No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (4 page)

Nothing suggests evil does his rounds like a beast

Without a spoor. The dog bites. If only Dos had noticed

As he left—that I die—

The illness won’t deny
.

But didn’t the others notice?

Before dropping
,
the elevator door

Will have shut
,
my reach unnoticed
.

A mess indeed: it was the Colasiopo brothers’ Dalmatian that bit her.

For some reason—I can’t recall what—it was necessary to head downstairs, so the three of us all went down together. Dos was fawning all over the psychiatrist again, particularly there in the elevator, but it was hard for me to feel comfortable around Schnabelzon, particularly there in the elevator. I remember timidly lowering my eyes and noticing his two-tone shoes. (I’m not sure what Doctor Maranón would say on the matter, but I’ve always thought that two-tone shoes were a form of orthopedic substitution, popularized to make up for the loss of spats; or else, with porteños anyway, to serve as twelve-inch
godemichés
to compensate for a similar lack.) He trimmed his moustache with obsessive care, like an actor from the forties. The elevator door opened on a young man. The fashions of the day didn’t especially flatter any of us, but they seemed to have singled this fellow out for a particular savaging. Beneath his ample mane—which seemed to grow more outward and upward than downward—was a face adorned with metal-rimmed glasses, eczema, and a smile at once genial and glum. He wore a coat that was two or three sizes too large, a patterned neckerchief, low-rise corduroy bell-bottoms, and clogs. He approached us as if he knew us. Dos embraced him. As if he was an old friend. An intimate embrace, with every sort of clasp and clap, suggesting a practiced ritual, an oft-repeated rite. Afterward, Dos turned to me and said he felt sick.
How is it possible?
asked the kid.
How?
Only yesterday Inés had spoken to him, written to him … He had, folded up at the bottom of his coat pocket, her final piece of correspondence. We were standing just outside the elevator door, in the lobby, when Dos asked anxiously, “Has anyone told Nicasio?” immediately heading off to look for a payphone. Then, after pushing the doorbell first with thumb alone and then with the weight of his entire body [seek and ye shall find], in hopes of getting a look inside, a short gentleman entered (no doubt buzzed in by the doorman, Maglio, Wilson, the Uruguayan knew him) wearing a big raincoat and bearing a bouquet of flowers. On seeing us seeing him, he reacted with a “what gives?” sort of look, as Elena would have put it, before asking us “what happened?” Schnabelzon told him everything, and, turning to us, introduced the guy as “Doctor Perete.” I had no idea who Doctor Perete was, but he offered us each a mint, as well as a consoling arm to the kid whom Dos had hugged, behind whose smile he detected, with professional keenness, a need for consolation. Then my sister arrived, also with a bouquet of flowers. What happened? Why had I called her at the office so early in the morning? Inés was dead. They supposed it was suicide. How was that possible? It was possible. It was enough to go up to her flat to see that much. Who else was up there? Did Oliverio know yet? What about Nicasio? Doctor Perete asked her if she was an acquaintance. My sister said NO, as if she was ashamed, as if she wanted to deny their relationship. Dos returned from his attempt to contact Nicasio with what looked like a pair of rent boys he’d picked up along the way. Not a bad day’s work. The nearest payphone had been in a restaurant bar called 05 in Paraná in front of the plaza. It turns out the rent boys weren’t Dos’s latest conquests but actually two of Inés’s neighbors, Richard and Charlie, who’d been having breakfast at 05 where they were informed of the tragedy. Dos hadn’t been able to get through to Nicasio. Neither did he manage to get the whole message through to Astrid, because he got cut off and found he was out of change—likewise the two other guys. [One Christmas, they knocked on Inés’ door to invite her over. Even their flat was bigger than hers. But she was on her own with no other company than the Winco turntable on which she was playing “Christmas” by the Who …]. They invited us up to their flat, the one opposite Eloise’s, and so the retinue ascended [“we ascended”?] in three groups distributed between two elevators and a stairwell.

Their apartment, which was a little larger than Inés’s, had a lounge, a single bedroom, and many framed photographs on the walls. In the early seventies, to own such expensive property could only have meant that one of them “came from money” … Charlie, the younger of the two, slept in the lounge. He was always pottering about picking up items of clothing, worrying about what would happen to Inés’s dog, Carolo. I remember his older brother, Richard, objected to the notion that they “adopt” him on the grounds that … But Charlie said it was only right, that it was the human thing to take care of the dog. They were both less than eloquent, as far as their diction, but of the two, Charlie was the better speaker. The intercom buzzed. Richard looked up and said dismissively, “It’s nothing, it’s only the knife-grinder.” Dr. Schnabelzon recognized a former patient of his in one of the wall-photos. “My stepfather,” said Richard. “He lives with my mother in Ibiza. He’s an artist [reference: Banyalbufar, Majorca].” The door opened on Ivan, with Carolo in tow. He was barking. “I’m going to lock him in the bathroom.” Peculiarly, the barking made the kid with the glasses start crying. Dr. Perete said, “He was a gift from me, you know.” The kid turned off the waterworks. “Or, rather,” the doctor went on, “I provided [gave her] the money to buy the dog [him].” The kid hiccupped, swallowing his tears. “I was told Nissus got her the dog,” he said accusingly. Dr. Perete wasn’t a man too much troubled by details. “I was getting to that, young man, I was getting to that,” he said reassuringly. Carolo was howling. “I’ll get the plastic bone Inés used to give him,” said Charlie [[innocently or with malice aforethought (thoughtlessly or out of a sense of duty)]] and went back out. The contrast between the doctor and the kid, which Dos and I never tired of evoking, was notable: the kid—thin as a stick figure, sickly green in complexion, in temperament brittle as glass, unsteady in his clogs, nervous at the prospect of having to walk in them, insecure due to having already stumbled many times, and [above all] for having done so in front of so many people, in front of us mourners—had obviously been in love with Inés, and even seemed to have gotten some encouragement in that regard. It was something in Inés’s helplessness that had brought them together, though what he would or could have admired most—as did we all—was the way she kept her vulnerability so discreet. Old Dr. Perete, on the other hand—short enough to rub shoulders with a midget, bald enough to share hairdressers with E. T., with a spine so misaligned he seemed perpetually to be staring at his shoes, and yet so full of nervous energy that anyone would have thought he was perhaps possessed of that prime-of-life, that “sexualidad perfecta” as described by the aforementioned Dr. Marañon—was also in love with her, but didn’t show it, or didn’t want to be seen showing it.

He told us that the breakfast ordered last night as compensation for adultery wasn’t enough. And the administrator
,
Falduto (significantly in debt)
,
my sister’s future father-in-law. Extensive lobbying

The loose modality, the essential tolerance of the novel form invites pleonasm. NO—see the shift in narration from first person plural to third person omniscient in Flaubert’s imitators (Bovary’s pups), almost imperceptible if done skillfully.

Article in Lacanian journal: “The Scopic Drive and the Wandering Quest for the I.”

Contest. A
Downbeat
“Blindfold Test.” Charles vs. the narrator.

After all his many occupations and avocations, we finally arrive at the truth, the ultimate truth about Charles: jazz. His fanatical competitiveness—the pure form of that same quality which, more often than not, leads instead to enforced mediocrity among Argentine intellectuals—knows no limits.

Around the time María Elvira was captivating me.

—And do you recognize this one?

I had learned to adopt a poker face in this situation, whether the song in question was obvious or obscure, because my answering in the affirmative (or, I imagine, at all) seemed to send him into a profound depression.

Luckily, it was one of those Miles Davis records some of my other friends had bored me with before.

—Kind of Blue
, I said.

I even managed to identify a piece by Chet Baker—thirty years since he’d last been “cool.”

—Ah, but what about this one?

I listened attentively for a moment. John Coltrane, I told him.

—The dove is mistaken, cooed Charles triumphantly—and what about this one … ?

It was a question of saving face. I didn’t want to compound my error, but went all-in just the same. I tossed out all the names I knew, like a juggler with his pins, but I still managed to get several wrong in a row, mistaking Johnny Hodges for Ben Webster, Archie Shepp for Ornette Coleman, Cannonball Adderley for Albert Ayler, and Sun Ra for Lester Bowie, all to Charles’s great amusement, as I went on trying both to win and to lose—hoping in this way to win either my friend’s respect or, barring that, his gratitude.

—You’re a phony. And Marina even told me you write a music column for
El Canditato Gauche
! The Madagascan Candidate, more like …

—I focus on rock.

—That’s no excuse. Still, it must be hilarious. [a riot]

Then he made another thrust. Thankfully, I knew this one too. His selections were getting worse and worse. John McLaughlin, Mahavishnu Orchestra—a nightmare from which musical history is still trying to awake, and which continues to baffle and horrify neophytes. And then, my most reviled band of all: Weather Report. What they used to call “Fusion,” a decade or more ago. All these played on a Revox turntable with tangential tonearm.

After the last piece (embarrassingly, I’d nodded off after getting another one wrong), I said:

—This one sounds like one of those interminable Beatles gag-songs, like “You Know my Name, Look up the Number …”

—No, you Neanderthal. It’s Mingus.

—I may write for a jazz magazine, but I did say it was a rock column …

Sad skin of the universe /
Triste piel del universe
.

Then: Morecambe & Wise / Gilbert & George. Dream sequence.

Second story: “St. Mawr.”

Vera Villalobos fax about what not to miss in London.

The D. H. Lawrence story Leavis was so enamored of (and, likewise—though [Y.W., J.W., D.T.F., W.S.?] didn’t mean to let this slip—Octavio Paz), and from which I derived no pleasure at all. Was I even capable? Have another look.

Get the cheap Penguin paperback. It has another story or novella included under the same cover. A no-frills sort of edition.

Kitaj’s
The Londonist
.

Note: as I’ve already stated (I think), I read “St. Mawr” in the village of Tor, Spain, in an Argentinian edition with the title
La mujer y la bestia
(The Woman and the Beast).

Detective Stories

Venus Cascabel

Venus Rattlesnake

Regina Constrictor

Vernon Gish

Bruce—Bruno—Terrier

Inés

Completes first edit in Basavilbaso—

He worked as if piecing together court records (here or in La Plata?)

Nail-biter, like Ada

Ways of dining, both indoors and out

Maspero / Betelgeuse.

Basilio Ugarte

Someone confuses Basavilbaso with Virasoro.

Deafness: as used by Kermode.

O Viamonte. Ob-viously

Parallel confusions (i.e., the same ones): Barnett Newman / Wallace Stevens. Additionally: Jakobson on Nabokov. Samuel Butler / Pessoa: lies as imprecision.

Others: Lino and Lalo Scacchi. Remo Sabatani.
Eloi eloi lama sabachthani
?

Time to decide on our own, true name for Dos, a.k.a. Delfín Ambrosio Hurtado Iriondo. A transcription of the process. The minutes from some kind of rite or ceremony of initiation:

The Quintain

The
… have a look in Chatwin and Pessoa

The Invunche

The manipanso / maniputo / African fetish

The Go-Between
(
er
?)