The boy offered us corn, marijuana, axolotls, magic mushrooms, more tequila, Angostura bitters, a mercury or cinnabar casserole (which came with a clarification: specular soup for the reptilian brain). Zi wanted to try it, in spite (or as a result) of Hernán telling him it had hallucinogenic effects (similar to those brought on by severe fasting, according to a mendicant monk he knows who spends his summers on Mount Athos).
Asked to describe it, Hernán said it was a colloidal substance, with a taste like rolled oats mixed with a drop of sacramental wine (Nebbiolo or Semillon), which he remembers from his boyhood. He said he got used to the taste of the soup during a long trip around Patagonia with his stepmother. As regards its consistency, he tried to be precise (recalling his studies in chemistry) and therefore once again began by insisting it was a colloidal substance … something he had as a boy … like rolled oats and sacramental wine … In the end, we bought a parrot Aída fell in love with. It flitted from shoulder to shoulder and then became like the Paraclete of scripture or Felicité’s little mascot in that sentimental though charming provincial parable of Flaubert’s.
12.05. A look at the watch, then the sky. Clouds like nurses escort the sun unhurriedly in this climate. We were all sweltering in the heat, panting; moving was too much effort, speaking … cyanosis. Then, mercifully, a warm breeze’s caress, delightful and refreshing as a cold spray, and Aída was enlivened enough to point out the jacaranda and bougainvillea flowers joggling in response outside. Then a butterfly floundered in, hairy and (begging forgiveness of lepidopterists) repulsive, lighting on Aída’s tanned elbow. Once settled there, Aída took aim and burst it like an apricot or an overripe persimmon … some kind of fruit in any case.
Then Aída—who had a talent for persuading others to abandon a trite subject—performed a quiet gesture to suggest we forget the incident. But, luckily, Hernán brought his camera.
Haiku, improvised (drunkenly) by Luini: The butterfly / angel in my sleep / demon at my wake. Not a proper Haiku. According to the rules, seventeen syllables.
Having been abandoned by Psyche my soul, I was reminded of the book (because I do not hope) that led us to go to Mexico that first time: Zi Benno and I; not Luini. Luini was, is, in every sense of the word, a parvenu.
12.08. A gathering of geniuses in Tlalpan—Einstein, Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Max Planck, Pauli—and later (as if answering a casting call)—Crick, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Watson, Pauling, de Broglie, etc. This absurd convention defied all rationale: it was the crazy whim of the most important writer in Mexico at the time (whom our friends from the previous night prohibited us mentioning in their presence … luckily we were now in different company!).
Zi and I completed our monographs on time (which were published in The Notebooks of Tlalpan in summer, 1992, and for which, more importantly, we were remunerated). Without the need of Psyche or headphones, I could suddenly hear mingled unsettling cadences from the recent past, the sounds of Amon Düül and Ash Tempel. Howling hordes traversing the steppe [between things forgotten and remembered] avoiding the others, but charging straight for “me.”
Yma Sumac, anyone? Aída to the rescue. A DJ persecuted us before in a similar boat. Then Luini seemed to vanish as my soul rose up and up.
12.12. From a great height, I could see the tiny dot of our boat, and I prayed to return to myself. We all prayed to get close to one another. But the supplication was to no avail, for the prayer was quenched in the utterance. For afterwards, when I opened my eyes, I could see the jungle stretching in the distance, the water of the river lap the shoreline. And then, still presbyopic, I squinted on a little bark where four were tirelessly rehearsing sham civilities—imperceptible in vitro, but, otherwise, obvious—and a fifth, forcing himself to cooperate in the farce, which would seem less ridiculous with repeated exercises in loyalty.
Then I peered at the telltale oval of my watch (sixteen after twelve) and made an effort to rejoin the conversation.
Postscriptum, airport: look again at my wristwatch. Not much elbow room inside that little case. How the hell does Time cover so much ground?
12.17. We spoke again about the Venusón of Guadalajara. At the end of the fifties there was a change of ownership. The girls could now call themselves whatever they wished: Glenda Brian, Pussy Brain, Bermaine [Vermin] Greer, Xenia Brainiac. At the end of the seventies, the establishment itself got a new name (although it seems the large neon sign at the front wasn’t taken down). It was a time when many changes were made, and many shady deals. There was also a newsletter released revealing the names of many notables who’d once attended. Aída jogged her memory again: W. C. Fields, Haile Selassie, John Garfield, Greta Garbo, Elvis Presley, JFK, Ian Fleming, Lee Falk, Lee Hazlewood, Serge Gainsbourg, TL (Tom Lehrer? Timothy Leary?), and an Argentine (to whom I’ll also refer with initials because of my strong bond of friendship with his direct descendant): H.C.
12.22. I recapitulate. The reforms were initiated in 1969, année erotique, when it was rumored the place was bought by one of Hugh Hefner’s henchmen, who renamed it the Venus Club. “The business didn’t change, but the decorations did: the naturalist engravings were all replaced by paintings with an abstract motif, and all the bidets had to have printed on them the signature ‘F. Mutt.’ The interior decorator was an American conceptual artist,” said Hernán (none other than Bob Guteron, he eventually said after making us guess). “It’s still possible to see the originals today,” he added, but then immediately regretted the disclosure. Aída shrugged it off though. She wanted to finish her account: “The business is now owned by a group of Germans,” she said. “And like an old family heirloom taken out of the attic and restored to pride of place, they decided to reinstate the old alphabetical custom of naming the prostitutes. Except now, the names are all gringo: Ada Adcock, Fiona Farlow, Zaida Zorn … a consequence of globalization, no doubt.” “But it was just the same before,” yelled Luini …
In 1980, a certain fugitive called Lady Lumumba had jeopardized the integrity of the entire city-state. She transformed Villa Venus into a kind of mini-Cuba—not the free Cuba, but the communist one—with herself as Fidel Castrobarbarella. Luckily, someone intervened and restored things to normality. Hernán knew her. He didn’t provide any details.
12.29. “Are those names real or did you just invent them?” asked Luini, almost beside himself. And Aída answered him with calm disdain, adjusting her sunglasses with casual precision, “No, I didn’t just invent them. In fact, let me think … O yes, one of them happens to be my best friend.” “O really, which one?”
Samuel Johnson called those people most susceptible to enjoying the privileges and tolerating the hardships of a vulnerable institution “clubbables.”
12.38. After reading the Excelsior, we learned that Federico Prosan (who, at last, had learned how to ride) was heading from Chiapas to Mexico City. That our compatriot had managed to overcome this difficulty was, to Zi Benno and me, a cause of immense joy and patriotic pride. (And we remembered Belgrano, who, before embarking on the Northern Campaign, could only visit the city by dogcart.) That Prosan—after his marriage to the Mexican—became a righteous leader seemed incredible to the people of Buenos Aires, where, while he was still living there (some time before we’d arrived), everyone believed (as one of his best friends told me) “he had the social conscience of an electrical appliance.” But Mexico is different. Mexico changes everyone.
12.42. An author of works I’ve rarely encountered, Federico Prosan had great success in Mexico and the rest of Latin America with a series of novels whose titles were inspired by the argot of a local sport: They’re Copacetic, From Chaco to Pollack, Me to Ye. Then he used another system of naming using ordinary words in unexpected ways: Later, Mirror, Scout …
His last novel, Ingle, inspired by the life of Doug Ingle, the organist of a seventies psychedelic band called Iron Butterfly, was a complete flop. Their most famous song, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” a mondegreen recently deciphered as “In the Garden of Ede
n,” thanks primarily to the investigations of Holden Caulfield, who maintains the original was a phonetic rendering of an intoxicated Ingle’s slurred pronunciation to the first literate person (rare in California) who happened to have a pen.
12.46. I spent some time thinking about yesterday (which, through the alcoholic haze, seemed no different than today—a horrible day, whose unfolding I seemed to control at every opportunity by consulting the oval on my fragile left wrist, to verify that within that small space behind the glass face, only you and I exist).
I completely forgot. The evening spent at the home of Septimio Mir’s widow had been exceptional. The refined Uruguayan poet asked with oriental courtesy what had happened to the hototogisu in Zi’s novel … “The what?” yelled the poet’s husband, posing like a River Plate sodomite. Zi explained that the nightingale is in fact the cuckoo. The poet’s husband thought the words didn’t sound alike: the cuckoo, a scoundrel according to his moral lexicon; but not the hototogisu. How is it possible that within a belletrist culture like that one, there was so much admiration for the works of Zi—with their soppy sentimentalism and bumpkin sophistication, their bad grammar and archaic anacoluthia, and all those gigantic leaps away from the slightly credible to the wholly fabulous? Why him, a mere essayist, a literary seamster, a sower of gaudy patchworks, of varicolored doormats … ?
As always, Luini showed his true colors. For example:
12.55. In fact, there were many at the widow’s house: first, he attempted to steal a work by Gironelli (I doubt he’d have appreciated it, but it was the only book he could fit in his pocket); then he spent the whole night flattering guests and then backbiting them when they were out of earshot; finally, after slobbering his food and swilling his drink like a cuirassier, he soon had his face in the toilet, one of the two complementary seats of capitalism, the other being the bank. He shouldn’t have banked on us defending his actions though.
14.35. The widow’s house on Edgar Allan Poe Street, in Colonia Polanco, was like a museum. Paintings of the highest order.
14.36. (Wolfgang Paalen, Robert Motherwell, Adja Yunkers), portraits of the widow before she was widowed (posing with her husband as proof), and then, next to the latter, the former, the antecedent—the last—another of her posing with some friends—more like accidents of geography (who were clearly, unmistakably, indissimulably Cuevas, Fuentes, Ríos). There were also some other paintings there: autographed eyesores, according to Zi.
13.00. Enrique Gelzhaller, the husband of the Uruguayan poet, took advantage of the widow’s momentary absence (she went to speak with Sherman, her executor, on the phone) to tell some hilarious anecdotes about other literary widows.
In Montevideo and Buenos Aires (the Berlin of South America), there was one who boasted that her husband was with her everywhere she went, that she couldn’t blink without seeing him; and, indeed, it was true she was never seen in public without her distinctive eyelashes. Since none of us understood what he meant, Enrique, a verecund polyglot, hinted: “Poil pubique.” Laughter. More laughter. “Watch out,” said the poet, at the cusp of an epigram: “if the widow overhears, she’ll widow me.”
“You watch out,” he retorted. “I’m not the famous one here.” Someone suggested the title of a River Plate bolero.
13.04. Enrique took his wife’s advice: after all, he was [looked] much younger than she. The topics were [being] covered in quick succession: Communism and Amorim’s good fortune, the conjugal relations between Felisberto Hernández and the KGB (via África de las Heras). Juanele, Juan Emar, Juan Almela. The widow returned and the conversation switched back to her favorite topic of discussion, her widowhood. “Did any of us know Federico Prosan?” We all said yes. Later, we all went out onto the balcony to see the empty Edgar Allan Poe street in the dim moonlight. (“If you’re standing alone, don’t lean against the balustrade. It’s dangerous.”)
[stretch-marked] Hagarene supplemental: celibate alabaster scimitar. Secret mission accomplished. Melancholy—the Ultraist’s melody [Borges].
Someone indicated that my watch had stopped, died. Ah, I return abruptly to the present. “Now let’s see if we can pause long enough to see it. That’s to say, pause long enough to see if we can see it,” said Hernán oratorically, seeming to look at us panoptically.
Later, when the Uruguayan finally said the last word on the last of her serious topics, Zi and I began discussing our own: Francisco Coloane, Pablo Palacio, Pilar de Lusarreta, Pedro Leandro Ipuche. No one was paying attention. Our conversation ran its course.
13.10. In the middle of the Xochimilco event (nobody could tell if it was really the middle, considering where we were and our level of drunkenness), but we were actually in the middle of a perfectly blue, perfectly oval lake, a perfectly reflective lake as would be found in the northern land of Zembla. Zi, on returning from somewhere far away, or, according to Luini, a distant and unchartered X that encroached on the letter Z—for Zembla—was in good spirits, and he broke into a recitation, chanting the measures, counting the beats for the synod’s delectation. At the expense of the parrot / and forgoing any Latin / this sonorous feat / by Aurelio Asiain:
Salvador Novo was suppressing his laughter
as he proudly unveiled his smiling Mona Lisa:
A photograph of José Gorostiza—
Fair-haired pharos of fishermen’s trawlers—
flanked on both sides by many a señora.
And as time went by, it was as if Zi’s words were filling an old scrabble board sustained on Xochimilco’s noonday shoulders.
13.14. Then suddenly the drunken boat lurched towards a topic already discussed the evening we were at the widow’s house, Federico Prosan. But one of Luini’s imprudent interruptions saved the day. Who are the ones responsible for the literary supplements over there? A bunch of kids, we said. Explanation of what we meant. Gave examples. Then we came to a unanimous conclusion. Just like here, we said.
13.27. The huge head was the very first thing we saw. The legend goes that when he leaves his [ancestral] bed for the second time, he does so feet first. But no. The great mythological monster slowly emerged according to the normal conventions of birth, top to bottom, looking like a huge stuffed animal that was custom made for an acromegalic child … Without hair! “Residual alopecia,” said Zi, taken aback. Then there was a rumbling noise like the sound of distant thunder, or a seismic event attenuated like a wave by the very air, the breeze transmitting it.
True, the circumstances demanded more than cheap suspense. There was supposed to be introspection. I was distracted by the sight of Zi looking at the giant head. There wasn’t an iota of energy wasted on those commonplace reactions of amazement and wonder. That’s right [he was introspecting]! He seemed to absorb the image like the pages of my Mexican journal absorbed the ink from my pen. Ah, my Mexican journal. With such beguiling voracity it absorbed [drank, swallowed] the ink from my pen! I bought it the day after I arrived on Donceles Street, in one of those stores that always confuse tourists because they sell different things and things under different names to the right, correct, and just way they’re used to back home.
13.41. The Great Chihuahua of Xochimilco wasn’t a Chihuahua per se (that, in itself, would’ve been horrific), but something worse, something more appalling: one of those ugly hairless dogs they (in the United Provinces of Río de la Plata; in the northern part, that is, where they use them to heat the bed) call perros pila. In someone’s chronicle of the Indies—or an apocryphal chronicle, certainly not one by Bernal Diáz del Castillo—it is stated that, when Hernán Cortés saw it for the first time, he christened it Egito. Perhaps it’s in Prescott. The fact it didn’t have any hair, made it look eerie, supernatural. Then there’s the size—like the Trojan horse the Greeks left as a tribute to ensure a safe passage home (see Chapman). The one “that was then stuffed full of armed knights,” as Cervantes wrote. And that’s what terrified me. Perhaps the number of men hidden in its interior was only known by a woman (to the chagr
in of every male, especially T. S. Eliot), a woman called Laura Riding.
13.44. Stuck like remoras to its muddy flanks were water lilies, Victoria Regia, and scraps of posters—some with political captions, others by the CONACULTA with old ringing slogans like Put the Garbage in the Trashcan …
It looked way-worn; you could tell this was its second time out. A crowded boat with a mariachi band approached it, strumming their guitarrons, striking their marimba, and whining tiresomely. At my side, Aída began singing the Argentine National Anthem, which she knew by heart (she’d learned it at a private school, a multilingual college where she was made to memorize the anthems of many countries. But of all the anthems in the world, for some strange reason—not an intellectual one—the Argentine was her favorite).
13.50. That was quite painful. We vented our distress using appropriate exclamations in various languages, the last of which was:
13.51. Good grief! And I was reminded of (Terry Southern’s and Cathy Berberian’s) Candy. Oh, yes: as any spectacle or show, the manifestation required either an entrance into or exit from a body. To enter through the ass as Perelman’s brother-in-law described in The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Our natural acquiescence to the rhythm of the spectacle seemed to indicate our weariness of flesh, our general malaise with all the rituals we perform to gratify it, with the institutions established in its name (including adultery). Dung & Death. And the voice of Aída, a firm contralto, at my side: .” . . digníisimo abrieeeron, / Lahs provinciah sunidah del Sur.”
13.55. Y los libres del mundo responden. Eroticism of the heart, of the gut. Naïve eroticism. Vargas was the first to capture this in his pioneering Playboy pinups. An intellection of adolescence and youth, The playmate as fine art. Rita Renoir, Balthus, Meret Oppenheim (those tight-fitting bridal shoes!).
In my country, zit-faced teens were given official sanction to go exploring in landfills and garbage dumps for their moral principles. So they gathered around a horrible toadstool covered in blemishes and eschars, for these made it look a fitting exemplar, or perhaps it was more a leprous garden gnome, who carried his personal tragedy with him everywhere he went, and because of his dual nationality, bumped into us more often than not. And overwhelmed by the lack of conversation … My first sensei used to say: “Leave it to Eiralis.”
No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) Page 14