And: “No manna, no manna …”
And, on one occasion, he heard: “Look, here they come … the belfry owls …”
[But] he had a good childhood, thanks to his orphancy, and he has many fond memories of playing outdoors with other children, or alone in the garden with bugs — earthworms, beetles, and smoking toads. And if the world was made up entirely of earthworms, Doctor Natchez once said to him, it would suit him to the ground [find in Book of Merlyn]. When he hung out with other boys, they were either at school or bathing in the lagoon. One time, the bonetudos stole their clothes from the branches of the trees that circled the lagoon. It was on a sunny afternoon in November, before classes had finished. A surprise attack, for no one expected the bonetudos to be on duty until later.
There were [public] outrages committed behind the carnival mask. And indeed, it was a grotesquery of disguises — tall hats, stilts, shiny pants, and feathered masks — that ensured the malefactor’s anonymity. For the carnival time is when small offences are forgiven, crimes encouraged, and outrages lavishly rewarded. [At sixteen, he was very precocious,] The foregoing was about Firpo. The brisk night air was riven by howling. But he vowed to stay silent, and he did.
Before going to study in La Plata, Gabriel got to know the first and last names of some of the bonetudos. It was one of the most astounding discoveries he’d made in his life up to that time; but after two months in the city, it seemed the most banal. How strange it is to live at the mercy of time: before he died, and just before he found the Forbes Mallacombe edition of the Progresse of Sicknesse in Rubio (bookstore), GD recalled the name of the boy who found the clothes (it didn’t matter that they weren’t his clothes) close to Fiñuqui’s property, nearly two miles away from the lagoon. Finnucan [surname].
When he got back to the house, the Donados …
Three days later (so begins the anecdote), on Holy Thursday [?], Gabriel went with Socorro to the market to lend a hand. The market … “maritime or fluvial?” enquired his tutor. And Gabriel recognized the voice of his benefactor [masked, lacunar] hoarse after shouting from the kiosk: “twenty for a pair.” She was his first love.
At his fiancée’s insistence, he went to see a psychologist. “Your motivation is your salary.” Adelaida’s suitor had given her a gift of stamps (Antigua, penny, puce). In El Carapálida’s lycergical glossary (I forgot the codes), Patrick Hamilton and the postage stamps they gave him
Suite of names
Wanda Landowska. Conlon Nancarrow.
Vivant Denom. Bonomy Dobrée.
Include the scene in A. de Mayo’s bookstore.
He couldn’t think about them without remembering a certain epistle of Lope’s, and he couldn’t think about this without being reminded of Lugones’s poem, “The Old Bachelor.” He’d pocketed these anecdotes in order to share them with others he confided in, the people he most wanted to impress. He’d repeat them frequently to those who’d already heard them, but in changing certain details here and there, his interlocutors got the impression they were hearing them for the very first time
In the town, Pondal [Pividal] used to call them “belfry owls”
Until he was sixteen, he never went a day without seeing them. After he left, he only returned home after hearing of Alina’s death, which happened the same spring he went to study in La Plata. They died in the order they were born, although Lourde’s sickliness seemed an omen of her passing not long after. They bequeathed to him many memories and stories, but also a strange uneasiness he always felt while he was living in the house, which others felt as well while under that roof: a feeling each of them provoked, and which was only enhanced when the two were together.
(…) In the period before he left, when he was at the cusp of adolescence, Lourdes used to request it whenever she was in the shower. He’d gotten used to seeing his guardian through the frosted glass partition, but he’d yet to grow weary of seeing her youthful body. When she knocked on the glass screen, he understood it as a request to regulate the water heater. Once, she drew the screen too soon and he was able to catch a full-on glimpse of her for the very first time. Her body looked more youthful in the vaporous brisk air than it did through the opaque barrier. She seemed flawless, her skin, a marmoreal pallor rarely violated by the sun. And although the image lasted but a second’s glance, a glance he tactfully removed before she felt it, it left an impress on his mind he never lost.
Alina, he recalled at the wake, was more than just a stockpile of euphemisms and abstruse paraphrases: she’d been the one to instigate his habit of collecting, beginning with words and sayings in various languages. And she, the weaver of his destiny from the following day onwards, was responsible for uttering what he deemed an unrepeatable insult: “Mr. Mies has his quincunx aspect badly disposed.”
Later, when he was moving in more lofty circles, pushing his luck amidst the movers and shakers of the Buenos Aires elite, Gabriel Donovan would often repeat the story, but censored himself from uttering those secret foreshadowings his overactive infantile brain once associated with that word, as if the uncertain and the certain had, in the intervening years, become equally demonstrable, equally representable, as a blank page and a written page; or an arrangement of dots and an exhaustive interpretation of those dots. So he presented the story as a comedy of errors, and his vaguely astrological quincunx took on the significance of a Jewish prepuce, his sexuality cold-blooded, reptilian, for there was a weakness in the susceptibility to derive pleasure from a woman’s body, immorality in that for which he was once grateful, now the quincunx became a shibboleth he couldn’t pronounce, a goddamned reminder of his former self … [a reminder of the one that held the sword above his head] Reread Cavafy
Mr. Mies was a Dutchman who stayed in the barn at the back of the Donados’ house (which, GD found out years later, was also where the bonetudos kitted themselves out [where they stored their facemasks, their wagons]). The first time he saw him he was chewing on the bit of his bubble pipe
He was amused that his close friends were so amused by his “bad quincunx aspect,” although they were guilty of their own blind superstitions, which was reflected in the books they read, books by authors as important to them as any on the university curriculum (Arendt, Sontag). He himself enjoyed a semester under the saturnine influence of various authors … There was an astrological clique emerging in his circle of university friends, and he felt he had no choice but to go along with it. “Saturnine” is a reference to the editor, Saturnino Calleja. But it wasn’t really a case of peer pressure. He always reserved a hint of admiration for those who can spell and who respect the basic rules of grammar.
They interrogated him about the bonetudos and he gave them away. Now that he’d moved up in the world, he didn’t care. He also wanted to know the names of those involved in the conspiracy against D.
Before going to bed, and before making what he called a “moral choice,” he recited “Prayer Before Birth,” by Louis MacNeice
Anagrams, pangrams, double acrostics …