No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (22 page)

Suspense

14.37. Hernán asked Aída who it was I’d been speaking to. She saw me leaning on the gunnel, gesturing to an invisible presence. As I saw no reason to keep it a secret, I told Aída all about Amelia Mevedev. I told her about my reservations, my suspicions, adding: “Amelia Mevedev was one of the people we alluded to, probably without realizing, when we were discussing the literary supplements earlier. A renowned critic, who grows old alongside one of the giants of our literature,
unless
, that is, this giant of our lit …” And Aída, who was barely paying attention, whispered: “Then you know who the second one was?” But before I could respond to her question, which she asked in a tone that implied she knew the answer already, she said: “You know Doctor Lafora who treated Jorge Cuesta? His daughter.”

14.38. And Zi, overhearing our exchange, interrupted: “And what about the third?” At which point Aída responded defensively: “[Ah,] If you don’t know that then …”

14.39. For God’s sake!

14.41. After much badgering and pleading while blessing ourselves, some members of this self-styled navy crew finally acceded to grant our wish …

14.48. In a few instances, there were fits of hesitancy, distraction. Too much baggage, too much world. (
Cadaver full of the World
, that was the name of the book Zi loaned me. It belonged to his friend … Aguilar Mora? And the title’s a quotation from … Vallejo? And
If I die far from you
? What was the other book by Aguilar Mora or that other Vallejo quotation?) “The seventies,” Aída intoned, “how young I was!” She sounded as if she was delivering a quotation. “I’m younger than you are,” said Luini, “and I hated the seventies. I was forced to do military service. But nevertheless, after I was drafted, I joined a group of political leftists. That was 1977.” He didn’t sound very convincing, but we nodded credulously. “But it kept me alive, being wedged between the two—accommodated,” he stressed, as if to applaud his choice of phrasing. “But I spent the worst fourteen months of my life serving a sentence for a crime I hadn’t committed.”

Ah, the seventies.

“The Ethical Dative,” said Zi, sagely. “I’m reminded of a poem by a now forgotten Mexican poet you’ll probably never again see in print.” Hernán looked at him as if he were about to betray himself a member of a secret brotherhood. Then Zi recited:

The ethical dative moved you. You disappoint me
.

It’s the same with almost every woman your age

(And age is what counts
,
almost all that counts)
.

True
,
we shouldn’t be indifferent with the time
,

But it’s wrong to note the chime of every hour. We must

Do away with superstition
,
the tender bruise

Around our wrist
,
the thumb pressed on our veins
.

But noting the passage of hours is what you do best:

You disappoint me. Noting the chime of every hour

is what women who know me better than you
,

do their utmost to forget
.

You have made me as true as a commandment or debt
.

What a pity. I will do my best to ensure you forget me
,

I will do my utmost to ensure I forget about you …

It was a crazy gathering of people, the consecration of memory, the forgetting about paradise,
the loss of a kingdom that was only for me
. The rhythm of the day must have consulted the laughter of a century’s close to beguile me with such extravagance, such opulence, behind my back.

The Princess of Faucigny Lucinge was introduced to me by Amelia Mevedev, who, aspiring for proustian éclat, said: “you will have spoken to or seen her on more than one occasion, which is, I suppose, the same thing.” Of course not. She was a mummy whose bandages reeked with the myrrh of premonition, leaving me with a sickening, cloying feeling. Vertigo, gooseflesh, a feeling of resonance with Chateaubriand. It was a supernatural resonance, hardly an aroma.

The entourage didn’t halt as they passed, and I forced myself to salute a chattering of incumbents who kept tabs on the senescence and senility of their soon-to-be retired forebears. “A pleasure, Mr. Espeche.”

Outside
,
with no sense of the time
. Hilarión Curtis, a handsome man wearing a handsome amount of makeup (full crimson lips, eyes darkened with kohl), recited to me a sonnet by Salvador Novo about starched entrails or viscera or something, and after asking me for the time and politely requesting a kiss—and after I said that my watch had stopped—he recommended I read Novo’s diaries from the period of the poem’s composition. “Son, look at how much trouble I went through to be reborn.”

Some chandelier crystals began to fall (from the canopy, the baldachin). And when everything seemed about to extinguish, recede, die out, when each of those crystal drops or tears had fallen, someone who resembled Onofre Borneo, with an accent less Chilean than drunken, began insisting, confusedly, confounding me with someone else—Luini?—that I give him back all his originals. How many were there?

The countess Merlin, disguised as Mother Hogarth, couldn’t disguise her airs, so she left the group before she was detected. And Constantina Mevedev, like Harry Houdini, introduced Federico Prosan, who’d traveled clandestinely, as Nicolás Mancera—who was also present (I saw him walking away or ducking out of the meeting)—in a magic trunk, decorated with an old-fashioned sailor’s compass. While the father of Lupanal—most recent proctological descendant—and newly invented biographer of Hilarión: Russ Tamblyn disguised as Tom Thumb.

“After my cursory glance at Nebrija’s grammar …” I said, “I maintain that Nurlihrt doesn’t write as badly as Elena …”

A squat, ill-mannered Mexican wearing an ugly jacket with a pistol barely concealed at his waist made his way towards us. He was Bernabé Jurado, the shyster lawyer who’d secured the acquittal of W. S. Burroughs for his uxoricide. I wondered what Yturri Ipuche would think.

… And in that sweet carnivalesque apotheosis,

That playful, Bakhtinian,

subversive, subjunctive

Hebraic,

literary apotheosis,

I extended a hand, like a blind man or woman who’s remained at a pier,

Alone in the silence and spray

The conticent hour

when the gondola’s left for [a] neighboring dark,

as in the film I saw [in the company of others]

long, long ago

(and those who were with me were

Corpses or wives
, as Swinburne wrote,

And all I recall about the film

is it was inspired by a book,

Du Maurier’s
Don’t Look Now
), and a warning:

Be cautious
,
be alert …

On the contrary. Be heedless, unprepared in every situation …

And although I believed finishing a book, even a narrative like this, required a long and emphatic peroration, a prolonged and ecstatic yawp or agonizing howl, a grinding of the teeth and beating of the breast, I realized that for this ending—which really is the last one—I could dispense with an ecstatic or plangent finale, smother all feeling, suppress all effusion, and end my narrative with a whimper. And thus lowering my voice, lowering it below the register of a whisper, I told Zi, Zinaida Gippius, Zi Benno, Zeno Cosini:

“How costly and pointless it all turned out to be.”

They looked at me blankly, vacantly, vacuously. Finally [their eyes] one of the two conveyed, repeated:

—And what’s worse, it looks set to continue, very near to me, but apparently speaking from the other side.

And from the other side—from West Berlin—Zi and I saw the slow, uncreditable development of the showbiz aspect of the contemporary novel.

And then we saw a young, historical, couple running away, going into hiding. They took refuge in one of the izbas that are found dotted on the outskirts of Xochimilco’s teeming suburbs.

We saw them or I saw them while Xochimilco’s golden dawn was passing.

A hideous pariah dog followed them in
.

And I retreated back until I
found myself
, three years or three millennia before, in the Ritz Hotel. When I lowered my eyes, I saw the same [oafish, unclaimed] error: tortillas mistaken for “tostadas.” The sun was setting. I began to regret my perpetual error when we disembarked from the vessel

Common ending: St. Mawr / Xochimilk

In the airport, shortly before departure, I consulted [I consult] my watch, alive and ticking again:
while respiring in that little case
,
what [the hell] does the time be thinking?

We may be the products of that anguish, narrowness, asphyxia.

The issue of the first and last erection of a god, dangling from a gallows that we built.

The heart of standing is not to fly
. Empson, “Aubade.”

Larkin.

… if we told that the surrounding aristocracy was accompanied by a serviture of ghosts, that … so as not to make it laughable (Cf.
The Barefoot Contessa
), their number should be doubled …,

… there were an insufficient [odd] number of offices where we worked (headquarters of the impossibly-named business: Beehaitchhaitch), [above all because] one of the three was the boss. How old was the boss? Same age as I am now. How old was I back then? Same age as my buddy, Gustavo. We’d left military service the year before: eighteen, nineteen, twenty. The days when we stayed up until late, until ten, eleven, or even later if one of the employees lost track of the time. When we left, we used to stop the machines—an Olivetti 24, and an old Remington typewriter with a wide-carriage for doing the dirty work—a habit the consul’s wife disapproved of, who, one morning or afternoon, passed a comment about her seeing them do the same thing in police stations.

We were living in the worst of times. The consul’s wife was having an affair with one of our superiors. Our superiors—Blamires, Haedo, and Haines—were more accomplices than associates. Haedo worked with us in our office. Blamires was the one who said we should always return the machines to their natural state of repose. Haines had his lover in his office, or perhaps it’s better to say, he made sure she was working with him in the same office. Molly was the one who took all the important phone calls, and addressed all five of us using the same submissive vocative: “my king.” Once, Gustavo asked her to call him “viceroy.” She was quite a curvaceous missionary, her hair dyed blond from raven black [I mean that without being funny].

We had three journals: one on cinema, one on music, and the other on rugby. At that time, I believed I knew a lot about the first two subjects and bragged about knowing nothing about the third. This was a cause of much hilarity for Haines, the one responsible for the rugby journal, just as Haines’s lover was, in turn, a cause of much hilarity for the “viceroy.” The journals didn’t produce any revenue. The trick was to deceive the advertisers about the distribution and prints runs, an art Blamires and Haedo were particularly adept at, while Haines did all the talking.

The product that really
kept us afloat
—and brought lucre to the publishers—was a book we had translated:
Venus Cascabel
. It was quite a small edition, twee. Felix, the layout designer, did his best to make them attractive, copying the original designs that were based on
pulp fiction
illustrations of the fifties. Felix’s skill was both a consequence of his extreme static perfectionism and his inability to draw dynamically (perhaps the two are one), which stood out in the first edition, but was enhanced with a vengeance after the success of the following three. Felix couldn’t have children, he always confused lemurs with [for] lemmings—thanks to which I won a bet: he had to buy us (Gustavo and me) a meal—[and he looked on with wistful resignation at the women’s butts, like one who is to be ordained to an abstinent office. NO]

The first volumes of
Venus Rattlesnake
were on a shelf next to Gustavo’s writing desk, each one with its corresponding translation. Gustavo was very organized. He read every copy in advance before sending them off to be translated. And he was a huge fan of Venus Rattlesnake, of Venus Cascabel …