With his imitation of Don Lucio Mansilla, the act became a farce, because some poor mulattos and a midget were playing the part of Ranquel Indians, wriggling in obeisance on the ground, while the plump and pompous Don was running up and down the stage with his prop sword hanging from his belt.
[Exaggerated scene from the Junk Museum]
Then, twirling his moustache and raising his eyebrows high, an affected Frenchman no one knew took to the stage. He started giving orders left and right, which the extras obeyed by halves, because by the time he’d finished barking one command, it was already superseded by another more urgent one.
This is the River Plate, said Hilarión to himself, that everyone around ridicules.
Midway through the interval. A dozen people, mostly ladies, approach him to say hello. Hilarión gets the impression some of them — the more serious-looking ones, the more astute ones — were approaching to apologize. How odd, he thinks, as if there were something [in this] that offended him. Doctor Yturri Ipuche [a one-time foundling] had arrived late. He rushed to take his seat next to Hilarión. The effort to do so made him breathless. But he had enough left in the tank to say the tribunal believed everything he said was true. The lights dimmed and some very terrestrial [[pedestrian, territorial]] acrobats came onto the stage, dragging their feet behind them. A woman was singing the national anthems of various countries, while it seemed Iris Oratoria was free to do whatever she wanted. After this, Atanor Lupino made another appearance. He made the appropriate apologies, in case the public had been put out [troubled, confused] by the presence of so many figures onstage …
The most eminent and imposing was … And, without saying the name, he proceeded to imitate the features and gestures of a doctor who is at the point of a great discovery. Darwin confronted by the missing link. Stroking his beard, he assumed the air of a bald [glabrous] skeptic, his doubt, his silence, suspending the public’s literal function as an audience — hearing — and thereby keeping them all guessing.
Many years later, Hilarión Curtis and his stepdaughter went to watch a silent film in a crowded room on Corriente Street specifically to recapture the outrageous, uncanny effect of that performance.
The rabbits of Malambo, the frogs of Aristophanes
The fighting cocks
Bad Times, fictional biography by Hilarión Curtis, Delfín Heredia Kleiber, Cisplatina publishers, 1960.
Reading Mackay (Popular Delusions) is like reading an over-edited, systematized Pynchon.
3.
#21 Giordano Bruno, John Florio, Philip Sidney
Sir Valdemar Hilarión Curtis, who are your physicians?
They are:
Dr. Phibes. Dr. Génessier (Les yeux sans visage).
Dr. Angelicus. Dr. Sublime. Dr. Sardonicus. Dr. Zhivago. Dr. Atl. Dr. Scholl. Doctor No.
The Mass in tongues by Remo Sabatani
Quote Poe, Ivor Winters
— Is this a tribunal?
— Don’t get your hopes up, friend: it’s only a social gathering.
— The Pole told us it’s Sircular Cymmetry — said Mardurga. It was recorded as such in the Club Maguncia logbook.
— Sircular Cymmetry expelled us.
— Nefelibata — someone sneered.
— Tungsteno — sneered another.
— Tusitala.
— Barbelognostic.
— Sircular Cymmetry.
— Sircular Cymmetry is the way for expats to die far away from here, too far to make their way back home. Sircular Cymmetry is nature’s way of distributing ash in the cartographical game of chance. Hazard. Azure.
— You must have seen it — interrupted the Basque — but if you haven’t, here’s the test. Place the remains of a loved one on a stable, uniform surface — smooth and flat, like language. Not a carpet or rug, please. They’re not in the same category [“stable”]. They tend to move, traveclass="underline" from Tripoli to Beirut, from Baghdad to Missolonghi, from Algeciras to Istanbul. Then, in this rapacious situation, force yourself to a helping of the divine air so small its inhalation doesn’t add to your cultural malaise, or its exhalation blow a single annoying diptera away. The [vegetal] rustle of a pubic hair, [or] the baritone bellow of an irregular verb.
Hell came freely through the narrow doorway of the monastery. All doorways lead to Rome [which is precisely where you won’t find it (La Haya)] …
The world is purely rhyme, conjecture. He enters dressed as a gallows-bird, a maimed cowboy in spurs who walks with the mien of a prince consort in front of the gardener and makeup artist, who take turns as his manservant. For the Spaniard, at least he does the favor of treading loudly.
Mock-Tudor house in Kenwood, in the abbey of exorcism, far from the first instance of excess — or abuse? — that didn’t even come close to leading us to the palace of wisdom. Or would it be a basilica? It makes the ship stink to high heaven. The Angels have reached the foothills crawling on their knees. The smoke, swamp fumes. Moreover. Cloister without threshold, shadow of an ash cloud. From here his beloved left, and his circumflexed spirit, and from there it will depart. Repeat undirected. Repeat undriven.
And later it left for good, departed. And gone was the interval between departure and return.
[Everything seemed better.] Help us, Urbain Grandier.
But no. Once experienced, the sea air up in arms or an orbit around Saturn, the rest goes back to the black caviar cave of the inevitable return. Or the inevitable path. For the unshod. For the odd ones. Now nothing preoccupies us. Now we’ve seen that justice will collapse through abuse of hendiadys. The critic of art through calumny, the white wisdom of her bones, the brush of a fly. Capellane. Toe cap. And next, an epigenetic phenomenon, the retinto ally of both. And the Episcopalian Italian, incidentally, gasping for breath. And all multiple forms: the snail, the Holy Bible, the landing strip …
A son of Aberdeen of two Hereford males.
— I can’t leave—said the starling.
— Sircular Cymmetry, yes. The inversion was the tangential formula — continued Madurga. That’s to say, the tangents of his religion, the thurifers, the censers [none other than the progenitors of the epsilom]. And there were even secret tangents, well-rounded symmetries. The tiger he spoke of was Sumatran, which, I’m not sure if any of you noticed, has a crazier aspect than any other tiger. It was said he was to come bearing justice. He was surely something like what Blake saw between the bars of his art before writing of that “fearful symmetry.”
— Yes, yes … — said Seregni who, for the first time, seemed interested.
— The tiger belongs to a narrative tradition we’ve ignored. Gobeluncz knew this, although he was as ignorant as we in every other respect. We had to accept the blame — he said — never the punishment. The incorrigible God, he said. The collector of prepuces.
Gobeluncz knew things we didn’t know by his cold nose, his borrowed nose, because he was a European, because of his extensive reading, and because, unlike us, he didn’t work in an office. The preputial bridle. He invented a type, a category — many ways to classify us. Those who came on Thursdays — which included our group, for we came to this very place to play billiards — he called Jovellanos. Those who came on Wednesdays, a group none of us had ever met or even seen, he called barbelognosticos. But rest assured, there’s no need to fret, I’ve already made inquiries. I never encountered any of them but I did discover this much: it seems, the barbelognostics were a Christian sect whose members — at the end of their ceremonies, their rites— … drank … semen. It wasn’t thought unchristian, but something divine, a mandate or commandment. Thy statutes will be my songs.