No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series)

by Luis Chitarroni, Darren Koolman

  Back Cover sent by Eiralis to D. Julio

  Christmas Eve on which the wolf howls

  Fernando Tapiols

  Circumstantial Island in Claveplana is an enchanting paradise in the middle of the Mar Izquierdo [which is hidden behind Basílico Bay]. [Those] responsible for maintaining its high standard of luxury are Iris Oratoria and her [twin] half-sister, Mateluna, [who’s] the bellwether of a flock of [hard-working, enigmatic] girl-scouts. Everything is going splendidly until Saverio Onofre Trápaga arrives on the island, [a] taciturn writer with dirty fingernails who drafts [imprisons] the girls into literary workshops with the apparent intention of re-educating them [morally] for the job [his ulterior motive being to corrupt them]. This is the story that Isabel Semiramis Errázuriz writes in the Hohenzollern mansion [castle], near Darmstadt, while her half-sister, Hildegarda, tends to a flock of Jewish girls in Zagreb, although using a whip instead of a staff, and with the help of Abravanel, a black German Shepherd of uncertain origin, who studies the Pentateuch. (Important details: the custodian of the land on which the Jewish girls pasture is an unscrupulous Brazilian magnate from Manaus, Ouroboros [Kniebolo]; a worm that grew into an anaconda during the rubber boom.)

  This is the tale written by Matilde Moura, nom de plume of Matildo Amancio Miura, an old pederast who shares a room with Medellín, a young Latin American boy (the suspicion he may only be Peruvian limits his prostitutional prospects), who maintains a long-term relationship with Don Federico Loane, a vaguely Argentinian man of mainly French-Basque origin who is writing a novel on the side. This novel plagiarizes Fernando Tapiols (a Chilean writer living in exile in Barcelona, “disgruntled by failure”), to keep the most vocal detractors of the junta, Pedestrian Square Root, happy. Tapiols is the author of a vast oeuvre, the highlight of which is an epic poem, “Christmas Eve on which the Wolf Howls,” a merciless chronicle set during the Christmas of 1974, written in nona-metric lines [distichs] of variable feet, a metrical pattern devised by Tapiols in homage to Nicanor Parra and to commemorate the passing of Pablo Neruda.

  Annick Bérrichon was one of the most prestigious literary critics; (which is the only reason why) Nicasio had been greatly interested in her. Besides this, she was also a professor of Balkan literature, although no one knew how she obtained the title or with what institution she was affiliated. But this last mystery is what piqued Belisario’s interest. Annick’s friendship with Elena soon led to her being introduced to the most prominent committee members of Agraphia, including Nicasio. One afternoon in June, almost seven months after Eloísa’s death, they met with a medium in the house on calle de las Posadas (not the one on calle de las Piedras).

  Miss Bérczely’s face was a grotesquery of warts and other excrescences, an especially nasty case of what Elena termed “lunarism.” She spoke with what sounded like an imitation German accent with a hint of French in the guttural. Everyone pretended to understand what she was saying.

  Those present were Dos, Oliverio Lester, and someone else who came with them; Elena had dragged along her best friend, Sofía Sarracén, who was even more superstitious than she—a pianist with certain mediumistic talents, who brought along her fiancé [Eloy Armesto: Lupanal …]—a student of Bérrichon’s—to introduce him to the rest of the group.

  At last, Nicasio arrived. His system of responses resembled those adopted by Elena to translate Blevgad: quibbling, nibbling, double negatives—disagreeable in any language—delivered in the passive voice …

  As it was a commemorative date—June 23, launch of Oxyrhynchus—the committee was hoping Hilarión Curtis would attend (who not only owed the journal answers, but also his fellow Argentine citizens).

  According to the more or less reliable testimony of those present—particularly Sofía’s fiancé—the first to induce a fit of histrionics and table tapping was a confused little girl who was communicating with the medium on the subject of writing. Suddenly, the medium began coughing and choking, perhaps because there was a change of … “visitant,” or because someone had taken off their shoes … [???] A high pitched voice then spoke in impeccable Castilian: “I am Zelda Bove, grandmother of Benkes, and the legitimate proprietor of his falsehoods …”

  Annick Bérrichon’s spiritual ancestry has been discussed in an essay by Eloy Armesto. Suffice it to say the literary critic’s grandfather—whose nom de plume, Belén Mathiessen, is better known to the uninitiated—had been complicit in the activities of Dunglas Home, who had duped many nineteenth century positivists. Today, we can conclude that Annick Bérrichon and all her pseudonyms—so suited to Agraphia—was born, as Blevgad prophesied, to unpack this piece of history, although her [personal] activities would succeed only in blurring the chronology. Her grandfather died in a pitiful way, although not as Luini described—nobody will ever know if her account precedes his—in both “Lemurids, Cheiroptera, et Cie” and Sherbet Aria.

  Two weeks later (after this encounter), Elena is elected (with respect to this story) as the keeper of secrets. It’s funny how little time it takes to become accustomed to risks; perhaps because they’re not truly risks, or perhaps there are no such things as customs. Nothing can be a custom that has a habit of perishing. Antúnez Irrusmendi’s lover (of six weeks), who’s the patron of Irene Picabea—Nicasio’s lover—confirms and displaces a crass fantasy of the servile novelist. See the disadvantage in the following light: Elena and Nicasio were, on this occasion, made the victims of this bungling demiurge who used them as theatrical doubles. The obvious correspondence condemned them not so much to the gossip of associates but to the twisted commentary of biographers and other forgers of their destiny.

  NO

  Bourgeois squabbling disguised as intellectual pride: they’re capable [CF, above all] of explaining away anything, even a gift …

  Exercise in baffling symmetry

  Moving up or down in an office building (after an initial humiliation). Hesitantly, he carries the photocopied documents to a nurse who is leaning from the balcony holding a less burdensome charge (a joint). It soothes and comforts. But then the horrible process of forgetting. For it’s necessary to: summon the elevator without success, climb and descend the stairs, check the baffling symmetry that prevents them knowing what floor they’re on, what level of negotiation their colleagues had reached, casually enter the disabled bathroom, offload the burdensome artifact, send it the way of dead goldfish …

  F.’s anecdote about McLaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas in an elevator. Bad memory.

  Eiralis to Don Julio:

  [I went to the bank to try cashing the check, the one just around the corner from the house in which I’m now writing this. Two fat heifers told me the bank didn’t cash checks, and that I’d have to go to the head office or a parent company. I went to the head office or parent company, or whatever it was, where, after waiting in a long queue, an employee even more clueless than I told me I couldn’t cash the check, that I had to deposit it into my account. But as you very well know, I don’t have my own account.

  NO

  Cryptodermia / Kleptolalia. Insist.

  The precursor’s mission, the successor’s mission

  The letter ending on a semicolon

  Rejected.

  Weariness. Self-indulgence

  Luckily, nobody noticed the allegorical didacticism in El Carapálida. Charlie had instructed me (nobody suspected the narrator’s name, Leboud, was an anagram of Double; no critic noted the ingenious cipher). And although political readings abounded in my favor, and superficial ones even more so, I have to be the one (after Eliot, Deniz and Empson, after Feiling) to throw light on the backstage so they comprehend the miscast and staging.

  I understand the resistance—the animosity—of readers and critics to texts that are conceived and arranged by tendentious principles. But just as the reference to Ph. Holland in “The Aleph” is a clue to be pursued, there is nothing in Argentine fiction to indicate where to go next, it is at an impasse: of mere storytelling, straightforward narrating,
having lost sight of that profundity of vision that inclines one to the implicit, to allusion, elusion, paraphrase, and veiled quotation.

  If literature is strengthened by its referential commitment (if we love Latin literature because it is derived from Greek literature, if Spanish and English literature occasionally surprises us with profound evocations, invocations of other literatures that informed them), El Carapálida presented, according to the author’s plan, a practical dilemma (practical because it offered two modes of inquiry) between the carelessly written potboiler and the Thomas Mann approach (profundity, difficulty, their consequences … )

  The two masters were leading the pack: Ricardo Neira and César Quaglia.

  In contrast to the weight of those initial sesquipedalian surnames—Beaumarchais, Bauvebrouillard—the pungent brevity of the biforked: Piglia, Aira.

  NO

  There was something evasive, annoying about Inés Maspero. Firstly, her protrusive eyes—that askant gaze—secondly, her mismatched teeth (the left incisor broken on the right side), thirdly, her taking care to always maintain a standard of inelegance, fourthly, the coarseness of her knees, and lastly [definitively], her bad manners. When Inés Maspero opened a packet of cigarettes, it was like watching a ravenous lioness quarter an antelope [Ogden Nash, in “Dead Aunt’s Diary”].

  Spanish translation

  Foreground anything to do with taste (other poem of Ogden Nash), if there is anything.

  NOt found. The account:

  The poem says a gourmet challenged him—O.N.’s “lyrical him”—to eat, god help us, a piece of rattlesnake meat, assuring him that it would taste like chicken.

  And O.N. (or the “lyrical O.N.”) ate it. Now he (“the lyrical he”) says he can no longer eat chicken since it reminds him too much of rattlesnake meat.

  Lead with the poem which has a part called “question of taste.”

  Inés Maspero was the kind of person no one imagined [being in love] falling in love, the kind of person with whom no one had wanted to fall in love, the kind of person with whom everyone fell in love. One morning, or perhaps it wasn’t the morning, at least one person discovered they were not in love with her.

  Or was it she who believed this and so everyone around her was led to believe it too?

  If there were reasons, some were perhaps of her own making—with the rabid elegance of an Egon Schiele, who for a time completely forgot about the love angle, the rectilinear lines of the Viennese baroque, its serpentine effect. It couldn’t have been because of Nicasio’s influence, because no one knew he was the second person that didn’t love her. The truth is, it was a long process that clearly entailed some psychological manipulation, but which also needed a little magic—the elusive and unhappy process described in “Returns”—at the end of which the insignificant skivvy of the reception desk had become—by the intervention of her Pygmalion and Svengali—Eloísa Betelgeuz[s]e, the inspirational muse of The Place of Apparitions and inspired poet of Chrysalid Simulation.

  Inés Maspero (ci-devant Eloísa Betelgeuse), who died in a variety of ways, all of them tragic, all anthologized in at least four stories in this book, died by accident (as one of the survivors liked to stress to the protagonist’s father), after ingesting alcohol, a lot of alcohol and medication (since she never referred to them by name), more than likely—according to a reliable witness [Dos]—an un-prescribed and dangerously high dose of Tryptizol (the suicide hypothesis should be discarded for the sake of a reasonable alternative …)

  It was a dimly-lit apartment Nicasio Urlihrt hadn’t helped her choose and which, according to a letter by a frequent visitor (Dos, a member of Agraphia’s second committee), was like “a cave made for a pygmy who obsesses over Jackson Pollock monochromes.” The stuff that was shedding from the walls is called skip trowel. And indeed, whoever visited would have shared the letter writer’s sentiments. Even those who spent an evening with the intensely private couple, playing those domestic games Nicasio—despite appearances—particularly enjoyed, would soon begin to miss their own hearth in the grim atmosphere. After the first death, there is no other.

  Eduardo Manjares described Nicasio Urlihrt’s curiosity in women using the adjective “proboscidal” [in … ?]. The zoological term is apt for a man with a large nose, corpulent frame, premature wrinkles, and a clumsy gait. This should be of concern to us because Manjares, who was passing through Buenos Aires, was guilty of an attempt at courteous dissuasion, citing Proust: “Let us leave the beautiful women to men of no imagination.” Nurlihrt, who was good with a riposte, and imaginative (or perhaps just in love), twice emended the citation with the intention of improving it, first saying: “Let us leave the imagination to men undistracted by pretty women”; and then: “Let us leave pathetic theories to men of tragic nature.” Oliverio, Felipe, and someone else were also present.

  A few ideas in stories already written (I’m not surprised by the notion that stories aren’t just motivated by ideas: Mallarmé to … Degas?). In “Early,” the first thought in the morning doesn’t correspond with the last one at night (Urlihrt’s program against random ideas). In “The Imitation,” we understand time by the substantive construction of history, not by looking at the clock (whatever that means). Nothing is understood plainly, needs elaboration, explanation. When the crystalline fails us, use the humectant and adhesive capacities of reasoning.

  “The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to little new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, for both our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so neatly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these creatures that fall so regularly out of awareness into fantasm—invested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain.”

  Iris Murdoch

  Scherzo

  Elena told me before entering the bathroom about her weakness for bespectacled men, men who don’t wear watches, men who wear neckties. I caught a glimpse of her removing her clothes [balancing herself, climbing into the bath.]

  Near the bath was a pile of Nicasio’s magazines. He could hear her body’s dialogue with the water, her sigh of gratitude for its embrace. Twice I left and twice returned to the same place. Elena said children inherit the way their parents sleep, and their way of getting into water. [I furtively got in, got out almost immediately.] I don’t have children. Elena does. It was raining.

  Staccato

  Books [abandoned] on the floor: Elena had not been a disciplined disciple. Betrayal in Trilce, inconspicuous satellite.

  Approaching the windowsill, a German cockroach’s deafening saraband, the silence of the world I didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to hear. Elena already left the bathroom. Her legs to the iliac crest, her eyes closed.

  NO

  Parallelism: “The Old Bachelor.”

  NO

  Elena claimed husbands should either be poisoned or deceived (if possible, both) between the first pregnancy and the (second) tale of Scheherezade.

  Mustn’t go back to where one was abandoned. One should know better. Because the right opportunities are scarce (the wrong too plentiful, if one sticks around).

  Buried keys

  Examples seen in Nabokov, hidden in James. The genius of that other Jeffrey Aspern—the maestro—Ray Limbert, is to be always suggestive, elusive; the opposite in V.N.: visibility of the other’s genius: Sebastian Knight, The Gift, John Shade and also the protagonist of Bend Sinister.

  He was acquainted with the jury. There was an ineffective trio of persons who ignored the fact there was a natural bias in favor of bestowing the
prize freely.

  O Lord, don’t punish me for that.

  Lord, you’ve already done it.

  Russian Story. Semblance.

  Onomastics, renown, polynymy, and denial in Agraphia

  Eloy Armesto

  [Extracting the Thursday from The Man who Was. Biannual Newsletter of the Universidad Autónomo de Los Sunchales]

  Going against Occam’s razor, the nominative entities of Agraphia are born to reproduce themselves, to proliferate, and after a short time, be discarded. Their life-cycle can be compared with that of the common cold. “Each syllable of their names, a germ, a potential pandemic.” Categorical proliferation, diametrical. The names function as algebraic permutations that make no difference to the final result. They accumulate, are collected, arrayed, and then spent (in the double sense). The metastasis occurs where fame is unevenly distributed. A whole argot of sectarian terms to designate where: first, the “paludinal glitterati” in Septic Midrash, then the “phalansterian demographic” constructed to “contradict the anecdote.” In the journal, “there is no theory,” except what makes you rich. Theory, they proclaimed, plagiarizing Proust, is the price tag on a gift. Nicasio Urlihrt was quoted in the newspapers as having said that admission into Agraphia relies not so much on intellectual common ground but on the postulant’s mandatory baptism at the font.

  So, at the “Sestina Session” they began laying down the (criminal) tracks towards what they believed was an amoral approach to anonymity—the pseudonym—a meeting that ended in compromise instead of unanimity. The uninterrupted progress of those tracks, according to “The Change.” For his final choice, Eiralis removes some, alters others. “Notes for a Plagiarist,” by Belisario Tregua, summons those eroici furori, four of the nine forms of love, both blind and blinded. With retrospective rage, one or another dissenter will sometimes change even the precursor’s name, exchange it for another. Who is Hilarión Curtis? The anecdote goes that he was a predecessor of Nicasio Urlihrt, although he is not. And in different places the apic ancestor appears to make the story seem apocryphal, to submit another dossier to the lore. So that Belisario Tregua, the original Glaucus of Urlihrt, can quickly make the exchange with Sabatani, the Glaucus et Diomedes permutatio.