Luz—she’s called Luz—has another mole in the lumbar declivity of her alluring, provocative back. A stunning back, the star to a footnote no one could ever fill. [That consequently would be filled with evidence of wrath and frustration—detritus, old-fashioned words, isoglosses, deltas of Venus, making us lose our footing; that molehill that continues to grow when expressed in her language, the second-best friend’s, her English, outdated, worn. All the rest is secret, darkness, delight. Hidden in nooks and crannies.] Although she said even the tungos (the boys who hang around the markets here) were lavish with their praise. Not that any of these ruffians could do her back any justice. Luz described what one of them said as a miracle of efficacy, exaggeration, devotion, lechery, among other words, of course. My goddaughter’s second-best friend didn’t ask me for explanations, until—exhausted—I myself seemed to request that she ask me. She turned around with elegant curiosity (because the dorsal session had persisted for some time, without variation) and said:
—Isn’t that the way men your age like it?
—Men in general—I said, defensively.
—Why?
—I don’t know why, exactly—I said. Unlike in written prose, in spoken prose, I was able to avail of more adverbs, [I grant my fallacy of arguing from my own authority]. With determination, she thought me the variants “toboggan” and “stake,” and I didn’t object to them as variants. When we’d both then moved from our respective positions, Luz was close enough to breathe on my chin through her nose. I kissed her. My thin, firm lips, acquainted with lies but not repentance, an answer to those thick, full surgical lips (kisses in the penultimate dark). She said she had a good time. She said, for the sake of my goddaughter—who was Luz’s best friend—we should try to avoid such situations in the future.
With all this waste of expletive, digression, circumlocution, bombilation, niaiserie, redundancy, stupidity—Ah!—that characterize Eiralis’s letters, we can’t see the supposedly attic narrative scheme underneath.
16 [in Preparation?]
1 Hyde Park: Serpentine, Rotten Road (i.e. “Route du Roi”), Pall Mall, Green Park, Science and Technology Museum, Victoria and Albert, Courtauld Institute;
2 Tate Gallery, National Gallery, Leicester Square (hic sunt leones …);
3 Butcher’s in Harrods
4 Places I like to say I “checked off,” (Dickens’s house, Johnson’s) without overlooking graves and cenotaphs (Blake, Bunyan, Hardy);
5 To Hampton Court by double-decker and return by commuter boat
6 Long walk: Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Parliament buildings, Whitehall, 10 Downing Street, Haymarket, Fleet Street to St. Paul’s Cathedral, Bank of England;
7 Belgravia, National Embassy (Argentine);
8 Oxford Street and Fitzrovia, Soho: bohemian pubs of the forties.Tambimuttu, Dylan Thomas, Henrietta Moraes, Bacon, Maclaren-Ross, Nina Hamnet (“the laughing torso,” the best tits in Europe, according to Modi[gliani]);
9 South Bank Cultural Complex (Purcell Room and other concrete eyesores);
10 Charing Cross, a full day trying not to belittle the most miserable bookstores, dedicating special attention to my bookseller friends, Larry Grosvenor Letham and Brian Boole, to see if I can get my hands on an impossible Shiel or a Sexton Blake by Flann O’ Brien;
11 Savile Row, to determine the amount of damage done to proverbial elegance by The Beatles;
12 Abbey Road, to determine how much they did to repair it;
13 Battersea, to investigate a hunch: that Giles Gilbert Scott’s constructive genius—like the musical genius of Elgar—can’t solely be attributed to raw talent, like some of his contemporaries (for instance: Le Corbusier, Mies, Wright, Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky) but seems to emanate with the help of the fabled city itself, London …
List of places in London I should’ve seen during my first visit and their order (according to my guide, Enrique Villa Veralobos, alias Harry Woolfstoncraft Shady, alias Eduardo Manjares, alias Basilio Aspid, in 1992):
Gabriel Donovan / Sebastian Birt to Eduardo Manjares
Bertorelli’s
18
(…) they were the over-sensitive clingers on, the ones who couldn’t spend a moment away from Elena, the ones who copied everything she did to the letter. They followed her everywhere, entertained her infidelities, sat down to have tea with her in her little room, or worse, on her mat. In the little room: through a high window one could see the train passing. Many years later, I discovered that through the former dentist’s office window, I saw the same train passing, leaving; the same train that we (Elena, Remo, Felipe, Dos, and I) saw that first time through Elena’s window …
Victor Eiralis, private letters to Julio Clausás
19
See Ibiza Trip
They postponed their return so Teodelina could be born in London—despite their deciding to christen her Teodelina. The discussion, which was briefer than the one about the naming of the journal—Elena wanted to call the girl Ema—ended when Nicasio said: “don’t sentence the girl to a lifetime of misery for the sake of a ceremony.”
[Ivan Salerno Scacchi], Out of a Greek Gift
For a time, they fantasized about [entertained the illusion of] spending the rest of their lives in Cuevacaviar, the hidden island [cave, fortress] off Bañalbufar. For Nicasio, it seemed the most desirable of destinations: where he could distance himself [definitively] from Eloísa, continue paying little attention to Elena, and educate Teode far from the madding crowd. For Elena, it was pretty much the same: a place where she could distance herself from Remo (from Lalo, from everyone), continue to reciprocate Nicasio’s indifference, and personally educate Teodelina …
Eduardo Manjares, Postcard from the Inquisitor
Ingrid gave Inés the job of sorting the archive, of dealing with the public “behind the screen,”
A portrait of Elena by Lino Scacchi [in sanguine chalk, the same instrument she used to correct his original] was hanging in the office where Elena was working, a Trompe-l’œil to compensate for the small number of people working on the floor of clients and contractors at Zigurrat and of collaborators and collectors at Agraphia.
Screen. Description.
Urlihrt’s writing desk was behind that screen. Once, unexpectedly, Oliverio and Dos opened the door without knocking and saw something they’d rather not have seen or, afterwards, described, because all that was visible was carnage, evidence of a recently-committed act of violence left abandoned on his desk; a spectacle others might confuse for mere disorder, mere chaos, a mere simulacrum. So that one might be tempted to say there was only a belt and a plate on his writing desk, a plate with a single fried egg and a cigarette extinguished in the yoke.
Something else Urlihrt must have heard and later seen.
Opus. The style. Prescriptions for its propagation.
Warn the reader that the emphasis placed “in those days” on the evangelical formula wasn’t a way to pass off [disguise] style as inspiration, but a way of establishing a simulacrum, essential when the lack of dates sanctioned our commitment to vagueness, [to discredit and even despair.]
Years later, when Eduardo Manjares paid them a visit, he described Nicasio Urlihrt’s curiosity in women as “proboscidal” [using the adjective, “proboscidal,” 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.” Urlihrt, 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 with us.
[The X-Positions, novel under preparation] [NO]
The gloss of a diptera’s win
gs to the triumphal shadow of a soaring falcon
NO
20
He was a typical Galician, Don Julio, just as you’re a typical Catalan. (No, I mean, that’s just from our point of view of course, I mean my point of view: and I’m from Valencia. Or from Valladolid?) But younger, with certain pretentions. He brought back to Buenos Aires an overcoat he acquired in Paris, along with a silk scarf and an attitude of modest abandon. And he deceived us all. He came with so bad a reputation, half the Buenos Aires intelligentsia was after him, following the piratical inktrail he left after translating Bataille and Benjamin without paying royalties. And he translated them badly too. If it was said there was a skirt-lifting flaneur walking the streets of Recoleta whose name was Walter! I’m sure you, Nurlihrt, Luini, and Lester immediately brought him into the fold, and Luini and Nurl introduced him to me in The Giralda (where the two rogues will have begun the process of transforming him into a local legend), thinking (I know it’s inconceivable, but in this case, the verb can apply to them) “that they’re doing me a favor.” I was without a job, without burden. Urlihrt and Luini read one of my fawning pieces and the Galician then immediately filed it away. My diffidence must have been an artisanal requirement. He invited me to dine at La Guillotina, the restaurant in which you and I met for the end of year parties and which, today, is but another cathedral submerged in memory, foreign. And this is was what convinced me. I was only one of his nègres.
Perhaps The History of the Secret the narrator mentions is an allusion to Brief Decoding of the Mystery, the book I wrote for him and for which I was never paid …
Despite the occasional nonsense, Manjares’s short story is quite good—the best in this court of blind men. Gullibly, one of the cretins felt obliged to justify the publication of such a strange a story (although all of them were strange), doing so in the worst possible manner—praising it until he was hoarse, trumpeting about it being full of “secret codes” that allude to the works of D. H. Lawrence and F. R. Leavis—as if these trifling concerns of university cloisterers would interest anyone.
The adulteries in parallel: Lalo Sabatani / Elena Siesta. Nicasio / Inés Maspero
Inés said [to him], “he was afraid of something” (referring to his evasive attitude with regard to his interaction with Belisario in his study, where he slept the day before). Nicasio was brazenly impudent: he became engaged to a beautiful woman as a token of defiance.
Lorenzo (Lalo) Sabatani used to perform his magic tricks (and he only had a few) in some of the crowded cafebars on Corrientes Street. He examined their pulses (“between the wrist and the thigh, diction and metastasis,” he’d say), read their palms, and again examined the pulses of those he called “lacanian monjitas,” and when he wanted to, he’d choose one of them to sleep with, and go back to her apartment. His preference for married women, though, meant he often ended up sleeping alone. [[He had a preference for married women; he frequently slept alone]]
Elena never went to those bars. She arrived one afternoon with an air of alarm and “irrepressible” indignation (exaggerated Lalo, who kept boasting until late, very late in the night, about his conquest) …
20
It hurts to recall the journal’s degree of semantic instability during those years. As Urlihrt argued: it oscillated between epileptic absence and rigorous malapropism. The work Luini had to present as evidence before a tribunal, like the one in the stories (go-betweeners, feticheurs, etc), was, according to Luini, a plagiarism larded with quotations, proportioned (although disproportionately) by Lalo Sabatani, Agraphia’s warlock of black magic par excellence.
CEREMONIES / LITURGIES
On Elena’s way of cutting the uncut pages of a book
On Nicasio’s means of quitting smoking
On Eloísa’s way of opening a pack of cigarettes
On the state in which Nicasio leaves his writing desk
On Elena’s way of tucking away a keepsake
A few words on Elena’s way of underscoring.
In more than one sense, Elena’s underscores are perfect. First, there is the sense of their being painstakingly worked over—abusing at least two meanings of the Spanish word prolijidad—and there is their sense of harmless, innocent accomplishment. They concealed [conceal] both her general temperament and her mood in the [moment, act of] reading while, at the same time, they showed [show / exhibited / exhibit] her infallibility in distinguishing what’s important from what’s trivial, accessory, and most of all [most often], obvious. The method was unique. Inés employed it with neither violence nor moderation in every book of every genre she read—drama, poetry, narrative, essay—in the three languages she’d understood—English, French, Spanish—an exercise, which, at first glance, may have seemed evidence of a strict upbringing, a rhetorical tribute or stipend to her harsh [hard-going, traumatic] orphanhood.
Perusing her underscores leaves the reader in no doubt as to the expectations, intentions, or interests of the young poet, nor, incidentally, of her desire to become cultured—understandable in someone in pursuit of independent judgment—accumulating [accordingly] hints, indications, suggestions, and ritornelli for the enrichment of her conversation.
Monitoring the behavior of these designs on the page could lead us either to an alleyway or into an ocean in the manner they evince the capacity or skill of distributing patterns and concealing them, discouraging any search for symmetry—every indication of it being interrupted with astonishing frequency and irregularity by so many irrelevant, extraneous, and self-indulgent diversions.
22
The trip was supposed to end in Athens, [but for some unknown reason] it ended in Treviso … With a bang, a whimper. Topics suggested [are]: an untimely confession, a lovers’ bedroom spat, not in view of the whole world [[Frost poem in Yvor Winters refers to Thoreau [in Blyth?], an inseparable accident]]. It was difficult, at that point, to give credence to Elena’s love, [respond to that] affection or show of affection responsible for Nicasio’s affection or show of affection. It is possible Elena contrived a scheme of indiscernible grudges and surprise attacks similar to those woven into the first sestina. The mutual disloyalties are an apotheosized exaggeration of error and inaccuracy. For Elena and Nicasio, who never collaborated on anything or even wrote in the same room together, this style was captivating.
Oliverio Lester, The X-Positions
23
Sestina of Departure
The Self from others always shies away
To taste the bitter bread of solitude
Boasts of knowing what it means to live
But blurs the trail, adulterates the prints
On that crudely-executed map of fate [:]
Whose exploration amputates his shade.
(V. 1) The Sun at midday amputates our shade
I was gullible, inconstant as a shade.
Even what remains eventually goes away:
The farewell prose of destiny, of fate
The asymmetric rule of solitude,
The foot’s unbroken contour in a print,
And the rival act of truly being alive
5 ISSUES
[The ages / Connection. Dos. Nicasio.
Style á deux—writing in collaboration]
1.
The Two Illnesses
[[#17]]
The two illnesses and the theory of the three endings and the decision on the title of the story taken from the collection of stories rejected by Belisario / Basilio in accordance with the narrative version in the plagiarized book—Accents?
There was a trend, in Agraphia, for taxonomy, for purblind classification. The writers, collaborators, had to—we had to—get inside familiar types. We decided on Elena and Nicasio. This was the idea: I would try to commit suicide within the first hour, i.e. of Hilarión’s departure, but would prove incompetent. Likewise, Nicasio. Not to mention Lino (Scacchi). But Lalo Sabatani referred to an earlier tradition, originating with Aldecoa Inauda, a poet of the Golden Age. Note: Gab
riel Bocángel wrote of him: “Being acquainted with many styles / he imitated all.” That is, he had an illimitable repertoire … and during the Golden Age too! Or maybe it was a joke, a boutade by Bocángel. Aldecoa was famous for his ability to adapt, for his skill in accommodating himself to the court (careerism, we now call it). The “being acquainted with many styles” could very well be a reference to this aptitude, instead of an encomium on his reputation as an imitator. But he, favored by nature with her gifts and the court with its endowments, did his imitating in the open; whereas we did it behind a screen, deviously, unscrupulously, copying and imitating, as if there was a chip in our brains directing us to plagiarize. For this first classification, there were [added] long-term consequences. For example: those of us who adapted to Hilarión Curtis’s practice would have an easy life but a difficult death. Note that I have sanpaku eyes so I always believed I’d die by accident. Remo’s death was what convinced us. Some of us would die of cryptodermia. They, the others, the better ones, they would live out the rest of their lives having adapted to kleptolalia.
Basilio U., an oral confidence
2.
Felipe has grown too much. He’s become a lot like me. But I, on the other hand, have gotten younger, so I no longer look old enough to be his father: more like his older brother, according to Dos. So, [disregarding me] Dos gives the impression that Felipe only had a mother—despite his being fat enough to have been incorporated by several parents—and since Eiralis lacks both matter and memory, Felipe’s father is conceived as a mismatch of body and soul, or viceversa, the result being a kind of ghostly figure with an out-of-focus skeleton covered by a film of breath. As such, he talks like a ventriloquist. The most recent of such creations arrived without my noticing and without anyone telling me their ages at birth or how old they are now. It’s all a matter of perspective, in the space where chronologies are made but time is indiscernible, eloquent, but also cruel. Oliverio seems to mock him to Luini, who must be the one who warns the character of the joke as he ages more and more to resemble me. But the small age gap between Lester and Prosan remains the same and only becomes nil at Elena’s discretion. Hazlitt or Lamb spoke of the satellitic character of women; the kind who write the sort of servile, saturnine characters who in turn becomes the satellites of others.
No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) Page 20