to a small circle of snobs with exclusive tastes and reverential airs, committed to a grim [sterile] formalism, that varied between free experimentation and idiotic
oulipienne
extremes, but which had the virtue—or defect—of not incorporating the audacity or stringent formalism of the latter, only the enthusiasm, effeminacy, and acedia [anesthesis] of its practitioners.

Emilio Duluoz,
Last Paid [Pure] Vacations

On Hilarión’s resurrection from the dead and the reburial

I live in communion with the dead
[Quevedo]

One stormy night, Nicasio brought us to the house in the south where Hilarión’s wake was being held. We gathered round him. He said: “there won’t be many of us.” Since there was no more coffee, they brought us mugs of milk. The smell of dead flowers was repulsive. “After three days, the body starts to reek,” said Nicasio before adding: “these three are the cultural apostles of
the distant far away
.” He was referring to a certain young man, an older man with the look of a lawyer about him, and Felipe Luini’s girlfriend. [Dead?] The Fedora [of imitation felt] resting motionless on his chest, a recent Band-Aid on his ring finger, a copy of
The Barefoot Path
. Also, an umbrella dripping outside the narrow furrow of his march, a standing ashtray brimming with inhuman ash, and some empty mugs balancing on a coffee table. At certain times, in an adjoining room lit with tubes, the three were face-to-face with the ambassadors of the distant faraway, and the youth took the opportunity to air his relationship with a woman ten years his senior.

“I expect the worst: that she’ll commit suicide. And that she’ll make the decision while I’m away.” The confession prompted a contest. The lawyer revealed he was in a relationship with a woman who was making his life impossible. Luini’s girlfriend said her brother was running the risk of being assassinated by a group of vigilantes, and that no one knew how to convince him to flee the country. Back in front of HCs coffin, someone standing next to Lester said: “How strange it is.” At which Nicasio explained: “Like a crustacean. The integrity of the corpse and the lack of smell are due to the illness. As it advances, it stops growth and corruption. We’ll be attending a premature burial.” Luini’s girlfriend—the sister of the threatened man, whom we all wanted to save in that same hour—ventured to ask something we’d disregarded: “If it wasn’t going to last more than a day, why have a wake?” Nicasio delayed in answering: “Don’t know. A whim. It just had to be seen.” And someone else puffed: “Was it really worth it?”

The following day, the dead of night seemed to reward them, but it was a false alarm, although it made the priest’s youth sermon more tolerable, and for Luini’s girlfriend, it made more tolerable the incessant advances of the obsequious lawyer with the ridiculous name.

Before they sealed the coffin, one of the three apostles pointed at the ring finger of the deceased [enringed with a piece of tan paper], around which there was a piece of paper. He asked Nicasio if he could remove it. After a questioning glance at the lawyer, Nicasio approved. The lawyer seemed to be waiting for that moment the whole night. He nodded with a smile, adding: “Don’t hesitate, do it immediately, but slowly: I also happen to be a notary public.”

It was a piece of rag paper. On the side in contact with the skin, there was a printed inscription:
The illness has assumed the likeness of death that death
,
the same death you question! [sic] on the way out
,
will not deny
.

Nicasio was left with the rag paper piece, that is, one of the apostles.

[“Thoroughness” extends in two directions because of the two senses of the word: comprehensiveness and meticulousness.]

It’s difficult, and especially now, to find out in detail what he did for Inés, who was always wishing for someone to visit, but someone who didn’t immediately become, or become by degrees for that matter, tiresome on visiting. She used to say, to claim, it was a result of her middle class, her bourgeois vulgarity. But there was something else.

[#26]

It’s not easy writing a sad tale after a happy one. [Perhaps] Tolstoy had this in mind when he heard the first beating intimations of his Anna K. It may be hard to hear a beat in here. My family bedroom is host to every kind of noise.

Beginning of “Replicas”

Fantin-Latour. To block outline.

Blocked outline.

Anales diáfanos del viento
. Góngora

Mourir

Although nothing prepares us for it, dying suddenly when young exempts us from having to go through the slow process of dying when old. Two ghosts have stood up [in unison]. They are the ghosts of old age and of sickness. [And] they stood up together and got ready to leave when we alerted them that we still hadn’t died, that we hadn’t died yet, that we are still standing, [that we will remain standing,] that we’ve begun walking. We caught up with them almost immediately. All our actions were mirrored in theirs, as if they were glued to our backs, beginning at the hip. Duelists, if we were, in truth, chronological caricatures. After they cross our path, we will not see them again, but we will hear them say, illegibly or inscrutably, through the semi-consciousness of awakening from sleep, that since they began expecting us (waiting for us, frightening us), the slow process of dying is no respecter of age. Dying and aging are very different things, as if one was written in verse, the other, in prose. Even now, when I think I’m beginning to understand them, I do not. And perhaps it’s because “now” demands too much exercise of will, and “do,” even more. And everything I had set out to describe here, before Basilio stopped me, is inaccurate, an implausible version of what really goes on. And what really goes on: birds decapitated over headless torsos. And this makes me think of D. H. Lawrence, and the precise way in which he ends
The Woman Who Rode Away
by dismissing what is loved and what is seen. But Lawrence himself isn’t an example of what I mean. In him, the illness, the sickness, isn’t a ghost, and old age is only an intruder insulted by his good looks. Not a ghost, but a beggar that follows him, circling round him, a dervish, spinning round him, transforming him with every turn, as Morgan Le Fey does to Prince Valiant in the first book I ever truly loved. That lets him see, through graying orbits, time spent, what the years ahead will bring. He will have the good sense not to fulfill them, but not so as to die suddenly when young, but to go through the slow process of dying … Yes,