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

He kept vigil in one of the college classrooms

The latter was the first instance where reference was made to a person without naming him, at least openly, a man who would remain anonymous, despite his cultivation, his supposedly great intelligence and learning, refusing to be honored at every opportunity, or to be the subject of some discourse or panegyric: it is the result, some say, of his timidity; it is a stratagem, others say, of his inordinate pride, a form of display in the refusal to display, a show of the romance of seclusion. It was to him Miss Aserson alluded, indicated, and pointed when she spoke of the many times they colluded together in a Brighton bar — he with a dry martini, she a gimlet — and despite having learned by then to remove her moustache with minimum violence, she retained the aspect of a doll, trembling, irreal, one who only came alive in the hours she was with him (Kleist) … At the end of her talk, she had the bad idea of recalling the secret conversations they used to have in English — confessing [honestly] that her English, which she learned from a Welsh aunt, was abysmal — and then citing from memory a wicked remark of Nicosi’s about Eliot that was in a style that parodied his verse [true].

The murmurs that followed him weren’t intimations of dispraise, nor were they intimations of immortality. They were, as one might expect, murmurs of relief, of good riddance. All were a little weary of the legend by then, which held but little fascination, little relevance, considering it propped up what was now a faded old gentleman, who, even in his youth, was never very handsome, and now — to top it all off — he was dead, which was a reprieve, for he would have continued to fade further and further into obscurity, thanks in large measure to Nicosi’s devastating slur: “If it is not exercised, permitted to fall,

To recover “The Old Bachelor”

to soften or die — with a dying fall — is going to be [will be] his unbending ally in all his defeats. I’ll have you all know I’ll not give in to silent defeats. Come little ones, you know what I mean. It’s not a matter of guessing. It is on the tip of your tongue[s]. Say it.”

Je renonce à Satan, à ses pompes et à ses oeufes!

Paul Verlaine

Lugones, “El Solterón”

Swinburne,

Betjeman,

George Herbert

Ater Umbrius , De Quincey

Faulkner, The Bible, Aeschylus (Alter) — book of David, Christopher Smart

Pedro Leandro Ipuche; invented source, Clemente Colling

Superstitions

If a man succeed at completing another man’s Librarie , he shall surely perish

Worries mount as volumes of Books, so that it bee common-place in the lives of Men that loss of cares occasion newer ones. For Men are such vain and deceptible Creatures that many will fain embosom Misery who are loath to suffer injury of Pride, as certain Schollers, whose Pride of intellect causeth them to hurry after wind, seeking augury in the disposition of figures in Holy Books, or mathematique patterns in absurd Chronologies. Such Men are but slow discerners of the Truth, since that even Children quicklie learn that Books and Calenders are but the fruits of our unperfect Wit, which hath never procured unto us a perfect means of reckoning Futurities, but only useless Prescriptions and Formulae that touch not our salubritie, nor inform us on which day we breathe our last, but indicate only the passage of Years, the assurance of Infirmity, and of our absumption unto Death. Nor should we reckon the years to come by historical deductions, since that even Janus seeth not the same Symmetrie twixt the Future and the Past. Thence the great Mutabilities of Time must needs be recorded as they transpire, for Vanities adulterate Remembrance, and Errors multiply with each Recollection. So Man should remember only his Negligibilitie, and heed not the sophisticall advisos of Prejudice and Superstition, since that Time’s vengeance is to render these as mutable as Bone and Flesh. For upon His long Journey between Diuturnities, Enlightenments accend but rarely, as the fabulous adjections of succeeding Ages, the heroical deeds of singular Men, or the life of the mortallest reputation, since that all are but the flickerings of cressets .

After the style of Sir Thomas Browne

Instill

There were some snatches of English poetry translated by commission of Benigno Uzal for the Ur anthology, Nurlihrt’s first publisher. Poems by Dylan Thomas and George Baker, Philip Larkin and Anselm Hollo. And a poet with the pseudonym: Gabriél Donovan. Donovan was his mother’s maiden name.

His name was Gabriel Sebastián Lubriano [Cecchi] [?]. Donovan was his mother’s name. Sebastian Birt [via Concluding ] …

[But some began suggesting it was jinxed: Trib ]

On a trip, Bambi falls for him [???]

I remember they divided the translations between Belisario Tregua and me [“him”]. “I got to know Belisario the same day I got to know Nicasio …”

The narrator has a book belonging to the old bachelor. Read the highlighted parts, the annotations.

Inventing the book

He’d thought about leaving with his books. Or rather, he’d never have thought to leave without them. The forgotten, the unread, everything was a pretense of death as the two of them read in the same room together without acknowledging each other. And they did so with neither a show of reverence or nonchalance, as they would have done in the presence of their enemies [solicitous, smug, thought themselves ahead of everyone]. Sometimes a general overview is all it takes. After which, one discovers — he discovered — how many victims could be disinterred.

At some point, after all the trials, the stumbling blocks, [and mostly] all the anger and frustration, he finally attempted to make a record of his experiences as a bibliophile. But there is little left of his notebook; in fact, all that remains is a single inscription, brief but desperate, which perhaps cannot be properly conveyed in the indirect style we’ve adopted here (and which he’d also adopted). On one occasion, the loss of a very precious collection — the five volume study by P. Uslar on the libraries of Jesuit missionaries: source, P. Pastell, who succeeded in reducing the number of volumes to four — obliged [forced] him to commit a “surreptitious crime.” For him, it was a point of honor that he never stole a book without first consulting the price tag, and fortunately, when he got to the bookstore, everyone was too distracted by the man who came to sign Uslar’s collection to notice the indiscretion. Everyone, that is, except Birt, who was standing three paces behind him, with a look of irritation that quickly developed [distorted] into an expression of outright disgust, as he watched the incident unfold. The judge of appearances residing in him [Birt] disapproved of the ostensible buyer [shady fellow], who was neither a collector nor a noted bookseller but one of those fatuous men [and adventitious] who was, perhaps [at best], only a very distant descendent — the genealogical branching, formalist in design, blessed Uncle Toby — of P. Uslar or Pastell.

Where was he wounded?

Shandy, not pointing to the anatomical ubicity of the wound [the groin], instead disclosed the geographical ubicity (or name) of the battle …

It wasn’t so much the loss of his precious books that distressed him, but being deprived of his closest companions; he felt as if he lost an entire kingdom. The irrevocable absence in his library spread like a contagion in his person. He spent days in mourning. He neither bought books nor consulted his own. He was content to read only those he carried in his briefcase (never fewer than four). But neither penitence nor abstinence could repair the gaping wound [left by the loss of those precious books] of his ravished library.