Orphaned at a young age, he was adopted by aunts who got their money’s worth when they sold, for a good price, the umbilical cord that nearly strangled him (15), for he spent his early years listening only to them. “Girl, open the shutters so Phoebus’s rays can unsettle the Lord’s diadem,” he remembered the eldest asking her younger sister when she wanted some light in her room. Pilar Rosario and Adelaida Barriolo … referred to eggs as “homemade abortions”; to rides downtown in a sulky or tilbury as “baleful journeys to the ninth circle.” Adelaida’s only suitor, an Englishman in the merchant navy, was received by Pilar with the question, “A vicissitudinous journey, was it?” The two women were known as the “Belfry Owls.”
After his aunts — who always repeated the same not very bookish stories — dates and people seem to have evaporated from his life. Perhaps it was because the people he met made his aunts seem bookish by comparison. But, some fifteen years after his first class at the Balmoral, and fifteen years before Enzo Nicosi’s death, certain anecdotes, like suspended whispers, began repeating themselves in places suited to abuses such as repetition (Kingsmill). A mascot, an English Setter — named Bramwell — was given to him as a thank you gift from Mr. Netbro’s [T. Lebron’s] daughters, and not only did it become his pet, but it was perhaps the only living creature about which he ever spoke with true affection. The fact is, he was going through a phase, whether he knew it or not, of wanting to be part of an English tradition (Ackerley, T. H. White). That symmetry, marked not so much in geometrical terms or by the equable disposition of objects in space, but temperamentally, as in the feeling of surprise one gets in discovering hidden objects [treasures] after years of searching, and seeing they are located at equal distances away from two equally terrible catastrophes; somewhere herein lies the indemonstrable [indescribable] artistic temperament others persist in attributing to him.
A game of tennis is perhaps the only way to see it in the open, one without a commentator. He’d learned to play in Lobos with his aunts, and his playing was — according to those who witnessed it — a perfect testament of that apprenticeship. A witness told the story many times [Bioy père, El matrero] of when he played a game of doubles and tried handicapping his opponent — one of the accountant’s daughters — by aiming for her ring finger, specifically the sovereign in the ring her godmother Barriole gave her for her confirmation. He and his partner — a young man who had also been taking lessons — were winning emphatically (score:?), and it was one of those happy occasions he’d later recall with avid boasting. But the accountant’s daughter wanted to quit before the second set, convinced her side would be routed; whereby he, her instructor, had to suffer, earlier than he expected to, the absence of his favorite pupil; and so, for the length of an entire weekend, he was divorced from her, separated from the ring that betokened her, the only seal that approved his existence, the only emblem that secured his identity. According to entries found in his only known diary, the separation resulted in, by turns, nights wracked by insomnia and sleep wracked by nightmares. The following entry records his bewilderment: “The ring, not the book. But I wake up groping, knowing they’re the same. That I’ve kissed her, not him. The atrocious derelict. What made me kiss her. The hope of a result is the strength that gives us a weakness for rejoicing. Mutual.”
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.