No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (5 page)

Committee members present: Elena, Nicasio, Belisario.

And once you’ve come up with a good name: sell the rest, settle for the leftovers.

Parsnip & Pimpernel (Waugh): Auden & Isherwood.

Central committee, without Nicasio. “Sircular Cymmetry.” Liturgical glossary. Lycergical glossary. The noise of many glossaries

The journey. List

Cheap Penguin edition:
The Virgin and the Gypsy
. The cover of
La Mujer y la bestia
.

Passive apnea: Monitor / Merrimac.

The passive voice, using “one” as a third-person pronoun.

What goes around comes around / Snowball.

The story of my friends visiting the dying Virgilio Piñera. Modest porteño scene of a man sitting at his desk writing, a scene very much like the one in that Kubrick film where a Marcos Zucker lookalike (Krapp?) is writing a book with the same title as the movie (or, anyway, the book on which the movie is based). With an Angolan nurse (male). Disease located right there. The comment: “What goes around comes around.” The lumbar religion (Nurlihrt
dixit
).

Sluglike. Non-peristaltic virgin.

A pinnacle of elegance vs. the Mamarracho.

First catalogue of stories (written and partially written):

Early

The Imitation of an Ounce

The Scent of Thunbergias

America (The Fasting of Lourdes?)

Occupation (after Henry James)

Returns

The Old Bachelor

Semblance

Replicas

The Xochimilco Diary

Out of a Greek Gift

Did he Reach Thirteen?

Arriving Late

After Ibiza, we lived in Barcelona, where Elena had family. Hoards of cousins—both the docile and delinquent kinds. Mansions with outdoor swimming pools, omniscient beggars in the Gothic Quarter. Our short visit to Pere Ausic, a distant relative, who signed his name Zeuxis, posing not only as a sodomite but a sculptor (though his strong point was drawing), delighting in trivial cryptograms and impenetrable
repentismos
—songs with improvised lyrics. It was hard following him, but afterward, we were able to repeat a few of the things he’d come out with: something (a fib) about the Catalan painter Ramón Casas, and something else (a bon mot) about Sunyer. We didn’t stay long, with our responsibilities moored like sailors at a riverbank, growing impatient; the sea beckoning them.

We went to Madrid alone, leaving our friendship with Eduardo Manjares behind. We visited an antique store and “ran into that specimen of graying Spaniard who knows a lot about diving suits,” said Elena, “and who was asking us about books by some Argentine pornographer we’d never heard of.” This anecdote always ended with us back at home, faced by Dos’s wide, disbelieving eyes, and/or skeptically amused expression, after which he would proceed to explain the relationship between the pornographer in question and his avuncular herald [brother of the father of the protagonist-narrators in “Replicas”].

When we arrived in London, following Sebastian Birt’s handwritten guide, it didn’t take us long to realize we were lost.

Nicasio Urlihrt,
Diary

“Dead Aunt’s Diary” in “Out of a Greek Gift”?

A woman with her feet freighted in a new pair of shoes, growing impatient, the nails of a nautical excuse chewed away. Fingernails, that is.

To go unnoticed, as Aira once was; like Pizarnik; like Raúl Gustavo Aguirre.

Three intersecting diaries: the dead aunt’s (Inés?), Nicasio’s, and Xochimilco’s (Prosan, Luini?)

The story by ??? In the “detective magazine” with the mask … ?

Black Mask
. Haggard.

Elena / Teodelina

They were so alike that seeing them together compelled people to spout similes as well as point out the differences between them. Mere shades, nuances. Today’s jasmines compared with those of days before.

Nurlihrt, a professional, had photographed them while they were asleep. They posed before the incubus, each with the same expression of docile acquiescence.

Do away with similes, as Flaubert wanted (this is in the letters, Louise Colet, look up)

Stendhal in
Muse and Thinker
.

Voices

Dress rehearsal

(baton, throat-clearing)

Agraphia / Alusiva
, a journal founded by Nicasio Urlihrt (Emilio Mario Teischer) and his wife, Elena Siesta, with anonymous—or at the most, acronymous—contributors, to publish the best literature (statement of purpose rather than fact) according to the couple’s own criteria. Their penchant for pseudonyms, which an essay in the first issue would account for with the phrase
ad usum Delphini
—in other words, for the education and diversion of the young, with an eye toward use in institutions of higher learning—was a [judicious] challenge issued to their era, as well as a source of wildfire gossip (with its usual roll call of the relevant phantoms, quotations, and parenthetical remarks). Urlihrt adduced a controversial synthesis of Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico to exculpate the culprits [and conspirators], and, at the same time, to demonstrate that creation and corruption are the same thing. From the middle of the last century to the beginning of this,
Agraphia / Alusiva
was, by and large, the leading exemplar, epitome, and promulgator of this bogus proclamation.

Agraphia / Alusiva
, a journal founded by Nicasio Urlihrt (Emilio Teischer) and his wife, Amanda Corelli Estrugamou (Elena Siesta), intended to be entirely anonymous. It was to publish only the best literature, at least according to the couple’s criteria. Their preference was for the use of pseudonyms—a legitimate reflection of their era’s zeitgeist (and the cause of wildfire gossip once word got out), but a flimsy screen when subjected to serious critical scrutiny today. The contributors were known for—or ignored thanks to—the heresy they’d committed, and of which they took every opportunity to boast, even calling themselves “the writers without stories.” They went around publishing books espousing the theory that it’s better to simply write stories than to write about the writing of stories, and to illustrate this, they simply wrote stories. Few readers remember those stories today, but many recall the anecdotes associated with [adjacent to?] them. [Such that] Forgetting is not so serious an affront as long as we remember what it is we’ve forgotten. If it were [it was?] ever to become necessary to exonerate [the coterie, the conspirators], Nurlihrt would just publish a series of [unsigned] editorials to adduce a controversial synthesis of two seemingly incompatible theses, and at the same time, [to] proclaim that generation and corruption are one and the same. From the middle of the last century to the beginning of this,
Agraphia / Alusiva
was the evangelizing force behind this and other forms of casuistry.

Eiralis the Prologist, at arms:

Mar del Plata, 23 April, 1899 [sic]

Dear D. Julio,

Now that you’ve explained “the project,” I’m less inclined than before to accept “the commission”—please excuse the scare quotes, but in this case I feel they are entirely necessary. I know that some of your best friends would, if having this conversation aloud, take the opportunity to pinch vulgarly at the air with their forefingers as they spoke, to make their disdain for such terms as evident as possible.

Of course I’ve heard of
Agraphia
; I’ve even had the dubious honor of being invited to work with the people “behind
Agraphia
,” and the pleasure (although I didn’t tell them it was so) of declining their invitation—a piece of information you should keep to yourself (like a whisper in your ear …).

I’m neither “proud” nor “flattered” that the Urlihrt estate is apparently so “flattered” and “proud” concerning the prospect of my “editing and introducing” the book in question, and look, I seem to have used more of those inevitable quotation marks, but then I would never have known how to word this long sentence if you hadn’t yourself provided the—borrowed or invented—vocabulary. Don’t forget, although I’m now a learner, I started out as a teacher, same as Nurlihrt and Quaglia. Well, thank the widow in any case for putting my name forward. (But do your best not to antagonize her—I know how bad your temper is, but she’s got a chorus line of family lawyers on retainer.)

In any case, I’m getting by fine here, doing odd jobs, so am not nearly desperate enough. Still, if the book’s already been signed on, I thought of two people who might do the trick. You know them, they’re old colleagues: Inés Macellari and/or Corvalán’s missus. (By the way, did you know that our old dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas’s aide-de-camp was one General Manuel Corvalán? Go tell that to your “historical” editor, and if anything comes of it, be sure to send me my percentage.)

Anyway, I do appreciate the gesture and offer you my warmest regards,

V.

(The epistolary Eiralis …)

Belisario Tregua (or Basilio Ugarte) in a new draft of “Early”:

“Say that again. Can’t you see I’m hard of hearing? What was it? Glorify him? Vilify him? I met Robert Lowell here, you know. Now there was a man whose head practically glowed in the dark, a real bundle of nerves. Truly a magical thing, that brain of his—a brain that absorbed experience so rapidly the price was an early death, too early a death—with language blindly battening away at the pulp and marrow of his faculties, at all remaining potential, promise … I’m quoting someone or other. Look, I don’t know if it was the same Salas. I told the CIA everything that went on. And I’m still pimping for my friends even today. See, right here in my briefcase I have the depositions of two friends who want to get a divorce. And look, these aren’t newlyweds. But now they’ve come around. And believe me, they’re doing the right thing. That’s why I never got married—seeing my parents fight all the time. It’d be hell, no? My two friends say just the same. They live to ask me favors. And it’s like people say, no good deed goes unpunished. Anyway, he asked me to translate a Russian story—from the French. And now he’s asking me—because the publisher asked
him
—to retranslate it into a kind of Spanish flea-market slang. Christ, the shit they expect me to swallow …”

Bambi in
St. Mawr

“It’s all very well saying ‘the sixties,’ Mr. Rico, but the sixties weren’t really the sixties for those who survived them. Looking back on them, now, from my place in the attic [of my life], I regard them with more astonishment than nostalgia.

“I made my debut in some provincial company, as an understudy. My stage name was ‘Cyprian.’ At fourteen, I was already capable of following Israel Regardie’s regimen of anorexia and vomiting—so fashionable today.

“Soon I joined a traveling theater company, The Serendipitous Ashram, which staged plays, among other happenings. You know, Mr. Rico, as someone once said, all is change in this world—except avant-garde theater. So we started doing group improvisations, with disastrous results. In Amsterdam I almost got deported, though in Hamburg we had such a successful premiere that I stayed in Germany for three years. Then I started my solo act.

“They said the way I walked was like a dance, like the way Edie Sedgwick moved. And I used to mix LSD and cocaine, also like Edie [Sedgwick]. I would stay in Almería from time to time. By then the original company had disintegrated, each member going his own way. I worked in a bunch of movies, as an extra or in minor roles. I remember one movie scene in particular, a scene we rehearsed so many times—I don’t even know how many times, perhaps a hundred—until it came out right. And it was so right, Mr. Rico, that I still feel proud whenever I see it today. In it, I’m standing in line with my brother, an attractive if unkempt boy, and we have to pass a message to one another during a funeral. To do this, we file past the coffin and cross ourselves in a particularly elaborate manner. If you ever get to see it, I’m the third in line—after my so-called brother and grandmother.

“I shouldn’t have left Germany. After all, I was getting on quite well with the language, working myself into real verbal ecstasies. Rainer played the sax behind me, and I fell in love with him, then I fell in love with his best friend Brian. I wasn’t ambitious, just couldn’t sustain it, but Brian [Colin] was just the same—a Briton, he’d inherited a small fortune and some property in Islington, so by the early seventies, I found myself living in London again. And let me assure you, far from how it might appear to most adult mammals of our species, it isn’t the best place to live. Perhaps the seventies wasn’t the best time to be alive, Mr. Rico. I felt just like Ziggy Stardust did—or would.”