No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series)

by Luis Chitarroni, Darren Koolman

  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.”

  Suddenly, the rather unfriendly James of St. Mawr, agitated and taciturn, sat down by us, but didn’t participate in the ongoing conversation. He was supposed to come and collect us. But we hadn’t imagined he’d arrive so early.

  “I went back to Brian’s home, Mr. Rico, but there was always something wrong. We would argue about this or that, and I’d think to myself, ‘At least I’ve got a guy on the side.’ I think real women must have other options. Nonetheless my lover was the unhappiest man I ever met. Lord Swindon—excuse my sighs—wrote an entire book just to show off—not just to me, but to a proper audience!—his clandestine love. Poor deluded man! He called it The Naked Bed and it was a complete failure. He went on writing other books, of course—Loud City, A Beetle Called Greg—as I’m sure you remember. And, soon enough, he’d found another lover.

  “As for me, Mr. Rico, my high point and low met for the first time like two stray dogs in the street, sniffing at one another then … humping, do you say?—a spectacle, to be sure, but by no means spectacular.”

  I have the worst ear in the world. The music was the same sort you’d expect to be broadcast on any FM station in the world. But Bambi gave me a special look whenever the first few bars of a Fleetwood Mac song began.

  “Cocaine and adultery, those were for the eighties. I was ahead of my time.”

  I was ecstatic, couldn’t take my eyes off her—her redskin profile, her Adam’s apple.

  “It’s not me, Mr. Rico, but desire that’s grown stale. Become old. I began to realize this in Rio about four years ago. I was on the beach one day and was suddenly overcome with boredom. The bodies I saw did nothing for me, they looked like barely distinguishable mannequins as they passed … and I remembered … The world is a grand, rickety monument erected by some mediocre architect, but the truth of the flesh was carved by none other than Phidias … That’s what my Catalan friend used to say, Mr. Rico, a man far more interested in the subject than either of us, these days. But in that vaunting statuary, that beacon of human flesh, there was no substance, no delight, no heat. How I would have preferred to lick, bite, and suck at those delicacies until I choked to death, turned blue. Drowning, asphyxiation, cyanosis, are triumphs in comparison with the slow apnea of mere survival. The sublime course of the shark—I say, très chic. But there’s nothing special about dying for love. Merely surviving as time goes by is the ‘done’ thing, these days. And, despite appearances, Mr. Rico, I followed suit. Swallowing my saliva, holding my breath, and heading to bed early.”

  We toasted again. She and I were drinking gin and vodka, respectively, and practically straight up—on a single rock each. We said all there was to be said in all those languages in which nothing need be said … But the clink of our glasses added little to these interjections. We might as well have been hoisting a co
uple of milk jugs in broad daylight.

  “Our sins, Mr. Rico, are only of concern [and only start to matter to us] once we’ve stopped sinning. Then we reap our so-called reward. The preacher who married my mother made that quite clear. And so I’m always vigilant, always alert. I ended up going to Brazil with Mr. Quint, Basil Quint, Hugo’s cousin—a businessman, among whose many deals during that time I’m afraid I would have to be counted [as] the least significant. Basil always went on his business trips weighted down by new theories regarding this and that: I used to call them his “carry-on baggage.” For instance, he used to say the highest aspiration of any decent and honest citizen is to be a tourist, and also …”

  Ignorance, license, laziness: who among them could so much as recognize it, who among them could take the hint? Not a single one of them: the gentleman of the jury! They knew all about what everyone was reading without ever bothering to read (let alone memorize) a single poem, a single line. The possibility that ordinary, quotidian language might ever be found in a poem didn’t amuse them in the least—or even make much of an impression. The gulf separating us wasn’t just a matter of passive consecration and active anonymity; it was in the view that the act of reading is an exercise in forgetting (the nuisance, the burden) all that doesn’t pertain to oneself. And the things that pertain to them are prizes, tributes, reviews—more incentives not to read. And they wouldn’t—they wouldn’t read my book; they’d read me, or rather my pseudonym: Atrius Umber. And boy, he’s sure racked up the points for me while I wait here in the dark; enough for them to hand me the prize. Moreover, I seem to remember having presciently, preemptively, commended the four of them—in reviews, in post-award speeches—with all the astuteness and patience of someone who foresees—is investing in—receiving a favor in return, someday. The conspiracy of gratitude would unfold in the Silvio Astier Amphitheater.

  In this sense, Accents, Répide Stupía’s book, was nothing more than the flimsiest pretext, but the best one possible, under the circumstances. Irreproachable on formal grounds, it had the virtue of going unnoticed initially due to the author’s misanthropy. But, likewise, thanks to his misanthropy and his wilful anachronisms, his work ended up becoming wholly acceptable, plausible, to contemporary tastes. And if he could be plausible, then I, who am not, could begin at last to be a Somebody, thanks to [as a consequence of] the simple, relaxing occupation of plagiarizing him.

  “Early”

  “He’s asking for a play.”

  “A play by whom?”

  “He said (let me see, I wrote it down) by Ann Jellicoe.”

  “In that case, suggest Mr. Logic & Miss Understanding.”

  (Lord Swindon)

  “The gentleman has arrived a day early and would like to wait.”

  “Wait for what? I don’t believe time is wont [able] to [oblige] suit [obey] him.”

  “The gentleman has decided to stay, I mean.”

  “Those are very different things. And ‘I mean’ reduces all meaning to ash. ‘To stay,’ on the other hand, implies location, a specific place, and only tomorrow will we know if such a place exists. For him or any other guest.”

  “In any case, the gentleman told me he’s waiting for your decision.”

  “I can’t make the decision until after the [his] arrival.”

  “But he’s already here.”

  “A situation we sadly share.”

  “And he wants to stay.”

  “That [this] is where the similarity ends.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Depends on what you want to do.”

  “I mean, with him.”

  “That depends in large measure on what he wants to do with you.”

  “Sir, we owe him a response.”

  “How can I owe something to someone who shouldn’t even be here?”

  “He deserves it, poor guy.”

  “But, you see, to visit upon a victim his just desserts is an exercise of power I’d rather [I prefer to] avoid.”

  “If he leaves, something terrible might happen.”

  “I fear it’s already happened. Simply on account of his being here.”

  “You have no respect.”

  “On the contrary: [It’s] you [who] have too much respect.”

  “He has come with a proposition.”

  “And he can leave with it.”

  “He was invited.”

  “To arrive before being invited is a form of discourtesy that demands immediate reciprocation. One of the few for which such reciprocity is demanded, in fact. So get rid of him.”

  “We’re not about to hand out the same information you could very well research yourself in any museum. And look, if you want them to understand what you’re after, make sure to call her, ‘Frah Ann Jellicoe.’”

  Biography of Lord Swindon

  Ingenuity of lists

  How do we appropriate?

  Original Soundtrack

  In “Early,” listening to whatever (whatever, that is, Charles imposes on everyone). Contrast this with what the narrator listens to:

  —The narrator, when alone: Incredible String Band, Joy Division, the Teardrop Explodes …

  … XTC, Cockney Rebel, Duncan Browne—the Blue Aeroplanes?

  Too late, in their roughest patches, they managed to sound like the Stranglers.

  —Gilbert & George:

  Noel Coward: “Poor Little Rich Girl,” “A Room with a View.”

  Lenny Bruce, Tom Lehrer, Brute Force.

  —The kid from the car: Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, George Benson. He plays the guitar. “Caresses it,” according to Gilbert (or George).

  Cole Porter

  When Marina’s talking on the telephone, Penguin Café Orchestra:

  “The Sound of Someone You Love Who’s Going Away and it Doesn’t Matter”

  Rovira

  Piazzolla: “Ode to a Hippie.”

  Luis Alberto del Paraná. Those who listened to him in London, those he listened to.

  Keyboards: Alan Price (Animals), Brian Auger (J. Driscoll, The Trinity), Stevie Winwood (Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Blind Faith), Garth Hudson (The Band), Mark Stein (Vanilla Fudge), Doug Ingle (Iron Butterfly)

  The music we adopted to impress girls. The cube root of error.

  It’s pointless, him rehearsing

  What to say in her memory,

  when Koechlin’s answer

  Étude sur les notes de passage

  still rests on the music stand.

  Ironic too, anche

  what the muse will say

  in flight from everyone, en fin

  (There was a crueller month than April).

  In homage to what he heard, he listens.

  Around the deserted isle, autumn fluxes,

  he listens to what was (it’s supposed to be music,

  it is noise

  But not for me).

  In “The Scent of Thunbergias,” Misia Taboda. Lady Obstreperous. Bette Davis. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. W. S. Maugham’s The Letter. Dotty Dabble. Mme Marasm. Mme Sarcasm.

  There’s no better place for hiding a secret than an unfinished novel (Calvino, Italo). Quoted by someone else, citation needed.

  Voices: George Sanders, Tom Conway.

  Finally decided on a title: The X-Positions (Las equis distantes)

  And, incidentally: no one else seems to like it.

  (Appendices)

  Concerning the enigma of The X-positions

  “Today I put an end to—which is to say, I found names for—two of the enigmas in my life, now banished forever,” wrote Nicasio Urlihrt in his diary shortly before his death. “They were in a terrible poem,” he added, “by a terrible friend: his worst, I’d say, although I admit its intended meaning was lost on me. Love’s got to be good for something. Time’s got to be good for something.” Those who want to pursue this matter further (or destroy the evidence) can take a break from reading this apologia and seek out the material in question, as publish
ed in the journal Agraphia. If nothing else, you’ll get a kick out of the punctuation.

  X-Positions refers more to unresolved puzzles, the unknown, than to the old question of anonymity; this according to a somewhat biased interpretation of the second hemistich of the last line of the first stanza of the sonnet by Sabatani—“It wasn’t yesterday the world we call old / Nor the secret lost on a mystery / Cult. Be grateful for the levity in the grave: / The bad poets, the x-positions”—that precedes the three Spanish versions of Mallarmé’s “sonnet on X” in his chapbook.

  The ability of the X to contain conflicting concepts is both a blessing and a curse, bestowed by accident and by amphibology, among other things. Xs are, according to Sabatani, “symmetries of opposition or denial similar to the phenomena of inverse relations studied by Lévi-Strauss.” The genealogy of these Xs goes back to the “the Arcadian period” of Agraphia [Urlihrtian terminology]—to its very first issues, in other words, in one of those supposedly popular articles Lino Scacchi wrote for Sherbet Aria (“Todo Sobre la equis” [All About X] later published in Idiomatics as “Todo sobre equis, nada sobre Zeda” [All About X, Nothing About Z]), later translated into English by Hermione Hepburn and published in a journal called Bible Black (Tantrum Press, 1978) with the title restored to “All About X” (for a brief description of how all this came about, see “Early”). In his essay, Scacchi unleashed all the voodoo-erudition of a man who nonetheless ended up as the crossword-writer for a small-town paper. He ascertained, for example, that the Dictionary of Defiance by the mysterious L.F. [Louis Felipon], traces the sound of the letter X to that of the Greek word chrestos, or Christ. And according Scacchi, who cites “the best prose in the world,” to adduce that the letter X “cheered and chastened the best man in the world, Thomas Browne, who said ‘the letter X … is the Emphaticall decussation, or fundamentall figure.’”

  After two pages of frenetically-written fustian, full of unconnected ideas and obscure references, Scacchi proceeds along the following line of thought: “It’s curious to trace in the history of this feeble cruciate sign the adventitious influence that has led to its being given coronal rank in the hierarchy of letters. Nonetheless, in the majority of cases, writers, from Ben Jonson to Gertrude Stein, Confucius to Cummings, Argensola to Gerardo Diego, have rejected it with disdain. Ben Jonson wanted to remove poor X from the alphabet, saying it was ‘rather an abbreviation, or way of short writing with us, than a letter,’ and Gertrude Stein spoke of its triviality, its function as a simple strikethrough, swift deletion, blind shorthand. Some countries and languages—like Welsh and Gaelic, for example—have never felt its influence. Yet, its wholly gratuitous or fatuous acoustical expression is married to its striking graphical representation like no other letter in the abecedarian chronicle.”