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’Académie 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.
And though a guest were to arrive, expectedly or unexpectedly — or not, since an absence, expected or unexpected, was always welcome — solace remained his constant companion (“his mutual consul,” they said, mockingly, of Dickens), a friend that eased the dyspepsia of too much living, enabling him, without guilt of pride, to etch — for any guest, any companion — a portrait of himself that were as crude as a silhouette or complete as an incarnation. Without guilt of pride, yes, but pursuant to what he believed was his legitimate hatred of the real and its eternal trappings. Thence, on that particular August afternoon, at the hour when the demiurge oft goes handing out empty promises — so many trappings — he resolved, with aristocratic disdain, to ensure his reciprocal and utter destruction.
Back Cover sent by Eiralis to D. Julio
Christmas Eve on which the wolf howls
Fernando Tapiols
Circumstantial Island in Claveplana is an enchanting paradise in the middle of the Mar Izquierdo [which is hidden behind Basílico Bay]. [Those] responsible for maintaining its high standard of luxury are Iris Oratoria and her [twin] half-sister, Mateluna, [who’s] the bellwether of a flock of [hard-working, enigmatic] girl-scouts. Everything is going splendidly until Saverio Onofre Trápaga arrives on the island, [a] taciturn writer with dirty fingernails who drafts [imprisons] the girls into literary workshops with the apparent intention of re-educating them [morally] for the job [his ulterior motive being to corrupt them]. This is the story that Isabel Semiramis Errázuriz writes in the Hohenzollern mansion [castle], near Darmstadt, while her half-sister, Hildegarda, tends to a flock of Jewish girls in Zagreb, although using a whip instead of a staff, and with the help of Abravanel, a black German Shepherd of uncertain origin, who studies the Pentateuch. (Important details: the custodian of the land on which the Jewish girls pasture is an unscrupulous Brazilian magnate from Manaus, Ouroboros [Kniebolo]; a worm that grew into an anaconda during the rubber boom.)