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

11 Savile Row, to determine the amount of damage done to proverbial elegance by The Beatles;

12 Abbey Road, to determine how much they did to repair it;

13 Battersea, to investigate a hunch: that Giles Gilbert Scott’s constructive genius — like the musical genius of Elgar — can’t solely be attributed to raw talent, like some of his contemporaries (for instance: Le Corbusier, Mies, Wright, Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky) but seems to emanate with the help of the fabled city itself, London …

List of places in London I should’ve seen during my first visit and their order (according to my guide, Enrique Villa Veralobos, alias Harry Woolfstoncraft Shady, alias Eduardo Manjares, alias Basilio Aspid, in 1992) :

Gabriel Donovan / Sebastian Birt to Eduardo Manjares

Bertorelli’s

#18

(…) they were the over-sensitive clingers on, the ones who couldn’t spend a moment away from Elena, the ones who copied everything she did to the letter. They followed her everywhere, entertained her infidelities, sat down to have tea with her in her little room, or worse, on her mat. In the little room: through a high window one could see the train passing. Many years later, I discovered that through the former dentist’s office window, I saw the same train passing, leaving; the same train that we (Elena, Remo, Felipe, Dos, and I) saw that first time through Elena’s window …

Victor Eiralis, private letters to Julio Clausás

#19

See Ibiza Trip

They postponed their return so Teodelina could be born in London — despite their deciding to christen her Teodelina. The discussion, which was briefer than the one about the naming of the journal — Elena wanted to call the girl Ema — ended when Nicasio said: “don’t sentence the girl to a lifetime of misery for the sake of a ceremony.”

[Ivan Salerno Scacchi], Out of a Greek Gift

For a time, they fantasized about [entertained the illusion of] spending the rest of their lives in Cuevacaviar, the hidden island [cave, fortress] off Bañalbufar. For Nicasio, it seemed the most desirable of destinations: where he could distance himself [definitively] from Eloísa, continue paying little attention to Elena, and educate Teode far from the madding crowd. For Elena, it was pretty much the same: a place where she could distance herself from Remo (from Lalo, from everyone), continue to reciprocate Nicasio’s indifference, and personally educate Teodelina …

Eduardo Manjares, Postcard from the Inquisitor

Ingrid gave Inés the job of sorting the archive, of dealing with the public “behind the screen,”

A portrait of Elena by Lino Scacchi [in sanguine chalk, the same instrument she used to correct his original] was hanging in the office where Elena was working, a Trompe-l’œil to compensate for the small number of people working on the floor of clients and contractors at Zigurrat and of collaborators and collectors at Agraphia .

Screen. Description.

Urlihrt’s writing desk was behind that screen. Once, unexpectedly, Oliverio and Dos opened the door without knocking and saw something they’d rather not have seen or, afterwards, described, because all that was visible was carnage, evidence of a recently-committed act of violence left abandoned on his desk; a spectacle others might confuse for mere disorder, mere chaos, a mere simulacrum. So that one might be tempted to say there was only a belt and a plate on his writing desk, a plate with a single fried egg and a cigarette extinguished in the yoke.

Something else Urlihrt must have heard and later seen.

Opus. The style. Prescriptions for its propagation.

Warn the reader that the emphasis placed “in those days” on the evangelical formula wasn’t a way to pass off [disguise] style as inspiration, but a way of establishing a simulacrum, essential when the lack of dates sanctioned our commitment to vagueness, [to discredit and even despair.]

Years later, when Eduardo Manjares paid them a visit, he described Nicasio Urlihrt’s curiosity in women as “proboscidal” [using the adjective, “proboscidal,” apt for a man with a large nose, corpulent frame, premature wrinkles, and a clumsy gait]. This should be of concern to us because Manjares, who was passing through Buenos Aires, was guilty of an attempt at courteous dissuasion, citing Proust: “Let us leave the beautiful women to men of no imagination.” Urlihrt, who was good with a riposte, and imaginative (or perhaps just in love), twice emended the citation with the intention of improving it, first saying: “Let us leave the imagination to men undistracted by pretty women”; and then: “Let us leave pathetic theories to men of tragic nature.” Oliverio, Felipe, and someone else were also present with us .

[ The X-Positions , novel under preparation] [NO]

The gloss of a diptera’s wings to the triumphal shadow of a soaring falcon

NO

#20

He was a typical Galician, Don Julio, just as you’re a typical Catalan. (No, I mean, that’s just from our point of view of course, I mean my point of view: and I’m from Valencia. Or from Valladolid?) But younger, with certain pretentions. He brought back to Buenos Aires an overcoat he acquired in Paris, along with a silk scarf and an attitude of modest abandon. And he deceived us all. He came with so bad a reputation, half the Buenos Aires intelligentsia was after him, following the piratical inktrail he left after translating Bataille and Benjamin without paying royalties. And he translated them badly too. If it was said there was a skirt-lifting flaneur walking the streets of Recoleta whose name was Walter! I’m sure you, Nurlihrt, Luini, and Lester immediately brought him into the fold, and Luini and Nurl introduced him to me in The Giralda (where the two rogues will have begun the process of transforming him into a local legend), thinking (I know it’s inconceivable, but in this case, the verb can apply to them) “that they’re doing me a favor.” I was without a job, without burden. Urlihrt and Luini read one of my fawning pieces and the Galician then immediately filed it away. My diffidence must have been an artisanal requirement. He invited me to dine at La Guillotina, the restaurant in which you and I met for the end of year parties and which, today, is but another cathedral submerged in memory, foreign. And this is was what convinced me. I was only one of his nègres .

Perhaps The History of the Secret the narrator mentions is an allusion to Brief Decoding of the Mystery , the book I wrote for him and for which I was never paid …

Despite the occasional nonsense, Manjares’s short story is quite good — the best in this court of blind men. Gullibly, one of the cretins felt obliged to justify the publication of such a strange a story (although all of them were strange), doing so in the worst possible manner — praising it until he was hoarse, trumpeting about it being full of “secret codes” that allude to the works of D. H. Lawrence and F. R. Leavis — as if these trifling concerns of university cloisterers would interest anyone.

The adulteries in parallel: Lalo Sabatani / Elena Siesta. Nicasio / Inés Maspero

Inés said [to him], “he was afraid of something” (referring to his evasive attitude with regard to his interaction with Belisario in his study, where he slept the day before). Nicasio was brazenly impudent: he became engaged to a beautiful woman as a token of defiance.

Lorenzo (Lalo) Sabatani used to perform his magic tricks (and he only had a few) in some of the crowded cafebars on Corrientes Street. He examined their pulses (“between the wrist and the thigh, diction and metastasis,” he’d say), read their palms, and again examined the pulses of those he called “lacanian monjitas,” and when he wanted to, he’d choose one of them to sleep with, and go back to her apartment. His preference for married women, though, meant he often ended up sleeping alone. [[He had a preference for married women; he frequently slept alone]]