“I expect the worst: that she’ll commit suicide. And that she’ll make the decision while I’m away.” The confession prompted a contest. The lawyer revealed he was in a relationship with a woman who was making his life impossible. Luini’s girlfriend said her brother was running the risk of being assassinated by a group of vigilantes, and that no one knew how to convince him to flee the country. Back in front of HCs coffin, someone standing next to Lester said: “How strange it is.” At which Nicasio explained: “Like a crustacean. The integrity of the corpse and the lack of smell are due to the illness. As it advances, it stops growth and corruption. We’ll be attending a premature burial.” Luini’s girlfriend—the sister of the threatened man, whom we all wanted to save in that same hour—ventured to ask something we’d disregarded: “If it wasn’t going to last more than a day, why have a wake?” Nicasio delayed in answering: “Don’t know. A whim. It just had to be seen.” And someone else puffed: “Was it really worth it?”
The following day, the dead of night seemed to reward them, but it was a false alarm, although it made the priest’s youth sermon more tolerable, and for Luini’s girlfriend, it made more tolerable the incessant advances of the obsequious lawyer with the ridiculous name.
Before they sealed the coffin, one of the three apostles pointed at the ring finger of the deceased [enringed with a piece of tan paper], around which there was a piece of paper. He asked Nicasio if he could remove it. After a questioning glance at the lawyer, Nicasio approved. The lawyer seemed to be waiting for that moment the whole night. He nodded with a smile, adding: “Don’t hesitate, do it immediately, but slowly: I also happen to be a notary public.”
It was a piece of rag paper. On the side in contact with the skin, there was a printed inscription: The illness has assumed the likeness of death that death, the same death you question! [sic] on the way out, will not deny.
Nicasio was left with the rag paper piece, that is, one of the apostles.
[“Thoroughness” extends in two directions because of the two senses of the word: comprehensiveness and meticulousness.]
It’s difficult, and especially now, to find out in detail what he did for Inés, who was always wishing for someone to visit, but someone who didn’t immediately become, or become by degrees for that matter, tiresome on visiting. She used to say, to claim, it was a result of her middle class, her bourgeois vulgarity. But there was something else.
[#26]
It’s not easy writing a sad tale after a happy one. [Perhaps] Tolstoy had this in mind when he heard the first beating intimations of his Anna K. It may be hard to hear a beat in here. My family bedroom is host to every kind of noise.
Beginning of “Replicas”
Fantin-Latour. To block outline.
Blocked outline.
Anales diáfanos del viento. Góngora
Mourir
Although nothing prepares us for it, dying suddenly when young exempts us from having to go through the slow process of dying when old. Two ghosts have stood up [in unison]. They are the ghosts of old age and of sickness. [And] they stood up together and got ready to leave when we alerted them that we still hadn’t died, that we hadn’t died yet, that we are still standing, [that we will remain standing,] that we’ve begun walking. We caught up with them almost immediately. All our actions were mirrored in theirs, as if they were glued to our backs, beginning at the hip. Duelists, if we were, in truth, chronological caricatures. After they cross our path, we will not see them again, but we will hear them say, illegibly or inscrutably, through the semi-consciousness of awakening from sleep, that since they began expecting us (waiting for us, frightening us), the slow process of dying is no respecter of age. Dying and aging are very different things, as if one was written in verse, the other, in prose. Even now, when I think I’m beginning to understand them, I do not. And perhaps it’s because “now” demands too much exercise of will, and “do,” even more. And everything I had set out to describe here, before Basilio stopped me, is inaccurate, an implausible version of what really goes on. And what really goes on: birds decapitated over headless torsos. And this makes me think of D. H. Lawrence, and the precise way in which he ends The Woman Who Rode Away by dismissing what is loved and what is seen. But Lawrence himself isn’t an example of what I mean. In him, the illness, the sickness, isn’t a ghost, and old age is only an intruder insulted by his good looks. Not a ghost, but a beggar that follows him, circling round him, a dervish, spinning round him, transforming him with every turn, as Morgan Le Fey does to Prince Valiant in the first book I ever truly loved. That lets him see, through graying orbits, time spent, what the years ahead will bring. He will have the good sense not to fulfill them, but not so as to die suddenly when young, but to go through the slow process of dying … Yes,
free
with weariness of flesh when the dice that we spend our lives burnishing fall outside the precisesly measured circle of error that predicts the probability of a sudden accidental death and are blunted …
In Precisions
Chronology & Critique
Emma Steele (???) Cristóbal Niaras
The zero, a round number—achievements and memorabilia of Agraphia
A great puzzle whose answers are all out of place
It’s easy to determine the system of belonging at Agraphia from a stylistic criterion, and despite what’s said above or below [Niaras and Armesto were mere footnotes] about collaborative writing. “Specular Soup” and “Replicas,” for example, are covered in the stylistic fingerprints of the folie á deux collaborations of Nicasio Urlihrt / Eloísa Betelgeuse and Oliverio Lester / Elena Siesta. In the first, the tendency to supply an aphoristic generalization followed by a narrative conclusion (“We know it takes time: Tashtego awaited the revelation two centuries after his departure from the Puerto de Palos of his invention, languishing on a Patagonian coastline”) competes, paragraph after paragraph, prayer by prayer, with the transmission of useless technical terms to the reader (example, transcription) …
The correspondence of mythological ambiguities (with additional ones taken from Sebastien Birt’s Diary to Elena) in the latter: “my male sister,” etc. etc.
In contrast: the profusion of expletives in Eiralis’s letters, not solely attributable to the epistolary tone, and their scarcity verging on dryness (not solely to be blamed on ambiguity of phrasing) in Felipe Luini’s “The Office Next Door.”
At the height of their dalliances and defiances
Lalo and Remo began moving as one, intrigued by the delectable matter offered them by their master. They snuffled with equal misgiving, with the same animal mistrust. Then they submitted unanimously, obeyed. While Elena’s ability to respond to compliments, or pretend to respond, was strong, [well-known, profound, as her listlessness] her dry disinclination for returning them was characteristic: in the case of Lalo and Remo, a rejection of either one was to be taken as a rejection of both. A strange procedure indeed. She appreciated in [others and in] herself the capacity for contempt and invective, but not for passive flattery. For Lalo, her lack of response made her seem almost a widow, dead to love because of Urlihrt, because of condescending indifference. She, disposed [as was stated] to use up all her nine lives at once, was already familiar with those nuances of love as they are reckoned in the tribunal of a single glance.
28
Basilio’s briefcase [Charles Bovary’s cap]
—Stop describing it, Basilio. I swear I didn’t see it.
Francisco Xavier Aldecoa Inauda (1569–1616). Aldecoa recounts: “I was born under the aegis of the twins, heralded by a pageantry of signs. The first born, having already deprived my mother of her prime, and fifteen years of working life, I would be the son that, after a difficult labor, deprived her of her life. The place of my birth was the village of Yeste, at the house of the Inaudi, the which being my grandparents’ home, in the distant far away, and I know not how my father came to traverse that distance for the conception. He was the court bailiff, an
d was never at home. That I grew up beset by poverty, but in the tender care of one of my mother’s sisters, was the will of the omnipotent and simpleminded Lord. In my works, by contrast, the reader will discover in the disarray that life is not disposed as verse or prose, and for a man to persist in trying to arrange it thus, makes him vain, obstinate, and deficient in skill, in reason, and in memory.” Those works include the sonnets and décimas from La semana horizontal, which was dedicated the duke of Osuna, and is often compared with the Devotions of Donne (1573–1631), since the Spaniard’s work was also the product of a lengthy convalescence; the comedy in verse, La ceñida visitada; the long meditative work, Ejercicio malogrado en homenaje a la vista, which, between 1608 and 1611, was translated and exported all the way to America (where it was used by certain schools of thought for matutinal instruction), and sometimes known by the title Lengua de pájaros, after one of its longest chapters: it was his most frequently printed book. A victim of mild insanity—the Spirochaete way—Inauda inaugurated a mode of free expression that belongs more to the twentieth century, which is the reason why he’s been variously celebrated as a precursor. Much of Inauda’s oeuvre remains secreted and unpublished by his estate, which is kept by a fanatically religious descendant who prevents “their being known to a wider public, which is neither here nor there, since the works themselves aren’t aware of being read, or that they risk my soul’s place by the side of the righteous.”
Eloy Armesto made his critical debut for Hendiadys and was afterwards encouraged to write for less boring journals by Cristóbal Niaris and, above all, Annick Bérrichon. Author of valuable works of fiction: (The Prince of Modesty, Tatami, Sensei, Progress [[Vienna while in Prague]]) (novels). Pretérito anterior (Past Perfect) collects all his critical works to date.
The Meaulnes, Edgar Alain: the journal’s first exegete and faithful apologist. Berna, while in Riga.
Biruté Aurigón: the first lady to penetrate the virile cloister of Agraphia—patterned after a confessional—was this Cuban exile living in Buenos Aires. She was married to Virgilio Anscombe Melián, who held a diplomatic post at the (…) embassy. In the early fifties she was officially Urlihrt’s lover. All her books, which anticipate magic realism, merit republication. They are: Sepúlveda and us, The Tales of Jeremiah (children’s), The Dazzling Kingdom, The Bone and the Salt, She Recovered at Home (Casa de las Américas Prize), Beyond Them were All, The Fruit of Yesterdays, Spring of Ashes, The Statuette Prince (children’s), Migraines and other Private Weaknesses, George Gershwin (illustrated biography).
Zi Benno: nom de plume of the author of a gigantic work entitled, The Epsilom (or My Scruples), a cycle of almost four hundred novels (among them, The Surface of Venus, The Sirius Point of View, The Anecdotal Father, The Times, A Small Wonder, The Spartan Minutes, The Ionian Spy, The Gay Physicist, For a Terrible Theatre, Without Sensing that they Call Me, The Chance Encounter of V[irgilio] P[iñera] and T[ennessee] W[illiams] at the Poolside Surrounded by Guests, The Ankles of Memory, Mexican Journal, High Jump, Embroidered with Cadmium Thread, Mortuga, The Snail, The Winding, By the Grace of Terence, Fossil Chamber, The Unfortunate, An Adaptation, The Patrol, Ghetto Bosses, Age of Fractals, The Intellectual Hoard, In Search of Madame Tussaud, Tabitha Salieri, The Bearcat’s Search, The Mongoose’s Pagoda, Titanium Thigh, etc.)
Shortly after his death (September 11, 2003), when the identity of this prolific and well-regarded (though still poor) writer was revealed, those who didn’t know the man by his real name—a few close friends—were astonished: César Quaglia.
Constantin Beret (1899–1966). “For all exiled Russian writers, the German word Zeitgeist is a fairy with no counterpart,” wrote Beret, christened Constantin by his fantasist mother, who was an admirer of his homonymous precursor, Balmont. He even wrote a work in Russian, French, and English in which he homelized on this maxim throughout, although it had failed to conquer his imagination, an environment inimical to fairies. He dedicated himself to showcasing his style, which tended more to the playful and suggestive than the polemical and invective, in his first collection of short stories, Broken Mirror (from which “Semblance” is taken), which remains the best place to encounter at once his elusive heroines, his borrowed moneylenders, his transgressions, and predictable use of candelabra. He also wrote a tedious biography of Lermontov (translated into Spanish with the title, El héroe sin tiempo), which cemented his reputation in France. The translation of “Semblance” was attributed to Belasario Tregua, with multiple emendations by Urlihrt, Luini, and someone else. Of Beret’s many works, the Agraphia committee used always to recommend three titles: Rhapsody in Pink, Symmetry and the Diabologhs, Hotel Abîme.
Annick Bérrichon (1888–2000)
Eloísa Betelgeuse (1950–1979) a.k.a. Eliza Beetlejuice (née Consuelo Inés Maspero), author of The Chysalid Initiation, Perspective in Botteghe, Catalogue of the Annunciation. Committed suicide on November 22, 1974, in Buenos Aires. Publication in French [?] and English earned her a universal reputation for … A sequence of posthumous poems, edited and published in 1980 with the title, Gris gris. Tango Elegies. The author of this note first encountered her famous sestina in 1997, and it was [almost immediately] translated into French by … Bettina Agutter.
Deborah Dubois Verdoux
Letter to Artemisia Gentileschi
Hilarión Curtis Ertebehere: A writer, dead almost six decades. Agraphia’s most assiduous contributor and its Canterville ghost. Indeed, he was more than just a contributor to Nicasio Urlihrt, who said he was “the legend I’d wanted to be” … To his other descendants, Curtis was just another Argentine writer, but according to another exegete, Federico Prosan, he was “The most extraordinary Latin American writer you can imagine: typical and, at the same time, completely atypical.” Although none of Urlihrt’s forefathers had his surname, it is certain he’s Curtis’s direct descendent, his grandson.
(See also “The Seychelles.”)
Urlihrt was a German from Bavaria: proof in the Almanach de Gotha
Eccles, Ciaran: wrote under countless pseudonyms, including Lord Swimmingpool, Eliseo Arias, Sabás Salazar, Sal Simpson.
Oliverio Lester: (see Liborio Treles).
Cora Beatriz Estrugamou. Primary studies at the Mallincrodt College then, immediately afterwards, lottery of cards, escoba de 15, truco, canasta, card routines. Backgammon. Chess. Go, Mahjong and Tarot, luck and anarchy. Never learns to draw. First happy book: Unfavorable feast. Later: We Visited, Sleep of Night, Original Sins.
Her poetical works. Her versatility. The little that’s known about her. The pseudonyms.
A Night is the Lifetime Stars (Calderón), Biography of the Imagination, Original Sins …
The Place of Apparitions, her unfinished novel and a smattering of short stories, and The Times, which collects all her theatrical works (Kropotkin’s Closet, etc), published under the pseudonyms, Clara Gazul, Elena Sombra. There are some legendary stories about Elena, some disseminated by her ex-husband, but it is certainly untrue that she resurfaced in Italy as the interior designer of the Gnu house (which her ex-husband, by then senile and reduced to a state of infancy, thought a belated tribute) (Principles of the Imagination on the Other Side of Sleep, translated into Spanish in the early seventies, in Chile).
Lord Swindon: see Museum, Sherbet Aria.
Felipe Luini (Buenos Aires, 1938). His first book, Misery of a Realist, won the [national award for unpublished literature] critics award. This was followed by Stepping into the Dubious Daylight, Someone Else’s Dream, Foolish Verses, and Reckonings of the Possible (poetry). In 1992, the novel Noisy Deaf, which chronicles the adventures of a few Buenos Aires teachers during a vaccination campaign, won the municipal prize. In 1997, he was touted to be awarded for The Redskins, an atrabilious collection of short stories that didn’t seem to have any endings, or which actually didn’t have endings (since, according to the author, there was a secret unity that renders the collection a single novel), and which was therefore thought inn
ovative, or reproductive of what was once innovative. The theme of the extermination of the local Indian populace counterpointed the extermination in the seventies of all talented primary school children. In the early 2000s, during his self-imposed exile in Barcelona, the author’s last three works—the titles of which are all proper nouns—attracted both popular and critical attention. But [alas] we cannot recall the titles. It was the director of the adapted movie who used the title Noisy Deaf (movie title),
In the letters Eiralis refers to plagiarism
Irene Inauda: the journal’s most recent [decent (a misprint)] contributor is a figure of widespread, even international, notoriety with a multifaceted profile [what the heck’s a multifaceted profile?] that this brief annotation could hardly limn [or do justice to]. Born to a good Argentine family of the patrician class, she had early—one could even say immediate—access to the world of haute couture, of high society, and as she grew, so did her admiration for this world and the people in it so that, remarkably, when she was barely out of adolescence, she was already a seasoned socialite. Her parents and grandparents were and continue to be prominent cultural and political figures in Buenos Aires. In the early sixties, there wasn’t an exhibition, parade, or other significant “happening” they didn’t attend. And although her father, a prominent lawyer, used to undermine—as a patient does to his therapist—all these past ticker tape events and the part their family played in them, saying that the best thing about the era [decade] was the stuff that came out of the printing presses, she always felt she was a precocious [and privileged] witness of that era, and afterwards, a victim of the one that followed.
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