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?)
Committe
e 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.
No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) Page 3