Belisario confessed, smoothing his moustache, trying to be subtle but avoiding understatement, that I reminded him of a Hungarian consul in a movie by Molnar [Lubitsch]. He emphasized his resemblance to a small graceful animal whose tiny cage left him room enough to do little else than chew the bars and lick his claws. Belisario, who’s still five or six years older than me, belongs to another generation. When I first met him, he was wearing a chambergo, so I thought he was more like a century older than me. Who knows what the kids think of me, the ones eighteen or twenty years younger? It’s true that differences shrink between thirty and forty, and they shrink even more between forty and fifty. But sixty establishes its own law of gravity. And many fell away, like Belisario and me. While others continued gravitating: in the case of Lalo, without making much progress. I see him leaving, squeezing through Vidt’s narrow doorway, like a bony-ass coward. It helps to be of an age where one can be irresponsible without being accountable [backed by the myth about youth, which covers any misstep or error with the lie of singularity and potential]. How many excuses are made for mediocrity in the young! They said he lives in the Balearics, perhaps in Banyalbufar—where Elena and I once planned to elope—living his life immersed in the company of others, in better company than ours.
Nicasio Urlihrt, The X-Positions
Eiralis: Nurlihrt via Empson: Nerrida
3.
The collaborative writing at Agraphia required at least two pleasant adherencies. At least two simultaneous missions and a lack of purpose encouraged (and attenuated) by the lack of evidence for the anonymity. The act of writing therefore required confinement, indulgence, speed. Conditions ideal for lovers. Writing together will be: Elena and Nicasio, Inés and Nicasio, Elena and Lalo, Inés and Elena. But not Nicasio and Lalo, due to the lack of proof (although there are suspicions “The Mass” came to be on that inexplicable [clandestine] night Nicasio and Lalo colluded together). In a publication made possible by a bevy of accomplices / adversaries, it was inevitable and went with the job. Now, according to Agraphia’s presocratic numerology, two was not a number. Like good primitives, they needed a figure that lacked the balance of two, the unity of one. From this came “Agraphia’s principle of adultery,” which implies a number more than two, an interloper: a third wheel, an “intruder in the dust.”
The Cristóbal Niaras, Agraphia: Chance Laboratory
The three periods of Agraphia / Allusive can be classified before the conclusion. The predominance of Elena, with her luminous vocation of vanguard and error, her puerilities and idiolectal glossaries, (noninterventionism, errancy, contrerejet, renegations, freakatives, inindicial, inkhorn, lepro and graphorrhea, [naiserie], malapropism, oliguria, umbilicapedia, panxiety, titubiosis, xelexion, zeuxidia), her unyielding latticework [revision of final proofs from the editor, accounting for foreign words with a dictionary in hand] lasts until the first trip to Europe. Period of estrangement that led Sabatani to inaugurate a period of lapsing, the one corresponding with “Salon of Independents,” known later as “Diet of Worms.”
The period known as the Luiniad lasted as long as the Council of Trent (eighteen years), and according to Urlihrt, the period should’ve been called “Trent,” but, because of a lack of foresight and planning, the result was less ferocious, less feracious. But such foresight and planning culminates “by its own means and fears, in the atrocities of the worst of Argentine dictatorships,” alarumed Isabel [Teodelina] Teischer, “with remarkable boldness” in a literary pamphlet (Matilde Urbach publishers, s/f). Proof of this can be read in “Lycergical Glossary to Sircular Cymmetry,” “Ysir,” “The Dreadmist,” “Out of a Greek Gift,” and a great number of stories that aren’t seen in canonical anthologies of Argentine literature.” We can add every other anthology, including the lamest of those published in those lamest of years.
Eloy Armesto, The Sycophant’s Soliloquy, in Parts without Justification, for the Symposium on Invisibility (included with modifications in From Secret Zero to a Number Less. Biography of the Invisible)
4
Going against Occam’s razor, the nominative entities of Agraphia are born to reproduce themselves, to proliferate, and after a short time, be discarded. Their life-cycle can be compared with that of the common cold virus. “Each syllable of their names, a germ, a potential pandemic.” Categorical proliferation, diametrical. The names function as algebraic permutations [that make no difference to the final result]. They gestate, accumulate, are collected, arrayed, and then spent (in the double sense). The metastasis occurs where fame is hierarchically [unevenly] distributed. A sectarian argot of terms: first, the “paludinal [glandular] glitterati” in Septic Midrash. Then, the “phalansterian demographic” constructed to “contradict the anecdote.” In the journal, “there is no hint of theory,” except what makes you rich. Theory, they proclaimed, plagiarizing Proust, is the price tag on a gift. Oliverio Lester proclaimed that admission into Agraphia relies not so much on intellectual common ground, but on the postulant’s mandatory baptism at the font. With regard to the oblivion of narrative, “no one who had anything to say dared to write [be a literary casualty].” It is Nicasio Urlihrt’s motto and blazon.
Cristóbal Niaras, Agraphia: Chance Laboratory
5
The Epsilom, called a “Treatise on Small Quantities,” is a difficult novel to describe (and yet, I’ll try, because I want to justify [my] our admiration [for Zi]). The protagonists, a gang of [perennially] homeless guys, all of them enfants savants, go wandering around making friends with the [common] people. According to the narrator, they have two serious flaws [one of diction and another of understanding]: stammering whenever they attempt to make a comparison, so that the second term never arrives [appears], or it is one the interlocutor / adversary can simply ignore, of a type “equivalent to Mezzaloth when …” The first adventure occurs in Patagonia. The epsilom, in this case, is … [Medellín the good], “The Imitation of an Ounce,” “Xochimilk.”
In order to begin late, and beginning for no particular reason, the epsilom live their lives in reverse: they’re born as geriatrics in the future and live each day improving on that condition, rejuvenating, reaching full maturity at roughly ten years old. [However,] Due to time’s reversibility, and a complementary mechanism of adaptability, for which Zi has an explanation I cannot remember (which saves me having to explain it), the events in their lives are mapped out and so anticipated [[as long as there is [intervened] was an accident]] by ordinary mortals who live their lives in the conventional way, and for whom the clocks run normally [“correctly,” according to the dogmatic Urlihrt], an idea that accounts for [the now outdated admiration of] Zi’s precocity.
It makes no difference whether one reaches today from yesterday or tomorrow: for both past and present meet at the crossroad of the present moment …
So the Zi Benno of “Xoch.” still hasn’t attained the remarkable maturity of a wunderkind and has to be around thirty years old. The Zi Daisy Ashford wouldn’t appear for another twenty years or so.
When I mentioned her, he didn’t seem to remember her.
In the early eighties, Mario Levin invited me to write for his journal, Cinegrafo. For the first issue, I drew upon all my ignorance and pedantry to write a piece about cinematic rock. I reviled the genre, vindictively lambasted everything I’d seen, doing so, I believe, with juvenile zeal (although, at twenty-one, I wasn’t that young), to make myself worthy of inclusion.
None of that exists today (I’ve seen many things that contradict my daring, “transgressive,” claims), but a taste of the era still lingers in my mouth, and that’s strong enough to vindicate all my mistakes … seen immediately.
The cover of that first issue—a tremulous Bogarde at the end of the Fassbinder film, Despair, screenplay by Stoppard, adapted from the novel by Nabokov—exhibited, according to Mario, our paranoia about concealing—reason enough to turn to the inside front cover: photo of Orson Welles in full armor playing his own Macbeth—our omnipotence. Inc
luded before without footnote.
Tears shed for the profession
Hilarión Curtis on the quantities and the disasters
6.
Urlihrt lived by his insomnia. The perfect work Nicasio had promised would be divided into two parts, each part in turn divided—like the Goldberg Variations—into thirty-two fragments. Now, the first sixteen chapters would proceed as if up and down eight steps, each step having its own peculiar signs that are met first on the way up, and again, but in reverse, on the way back down. Now, although the number of fragments left by Urlihrt far exceeded the stipulated quantity, no one—not even Lester, Luini, or Urlihrt’s daughter—could make them [that accumulated heap] appear like an orderly collection … The excesses of symmetry lead to the desert of boredom.
His diary ended: this has set its seal upon the age
The old bachelor pays a visit to the dead poet’s library
Soon after publishing my first fictional piece in the journal, Change (“Misery of a Realist,” first extract from Finesse), I was thought to have risen high enough in the disordered hierarchy of the literary world to be called upon to judge my first short story competition. I read more than a hundred; there seemed to be no end: none were displeasing, but all were unmemorable, except for one, which I remember because I particularly disliked it. It had a title something like, “Diphteria of a Cereal,” and it was a perfect parody of my first piece. I felt the same way I did that time in fourth grade when I entered the classroom and caught L(eporello) imitating me. I never saw myself like that before, but now I saw myself perfectly as I was. There’s something in an imitation, however foolish, that always supersedes the model: imitation is the only advantage left to the featherless biped whose evolution left him with a paltry handicap for racing against any of the quadrupeds. The progress of our steps is always backwards. Barefooted humiliation. Why we can’t justify Bates’s outrage after Maclaren-Ross; or comprehend the spit in the eye that so annoyed Carpentier and Lino Novás Calvo after Cabrera Infante (despite his stating explicitely “Parodio no por odio”).
Look for Ivor Black in The H., V.N.)
Ravel
In defence of the stories, though, one can invoke an extraneous though irrelevant detail. When Oliverio Lester—who’d won various prizes by that time—was judging a short story competition for which he had to read “almost three hundred stories,” he arrived at a curious and exasperating conclusion. All of the stories were populated by similar characters following neatly constructed arcs in neatly constructed fleeting unrealities. As if the contrivance were an instrument or toy for imaginations dominated and constrained by outdated modes, so the arts and trades, occupations and situations described in those three hundred stories Oliverio Lester had read were the same arts and trades, occupations and situations he’d read about in stories from the forties and fifties. The first mawkish scruples prevailed in the realistic narratives—gatekeeper grandfathers, office lovers, tenement suicides, miserable prostitutes with guilty consciences, miserable narrators with guilty consciences, and just plain misery by the bucketload. But even the fantasy tales—encounters with aliens more clever and civilized than ourselves, discoveries of old documents that have a modifying impact on the present time, predictable suspensions of reality for unwelcome forays into the oneiric—arrogantly flouted any implementation, insinuation, or hint of the modern.
So he was determined—roughly a decade ago—to publish a collection much like the one the reader will encounter here, but with a mere exemplary, didactical intention. But then other issues distracted him.
6 CALUMNIES
Elena Siesta, “Sestina of Departure”
What did our detractors mean when they said “without stories” … ?
Nicasio Urlihrt, letter ending on a semicolon
Letter ending on its tippy-toes
What did they mean to say, Don Julio? They meant to say that no one understood what in the world they were talking about or writing. What do they mean to say? They mean to say that all of them, all are just gazing at their navels with the kind of smug self-satisfaction that others find repellant. See, for example, if anyone can understand a word of the discussion regarding Agraphia’s aporia in “The Mass in Tongues”: there is so much understatement, so many baffling interpolations and obscure references, it would exhaust most normal readers’ curiosity and patience. To know that Duchamp’s nine malic molds correspond to the thirty-six family doctors, and that the number of ocular witnesses weren’t in fact four but three: north and south; that 646416 was the magical cipher in the arcane numerology known to the initiated. One must become familiar with automatic formula for the anagrams and pseudonyms and use it to share ones devotion to cryptic books …
Victor Eiralis, idem
24
Carelessly, I got used to the idea that paradoxes themselves were acceptable to everyone, and often mentioned them in passing, though I saw no signs of support or even sympathetic smiles around me. But, occasionally, when I was alone, I indulged my superstitious sense of self-importance. Thence, ready to begin my narrative about the cult, or the legion, I remembered that my two favorite stories in English are about sects or lodges: “False Dawn” by Kipling, and “The Primate of the Rose” by M. P. Shiel. But then I realized, after thinking a while about these stories and their themes, that I was wrong: neither of them have anything to do with sects or lodges. Sebastian Birt, Lenten Diary (Diary to Elena)
8 FAREWELLS
[#27]
Before closing the door on the previous day
[Shortly before Elena sneaked into the background with Bindo, quietly and deftly, so they wouldn’t hear her speak about them, she left a note that was, in both style and substance, the very opposite of a suicide note.]
By doing it so badly, maintaining my distance and calm, and because Remo was there, and because his languid liquid stare made me nauseous. For this and because of my rough and narrow throat (almost all we ever did was smoke). For this and because I knew about Allegra Siri, all of those characters, so to speak, placed at yours and our mercy. Dos, Pimpernel, whoever. And I see I must carry away a flock of adjectives (“every ewe with its mate”). Except they’re not ewes but lemmings. The edge of Agraphia’s fjord placed by you over there so we don’t fall.
(…) All the stubbornness, the foolishness, the constant betrayal, and the pride—especially in his case. My constantly aching molar seems unjustly to be at his temperament’s disposal. Without justice of divorce, you’ll say. I don’t deserve it when he’s the one to blame. He’d like to be the next presbyobe, the one who pays no attention to the details—not I, the one who stays at home. La plus cruelle absence est celle que l’on peut toucher avec le main. Toulet, apt, isn’t it, considering our arrangement? Remind her of it, whoever she is. The drafts are still there [in Vidt]. If, at some point, Teode wants them back, it’s your duty N. to return them to her. Also, give her those books you merely hoard without bothering to read them. It would help if you collected books instead of women, they said to CC. I [on the other hand] feel incapable of doing either: I have no contempt for books or women, but I’m quite indifferent to collections of them. I only lately understood the impulse: collections, collections. I’m an irregular verb.
[There are things that surround us, that abound in great numbers, that slither or crawl, and yet, today, they don’t matter. The monkeys are clamoring above our heads. I assert, I insist: I’m an irregular verb.]
Note of farewell by Elena Siesta / Laetitia Pilkinghorn
Shortly after the last throes of Agraphia, justified because of the password “after the first death, there is no other” [Dylan Thomas bromide], and after the latest babbling in search of a scheme or pattern [“Specular Soup,” “Early”], the group had been reduced to a small circle of snobs with exclusive tastes and reverential airs, committed to a grim [sterile] formalism, that varied between free experimentation and idiotic oulipienne extremes, but which had the virtue—or defect—of not incorporating the audac
ity or stringent formalism of the latter, only the enthusiasm, effeminacy, and acedia [anesthesis] of its practitioners.
Emilio Duluoz, Last Paid [Pure] Vacations
On Hilarión’s resurrection from the dead and the reburial
I live in communion with the dead [Quevedo]
One stormy night, Nicasio brought us to the house in the south where Hilarión’s wake was being held. We gathered round him. He said: “there won’t be many of us.” Since there was no more coffee, they brought us mugs of milk. The smell of dead flowers was repulsive. “After three days, the body starts to reek,” said Nicasio before adding: “these three are the cultural apostles of the distant far away.” He was referring to a certain young man, an older man with the look of a lawyer about him, and Felipe Luini’s girlfriend. [Dead?] The Fedora [of imitation felt] resting motionless on his chest, a recent Band-Aid on his ring finger, a copy of The Barefoot Path. Also, an umbrella dripping outside the narrow furrow of his march, a standing ashtray brimming with inhuman ash, and some empty mugs balancing on a coffee table. At certain times, in an adjoining room lit with tubes, the three were face-to-face with the ambassadors of the distant faraway, and the youth took the opportunity to air his relationship with a woman ten years his senior.
No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) Page 21