No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (9 page)

He decided he must resolve the matter sooner rather than later. He sat down to write: Wednesday afternoon he’d summon a coach and tell George, or even better, Burgess, that he’d be visiting Wharton or Agassiz. He would prefer that Miss Theodora Bosanquet absented herself, for she cultivated an annoying habit of interjecting on every serious discussion with dreamy sentimentalities: the poor woman. Then he’d proceed directly to Addison & Ibbetson’s office to consult the guide on contract waivers (taking for granted such a thing exists). After reading the various articles, he’d choose the most relevant, this being the one that suggests the most lenient way of terminating domestic service (supposing the archive had such a classification) in a house in the suburbs, roughly the same size as his. This last point should have been given the most attention, because the amount of redundancy is calculated according to how much work is done, on average, over the course of a period, and payment is then given both for the present period and the following one.

canNOt

Sounds NOthing like James. Reread those three short stories again, especially “The Next Time.”

I feel more assured by the incoherent babbling of a panhandler than by the apodictic pronouncements of philosophers.

Good Day
,
Sunshine

He considered that, if such a law existed (and he presumed one did, for his is not an unprecedented case), and allowing for a considerable margin of error, the amount allocated should vary in proportion to the number of tasks completed and the number that would have been completed, during the remainder of this period and the whole of the next, adjusting for age, the relative advantage and disadvantage of being made redundant when young, when mature, or when not far from that permanent redundancy of death, and all in accordance with the terms of the contract. The figures, however, did not matter. These can always be altered, and the amount extrapolated adjusted according to the arbitrary standard by which justice is usually dealt out. Insofar as the redundancy calculated at the expense of one’s dignity is proportionate to effort, he believed it to be just, and would pay that amount without scruple. The value of work not done, on the other hand, required of the employer an inordinate degree of generosity. Because the dismissal in this case was not unfair, it was a result of a conflict of interest. The scarcity of resources was the employer’s first defense, and those he had at his disposal, could be called to visibly attest to his humble way of life, and furthermore, they would illustrate the stark contrast between reality and mere show, which was the
fashion
of his age, an age when the condescending image of the real, the superficial, had been overthrown by something altogether alien and antagonistic, although he, being an artist, would have certainly reduced the issue to a contest of wills, hoping that, in the struggle, in his writings, he could produce a better substitute, someone more attentive, more benign, and less distracted than himself.

An outside intervention
,
please

It had begun raining so he left off writing. How much better he felt dictating on this occasion! In reality, the lives of the George and Lydia Smith of this world mattered more to him now than before—although their situation was, in reality, less hopeful—and he came to realize that, in all the time since making their acquaintance, he had scarcely learned anything about them … He should allow himself to recover. He did so tentatively, at first, even fearfully, as those people frequently do who have spent or misappropriated their store of passion—and he remembered, could have listed many a case—with obstinate greed, and afterwards, wheezing satiety.

They first came to Lamb House recommended by Lucien Sordido, a Corsican gentleman of Napoleonic stature who in bustling London, where word so quickly turns to gossip, was unable to prevent news spreading of his broken reputation. But Sordido certainly held him in high esteem, although it was the kind of esteem a man with an irreparably broken reputation bestows on one who is careless with his. Lucien Sordido had sent the couple to his home with a letter of introduction
;
it must still be in the notebook in which he was working at the time. He vowed to go looking for it, but not at that moment, since there was nothing in the contents he didn’t already know. During that first interview, he avoided interrogating them, for although he intended to improve, or at least not depreciate, the matrimonial economy, his sudden interest in them, after so many years of rebuffal, might have intimidated, or been interpreted by them as a prologue to a threat or a warning. But—taking into account the possible consequences, especially when fueled by a bottle of sherry—he wasn’t going to bring them to task for former actions they could not undo. His careful scrutiny of them, however, might have yielded answers to queries discretion prevented him asking: how much had redundancy affected them, and did it correspond to one of those pathetic destinies he had imagined? For not being content with ignorance, he transformed a mere presentiment of debility and destitution, of desperation and crisis, into an augury. His only duty was to be alert, should their conduct betray any subtle confirmation of it, or should their claims induce in him any impressions of incredulity.

Since then, having succeeded in restoring them to that previous state in which their livelihoods depended on a meager spring (one that delivers only on a monthly basis), he eases a vellication of remorse with the thought that they would be amply remunerated with freedom of time and leisure, although he knows the leisure of redundancy cannot truly be enjoyed. He could dissimulate that his reason for dismissing them was to allow them the opportunity to find better employment, but he could not deny that the pension afforded them but little subsistence, and encouraged too much idleness. Worse still, a cocktail of sherry and idleness could precipitate their ruin. They could of course argue that an everyday existence vitiated by poverty, fatigue, and disenchantment need not be altogether intolerable. They could very well relieve the sting of privation by beginning a regimen of more healthful distractions. If they manage to sustain it, he could call on the Smiths now and then to check on their progress, update his case study,
in situ
. And yet, he would still call on them, even if their regimen came to nothing. The one certainty is there will always be a story. And no matter how long or short, it would always be interesting, for the events in their lives continually rapt the attention of the curious. And curiosity should be considered, in the case of these rigorously
factual
stories, the means by which their factuality, their consistency, is proven: for curiosity questions every revelation, accepts nothing on trust.

If—this very morning—Mr. and Mrs. Smith were to arrive again at his door, exhibiting all the symptoms of delirium tremens, despite their avowed sobriety, and if they came recommended by the same authority—the same Lucien Sordido who was unable to exchange a broken reputation for a new one—
he
would certainly receive them with the same apprehension, the same mistrust, and the same pretense of goodwill as during that first interview, suspecting that, due to Sordido’s notoriety as an author of operatic librettos (a craft not dissimilar to his own: the only variant being the notoriety), they were introduced to one another at a party, and considering them too dull and tasteless to be among his own cast of caricatures, or believing, almost superstitiously, that they were practicing the art of evasion, of dissimulation, and that this was the means by which truly singular personalities concealed their exceptionality, he recommended them to him—perhaps naïvely—as living models. Living models, indeed, but for a novelist. And as always,
he
—disinterestedly—availed of them.

If his memory were as reliable an instrument as his imagination, he would have recalled that Lucien Sordido had in fact sent the couple at
his
request, and that he had afterwards muttered to Sordido in a restaurant—during one of those myriad occasions they dined out that year—a slight of
their aristocratic pose
, which required an almost anonymous fealty to borrowed habits, a wavering confidence in the performance of those habits, and a similar irregularity in the upholding of one’s convictions and scruples.

For now, he could dream of Mr. George Smith, with his threadbare coat and perfumed breath, as a citizen borne of his own inventive memory: as a guide or cicerone to a gallery of facetiae chosen with more haste than judgment, and afterwards replaced with variants whose verisimilitude relied more on his degree of inebriation than on the appraisal of critics, or, above all, of future biographers. The biographer, in particular—being tethered to the past—is a class of professional whose imagination retards his recognition of the present moment, though this is the first door on which every casual observer knocks. As George himself—although not a biographer—had done …

By contrast, he was never wanting in charm and elegance; indeed, it could be said he had more than his share, something he made pains practically to exhibit during postprandial conversation, while enjoying his demitasse, when a distant onlooker might imagine he was descended from rural nobility; and this was justified, almost as much as the paradox of Burgess’s mundane beauty, or his own treatment of realistic tragedy according to the conventions of fantasy, imagining there was neither conflict nor contradiction. True, conflict—which was real in the case of the Smiths—brought with it a kind of superfluous scaffolding, so that the course of events, whether suspended or delayed by that cumbrous stage machinery, forced him to anticipate every flaw, every error in that machinery. How instructive and misleading are errors! How the terricolous Hardy erred in believing he had to bury his hands in the loam of misfortune to prove that he had suffered! Dirt under the nails was the ultimate proof. But Jurisprudence was for him a secondary calling, one whose emblems solicitously evoked a fealty to justice and the public weal, and whose symbolic acts were so amply displayed during the ceremonial openings of law firms, whose founders took care to choose a splendid Latin motto to suit the heraldic monogram surmounting the doors of their establishment, an establishment whose end was not justice but commerce.

In any event, planning the married couple’s future allowed him to distance himself from a problem only Addison or Ibbetson could resolve, each one of whom dealt with the kinds of technicalities he believed were at the core of the issue, but which he could never fully apprehend, since, from the time of his earliest instruction until his removal from the Polytechnic school in Zurich, such things were always lost on him due to his natural inaptitude for systemized learning. No, for him, any attempt at indagation or inquiry into such matters would condemn him to circumambulation, frustration, and endless raving. And, after some time following his own steps, he would find himself once again going down the path already beaten by Musset, who discovered
il s’absente trop de l’Acad
é
mie parce qui’l s’
absinthe
trop
. Although, he could adduce in his defense a monastic temperance so commendable, the casual drinker’s tipsiness—or if he be Irish, the not so casual, for an Irishman would pursue the matter along an entirely different course without ever encountering a Musset—would seem Bacchic by comparison. In this sense, his sorrow, grandiosity, and style were all consistent. And someone who wasn’t even intelligent, but were only a link in a system devised by others, a man who maintained his place only by fear and trembling, would have no difficulty in recognizing him. Even in anticipating him. This is style, and cannot be taught at the academy. If he could hold a conversation with his brother without the usual pretenses or recriminations, they could surely come to some agreement. And especially now he had begun reading
The Varieties of Religious Experience
.

There was always gossip concerning the two of them, whispers sprayed like shrapnel, for without at least one of their deaths, there cannot be an autopsy, or afterwards, a museum of commemoration. It was said that it was impossible to mistake one for the other, since “one was a novelist who wrote treatises on psychology,” and the other, “a professor of psychology who wrote novels.” The derisive chiasmus of fools.

Tomorrow
,
enough

The other benefit was to incur an immeasurable indebtedness to life for visiting on him so many woes. Curious he would think it a life’s work, and not a novelist’s, to repay that debt, as if his writing could remedy or at least assuage the wounds he accumulated with experience. What is certain is that all his possessions together could not discharge that debt, of which the most valuable, the most powerful, was also the least ponderous—his splendid art, his sad profession.

The days passed, the ceremonies were repeated, the guests arrived and then departed, but it was only after they were gone that blood once again engorged the arid channels of his heart. So with impatience arising from bewilderment of desire, he awaited the arrival of the gentlemen guest who would prevail on his hospitality. Or, in the event he didn’t come, he would celebrate the prospect of a full day dedicated to solitude—a Saturday—during which, after initial speculations as to why his guest had failed to come, his imagination would be free to follow its own course. Once, a fellow conversationalist—a Spaniard, he recalls—made the pronouncement in English that Saturdays were days of the imagination, speaking with such orotundity, his words seemed to dress the invisible air in the flounces of that paralogism. Curious: time requires more space than space itself for those who were once close to become estranged. But for
him
to be estranged from those spaces of time when he was made the victim of posturing and casuistry, requires nothing at all. But it doesn’t matter.
Trop
. His account of the most decisive days was now complete, although it was lacking in vigor, although it seemed puerile, and vacuous, and although his fingers reached into the pit but did not feel the loam.