No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series)

by Luis Chitarroni, Darren Koolman

  (…) In the period before he left, when he was at the cusp of adolescence, Lourdes used to request it whenever she was in the shower. He’d gotten used to seeing his guardian through the frosted glass partition, but he’d yet to grow weary of seeing her youthful body. When she knocked on the glass screen, he understood it as a request to regulate the water heater. Once, she drew the screen too soon and he was able to catch a full-on glimpse of her for the very first time. Her body looked more youthful in the vaporous brisk air than it did through the opaque barrier. She seemed flawless, her skin, a marmoreal pallor rarely violated by the sun. And although the image lasted but a second’s glance, a glance he tactfully removed before she felt it, it left an impress on his mind he never lost.

  Alina, he recalled at the wake, was more than just a stockpile of euphemisms and abstruse paraphrases: she’d been the one to instigate his habit of collecting, beginning with words and sayings in various languages. And she, the weaver of his destiny from the following day onwards, was responsible for uttering what he deemed an unrepeatable insult: “Mr. Mies has his quincunx aspect badly disposed.”

  Later, when he was moving in more lofty circles, pushing his luck amidst the movers and shakers of the Buenos Aires elite, Gabriel Donovan would often repeat the story, but censored himself from uttering those secret foreshadowings his overactive infantile brain once associated with that word, as if the uncertain and the certain had, in the intervening years, become equally demonstrable, equally representable, as a blank page and a written page; or an arrangement of dots and an exhaustive interpretation of those dots. So he presented the story as a comedy of errors, and his vaguely astrological quincunx took on the significance of a Jewish prepuce, his sexuality cold-blooded, reptilian, for there was a weakness in the susceptibility to derive pleasure from a woman’s body, immorality in that for which he was once grateful, now the quincunx became a shibboleth he couldn’t pronounce, a goddamned reminder of his former self … [a reminder of the one that held the sword above his head] Reread Cavafy

  Mr. Mies was a Dutchman who stayed in the barn at the back of the Donados’ house (which, GD found out years later, was also where the bonetudos kitted themselves out [where they stored their facemasks, their wagons]). The first time he saw him he was chewing on the bit of his bubble pipe

  He was amused that his close friends were so amused by his “bad quincunx aspect,” although they were guilty of their own blind superstitions, which was reflected in the books they read, books by authors as important to them as any on the university curriculum (Arendt, Sontag). He himself enjoyed a semester under the saturnine influence of various authors … There was an astrological clique emerging in his circle of university friends, and he felt he had no choice but to go along with it. “Saturnine” is a reference to the editor, Saturnino Calleja. But it wasn’t really a case of peer pressure. He always reserved a hint of admiration for those who can spell and who respect the basic rules of grammar.

  They interrogated him about the bonetudos and he gave them away. Now that he’d moved up in the world, he didn’t care. He also wanted to know the names of those involved in the conspiracy against D.

  Before going to bed, and before making what he called a “moral choice,” he recited “Prayer Before Birth,” by Louis MacNeice

  Anagrams, pangrams, double acrostics …

  [Arribalo, Barriola, Donado, Ventimiglia] the Andovers’ residence with his girlfriend, a young woman (daughter of Ventimiglia Donceles, the singer—remember?) who was very much in love with him, and an avid reader of everything he wrote. And he wondered, but refrained from asking aloud … How could she be in love, the only condition for which reciprocation isn’t a law … ?

  Combine hearing / / Conversation

  —She’s in love with him because he writes.

  —Does he write so well?

  —For sure. She reads everything he writes.

  And then he asked himself …

  Conversation with the editor.

  —It’s Balmóral, everyone pronounces it wrongly. I’m surprised at you.

  The aunt. Everyone was living in a state of shock. Shock that overrode the fear.

  After returning from his last trip, he saw his door had been forced open. He was [NOt]

  surprised at what was taken [by those freaks]. He knew what they were looking for. Honor among thieves.

  He stepped over the threshold and tripped over the books from his last trip, still wrapped in a Galignani bag. Jet-lagged, he moved through the house with a weary contempt of the all-too-familiar. He was humming a song.

  In the bathroom, he found the dog-eared though still unread journal he bought on the train from that youth who reminded him of George.

  End of P, bad marriage to an awful girl. Chesterton’s biography of Chaucer: William Morris’s edition of Chaucer’s works. The smell of cat piss hit like a brick wall. At least other urine smells only erect a semi-permeable barrier. And having some way through is always better than having none. He had to get rid of his slithering, reptilian comparisons: repudiate them. And he was here. There.

  A not-unexpected death begins the story (disease, obviously)

  The three factors. The conversation in which we learn: X is the accountant’s daughter’s boyfriend. The house broken into during a trip to Europe. The angelic girl in the Pallemberg bookstore. Passing by a poster of Belgrano in Peru (“The House on calle Piedras,” “Replicas”)

  A lengthy tribunal negotiation (on the same day Luini saw him) concerning the movement of the inheritance southwards, which couldn’t happen until after July 9 …

  [Eiralis sets the date … in the preface or the letters?]

  Luckily he liked walking …

  So that he went down, as he liked to say, as he liked to believe, for Esmeralda, then he got to Piedras—with the cars and buses before him, daring him—and he got as far as Carlos Calvo, at which point he doubled back.

  Include the booksellers in “Early”

  Accents has the original strip of paper [a valuable addition to my bibliophile’s treasury], which contains a false enthymeme or [involuntary] syllogism:

  “A completely original work that will endure in the memory: all its readers will be friends of the author and one another and so complicit in ensuring its endurance.”

  I’d already managed to acquire some gems in that unassuming bookstore with its unprepossessing old proprietor. Most were on the tables with the other cheap books, but, occasionally, there were one or two great volumes to be found on the shelves. Of course, they’d remain there unsold for several months before being demoted to the plebeian tables. Some of my best friends were witness to the regularity of this process. The most observant of them called the period of caducity “the fall,” and he’d usually announce its arrival out loud. But it was still the middle of spring. Behind me, the two sisters and heirs of the establishment were conversing—a pair of redheads who looked like they came out Dante Gabriel Rossetti via Zwi Migdal or the Warsaw Ghetto. They were speaking in intricate detail about some family matters. But there was an anger or furor in their voices (perhaps they were just being loud) about information one wouldn’t expect two siblings to disagree about. The indirect way they related that information didn’t help, but any auditor would find it hard to believe that two sisters who spent nearly every waking hour together for the better part of fifteen years, would be ignorant of their father’s eye color, the ages and genders of their cousins, or the fact their mother was bald. But I swear that this was the nature of their exchange.

  That day, each of them discussed how much they disliked the noise and heat of their respective houses, in the process of which they gave away not only their addresses, but how long they’d been living there, how many rooms they had, the location of the television, etc.

  I thought that if this absurd display was practiced, merely an exercise of redundant communication intended for the casual listener, then I should demand a refund for those four issues of Accents I bought
(the most recent hidden under the ponderous weight of a copy of Papini’s Final Judgment), the contents of which were lame by comparison; but if they weren’t practiced, intentional, then I regret having admired their pleonasms and redundancies for as long as I had, which seemed to go on for as long as I’d been in possession of a mortal coil.

  Temporal convergence of “Early” narrator / “Replicas” narrator [“The House on calle Piedras”?]. Stop. Stet. We’re still in the “The Old Bachelor.”

  He knew the bookstore he established there—Columbo, Pallemberg, Palermo—would, on many occasions, provide him with surprises [Ethics of the Dust, Galleries of Whispers, Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, And the Name of the Star is Wormwood, The Goshawk …]

  The Finnish biography of Maturin: Charles Robert Maturin, His Life and Works, Niilo Idman (Helsinki, 1923).

  On the near empty shelves of the bookstore on Montevideo street, there were copies of books that he purchased at a surprisingly low cost: the first volume of Rabelais’ Gargantua, translated by Thomas Urquhart [7 Types of Ambiguity, first edition with dedication], a first edition of Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, two books by Meredith (The Shaving of Shagpat, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel), and almost every volume of I. A. Richard’s Modern English. The Milton is in the dead aunt’s house

  Meredith’s monograph on Siegfried Sassoon.

  He was about to leave with a bizarre and [little known] treasure, a book of Armenian grammar that was signed by one T. Anlunle in Mexico City in 1965, when from a distance, he noticed [the soft glint of stealth in motion? Try thinking of a concrete comparison] the slow descent of a spider on a book inside a tray he’d already explored. He was well known for his fear of spiders—even amongst those who barely knew him. The creature swayed back and forth pendulously, dexterously, before finally alighting. The book on which it stood seemed to glow under the overhead lighting.

  Then he saw the spider stretch out its forelimbs, as if it were the girl, the Donceles’s daughter, inviting an embrace …

  He approached the tray into which the miserable creature dropped, and warily examined the book it seemed to select for him: William Morris’s edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. With the spider nowhere to be seen, he quickly stowed the book in his sleeve. He was looking forward to thumbing through it, as he did when he was young.

  The next row of books was so disappointing—for example, three volumes of the works of that impossible poet they tried persuading GD to translate into English, the novelettes of Herman Wouk, Vicki Baum, Hans Fallada—he felt he had to check if the “treasure” he had under his sleeve was really the book he thought it was. He looked at the timeworn, almost non-existent binding, the near-extinguished glow [like the liminal glow around a flame: his reason for taking it]. It was old, but at least it was the right book. Then Gabriel Donovan suddenly thought he was too hasty in judging the row of books disappointing, for while flashing his eyes along the upper shelves, past some old gazettes and anthologies of English poetry compiled by Patrick Gannon, he happened upon the very paperback copy of Henry Williamson he needed to complete his collection. Then he found a copy of And the Name of the Star by Oliver Stonor, and that hard-to-find French bibelot—which French booksellers gloated was actually impossible-to-find, a claim he not only disputed but which he vowed to confute—La muse demi mondaine et les antibiotiques, the first and last work of Luc Crespin—a kind of Radiguet figure to Lucien Rebatet’s Cocteau; that’s to say, a last intimate acquaintance [but we must specify what we mean by “intimate” lest it be understood with the same unscrupulous literality the French scandal-mongers derived from perusing their Littré].

  And in another tray he found [the works of Swindon listed before and …] Then he suddenly got the impression he was in his own library and was afraid he was no longer in the place he thought he was …

  Because whoever arranged or mixed up the books would never have thought to do so in the following order: [unrealistic books, Sebastian Knight, Herbert Quain …]

  An ordering that inexplicably corresponded with his own—with Donovan’s—personal, interior, library

  Time, air, and substance, aspects of the real we take for granted, but which seemed unreal in that single volume initialed [prepared by] HQ [Herbert Quain] containing both April March and The God of the Labyrinth. When his fingers found the well-worn edge of a copy of The Prismatic Bezel, he lost his breath, and his heart skipped a beat … with a sense of foreboding aptness, there was a copy of The Tragedy of S. K., by John Goodman, lacking a jacket and balanced precariously on a shelf’s edge.

  And then, slowly, with a characteristic swaying back and forth, which his best friends had detected when they accompanied him on his bookish excursions, [on their way to Esmé’s] Gabriel Donovan was fading away from, crumbling out of the dream he’d been dreaming. When he found himself again …, he realized he’d arrived, as if by magic, in his own house …

  He hadn’t regained his calm after the return journey, which he made believing himself laden with treasure, a journey that felt like a swift descent; nor had he lost sight of those images of private devotion from which he was so rudely awakened …

  ??? He was found dead: a happy suppression of consciousness and all conjecture, passively accepted in every tribal dialect [the following day]. [Circumstantial data] No one believed, etc.

  No one wanted to believe.

  While others—puffed with bombast—appear

  To lash the sea’s shoulders, skirt the poles

  Though blustering of all things tropical;

  They lantern the moon, lend Apollo a taper

  Worse than the lady of my mind, my Earth,

  Who, once baptized, foreswore her place of birth.

  These you will see depicting battle scenes

  Full of gorgons, griffins, and centipedes

  Invoking Scylla, their runaway harlot.

  Lope, “Epistle to Barrionuevo”

  With a grammar book signed by T. Anlunle in which were copied the following lines [from the second sestina]:

  Because it was the touch of a distant stream

  That made his visible [palpable], broke its surface

  As a body falling in the concave glass of night,

  As dreams mirror the last day’s wayward steps

  Leading to a false awakening [dawning],

  To the icy sting of awakening without him

  A kind of parody or burlesque of Elizabethan writing

  Inquiry about the Progresse of Sickness[e] and the Behavior of Death. Elizabeth, [Jean-Marie] Maurice Schérer, Gallimard, 1946.

  Lord Swindon: Early Fiction (André Deutsch, 1964).

  Lady Centipede, Religious Matters, The Game and the Solitude, Before & After Firbank, Auday & Ainchil,

  Dreams that money can buy

  “Disney contra the metaphysicians …” Perri

  The Referent

  By Nicasio Urlihrt

  Followed by notes and commentary

  By Oliverio Lester and Ema Teodelina Wuhl

  Epilogue by Luis Chitarroni

  Ema Wuhl

  Magritte

  Apple: western communism

  After visiting the pathologist

  Inscribe Miss Gee’s verses in a Gideon Bible. See original draft of “The Old Bachelor”

  In February 1971, the French journal, Alusif / Imposture, launched a short-story competition. Instead of using a panel of judges to arbitrate on their suspiciously nepotistic, allegedly venal, and indisputably subjective standards of taste, winners were chosen for their ability to fulfill two very special criteria. The first was quantitative: whoever managed to adulterate their story with the most references and allusions would win. A key to these allusions should be sent as well, in a separate envelope and signed with a pseudonym (or, if the story was submitted under a pseudonym, a different pseudonym), specifying for each allusion or reference the title of the work in question, its author, and, where possible, the appropriate page number, chapter, publisher, and year
of publication.

  Considering the literary atmosphere of the time—the days of Tel Quel, Barth’s “Literature of Exhaustion,” and the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle … the era stretching from The Waste Land to Ada (which latter would have been published right around the same time the contest took place?); not to mention that of Finnegans Wake—the second criterion was a patriotic one: French literature might have felt a little depleted, not quite the [roll call] starry firmament it had presented in previous centuries. Why weren’t these great precursors more appropriated [drawn upon]?

  The funny thing is an Argentine won. Nicasio Urlihrt, a temporary resident of Paris, wrote the winning story in twenty one days (eight less than Stendhal) with no other library at his disposal than the one in his memory. He was lucky enough to befriend an excellent Antillean translator, Iphigenie Andromaque [Girri, Je pense a vous] Prévost, who could translate as fast as the story was written.

  The author’s notational convention is given at the beginning

  Even stranger, the first writer mentioned is also Argentinian: Osvaldo “Lalo” Sabatani, author of “Sircular Cymmetry,” a type of dialogue borrowing from the Ulyssean theme. Sabatani had had more difficulties. Firstly, his translator happened to be Urlihrt’s wife [Raquel Elena Salafia?], Elena Siesta. She was a fine translator but a slow and painstaking redactor. To achieve his unusual feat, Urlihrt used a detailed notebook. As Oliverio Lester discovered later, he used such a notebook in order to include, with a minimum number of variations, as many allusions as he could to the books he’d read in the previous three years. It was surely the variety of these references, and the way they were incorporated, that won favor with the judges. But what especially impressed them, was the way he adapted these references to his own language in such a way that made them appear fresh, original—it was as if they were being read for the first time—and the way his cryptic style made the writing seem almost inscrutable, the references almost undetectable, but with occasional lapses of more direct and coherent prose which, although less lively, functioned as a series of interludes.