The book is called Accents because Répide is preoccupied with the idea of “dramatic meter.”
Other related organizations: Blamires, Haedo and Haynes (Hayms). Memi & Memi. Memi & Wuhl. Arrowsmith & Babbage. Babbage & Arrowsmith?
The law firm on Viamonte Street — Memi & Memi — employs someone’s little sister: a scribbler of bucolic poems in her schoolgirl penmanship, which, to the law firm’s embarrassment, have actually been published.
Marina Ipousteguy.
Friends: Judith, Honorata. Clarissa. The Death of Clarissa and Hudson.
At one of their homes, a touch-me-not, which bristled about you, feeling your presence, hemming you in. The first overtures of a carnivorous plant.
Perhaps a pitcher plant.
Marina. The way she speaks on the telephone. The way she laughs.
[Morecambe & Wise: their way of walking: like Robert Mitchum, John Wayne. Ladies’ day: every Wednesday at the National Palace with my mom and sister. The Puig-like gayness or queerness I should try to include — because … etc, and then we’ll have more culture (cf. Gerardo Deniz). A narrative. Norman Wisdom.]
Ways of looking at a blackbird. Ways of smoking in a literary salon.
What made me think of the day Inés died? I’d been up to her little roost many times, as had Dos, although I didn’t exactly approve of her work. I liked her, or I liked that she didn’t care as much about Nurlihrt as he liked to boast. No one (not even me in my foreword) ever mentions that she had a little mascot. In his diary, Nurlihrt wrote (with a nod to Chekhov) that it was a “paranoid Pomeranian.” As if he could tell the difference between a dachshund and a mastiff, the old hypocrite! My sister said it was actually a Chihuahua, and she’s known Inés a long time, having befriended her back in the old days of discotheques and pool halls. I myself think it was a Pekinese. Besides, Luini and I are the only contributors to the journal who know anything about dog breeds. The thing’s name, though, escapes me.
Still, how could people neglect to mention the dog — be it a Pomeranian, Chihuahua, Pekinese, or even a Yorkshire terrier, for that matter — when her apartment was just a single room? There’s nothing so indecent — as Pepe Bianco never tired of repeating — as rhetorical questions.
I’ll never forget it. The first people the police allowed to enter were Dos and me — along with Nelly of course, her mother. Wilson, the doorman, let us in; he stayed on the threshold. The place was a temple to narcissism. There was a series of photographs taken by Richard and Charlie at Villa Gesell in which Inés is shown playing the coquette with everyone present — not only the two photographers, but also D.H., who just happened to be visiting the seaside village with a “friend,” and then another of her in a Citroën, posing with the dog. The best photo in the apartment didn’t feature Inés, however: it was a snapshot of Christopher Niaris, taken in motion, capturing the glowing snake trail of the cigarette perched greedily between his lips, evoking the beauty and cupidity of a man who couldn’t be more different from Nurlihrt. Christopher Niaras was also featured in the largest picture we found, enshrined in a vanity cupboard — a black and white shot, masterwork of Calixto Mazzeloth — showing Niaras in his characteristic pose, pouting like a dandy Don Juan, though he was never interested in women; after which we were treated to a photo of a man who looked to be in his late fifties, with a profusion of white hair, wearing very thick glasses, behind which his farsighted eyes seemed full of his then-recent if premature diagnosis of cancer [colon]. Meanwhile Sofía was sleeping with Scacchi, Eloy was sleeping with Niaras. Oh, God.
The dog was running around with its tongue hanging out, moaning and groaning; Eloísa called such behavior — when Nurlihrt was out of earshot—convulsions of canine delight. Entre nous, her exuberant flaunting, her canorous bays, are they not in fact … symphonies? All of us are prone to exaggeration. Soon, Schnabelzon, her psychiatrist, arrived. We’d met on a number of occasions, because he was something of a bohemian, or anyway liked to seem like one, if only until, like Cinderella, the clock struck twelve. Dos was fawning all over him.
a) It was summer. She waited until midnight, as for [adultery, ennui, self-denial?], before taking a non-prescribed dose of Tryptizol, and smoking a joint, or as she used to say, “killing her daemon”: the servile attitude she used to have as a writer, the ignorance she once flaunted; her anxiety as to how future generations might view her works — the links of her life as irregular as the beats of a headless dactylic line. “Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes” (Jimmy Rodgers). Bags packed, opaque. She went to bed thinking something would interrupt it, this filthy business; that Nurlihrt would call and wake her. The noise of the phone, the next link in the chain, the dream that would in fact go on without her.
The certainty of being disturbed:
[That the sound of the telephone would still be heard through death’s muffling hands. That something would eventually wake her from her sleep. Nurlihrt, the telephone, whatever. That there would be another link in the chain. That the sound of the phone would be louder even than death. Yes, louder than the sudden, if expected, vertiginous, deafening hands of death.]
b) She’d fallen asleep listening to a song by Laura Nyro: “And When I Die” … How obvious! If the so-called experts had paid attention, or at least understood a little English, they’d have realized it wasn’t just the note that indicated Inés’s intention to die.
The dog was running around. On the nightstand, some books: Dickson Carr’s He Who Whispers, Marguerite Duras’s La Vie tranquille—in a Spanish translation by her Avellaneda school friend — Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi…
[The Woman Who Rode Away, by D. H. Lawrence. A Corso or Ferlinghetti anthology. L’âme romantique et le rêve, by Albert Béguin. Pale Fire, the poorly bound South American edition, with an inscription furiously scribbled in HB penciclass="underline" “It’s no use, I feel sorry for N. and the kids, but I just can’t read it.”]
The lessons Nurlihrt had intended to give her weren’t enough. Nothing is for so short a life. Inés persisted in reading the worst translations, forgetting all the French she learned at the Lycée, her enthusiasm for Charles Trenet and Jacques Brel. In the typewriter was a page on which was written what one would have to consider a poem — hardly a last will and testament, since it had line breaks and didn’t respect the margins. [It was difficult to remove: four carbon sheets were in the way]. Having torn it out, I compared the contents with those of the letter that was brought by the youth. The Hermes Baby typewriter had a font that imitated the childish curlicues of a schoolgirl’s penmanship — but this was typical of Inés. Nurlihrt was the one who showed me her final drafts.
Of life, The Illness questions death
And someone says: Of nearly all there is of life …
Nothing suggests evil does his rounds like a beast
Without a spoor. The dog bites. If only Dos had noticed