The consul’s wife was having an affair with one of our superiors. Our superiors were more accomplices than associates. Haedo worked with us in our office. Blamires was the one who said we should always return the machines to their natural state of repose. Haines had his lover in his office, or perhaps it’s better to say, he made sure she was working with him in the same office. Molly — a curvaceous missionary with her hair dyed blond from raven black — was the one who took all the important phone calls, and who addressed all five of us using the same submissive vocative: “my king.” Once, Gustavo asked her to call him “viceroy.”
The translation of Venus Cascabel was done out of house by one of the editors of the three journals, specifically, the one we never met. And we more or less avoided the other one. Gustavo had more luck in this than I. But on one of the occasions we bumped into him, he said:
— Look, we [my partner and I] aren’t exactly lacking in insight, we understand that you, like ourselves, are only galley slaves working in a trireme that masquerades as a company, Beehaitchhaitch. Still, despite the tight shackles and endless drudgery, despite the difficulty in dealing with all this, how should I say, journalistic prose — for that’s what it is: lifeless, banausic drivel that rushes like a torrent and lacks all color and rhythm, except that it seems to come in waves, but you could at least pace yourselves by contending with these waves one at a time, consider only the number of strokes to be made between each strike of the clock, instead of dwelling on the calendar. The problem is, guys, we [my partner and I] have noticed the same two tendencies in all of you. Primordial tendencies, unforgivable, although at least correctable. Their names don’t matter. Let’s just call them A and B. Every time the strict numbering tightens its mummy bandages round the body of the text [[without yielding any reward]], A, in desperation, lavishes commas, rococo curlicues, resting points for idle intellects, to ease some of the strain, and if the bands are still too tight, it sprinkles needless “buts” and “thoughs,” like gaudy rubrics packing every page. B, on the other hand, specializes in either avoiding the continuous present tense, or abusing it whenever it’s employed, and worse, doing so in a mawkishly Gallic fashion. Blessed be friar Feijóo and friar Isla, and even William the Conqueror, that you guys forgot about one of them. One of the two. They were renamed by one of us [two] Coma Ocioso and Gerundio Galicado.
Emilio Duluoz, The Office Next Door,
[move to Calumnies?]
The Scacchi brothers played the part of the Goncourt brothers during an overlong literary soirée. The evening was organized by Elena, but Belisario was the one who invited the two brothers. Nicasio lost all interest in them after he discovered the real reason for their pig-headedness. It was the subject of Lester’s longest story, which, indeed, took him the longest time to finish. “One of the two,” said Manjares, “has to have talent, but I can’t decide which.” They’re both painstaking artists — Remo an engraver, Enea a draftsman — and they do pretty well in managing the printing press they inherited from their father, Lino Augieri, a painter of majestic scenes that purport to disclose the secrets of the Dalencourt school. After his death, however, the brothers took their mother’s maiden name, boasting that it was a tactful decision — they were both fond of chess. They’ve since earned a reputation as braggarts. In the early days, when they were wandering up and down the country [very á la Goncourt], creating sketches for works they never completed, provoking both the admiration and suspicion of Répide (the only art critic to whom Urlihrt confided about them), they divided their responsibilities between them, although scrupulously taking into account their respective individual needs. Incidentally, it was during this time that the earliest draft emerged of a story for which Eloísa and Nicasio would use the title “The Imitation of an Ounce” (later versions of which would be given the title, “Specular Soup”).
[[Remo ended his days as an editor of horoscopes and other bric-a-brac for an obscure newspaper. Enea, although now obsessed with numerology, is still living. Lester depicted them — like Gilbert & George — as a pair of lovers (combining some of their qualities with those of Richard and Charly, friends of Inés) in “Too Late.” As a tribute to them (or an epitaph prepense), Luini copied [translated] a few lines by Augusto dos Anjos:
Harried by misfortune, it is my fate
To live my life fastened to that wing
As an ember always rooted in the ash
As a Goncourt brother, a Siamese twin]]
It’s not unusual, representative examples of the “brushstroke I didn’t see.”
The lack of completeness. The final draft.
7.
At that time, in response to an ad, a timid ingénue, Inés Maspero, joined the editorial team at Agraphia. She told Ingrid, Urlihrt’s secretary, that she was an art critic. She contributed to the magazines Expert, The Night Watch, and The Court of Apelles, all of them insignificant. She said she’d begun working at fourteen, sorting out court records. Despite Inés claiming to be a specialist at something that didn’t exist in the country, Ingrid and I were moved [sic] by her former Galdosian trade, so we hired her without further quibble. Inés arrived the following day with a letter of recommendation from Belisario. [Elena, who spent her lunch breaks in the office next door, noted that] she was chewing her nails, she was a nail-biter. The second person who came in the door was the first who fell in love with her.
Elena Siesta, Dead Aunt’s Diary
8.
I went to Cambridge in 1992 at the behest of my friend (and, in time, my editor), Henrietta [Bonham-Carter / Hornsby-Gore], to follow up on two investigations I’d started on in Barcelona. The first concerned the musician, Bruce Montgomery, who was known for writing a series of crime novels — utter tosh he’d written under the pseudonym, Edmund Crispin. Secondly, I had to meet up with a scholar, who was giving me a copy of his thesis on an Argentine literary group, a cenacle of unequivocal and “magical” influence, which functioned almost as a sect. But both investigations were interrupted. The first, because a magistrate of the High Church intervened (I remember the series of gestures — three — with which Henrietta took for granted my discretion and obedience. In English, primado and primate are both subsumed in the latter word).The second, tragically, because the scholar was found dead in his Cambridge dorm. It isn’t known whether the cause of death was suicide or misadventure. We assisted the youth’s father in arranging the funeral service. He was a jobbing actor based in London, who was forced to get by — as many were in the decade following the one of excess — mainly on welfare. The next day, there began a series of events that would bring us from Cambridge to London, which I tried to adapt in a work of fiction — my oft-repeated “St. Mawr.”
Eduardo Manjares, Postcard from the Inquisitor
#2 EMPHASIS
1.
One doesn’t write well when not writing, one doesn’t write ill when writing well. The writer doesn’t really want to write, he wants to be; and in order to truly be, he must face up to the difficult challenge of not writing at all — not even a single line — of not theorizing, of not lifting a finger. I took the precaution of becoming deaf. There are whole days that go by when I don’t hear a single word, when not a single thought obtrudes upon my thoughtlessness. It doesn’t matter if there are voices around me, speaking, so long as I cannot hear the words they say. Everything I know or have learned to do well, I don’t know how to teach. Everything I could know or learn how to teach, I cannot do well. Our age is too pessimistic to allow us to pass comment on complex matters, or even simple matters, without recrimination. After all, didn’t you know our age is a tribunal? A tribunal of vultures. The kind of chopped up verse you only disregard, I regard with utter contempt (as I do poets who’d make firewood of King Arthur’s table): verse without measure, without form, ephemeral, ill-fated. The time goes by so slowly, and slow is the memory that reckons the delay: I was almost twice as old as this age is old when I realized this for the first time. The poets whose recitals I attend are therefore twice as old as you. The world never changes, only the cast of players. Yet, the work doesn’t seem to improve. [He lifted his head to see if we were taking note of what he was saying.] Apart from plagiarism, the only natural cure I know for this particular kind of drunkenness is inspiration, but in our age, sobriety is inimical to inspiration … Or maybe we should give up the plagiarism. Remember what Sterne did with Burton.*