No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (29 page)

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 wings 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.

C
EREMONIES
/ L
ITURGIES

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.