No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (30 page)

Oliverio Lester,
The X-Positions

#23

Sestina of Departure

The Self from others always shies away

To taste the bitter bread of solitude

Boasts of knowing what it means to live

But blurs the trail
,
adulterates the prints

On that crudely-executed map of fate [:]

Whose exploration amputates his shade
.

(V. 1) The Sun at midday amputates our shade

I was gullible
,
inconstant as a shade
.

Even what remains eventually goes away:

The farewell prose of destiny
,
of fate

The asymmetric rule of solitude
,

The foot’s unbroken contour in a print
,

And the rival act of truly being alive

#5 I
SSUES

[
The ages / Connection. Dos. Nicasio
.

Style
á deux—
writing in collaboration
]

1.

The Two Illnesses

[[#17]]

The two illnesses and the theory of the three endings and the decision on the title of the story taken from the collection of stories rejected by Belisario / Basilio in accordance with the narrative version in the plagiarized book
—Accents?

There was a trend, in
Agraphia
, for taxonomy, for purblind classification. The writers, collaborators, had to—
we
had to—get inside familiar types. We decided on Elena and Nicasio. This was the idea: I would try to commit suicide within the first hour, i.e. of Hilarión’s departure, but would prove incompetent. Likewise, Nicasio. Not to mention Lino (Scacchi). But Lalo Sabatani referred to an earlier tradition, originating with Aldecoa Inauda, a poet of the Golden Age. Note: Gabriel Bocángel wrote of him: “Being acquainted with many styles / he imitated all.” That is, he had an illimitable repertoire … and during the Golden Age too! Or maybe it was a joke, a
boutade
by Bocángel. Aldecoa was famous for his ability to adapt, for his skill in accommodating himself to the court (careerism, we now call it). The “being acquainted with many styles” could very well be a reference to this aptitude, instead of an encomium on his reputation as an imitator. But he, favored by nature with her gifts and the court with its endowments, did his imitating in the open; whereas we did it behind a screen, deviously, unscrupulously, copying and imitating, as if there was a chip in our brains directing us to plagiarize. For this first classification, there were [added] long-term consequences. For example: those of us who adapted to Hilarión Curtis’s practice would have an easy life but a difficult death. Note that I have
sanpaku
eyes so I always believed I’d die by accident. Remo’s death was what convinced us. Some of us would die of cryptodermia. They, the others, the better ones, they would live out the rest of their lives having adapted to kleptolalia.

Basilio U., an oral confidence

2.

Felipe has grown too much. He’s become a lot like me. But I, on the other hand, have gotten younger, so I no longer look old enough to be his father: more like his older brother, according to Dos. So, [disregarding me] Dos gives the impression that Felipe only had a mother—despite his being fat enough to have been incorporated by several parents—and since Eiralis lacks both matter and memory, Felipe’s father is conceived as a mismatch of body and soul, or viceversa, the result being a kind of ghostly figure with an out-of-focus skeleton covered by a film of breath. As such, he talks like a ventriloquist. The most recent of such creations arrived without my noticing and without anyone telling me their ages at birth or how old they are now. It’s all a matter of perspective, in the space where chronologies are made but time is indiscernible, eloquent, but also cruel. Oliverio seems to mock him to Luini, who must be the one who warns the character of the joke as he ages more and more to resemble me. But the small age gap between Lester and Prosan remains the same and only becomes nil at Elena’s discretion. Hazlitt or Lamb spoke of the satellitic character of women; the kind who write the sort of servile, saturnine characters who in turn becomes the satellites of others.

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. Included before without footnote.