No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (21 page)

Later, when the Uruguayan finally said the last word on the last of her serious topics, Zi and I began discussing our own: Francisco Coloane, Pablo Palacio, Pilar de Lusarreta, Pedro Leandro Ipuche. No one was paying attention. Our conversation ran its course.

13.10. In the middle of the Xochimilco event (nobody could tell if it was really the middle, considering where we were and our level of drunkenness), but we were actually in the middle of a perfectly blue, perfectly oval lake, a perfectly reflective lake as would be found in the northern land of Zembla. Zi, on returning from somewhere far away, or, according to Luini, a distant and unchartered X that encroached on the letter Z—for Zembla—was in good spirits, and he broke into a recitation, chanting the measures, counting the beats for the synod’s delectation. At the expense of the parrot / and forgoing any Latin / this sonorous feat / by Aurelio Asiain:

Salvador Novo was suppressing his laughter

as he proudly unveiled his smiling Mona Lisa:

A photograph of José Gorostiza—

Fair-haired pharos of fishermen’s trawlers—

flanked on both sides by many a señora
.

And as time went by, it was as if Zi’s words were filling an old scrabble board sustained on Xochimilco’s noonday shoulders.

13.14. Then suddenly the drunken boat lurched towards a topic already discussed the evening we were at the widow’s house, Federico Prosan. But one of Luini’s imprudent interruptions saved the day. Who are the ones responsible for the literary supplements over
there
? A bunch of kids, we said. Explanation of what we meant. Gave examples. Then we came to a unanimous conclusion.
Just like here
, we said.

13.27. The huge head was the very first thing we saw. The legend goes that when he leaves his [ancestral] bed
for the second time
, he does so feet first. But no. The great mythological monster slowly emerged according to the normal conventions of birth, top to bottom, looking like a huge stuffed animal that was custom made for an acromegalic child … Without hair! “Residual alopecia,” said Zi, taken aback. Then there was a rumbling noise like the sound of distant thunder, or a seismic event attenuated like a wave by the very air, the breeze transmitting it.

True, the circumstances demanded more than cheap suspense. There was supposed to be introspection. I was distracted by the sight of Zi looking at the giant head. There wasn’t an iota of energy wasted on those commonplace reactions of amazement and wonder. That’s right [he was introspecting]! He seemed to absorb the image like the pages of my Mexican journal absorbed the ink from my pen. Ah, my Mexican journal. With such beguiling voracity it absorbed [drank, swallowed] the ink from my pen! I bought it the day after I arrived on Donceles Street, in one of those stores that always confuse tourists because they sell different things and things under different names to the right, correct, and just way they’re used to back home.

13.41. The Great Chihuahua of Xochimilco wasn’t a Chihuahua per se (that, in itself, would’ve been horrific), but something worse, something more appalling: one of those ugly hairless dogs they (in the United Provinces of Río de la Plata; in the northern part, that is, where they use them to heat the bed) call
perros pila
. In someone’s chronicle of the Indies—or an apocryphal chronicle, certainly not one by Bernal Diáz del Castillo—it is stated that, when Hernán Cortés saw it for the first time, he christened it Egito. Perhaps it’s in Prescott. The fact it didn’t have any hair, made it look eerie, supernatural. Then there’s the size—like the Trojan horse the Greeks left as a tribute to ensure a safe passage home (see Chapman). The one “that was then stuffed full of armed knights,” as Cervantes wrote. And that’s what terrified me. Perhaps the number of men hidden in its interior was only known by a woman (to the chagrin of every male, especially T. S. Eliot), a woman called Laura Riding.

13.44. Stuck like remoras to its muddy flanks were water lilies, Victoria Regia, and scraps of posters—some with political captions, others by the CONACULTA with old ringing slogans like
Put the Garbage in the Trashcan
…

It looked way-worn; you could tell this was its second time out. A crowded boat with a mariachi band approached it, strumming their guitarrons, striking their marimba, and whining tiresomely. At my side, Aída began singing the Argentine National Anthem, which she knew by heart (she’d learned it at a private school, a multilingual college where she was made to memorize the anthems of many countries. But of all the anthems in the world, for some strange reason—not an intellectual one—the Argentine was her favorite).

13.50. That was quite painful. We vented our distress using appropriate exclamations in various languages, the last of which was:

13.51.
Good grief!
And I was reminded of (Terry Southern’s and Cathy Berberian’s)
Candy
.
Oh
,
yes
: as any spectacle or show, the manifestation required either an entrance into or exit from a body. To enter through the ass as Perelman’s brother-in-law described in
The Dream Life of Balso Snell
. Our natural acquiescence to the rhythm of the spectacle seemed to indicate our weariness of flesh, our general malaise with all the rituals we perform to gratify it, with the institutions established in its name (including adultery).
Dung & Death
. And the voice of Aída, a firm contralto, at my side: .” . . digníisimo abrieeeron, / La
h
s provincia
h
sunida
h
del Sur.”

13.55.
Y los libres del mundo responden
. Eroticism of the heart, of the gut. Naïve eroticism. Vargas was the first to capture this in his pioneering
Playboy
pinups. An intellection of adolescence and youth,
The playmate as fine art
. Rita Renoir, Balthus, Meret Oppenheim (those tight-fitting bridal shoes!).

In my country, zit-faced teens were given official sanction to go exploring in landfills and garbage dumps for their moral principles. So they gathered around a horrible toadstool covered in blemishes and eschars, for these made it look a fitting exemplar, or perhaps it was more a leprous garden gnome, who carried his personal tragedy with him everywhere he went, and because of his dual nationality, bumped into us more often than not. And overwhelmed by the lack of conversation … My first
sensei
used to say: “Leave it to Eiralis.”

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!