Cristóbal Niaras, Agraphia: Chance Laboratory
#5
The Epsilom, called a “Treatise on Small Quantities,” is a difficult novel to describe (and yet, I’ll try, because I want to justify [my] our admiration [for Zi]). The protagonists, a gang of [perennially] homeless guys, all of them enfants savants, go wandering around making friends with the [common] people. According to the narrator, they have two serious flaws [one of diction and another of understanding]: stammering whenever they attempt to make a comparison, so that the second term never arrives [appears], or it is one the interlocutor / adversary can simply ignore, of a type “equivalent to Mezzaloth when …” The first adventure occurs in Patagonia. The epsilom, in this case, is … [Medellín the good], “The Imitation of an Ounce,” “Xochimilk.”
In order to begin late, and beginning for no particular reason, the epsilom live their lives in reverse: they’re born as geriatrics in the future and live each day improving on that condition, rejuvenating, reaching full maturity at roughly ten years old. [However,] Due to time’s reversibility, and a complementary mechanism of adaptability, for which Zi has an explanation I cannot remember (which saves me having to explain it), the events in their lives are mapped out and so anticipated [[as long as there is [intervened] was an accident]] by ordinary mortals who live their lives in the conventional way, and for whom the clocks run normally [“correctly,” according to the dogmatic Urlihrt], an idea that accounts for [the now outdated admiration of] Zi’s precocity.
It makes no difference whether one reaches today from yesterday or tomorrow: for both past and present meet at the crossroad of the present moment …
So the Zi Benno of “Xoch.” still hasn’t attained the remarkable maturity of a wunderkind and has to be around thirty years old. The Zi Daisy Ashford wouldn’t appear for another twenty years or so.
When I mentioned her, he didn’t seem to remember her.
In the early eighties, Mario Levin invited me to write for his journal, Cinegrafo. For the first issue, I drew upon all my ignorance and pedantry to write a piece about cinematic rock. I reviled the genre, vindictively lambasted everything I’d seen, doing so, I believe, with juvenile zeal (although, at twenty-one, I wasn’t that young), to make myself worthy of inclusion.
None of that exists today (I’ve seen many things that contradict my daring, “transgressive,” claims), but a taste of the era still lingers in my mouth, and that’s strong enough to vindicate all my mistakes … seen immediately.
The cover of that first issue — a tremulous Bogarde at the end of the Fassbinder film, Despair, screenplay by Stoppard, adapted from the novel by Nabokov — exhibited, according to Mario, our paranoia about concealing — reason enough to turn to the inside front cover: photo of Orson Welles in full armor playing his own Macbeth — our omnipotence. Included before without footnote.
Tears shed for the profession
Hilarión Curtis on the quantities and the disasters
6.
Urlihrt lived by his insomnia. The perfect work Nicasio had promised would be divided into two parts, each part in turn divided — like the Goldberg Variations—into thirty-two fragments. Now, the first sixteen chapters would proceed as if up and down eight steps, each step having its own peculiar signs that are met first on the way up, and again, but in reverse, on the way back down. Now, although the number of fragments left by Urlihrt far exceeded the stipulated quantity, no one — not even Lester, Luini, or Urlihrt’s daughter — could make them [that accumulated heap] appear like an orderly collection … The excesses of symmetry lead to the desert of boredom.
His diary ended: this has set its seal upon the age
The old bachelor pays a visit to the dead poet’s library
Soon after publishing my first fictional piece in the journal, Change (“Misery of a Realist,” first extract from Finesse), I was thought to have risen high enough in the disordered hierarchy of the literary world to be called upon to judge my first short story competition. I read more than a hundred; there seemed to be no end: none were displeasing, but all were unmemorable, except for one, which I remember because I particularly disliked it. It had a title something like, “Diphteria of a Cereal,” and it was a perfect parody of my first piece. I felt the same way I did that time in fourth grade when I entered the classroom and caught L(eporello) imitating me. I never saw myself like that before, but now I saw myself perfectly as I was. There’s something in an imitation, however foolish, that always supersedes the modeclass="underline" imitation is the only advantage left to the featherless biped whose evolution left him with a paltry handicap for racing against any of the quadrupeds. The progress of our steps is always backwards. Barefooted humiliation. Why we can’t justify Bates’s outrage after Maclaren-Ross; or comprehend the spit in the eye that so annoyed Carpentier and Lino Novás Calvo after Cabrera Infante (despite his stating explicitely “Parodio no por odio”).
Look for Ivor Black in The H., V.N.)
Ravel
In defence of the stories, though, one can invoke an extraneous though irrelevant detail. When Oliverio Lester — who’d won various prizes by that time — was judging a short story competition for which he had to read “almost three hundred stories,” he arrived at a curious and exasperating conclusion. All of the stories were populated by similar characters following neatly constructed arcs in neatly constructed fleeting unrealities. As if the contrivance were an instrument or toy for imaginations dominated and constrained by outdated modes, so the arts and trades, occupations and situations described in those three hundred stories Oliverio Lester had read were the same arts and trades, occupations and situations he’d read about in stories from the forties and fifties. The first mawkish scruples prevailed in the realistic narratives — gatekeeper grandfathers, office lovers, tenement suicides, miserable prostitutes with guilty consciences, miserable narrators with guilty consciences, and just plain misery by the bucketload. But even the fantasy tales — encounters with aliens more clever and civilized than ourselves, discoveries of old documents that have a modifying impact on the present time, predictable suspensions of reality for unwelcome forays into the oneiric — arrogantly flouted any implementation, insinuation, or hint of the modern.
So he was determined — roughly a decade ago — to publish a collection much like the one the reader will encounter here, but with a mere exemplary, didactical intention. But then other issues distracted him.