Luis Chitarroni - The No Variations - Diary of an Unfinished Novel

[II] An eruption, a volcano. The scientific vocation is certainly wanting in mortals who commune closely with the gods.

Clucking tongue. The décolletées passing. Scapular. Swaying solemnly, that arbitrary souvenir, a volcano scapular from Storyville, the red-light district, which I still have. Why do I keep it, what will I do with it?

NO

Superimposition

of the bottom of my glass, a brief instant — a slick of melting ice, to the last drop — over the window of a Havana hotel. It’s raining in the dry season.

Out of a Greek Gift

Ranelagh, 29 December, 1995/91?

“So Doctor Yturri Ipuche is also Doctor Purcenau?”

“Could be”

“And apparently he lied about everything”

“Don’t know, maybe it was just nearly everything.”

“Nor could one simply attribute this to the fact that they’re all, well, fictional characters?”

“Hardly even that: they’re floating voices, like in that Sarraute novel …”

“Some English writer did the same thing”

“ Les Fruits d’ Or ”

“careful now, it’s not like we don’t have examples closer to home”

“since nobody understood a word they said”

“There’s just no way it can be sustained for long. Four or five voices without social or political status to differentiate them, all chasing after the same chick, a muse with a capital M ”

“Please stop”

“Ave María purísima …”

“Ave martini … dry”

“Maybe if they shared a real project, a political agenda, then you’d be able to include them. What did you say the book was about, exactly?”

“Well, it’s centered mainly on her, as a peripheral figure — no, better to say a hidden figure … being a girl. But — in any case. Here they saw the potential for many roles, right?”

Hopefully it rained. It was raining .

“How learned you are, what did you say it was called, again?

“No, those guys were such navel-gazers. Completely incapable of telling a story … Look, if I’d actually studied …”

“It was psych, for me, lit for everyone else …”

“thing is, it was going to be a play, the title of which escapes me just now …”

“Urn something”

“and you called it …?”

“oh, a … prolegomenon to an awful play. The awful”

“He was no stranger to them. And didn’t those guys also do work with the Brits and the Galicians?”

“perfectly bilingual”

“well, there you are, Melchior, it’s already getting hazy for you — he was Flemish, un flamand , he spoke six languages.”

“with that stupid face of his? … Tribilin … [?lingual]”

“Come now, we don’t want to let our reminiscing spoil your …”

“Spoil what?”

“The broth. This theory, hypothesis, or whatever it is”

“Wrong and wrong. Want another guess?”

“It’s a monograph”

“The hell you say”

“Don’t let the owner know, but that review of theirs keeps on coming out”

“and we two still contribute. Sporadically”

preaching to the deaf. My illegitimate father. Second chance, prayer of the river at the shores of .

how strange that I loved so …

“she’s no less important to us. As a spokeswoman”

“But how old are they?”

“Who?”

“Look, they’re coming down”

“How many miles has it been?”

“when did you finally tell the assistant?”

“So much the worse for us that we were picked to ‘discover her’ and “tell the story,’ in the movie by that friend of yours …”

“Every once in a while, or every so often, a novel, or a book with some political agenda is found …”

“the assistant”

“Lucky him”

“Politics in a novel, said Stendhal, is like firing a pistol during a concert. That’s stayed with me”

“We won’t ask for examples”

“But there are some”

“It’s a can of worms, Inés”

“But isn’t that all you do together?”

She wanted a glass to continue the argument. The other guy handed her one .

“that thing about the history of Prague — I read it too. And it was — what can I say? Bankrupt, inane …”

“Well, there are periods in history of which nothing survives. Or a little, just a little”

“Psychedelia, psycholalia … who the hell knows … experimental cinema”

“they leave their mark”

“ Vienna while in Prague ”

“who really cares … whether any of that stuff survives?”

“I disagree entirely”

“it all goes back to the father, see”

“what survives of that era? I noticed the other day … what’s his name?”

“ Bergsonne ”

“So-so”

If I should awaken, I will try to go back to sleep .

Since the reader will find throughout this effort a lot of unnecessary, perhaps superfluous, punctuation, reflecting the anxiety and indecision of the writer, it wouldn’t be entirely presumptuous to include a preface [note the inconsistency of this regime]. For what it’s worth: I wasn’t trying to write something experimental (much less spontaneous) when I commenced this journal. I was trying to find a structure in the mass of [modest, always modest!] narrative/cyclical intermittencies.

NO

Cryptodermia/deafness

There are none so deaf as those who will not hear

Strum away

Occupation

Auden, poem on Melville

As though his occupation were another island

When he saw them again, on that morning in August after returning from a visit to the city, he found them quite as submissive and conceited as ever; and he, once again trapped in their especial variety of conversational antechamber (in which they oft belabored him with successions of halting effusions), sought escape by firing off — or more properly, stammering — a bêtise on the “perfumed scent” of his butler’s arrhythmic respiration, which was indeed perceptible to him in more than one — and to more than one — sense. Not that George Smith’s exhalations were any more perfumed or arrhythmic than usual, but his master, having grown accustomed to the salubrious air of the city, and being somewhat distracted by his servants’ tedious divagations, judged his Butler’s breath to be, on this occasion, especially noisome, which contrasted starkly with that natural air of unbending courtesy that poor old George exuded in his manner, the odor of which, in its many persuasive nuances, would, in fine, have made any other man feel at home in his company.

Interruption: explanation/reasons/stylistic(s)

A story in the style of Henry James — perhaps unnecessary. Telling a genuine anecdote from his life (it’s in Leon Edel) — try to make convincing and meaningful for the ever-vigilant eye of Agraphia, or else discard. Don’t just parody, like Beerbohm (hopefully, I can pull it off). Try anyway .

Could proceed as follows:

When George had finally left, it was only the two of them at home, and he, nonetheless longed to evade that situation too, and by the same exaggerated dissimulation that proved useful in his escape from their suffocating antechamber. But Lydia Smith wouldn’t leave his side, debriefing him, as was customary, concerning his engagements for the coming hours, one of which, she supposed, would be a luncheon; and accumulating in the course of her routine interrogation, was that mixture of “perfection and sherry” he’d once mentioned in a letter to his brother (a letter in which, with customary — or simply epistolary — reserve, he’d avoided giving too many details), which continued accumulating as they settled his provisional itinerary for the coming days.