No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series)

by Luis Chitarroni, Darren Koolman

  —I don’t know—I huffed—I wasn’t paying attention …

  —How odd, you being an editor and all …

  It was impossible. I’d read somewhere that the number of English surnames with a hyphen was seven, and, after a day, I’d already found three in my notebook.

  Zi Benno (and his collected series of novellas that can be read as one very long novel) and Edgar Alan Meaulnes (and his very long novel that can be read as a garbage heap of literary scraps, both his own and those of others) persuade me. NO

  Eiralis?

  Writing a masterpiece isn’t something anyone can do, only he who heeds blindly the prediction concerning his fate to be alone on a tiny stage or in a cramped laboratory, an exclusive space where exclusive work is done, has any hope of writing one.

  Mirceau Eliade’s unease at the proselytizing propaganda of Jim Joyce. Scruples of the artist corrected by the superstition of impersonality—never of anonymity—that lends to his art a link / vehicle that’s functional, inconsequential, invidious, equinoctial, marketinero.

  I think I copied this way of writing from Girri. Marketinero, NO.

  [In preparation]

  And don’t dare enlighten them; it’s best if they continue as they are, in pursuance of something we’re not sure we know ourselves, something we may ourselves be ignorant of; if we do in fact know it, we haven’t been told what good it will do to communicate it to others; if we’re ignorant of it, then perhaps one day, your Excellency, we will come to know it. Nevertheless, let us prepare ourselves since they do not: when the truth overtakes them, memory and volition will give way, melt into one another and evaporate, and the [luminous] day and [certain] night will also cease to be. I’m here to tell you that it’s better if, in this world, they remain in obscurity and confusion; I’m here to tell all of you that it would benefit the pack if the light of civilization never dawned on them.

  Francisco Aldecoa Inauda, from the letter to Saavedra Fajardo

  (original epigraph of “The Imitation of an Ounce”)

  As the editor-in-chief and publisher of [responsible for] the irresponsible literature we produce at Agraphia, it’s left to me to apologize [rhet. Captatio benevolentiæ]. It was difficult converting the anesthetic [set of] abstractions they believed [was] to be literature into something readable. Although I tried my best, it suffices to read “The Mass in Tongues” and “Lycergical Glossary,” both of which were printed in those forgettable notebooks, to see I did not succeed. The collaboration with Victor Eiralis added very little: he was a jealous and inexorable defender of the same [abstruse and elusive] esthetic. I often say that whoever’s responsible for a literary journal has two jobs: keeping up appearances and bridging gaps—tasks more worthy of a [suicidal] theologian or [inhibited] geometer than a publisher. As to “keeping up appearances,” this basically demands that the one responsible uses his moral scruples to present to the reader a coherent [and consistent] intellectual pattern in the publications; and for “bridging gaps,” that risks must be taken with every literary adaptation, accepting that there can be no fixed model or approach for doing this, or if there is, it must be unintelligible. Of course, I was far from perfect in executing these tasks, but I am grateful for the interest, goodwill, and counsel of those individuals who helped me to exhibit the results.

  César Quaglia, On the Effects of Delay, Reflections on Distance

  [Reflections from Afar, on the Effects of Delay [Distance]]

  Time suspended in the real-time of “Diary of Xochimilk”

  10 [in Liturgies]

  It was the moment for which all other moments are either altered or bartered. It was my turn to answer. “Was it true about Nicasio and Elena in Spain?” It was true, insofar as they refused—or didn’t bother—to deny it, though they were all too familiar with the enemy rumor. Yes, she was pregnant by another—the late fifties, it was—and yes, it was because she had taken a risqué stroll to the bohemian corner that beckoned them with promises.

  Adventure of the sun [Gastr del Sol], revenge of the solstice. A ray suddenly—I suddenly exclaimed—fretted Aída’s divine [marmoreal] thigh and magenta shorts … And was it true what they said about us, that no one paid attention to us, that no one—to put it bluntly—“gave a damn” about us? That we were the writers without a legend or story, that all we ever did was read? Lies, Lies. Not entirely. It so happens that the books arrived—our books arrived—in the editorial hands of someone who wanted, in short, to take his revenge. Someone, a bigwig in the editorial department, whose wife had cheated on him with Nicasio or Remo—or perhaps it was both—a good man, a gentleman, the boss of the supplement, who said to his employee, an unpaid employee, an intern: “Look, I want you to fuck this book up. And don’t worry about the consequences. The author’s an imbecile. I don’t know if you’ve ever met him. He used to go to all the cocktail parties. Morally, he’s retarded; but intellectually, he’s a survivor, and of nothing resembling a battle or a tragedy …” And I heard all of this first hand, because I’m practically invisible.

  Another source?

  I saw, from a great height, the tiny dot of our boat, and I prayed to return to myself. I prayed to return to the group. But the supplication was to no avail, [the] my prayer was quenched in the utterance. The jungle was stretching in the distance, water lapping the shoreline. Old gray god. Capybaras in the pampas transformed into [a herd of] neutrinos. And afterwards, from the same height, still presbyopic, I squinted at a little bark where four people were tirelessly rehearsing sham civilities, and the fifth, forcing himself to cooperate in the farce in situ—a dissimulation that would be obvious to anyone [else] (especially to someone remote [like me])—which would seem less ridiculous with repeated exercises in loyalty. [Then,] once again, I was peering at the telltale oval of my watch before once again trying to rejoin the [lost, niggardly] conversation. It was sixteen after twelve: a prosaic piece of information that makes one forget about the adverbs of time, as I used to say in my palefaced infancy.

  The specular soup [vision] is the saline solution of the imitation of an ounce.

  As a result of an involuntary sacrifice, the effects of the drug that only one of us had consumed—nothing less than the specular soup—we were floating on high, manning the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. We? So I thought, at first, but none of my companions were actually with me. “Come on, Phileas dear, tell the truth, tell me about that friend of yours, Nicasio Urlihrt, you so often mentioned in conversation … What did he do, what did he create?” It was my late Chilean friend, Onofre Borneo, a ghost summoned out of death, out of absence, out of a change of custom. “Urlihrt was a difficult man,” I said, “very difficult.” We flew to a cruising altitude of at least two-and-a-half thousand feet above sea level. It was late, very late. “In the final days, he left Elena Urlihrt all on her own, and she was dead before he died afterwards. But she started doing the same after she met Bindo Altoviti—standing him up on dates—and he was dead not long before she died on her own. And she was doing the same earlier when it was Remo Sabatani, not Bindo Altoviti, who frequented her place.”

  Subtraction after subtraction, I remained in the wicker basket. I thought my disappearance—sorry, my absence—would make them miss me down below. Make them feel relieved, I immediately thought. I was reminded of Tom Sawyer Abroad, when the Negro, Jim, believes he sees Virginia because he once saw it colored pink on a map. While traveling by balloon. Then time dissolved, and I saw the map of my past, in monochrome at first, until a few colors began appearing here and there. And I saw myself arriving at the first meeting of Agraphia—me, still wearing glasses—when Remo Sabatani was still at the journal. And nearby, in a kind of rhombus of ochre hue, another scene, the famous black mass at the house on Giordano Bruno Street. And then a mad rush to the present, to Hilarión Curtis’s wake at the house on Piedras Street, Eloísa’s house in Avellaneda. And, symmetry goes, symmetry comes,

  Semblance [A Russian Tale]

  There are people w
ho wait for us and those who disappoint us. They come to us without us having to go to them [reciprocity], as if these encounters happen for the sake of only one of us, as if they’d been randomly or deliberately [premeditatedly] set in motion to range across the world searching for the one among us, the only one in the world, who is equipped to tell their story. Or maybe not, maybe these are in fact the most predictable of encounters, and we, although we’ll never fully accept it, are perhaps for them as shadowy a group as they appear to us. As long as we cling to our consciousness [conscience], I suspect we’ll never know [[if any of them talk of reciprocity.]] They are difficult people to keep inside the head, beings whose lives are only imaginable because they reside in the suburbs of our memory: imaginable but obscure, because these suburbs skirt the frontiers of oblivion—that which cannot be imagined—so that they’re only capable of being recalled, evoked, by a formula that sometimes works, but more often does not. If it does work, then the story begins to emerge, although the character, the protagonist, remains shadowy. So it was in the case of Velemir Dimitrovich Pachin. It matters not that we came to learn about him during our wanders in exile. It matters not that the unwavering dark forces of the imagination enveloped him until someone came along and announced—or shouted, rather—Attempt. Suire’s [Sartre’s] work was the password that unlocked it, and the pretext for telling the following tale. So although the premiere was so long censored, confirmation of the rumored plot was leaked by both major and minor actors alike, and Velemir Dimitrovich finally became a part of the permanent cast of characters in the shadowy opera buffa of memory.

  Velemir Dimitrovich Pachin didn’t attend the meeting at Elena Fiodorovna’s home because his coat was frayed. For years he’d treated it with neglect: an old-fashioned serge doublet with beaver skin lapels that his uncle on one occasion had brought him from Oslo or Helsinki. [[On one occasion, he forgot it … and managed to retrieve it a year later. But that’s another story.]]

  Velemir Dimitrovich had no virtues to speak of, but neither had he any vices, unless his proneness for distraction could be considered a vice, or his neutral stance concerning all things good and evil, complemented by an expressionless face—somewhat comic, adorned with one of those Russian noses that provoke teasing in childhood but, in adulthood, becomes a harmless, unflagging instrument—accorded him the virtue of being a good actor, a consummate actor. Yes, although his nose had been a cause of much affront and inconvenience to others, he, Velemir Dimitrovich, was completely lacking in that quality which, in the vaguest terms, is called intuition. When Olga Fiodorovna invited him to stay one October afternoon in the gazebo beside the train station, Pachin said yes, he would go. The winters in Berlin are less bitter than those in St. Petersburg, although the bitter unhappiness of temporary exile would make the sojourn bittersweet.

  Two days afterwards, three before the reunion, he was sitting on the bunk in his quarters at Frau Heise’s boarding house, wondering what the devil to wear to the party, complementing the rumination by quoting gravely, aloud, some of the more dramatic speeches from Suire’s opus. (He’d read the work in haste, as was his wont, but thanks to his prodigious memory, he was able to quote all his character’s speeches and interjections, as well as those of others.)

  Now then, he thought, none of his friend’s coats ever came close to fitting him, so he couldn’t entertain the notion of squeezing into any one. Night was falling. Pachin heard a droplet fall from one of Frau Heise’s taps, all firmly shut the night before by the silentious Giuseppe, [who always got back after ten]. Darkness flowed over the enemy city, a city in which no one had a spare coat for him. He heard the fretful stridulations of the tram as his eyes rested on the partial images drawn on the glass of a car on which someone (himself, the night before) had scrawled a word now almost erased. “Perebredev,” he spelled out. “Perebredev,” he then said, pronouncing it properly. He’d encountered him the week before in the market. Luckily, providentially, he hadn’t escaped his notice.

  Perebredev was the least trustworthy person in the world. His reputation as a conman spread well beyond the frontiers of St. Petersburg. His misdeeds, his contagious lack of discretion, once transmitted through the ear, infected the mouths of all. To make matters worse, Pachin had rehearsed with him a sketch of one of Perebredev’s misdeeds, hoping Nemerov’s company would perform it. All the same, Perebredev had a magnificent trenchcoat, and his smile was as welcoming in Berlin as it was in St. Petersburg. So he wouldn’t have a problem loaning his trenchcoat, because Perebredev was at once proud, amiable, and affirmative in attitude, always ignoring—as everyone knew—the deflationary “no.” He was born to say yes, born to allow his curiosity [proboscis] probe every nook and cranny of other people’s goodwill and confidence. Perebredev was [[a man]] as tall as Pachin, perhaps a little taller. Pachin had scribbled [[the fantasmal, fleeting]] Perebredev’s address and kept it in the only pocket of his only coat, the one from Oslo or Helsinki, [[the one he retrieved after once forgetting it]]. Pachin’s coat was hanging on the only chair he had in his room. So it wasn’t difficult, even for Pachin, to retrieve.

  No core narrative in these short stories, more like referential, allusive, flashes of information. And this won’t make for an easy novel. Moreover, I can’t simplify it (without altering its nature).

  As for me, life below always seemed to me excessively laborious. All that editorial drudgery [and muckraking], that urge to do something worthwhile, something significant, and all those egos so different from my own. I like being up here, which is to say, deep down within me; although, I’d like to be higher, of course, and without the aid of a balloon or wicker basket. My splendid art, my sad profession. My swarthy self, morocho, always full to rupture with either darkness or splendor.

  We all tried speaking differently and we all spoke the same. To write differently and we all wrote the same. Broken logic: we all started differently and ended up the same. No, it wasn’t about stylistic exercises, as some believed. Literature isn’t done by mechanically arranging syntactical and grammatical clusters, it must achieve buoyancy, drift on the air like music. And there is someone down there who understands this. Who elects, who chooses to hear this. It would be better if he listened.

  Zi Benno, The Epsilom

  Federico Prosan, Xochimilco Diary

  Mexican Journal

  Music. Pessoa. Contra Verlaine, contra Mallarmé:

  “For vague sentiments that resist definition, there is an art, music, whose end is to suggest without explicitly stating. For those sentiments that are perfectly defined, so that it is difficult for emotion to reside in them, there is prose. And for sentiments that are fluid and harmonious, there is poetry. In a healthy and robust age, a Verlaine or Mallarmé will always emerge to write the music they were born to write. They would never be tempted to try and utter in words what words will not suffer them to say. I asked the most enthusiastic among French symbolists if Mallarmé’s ability to move them was no better than that of a vulgar melody, or if Verlaine’s want of true expression sometimes reached the same want of true expression we hear in a simple waltz. They said no, and to this end, they meant they preferred Verlaine or Mallarmé’s poetry to plain music, which is to say, they preferred literature as music to plain music. But in so saying, they’re telling me something that has no meaning outside the meaning it has for them.”

  (Fernando Pessoa, 1916?)

  “As we strolled home, Iris complained she would never learn to cloud a glass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready to put up with her deliberate insularity but implored her to cease announcing á la ronde: “Please, don’t mind me: I love the sound of Russian.” That was an insult, like telling an author his book was unreadable but beautifully printed.”

  V.N. Look at the Harlequins! 1974

  The quote that justifies the laziness of the author (Revol, Cortázar)

  The burden of publication

  Sharing a defeat is one of those human weaknesses this b
ook intends to lambaste; I therefore share the triumph of this failure with my companions of the ear: Duncan Browne, Emitt Rhodes, Fred Neil, and Tim Buckley.

  For the characters’ getting together in order to die: the Alegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh.

  Adrogué, June 23, was thinking of Oxyrrinco, Hilarión Curtis’s journal

  Don Julio:

  I was in the busiest bar (say the local newspapers) in Androgué with my niece (and goddaughter) and that friend of hers I told you about, the one that showed up at Quaglia’s place (Quaglia, who’s a local). The friend reminds me a little of Sofía Sarracén, because she has an outstanding [thick] mole or beauty spot on her thigh. Speaking of thighs, she spends a lot of her spare time on my brother-in-law’s, imagine! Among other things, I told her there are no holidays without love. We could barely understand each other. That’s what’s tragic about getting old, believing we’re interesting when we’re just another group of foreigners. She barely understood what the words meant, I mean words in general. I won’t bother giving examples.

  She answered me no. She, who didn’t want to know what the words meant—but why didn’t she want to know?

  What a shock, Don Julio. My niece’s friend performed a horrible gesture, a gesture replete with that very substance, disdain: she raised her hand to her face, as if it was a telephone, with her thumb as the receiver, her pinky the transmitter, and her remaining fingers clenched between. And, with her other hand, she tweaks the air with quotation marks, a gesture I already explained to you. She must have picked it up from some nocturnal instructor when socializing. Then she says “no,” sounding the space between the quotes.

  Nonetheless, I have to admit that [my niece’s friend—her second-best friend] is a good-natured girl. I’d almost forgotten my intention to invite her to the warehouse [the hangar / warehouse discussion] on the night of my sister’s twentieth wedding anniversary. The happy couple decided to celebrate it at a restaurant in the center of town—alone (I don’t want to make myself seem important, but the reason was probably me). Lorena was at her best friend’s house; her second-best friend wasn’t to know. In the stories published by [the journal] Agraphia, of which I was the editor-in-chief for twenty years, both blemishes and beauty spots abounded. Women with moles. The moles were arranged [with rare beauty] around a shoulder that resembled an isthmus, or upon a long continuous esplanade of flesh (the white giant’s thigh). Nurlihrt swore by this anatomico-geographical convention of mythmaking—his dictum, everything lasts that becomes legend—until he himself realized the damage.