Perhaps The History of the Secret the narrator mentions is an allusion to Brief Decoding of the Mystery, the book I wrote for him and for which I was never paid …
Despite the occasional nonsense, Manjares’s short story is quite good — the best in this court of blind men. Gullibly, one of the cretins felt obliged to justify the publication of such a strange a story (although all of them were strange), doing so in the worst possible manner — praising it until he was hoarse, trumpeting about it being full of “secret codes” that allude to the works of D. H. Lawrence and F. R. Leavis — as if these trifling concerns of university cloisterers would interest anyone.
The adulteries in paralleclass="underline" Lalo Sabatani / Elena Siesta. Nicasio / Inés Maspero
Inés said [to him], “he was afraid of something” (referring to his evasive attitude with regard to his interaction with Belisario in his study, where he slept the day before). Nicasio was brazenly impudent: he became engaged to a beautiful woman as a token of defiance.
Lorenzo (Lalo) Sabatani used to perform his magic tricks (and he only had a few) in some of the crowded cafebars on Corrientes Street. He examined their pulses (“between the wrist and the thigh, diction and metastasis,” he’d say), read their palms, and again examined the pulses of those he called “lacanian monjitas,” and when he wanted to, he’d choose one of them to sleep with, and go back to her apartment. His preference for married women, though, meant he often ended up sleeping alone. [[He had a preference for married women; he frequently slept alone]]
Elena never went to those bars. She arrived one afternoon with an air of alarm and “irrepressible” indignation (exaggerated Lalo, who kept boasting until late, very late in the night, about his conquest) …
#20
It hurts to recall the journal’s degree of semantic instability during those years. As Urlihrt argued: it oscillated between epileptic absence and rigorous malapropism. The work Luini had to present as evidence before a tribunal, like the one in the stories (go-betweeners, feticheurs, etc), was, according to Luini, a plagiarism larded with quotations, proportioned (although disproportionately) by Lalo Sabatani, Agraphia’s warlock of black magic par excellence.
CEREMONIES / LITURGIES
On Elena’s way of cutting the uncut pages of a book
On Nicasio’s means of quitting smoking
On Eloísa’s way of opening a pack of cigarettes
On the state in which Nicasio leaves his writing desk
On Elena’s way of tucking away a keepsake
A few words on Elena’s way of underscoring.
In more than one sense, Elena’s underscores are perfect. First, there is the sense of their being painstakingly worked over — abusing at least two meanings of the Spanish word prolijidad—and there is their sense of harmless, innocent accomplishment. They concealed [conceal] both her general temperament and her mood in the [moment, act of] reading while, at the same time, they showed [show / exhibited / exhibit] her infallibility in distinguishing what’s important from what’s trivial, accessory, and most of all [most often], obvious. The method was unique. Inés employed it with neither violence nor moderation in every book of every genre she read — drama, poetry, narrative, essay — in the three languages she’d understood — English, French, Spanish — an exercise, which, at first glance, may have seemed evidence of a strict upbringing, a rhetorical tribute or stipend to her harsh [hard-going, traumatic] orphanhood.
Perusing her underscores leaves the reader in no doubt as to the expectations, intentions, or interests of the young poet, nor, incidentally, of her desire to become cultured — understandable in someone in pursuit of independent judgment — accumulating [accordingly] hints, indications, suggestions, and ritornelli for the enrichment of her conversation.
Monitoring the behavior of these designs on the page could lead us either to an alleyway or into an ocean in the manner they evince the capacity or skill of distributing patterns and concealing them, discouraging any search for symmetry — every indication of it being interrupted with astonishing frequency and irregularity by so many irrelevant, extraneous, and self-indulgent diversions.
#22
The trip was supposed to end in Athens, [but for some unknown reason] it ended in Treviso … With a bang, a whimper. Topics suggested [are]: an untimely confession, a lovers’ bedroom spat, not in view of the whole world [[Frost poem in Yvor Winters refers to Thoreau [in Blyth?], an inseparable accident]]. It was difficult, at that point, to give credence to Elena’s love, [respond to that] affection or show of affection responsible for Nicasio’s affection or show of affection. It is possible Elena contrived a scheme of indiscernible grudges and surprise attacks similar to those woven into the first sestina. The mutual disloyalties are an apotheosized exaggeration of error and inaccuracy. For Elena and Nicasio, who never collaborated on anything or even wrote in the same room together, this style was captivating.
Oliverio Lester, The X-Positions
#23
Sestina of Departure
The Self from others always shies away
To taste the bitter bread of solitude
Boasts of knowing what it means to live
But blurs the trail, adulterates the prints
On that crudely-executed map of fate [: ]
Whose exploration amputates his shade.
(V. 1) The Sun at midday amputates our shade
I was gullible, inconstant as a shade.
Even what remains eventually goes away:
The farewell prose of destiny, of fate
The asymmetric rule of solitude,
The foot’s unbroken contour in a print,
And the rival act of truly being alive
#5 ISSUES
[The ages / Connection. Dos. Nicasio.
Style á deux—writing in collaboration]
1.
The Two Illnesses
[[#17]]
The two illnesses and the theory of the three endings and the decision on the title of the story taken from the collection of stories rejected by Belisario / Basilio in accordance with the narrative version in the plagiarized book—Accents?
There was a trend, in Agraphia, for taxonomy, for purblind classification. The writers, collaborators, had to—we had to — get inside familiar types. We decided on Elena and Nicasio. This was the idea: I would try to commit suicide within the first hour, i.e. of Hilarión’s departure, but would prove incompetent. Likewise, Nicasio. Not to mention Lino (Scacchi). But Lalo Sabatani referred to an earlier tradition, originating with Aldecoa Inauda, a poet of the Golden Age. Note: Gabriel Bocángel wrote of him: “Being acquainted with many styles / he imitated all.” That is, he had an illimitable repertoire … and during the Golden Age too! Or maybe it was a joke, a boutade by Bocángel. Aldecoa was famous for his ability to adapt, for his skill in accommodating himself to the court (careerism, we now call it). The “being acquainted with many styles” could very well be a reference to this aptitude, instead of an encomium on his reputation as an imitator. But he, favored by nature with her gifts and the court with its endowments, did his imitating in the open; whereas we did it behind a screen, deviously, unscrupulously, copying and imitating, as if there was a chip in our brains directing us to plagiarize. For this first classification, there were [added] long-term consequences. For example: those of us who adapted to Hilarión Curtis’s practice would have an easy life but a difficult death. Note that I have sanpaku eyes so I always believed I’d die by accident. Remo’s death was what convinced us. Some of us would die of cryptodermia. They, the others, the better ones, they would live out the rest of their lives having adapted to kleptolalia.