No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series)
Page 15
14.01. Slow liturgical return of the great canine of Xochimilco to his dwelling in the dark episcopal depths where he sleeps on a midden of his own making. Just before disappearing altogether, a wild yodeling voice suddenly rose above the mariachis whines and Aída’s rousing song, a voice like a gringo’s, a cowboy’s, like Jimmy Rodgers’. I wanted to believe it was His voice speaking to Me. No, not to Me: I lost that majuscule some time ago.
Aída transferred the contents of her glass to Luini’s. The act was appreciated. There was mention of the coyotes’ encounter with the great dog we just saw. Hernán said it was idle gossip spread by Coyocoán intellectuals in order to secure their grants. As if they needed them. In the meantime, these intellectuals had moved to some godforsaken place far away which, after some years, became for them the true Coyocoán. There, Aída kept a garden of carnivorous plants cultivated in volcanic soil. Carbonic anhydrase toxicity.
14.08. He, however—Hernán Descortés—had failed to secure even a penny for the Lowry de Cuernevaca Museum, the posthumous writings of Sigbjørn Wilderness. “Sestina in a Cantina.” Evelyn Waugh had written a book about Mexico (he promised he’d send it to us). Waugh was staying at the Ritz in the Zócalo: my first impression of Xochimilco eleven years ago. We offered up Christopher Isherwood’s complementary: The Condor and the Cows. I had an abridged edition in Italian.
I commend Hernán’s essay on Henry Green (we assumed it was the first authoritative one in Spanish). Of course, Luini confused Henry Green for Hugh Greene, so he spent quite a while blabbering on about The Spy’s Bedside Book.
14.12. Aída said she thought the second coming of the Great Dog of Xochimilco was truly extraordinary. “Fairly extraordinary,” said Zi, “taking into account …” “Fairly extraordinary”: a form of meiosis intended to suggest the dullness of the thesis and make nonsense of its hierophanies. “And that’s exactly what I was trying to explain,” explained Aída. “What, a thesis or hierophany?” asked Luini. In reality, the great jackal of Xochimilco had only once pronounced against any kind of prophecy, she said. It was: February 31, 1965, the occasion of Mircea Eliade’s visit. Yes, in the presence of the great Romanian interpreter of religious experience, the accursed fucking dog came out of his dwelling with a voracity that was memorable, romantic. Witnesses said they’d never seen anything like it. The impeccable bareness of its glabrous skin resolved in a mound of astrakhan on its head, like a bridal bun. The cynical dog stood on its hind legs, like one of those therapods children admire and know much more about than us. He peered towards the shoreline, towards the tufted jungle canopies, and beyond them, to the foothills on the horizon, and produced a howl or a roar so loud, it could be heard in Mixcoac and Sonora, Aída recounted. Now, at the feet of the great religious scholar—and pessimistic novelist—lay the hot-blooded jaguar. With rhythmic cuts, he removed the yellow ocellated skin from the elemental skull, carving a trophy made of bone as a tribute to the Great Dog of Xochimilco, who approached Mircea as if summoned by a familiar voice. He sniffed at it. Mircea offered it up. He opened wide its monstrous jaws and gave Mircea his olfactory reward (the smell of shit was reserved as a consolation prize). “Why didn’t he record any of this in his diary?” cried the skeptical Luini …
14.12. Luini wouldn’t shut up. He was trying to argue that all of the above was complete bullshit. He began listing his arguments one by one, almost shouting himself hoarse, and we were all ashamed, embarrassed by his toe-curling effusion. Luini, with his sympathy for all things abstruse, and his kind of erudition—derived from his prolific readings of blurbs and the inside flaps of books—was one of those literary aberrations the ministerial mother country sought to include at every convention: another Waldo Frank (Scott Fitzgerald believed WF was some homonymous agency determined to appear at every literary congress in the world), a diplomat, a municipal poet whose name …
[Almost] surreptitiously, Hernán tried to fix a drink with the last drop from the last bottle (of vodka?) to shut him up.
14.18. Then a few vagrants in a type of canoe or pirogue appeared. They offered us heroin (and trepidation—another sac of powder [kettle of fish?]), pulverulent cure for melancholy, raw material for the immediate construction of Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome. From beneath the cloak of the Nahuatl tongue, microscopic daggers were flung at us. Silverfish, hagfish, mute wildlife, photophobic (no xylophagous insects, please) Xanadu in Xochimilco! One hundred and seventy-four Scrabble points!
14.21. But then somebody arrived from Porlock.
So I told them, the pornographer.
14.23? Zi said, tongue-in-cheek, that: “We travelled on an Argentinian airline surrounded by a troupe of robust Chilean virgins who were members of The Eucharistic Youth Movement. They made their graduate trip to Cancún singing hurrahs and vomiting at leisure … It’s not easy traveling such distances at cruising speed with the spiritual and physical weight of virginity weighing on the soul, or, moreover, with such a sensitive peritoneum. He, from the Yucatan, yucateco. She, from Guadalajara, tapatía.”
14.26. And when our shock and disbelief had already run its course, an obliging shadow, but not of a cloud, darkened the sky from north to south, while at the same time, a burgundy colored mist slowly extended from east to west. At their intersection was a yellow light, runny, like the yolk of uncooked egg, which then gradually appeared to solidify, the color changing to a [hard, boiled] strong, calcareous orange, as if the white and the yolk melted into one another, crackling, hissing. “I’d say we’re lucky to be inside,” said Aída. Hernán smiled and proposed another toast.
The great hummingbird of Xochimilco was, in reality, miniscule; the same size, in fact, as a hummingbird. (I imagined something as big as Coleridge’s albatross.)
We couldn’t see it from where we were, said Hernán. A tiny emerald amulet suspended in the air, the fluttering of whose wings would take us—Hernán moved Luini’s glass aside and did the calculation on the table—fifty-two years, seven months, three weeks, two days, fourteen hours, fifty-two minutes, and forty-nine seconds to register. We swore to be reunited on the boat the day of Xochimilco’s aurora borealis.
[But we also promised one another that, after receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship, we’d meet again on the boat, or if not, somewhere close by, to celebrate the foundation’s error and gross overestimation …]
14.32. When everything seemed to be wrapping up, I heard a voice with an Argentinian accent address me directly. It was a soft voice, muffled somewhat, and a little hesitant, like that of Amelia Mevedev, who spoke as if she was rationing her oxygen supply.
“What are you doing here?” it asked. And I answered, or started to answer, that I was using this picnic, this excursion, to gather notes in a notebook, a journal, which I showed it, was showing it, and that I intended, was intending to use them to write my very first travel book. Before it moved off, I realized it was indeed Amelia Mevedev who imparted to me this scanty, Eucharistic puff of breath … The winde bloweth where it listeth!
Suspense
14.37. Hernán asked Aída who it was I’d been speaking to. She saw me leaning on the gunnel, gesturing to an invisible presence. As I saw no reason to keep it a secret, I told Aída all about Amelia Mevedev. I told her about my reservations, my suspicions, adding: “Amelia Mevedev was one of the people we alluded to, probably without realizing, when we were discussing the literary supplements earlier. A renowned critic, who grows old alongside one of the giants of our literature, unless, that is, this giant of our lit …” And Aída, who was barely paying attention, whispered: “Then you know who the second one was?” But before I could respond to her question, which she asked in a tone that implied she knew the answer already, she said: “You know Doctor Lafora who treated Jorge Cuesta? His daughter.”
14.38. And Zi, overhearing our exchange, interrupted: “And what about the third?” At which point Aída responded defensively: “[Ah,] If you don’t know that then …”
14.39. For God’s sake!
&nb
sp; 14.41. After much badgering and pleading while blessing ourselves, some members of this self-styled navy crew finally acceded to grant our wish …
14.48. In a few instances, there were fits of hesitancy, distraction. Too much baggage, too much world. (Cadaver full of the World, that was the name of the book Zi loaned me. It belonged to his friend … Aguilar Mora? And the title’s a quotation from … Vallejo? And If I die far from you? What was the other book by Aguilar Mora or that other Vallejo quotation?) “The seventies,” Aída intoned, “how young I was!” She sounded as if she was delivering a quotation. “I’m younger than you are,” said Luini, “and I hated the seventies. I was forced to do military service. But nevertheless, after I was drafted, I joined a group of political leftists. That was 1977.” He didn’t sound very convincing, but we nodded credulously. “But it kept me alive, being wedged between the two—accommodated,” he stressed, as if to applaud his choice of phrasing. “But I spent the worst fourteen months of my life serving a sentence for a crime I hadn’t committed.”
Ah, the seventies.
“The Ethical Dative,” said Zi, sagely. “I’m reminded of a poem by a now forgotten Mexican poet you’ll probably never again see in print.” Hernán looked at him as if he were about to betray himself a member of a secret brotherhood. Then Zi recited:
The ethical dative moved you. You disappoint me.
It’s the same with almost every woman your age
(And age is what counts, almost all that counts).
True, we shouldn’t be indifferent with the time,
But it’s wrong to note the chime of every hour. We must
Do away with superstition, the tender bruise
Around our wrist, the thumb pressed on our veins.
But noting the passage of hours is what you do best:
You disappoint me. Noting the chime of every hour
is what women who know me better than you,
do their utmost to forget.
You have made me as true as a commandment or debt.
What a pity. I will do my best to ensure you forget me,
I will do my utmost to ensure I forget about you …
It was a crazy gathering of people, the consecration of memory, the forgetting about paradise, the loss of a kingdom that was only for me. The rhythm of the day must have consulted the laughter of a century’s close to beguile me with such extravagance, such opulence, behind my back.
The Princess of Faucigny Lucinge was introduced to me by Amelia Mevedev, who, aspiring for proustian éclat, said: “you will have spoken to or seen her on more than one occasion, which is, I suppose, the same thing.” Of course not. She was a mummy whose bandages reeked with the myrrh of premonition, leaving me with a sickening, cloying feeling. Vertigo, gooseflesh, a feeling of resonance with Chateaubriand. It was a supernatural resonance, hardly an aroma.
The entourage didn’t halt as they passed, and I forced myself to salute a chattering of incumbents who kept tabs on the senescence and senility of their soon-to-be retired forebears. “A pleasure, Mr. Espeche.”
Outside, with no sense of the time. Hilarión Curtis, a handsome man wearing a handsome amount of makeup (full crimson lips, eyes darkened with kohl), recited to me a sonnet by Salvador Novo about starched entrails or viscera or something, and after asking me for the time and politely requesting a kiss—and after I said that my watch had stopped—he recommended I read Novo’s diaries from the period of the poem’s composition. “Son, look at how much trouble I went through to be reborn.”
Some chandelier crystals began to fall (from the canopy, the baldachin). And when everything seemed about to extinguish, recede, die out, when each of those crystal drops or tears had fallen, someone who resembled Onofre Borneo, with an accent less Chilean than drunken, began insisting, confusedly, confounding me with someone else—Luini?—that I give him back all his originals. How many were there?
The countess Merlin, disguised as Mother Hogarth, couldn’t disguise her airs, so she left the group before she was detected. And Constantina Mevedev, like Harry Houdini, introduced Federico Prosan, who’d traveled clandestinely, as Nicolás Mancera—who was also present (I saw him walking away or ducking out of the meeting)—in a magic trunk, decorated with an old-fashioned sailor’s compass. While the father of Lupanal—most recent proctological descendant—and newly invented biographer of Hilarión: Russ Tamblyn disguised as Tom Thumb.
“After my cursory glance at Nebrija’s grammar …” I said, “I maintain that Nurlihrt doesn’t write as badly as Elena …”
A squat, ill-mannered Mexican wearing an ugly jacket with a pistol barely concealed at his waist made his way towards us. He was Bernabé Jurado, the shyster lawyer who’d secured the acquittal of W. S. Burroughs for his uxoricide. I wondered what Yturri Ipuche would think.
… And in that sweet carnivalesque apotheosis,
That playful, Bakhtinian,
subversive, subjunctive
Hebraic,
literary apotheosis,
I extended a hand, like a blind man or woman who’s remained at a pier,
Alone in the silence and spray
The conticent hour
when the gondola’s left for [a] neighboring dark,
as in the film I saw [in the company of others]
long, long ago
(and those who were with me were
Corpses or wives, as Swinburne wrote,
And all I recall about the film
is it was inspired by a book,
Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now), and a warning:
Be cautious, be alert …
On the contrary. Be heedless, unprepared in every situation …
And although I believed finishing a book, even a narrative like this, required a long and emphatic peroration, a prolonged and ecstatic yawp or agonizing howl, a grinding of the teeth and beating of the breast, I realized that for this ending—which really is the last one—I could dispense with an ecstatic or plangent finale, smother all feeling, suppress all effusion, and end my narrative with a whimper. And thus lowering my voice, lowering it below the register of a whisper, I told Zi, Zinaida Gippius, Zi Benno, Zeno Cosini:
“How costly and pointless it all turned out to be.”
They looked at me blankly, vacantly, vacuously. Finally [their eyes] one of the two conveyed, repeated:
—And what’s worse, it looks set to continue, very near to me, but apparently speaking from the other side.
And from the other side—from West Berlin—Zi and I saw the slow, uncreditable development of the showbiz aspect of the contemporary novel.
And then we saw a young, historical, couple running away, going into hiding. They took refuge in one of the izbas that are found dotted on the outskirts of Xochimilco’s teeming suburbs.
We saw them or I saw them while Xochimilco’s golden dawn was passing.
A hideous pariah dog followed them in.
And I retreated back until I found myself, three years or three millennia before, in the Ritz Hotel. When I lowered my eyes, I saw the same [oafish, unclaimed] error: tortillas mistaken for “tostadas.” The sun was setting. I began to regret my perpetual error when we disembarked from the vessel
Common ending: St. Mawr / Xochimilk
In the airport, shortly before departure, I consulted [I consult] my watch, alive and ticking again: while respiring in that little case, what [the hell] does the time be thinking?
We may be the products of that anguish, narrowness, asphyxia.
The issue of the first and last erection of a god, dangling from a gallows that we built.
The heart of standing is not to fly. Empson, “Aubade.”
Larkin.
… if we told that the surrounding aristocracy was accompanied by a serviture of ghosts, that … so as not to make it laughable (Cf. The Barefoot Contessa), their number should be doubled …,
… there were an insufficient [odd] number of offices where we worked (headquarters of the impossibly-named
business: Beehaitchhaitch), [above all because] one of the three was the boss. How old was the boss? Same age as I am now. How old was I back then? Same age as my buddy, Gustavo. We’d left military service the year before: eighteen, nineteen, twenty. The days when we stayed up until late, until ten, eleven, or even later if one of the employees lost track of the time. When we left, we used to stop the machines—an Olivetti 24, and an old Remington typewriter with a wide-carriage for doing the dirty work—a habit the consul’s wife disapproved of, who, one morning or afternoon, passed a comment about her seeing them do the same thing in police stations.
We were living in the worst of times. The consul’s wife was having an affair with one of our superiors. Our superiors—Blamires, Haedo, and Haines—were more accomplices than associates. Haedo worked with us in our office. Blamires was the one who said we should always return the machines to their natural state of repose. Haines had his lover in his office, or perhaps it’s better to say, he made sure she was working with him in the same office. Molly was the one who took all the important phone calls, and addressed all five of us using the same submissive vocative: “my king.” Once, Gustavo asked her to call him “viceroy.” She was quite a curvaceous missionary, her hair dyed blond from raven black [I mean that without being funny].
We had three journals: one on cinema, one on music, and the other on rugby. At that time, I believed I knew a lot about the first two subjects and bragged about knowing nothing about the third. This was a cause of much hilarity for Haines, the one responsible for the rugby journal, just as Haines’s lover was, in turn, a cause of much hilarity for the “viceroy.” The journals didn’t produce any revenue. The trick was to deceive the advertisers about the distribution and prints runs, an art Blamires and Haedo were particularly adept at, while Haines did all the talking.