No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series)

by Luis Chitarroni, Darren Koolman

  Eiralis describing either the first group meeting or the first group photo.

  People like B[] P[] who, in his strict observance of Q’s exercises in obedience, has become impervious to the teachings of Borges.

  Another one smuggling in Glenn Gould under his shirt.

  Who, because of his droning inanity, and making use of one of his own awkward metaphorical niceties, was given the nickname: “Luminous puree.”

  Lunar puree. Woolen puree.

  Add after A.P. on the women who

  Intersection of adulteries / collaborative writing

  Some bit of idiocy, as in Guattari?

  Analysis of the variations provided by only two options (remember, two wasn’t even a number before Socrates [see the pre-Socratics, Barnes, Watts]): two bloodlines: two illnesses:

  Aldecoa Inauda / Hilarión Curtis

  Kleptolalia / Cryptodermia

  And vice-versa: kleptodermia—cryptolalia

  Oliverio’s story about the Venus who repeatedly swaps her true form for human “furs” … Nicasio’s instance of cryptolalia: the mute little brothers in his short story, “The Imitation of an Ounce.”

  Collaborative writing. Comprised of two varieties:

  Analysis of all possible combinations

  Plagiarism

  Laurence Sterne / Lautréamont

  Stewart Home / Bajarlía

  Basilio Tregua / Belisario Ugarte

  Incoherency / Contradiction. Postpone dealing with this for the time being.

  Title of the first story: “Early”

  Or else rename it “Too Late”? It’s quite an old story (from back in ’86, or earlier) about the wanton world of plagiarism, a two-dimensional world existing in a two-dimensional space, populated by ferociously competitive inhabitants with two-dimensional outlooks. It appeared in an anthology published by Monte Ávila of Venezuela, edited by Héctor Libertella.

  Unease: there are always extenuating circumstances.

  Strategic reassurance and remorse. Would like to include the sestinas on departure and return (formalist nonsense!)—and the short poems in English from The B(achelor) in B(edlam) that Charlie was so fond of.

  I wrote “Early” for a meeting of The Cause—which was either a writer’s group none of us founded or a magazine none of us launched, in order to fulfill the mandate to start such organizations that was issued by (cacophony of resentment) the magazine El periodista de Buenos Aires (ah, that brings me back!). And before that?

  I think I was the only one who did his homework that time. The meeting was held in Charlie’s flat on Independence Street (the one from Ignatieff’s The Lesser Evil). Charlie, Alan, Chefec, Guebel, Bizzio, and myself. I remember them all going over the pages I typed on my mechanical Hermes while I waited, having nothing better to do. The Pole was the first to finish reading, or the only one who didn’t give up. “I like it,” he said, “I think it’s very sentimental.”

  The capriciousness of memory. I can’t imagine even Sergio or Danny being able to follow all this.

  Speaking of Sergio, in Trichinopoli (a novel I was writing in jest while others were working on theirs in deadly earnest), the basic unit of currency was the “chefec” (derived, supposedly, from the phrase check feckless coin). Sergio B[izzio], who was always prissy and pedantic, told me he could never read a book with such a title. It’s the name of a city in southern India, I puffed affectedly (being even more prissy and pedantic than he). There’s also a brand of breadsticks called Grissinopoli.

  Now let life obscure the difference between life and art.

  —J.C.

  Another reminder re: “Early”: The Répide Stupía book the narrator plagiarizes is a collection of poems, not short stories. Same title, however: Accents.

  The beginning [#5]

  I won a literary competition with a story actually written by Francisco Répide Stupía. Every page of the story is basically a word-pimp’s larding-on of obscurities and contradictions, the better to obfuscate the plagiarism—and written in a light tone to sugar over the gravity of the crime.

  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 o
ne 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 …

  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.