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

Mexican Journal

Music. Pessoa. Contra Verlaine, contra Mallarmé:

“For vague sentiments that resist definition, there is an art, music, whose end is to suggest without explicitly stating. For those sentiments that are perfectly defined, so that it is difficult for emotion to reside in them, there is prose. And for sentiments that are fluid and harmonious, there is poetry. In a healthy and robust age, a Verlaine or Mallarmé will always emerge to write the music they were born to write. They would never be tempted to try and utter in words what words will not suffer them to say. I asked the most enthusiastic among French symbolists if Mallarmé’s ability to move them was no better than that of a vulgar melody, or if Verlaine’s want of true expression sometimes reached the same want of true expression we hear in a simple waltz. They said no, and to this end, they meant they preferred Verlaine or Mallarmé’s poetry to plain music, which is to say, they preferred literature as music to plain music. But in so saying, they’re telling me something that has no meaning outside the meaning it has for them.”

(Fernando Pessoa, 1916?)

“As we strolled home, Iris complained she would never learn to cloud a glass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready to put up with her deliberate insularity but implored her to cease announcing á la ronde : “Please, don’t mind me: I love the sound of Russian.” That was an insult, like telling an author his book was unreadable but beautifully printed.”

V.N. Look at the Harlequins! 1974

The quote that justifies the laziness of the author (Revol, Cortázar)

The burden of publication

Sharing a defeat is one of those human weaknesses this book intends to lambaste; I therefore share the triumph of this failure with my companions of the ear: Duncan Browne, Emitt Rhodes, Fred Neil, and Tim Buckley.

For the characters’ getting together in order to die: the Alegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh.

Adrogué, June 23, was thinking of Oxyrrinco , Hilarión Curtis’s journal

Don Julio:

I was in the busiest bar (say the local newspapers) in Androgué with my niece (and goddaughter) and that friend of hers I told you about, the one that showed up at Quaglia’s place (Quaglia, who’s a local). The friend reminds me a little of Sofía Sarracén, because she has an outstanding [thick] mole or beauty spot on her thigh. Speaking of thighs, she spends a lot of her spare time on my brother-in-law’s, imagine! Among other things, I told her there are no holidays without love. We could barely understand each other. That’s what’s tragic about getting old, believing we’re interesting when we’re just another group of foreigners. She barely understood what the words meant, I mean words in general. I won’t bother giving examples.

She answered me no. She, who didn’t want to know what the words meant — but why didn’t she want to know?

What a shock, Don Julio. My niece’s friend performed a horrible gesture, a gesture replete with that very substance, disdain: she raised her hand to her face, as if it was a telephone, with her thumb as the receiver, her pinky the transmitter, and her remaining fingers clenched between. And, with her other hand, she tweaks the air with quotation marks, a gesture I already explained to you. She must have picked it up from some nocturnal instructor when socializing. Then she says “no,” sounding the space between the quotes.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that [my niece’s friend — her second-best friend] is a good-natured girl. I’d almost forgotten my intention to invite her to the warehouse [the hangar / warehouse discussion] on the night of my sister’s twentieth wedding anniversary. The happy couple decided to celebrate it at a restaurant in the center of town — alone (I don’t want to make myself seem important, but the reason was probably me). Lorena was at her best friend’s house; her second-best friend wasn’t to know. In the stories published by [the journal] Agraphia , of which I was the editor-in-chief for twenty years, both blemishes and beauty spots abounded. Women with moles. The moles were arranged [with rare beauty] around a shoulder that resembled an isthmus, or upon a long continuous esplanade of flesh ( the white giant’s thigh ). Nurlihrt swore by this anatomico-geographical convention of mythmaking — his dictum, everything lasts that becomes legend — until he himself realized the damage.

Luz — she’s called Luz — has another mole in the lumbar declivity of her alluring, provocative back. A stunning back, the star to a footnote no one could ever fill. [That consequently would be filled with evidence of wrath and frustration — detritus, old-fashioned words, isoglosses, deltas of Venus, making us lose our footing; that molehill that continues to grow when expressed in her language, the second-best friend’s, her English, outdated, worn. All the rest is secret, darkness, delight. Hidden in nooks and crannies.] Although she said even the tungos (the boys who hang around the markets here) were lavish with their praise. Not that any of these ruffians could do her back any justice. Luz described what one of them said as a miracle of efficacy, exaggeration, devotion, lechery, among other words, of course. My goddaughter’s second-best friend didn’t ask me for explanations, until — exhausted — I myself seemed to request that she ask me. She turned around with elegant curiosity (because the dorsal session had persisted for some time, without variation) and said:

— Isn’t that the way men your age like it?

— Men in general — I said, defensively.

— Why?

— I don’t know why , exactly — I said. Unlike in written prose, in spoken prose, I was able to avail of more adverbs, [I grant my fallacy of arguing from my own authority]. With determination, she thought me the variants “toboggan” and “stake,” and I didn’t object to them as variants. When we’d both then moved from our respective positions, Luz was close enough to breathe on my chin through her nose. I kissed her. My thin, firm lips, acquainted with lies but not repentance, an answer to those thick, full surgical lips (kisses in the penultimate dark). She said she had a good time. She said, for the sake of my goddaughter — who was Luz’s best friend — we should try to avoid such situations in the future.

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);

1 °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;