Before they sealed the coffin, one of the three apostles pointed at the ring finger of the deceased [enringed with a piece of tan paper], around which there was a piece of paper. He asked Nicasio if he could remove it. After a questioning glance at the lawyer, Nicasio approved. The lawyer seemed to be waiting for that moment the whole night. He nodded with a smile, adding: “Don’t hesitate, do it immediately, but slowly: I also happen to be a notary public.”
It was a piece of rag paper. On the side in contact with the skin, there was a printed inscription: The illness has assumed the likeness of death that death, the same death you question! [sic] on the way out, will not deny.
Nicasio was left with the rag paper piece, that is, one of the apostles.
[“Thoroughness” extends in two directions because of the two senses of the word: comprehensiveness and meticulousness.]
It’s difficult, and especially now, to find out in detail what he did for Inés, who was always wishing for someone to visit, but someone who didn’t immediately become, or become by degrees for that matter, tiresome on visiting. She used to say, to claim, it was a result of her middle class, her bourgeois vulgarity. But there was something else.
[#26]
It’s not easy writing a sad tale after a happy one. [Perhaps] Tolstoy had this in mind when he heard the first beating intimations of his Anna K. It may be hard to hear a beat in here. My family bedroom is host to every kind of noise.
Beginning of “Replicas”
Fantin-Latour. To block outline.
Blocked outline.
Anales diáfanos del viento. Góngora
Mourir
Although nothing prepares us for it, dying suddenly when young exempts us from having to go through the slow process of dying when old. Two ghosts have stood up [in unison]. They are the ghosts of old age and of sickness. [And] they stood up together and got ready to leave when we alerted them that we still hadn’t died, that we hadn’t died yet, that we are still standing, [that we will remain standing,] that we’ve begun walking. We caught up with them almost immediately. All our actions were mirrored in theirs, as if they were glued to our backs, beginning at the hip. Duelists, if we were, in truth, chronological caricatures. After they cross our path, we will not see them again, but we will hear them say, illegibly or inscrutably, through the semi-consciousness of awakening from sleep, that since they began expecting us (waiting for us, frightening us), the slow process of dying is no respecter of age. Dying and aging are very different things, as if one was written in verse, the other, in prose. Even now, when I think I’m beginning to understand them, I do not. And perhaps it’s because “now” demands too much exercise of will, and “do,” even more. And everything I had set out to describe here, before Basilio stopped me, is inaccurate, an implausible version of what really goes on. And what really goes on: birds decapitated over headless torsos. And this makes me think of D. H. Lawrence, and the precise way in which he ends The Woman Who Rode Away by dismissing what is loved and what is seen. But Lawrence himself isn’t an example of what I mean. In him, the illness, the sickness, isn’t a ghost, and old age is only an intruder insulted by his good looks. Not a ghost, but a beggar that follows him, circling round him, a dervish, spinning round him, transforming him with every turn, as Morgan Le Fey does to Prince Valiant in the first book I ever truly loved. That lets him see, through graying orbits, time spent, what the years ahead will bring. He will have the good sense not to fulfill them, but not so as to die suddenly when young, but to go through the slow process of dying … Yes,
free
with weariness of flesh when the dice that we spend our lives burnishing fall outside the precisesly measured circle of error that predicts the probability of a sudden accidental death and are blunted …
In Precisions
Chronology & Critique
Emma Steele (???) Cristóbal Niaras
The zero, a round number—achievements and memorabilia of Agraphia
A great puzzle whose answers are all out of place
It’s easy to determine the system of belonging at Agraphia from a stylistic criterion, and despite what’s said above or below [Niaras and Armesto were mere footnotes] about collaborative writing. “Specular Soup” and “Replicas,” for example, are covered in the stylistic fingerprints of the folie á deux collaborations of Nicasio Urlihrt / Eloísa Betelgeuse and Oliverio Lester / Elena Siesta. In the first, the tendency to supply an aphoristic generalization followed by a narrative conclusion (“We know it takes time: Tashtego awaited the revelation two centuries after his departure from the Puerto de Palos of his invention, languishing on a Patagonian coastline”) competes, paragraph after paragraph, prayer by prayer, with the transmission of useless technical terms to the reader (example, transcription) …
The correspondence of mythological ambiguities (with additional ones taken from Sebastien Birt’s Diary to Elena) in the latter: “my male sister,” etc. etc.
In contrast: the profusion of expletives in Eiralis’s letters, not solely attributable to the epistolary tone, and their scarcity verging on dryness (not solely to be blamed on ambiguity of phrasing) in Felipe Luini’s “The Office Next Door.”
At the height of their dalliances and defiances
Lalo and Remo began moving as one, intrigued by the delectable matter offered them by their master. They snuffled with equal misgiving, with the same animal mistrust. Then they submitted unanimously, obeyed. While Elena’s ability to respond to compliments, or pretend to respond, was strong, [well-known, profound, as her listlessness] her dry disinclination for returning them was characteristic: in the case of Lalo and Remo, a rejection of either one was to be taken as a rejection of both. A strange procedure indeed. She appreciated in [others and in] herself the capacity for contempt and invective, but not for passive flattery. For Lalo, her lack of response made her seem almost a widow, dead to love because of Urlihrt, because of condescending indifference. She, disposed [as was stated] to use up all her nine lives at once, was already familiar with those nuances of love as they are reckoned in the tribunal of a single glance.
#28
Basilio’s briefcase [Charles Bovary’s cap]
— Stop describing it, Basilio. I swear I didn’t see it.
Francisco Xavier Aldecoa Inauda (1569–1616). Aldecoa recounts: “I was born under the aegis of the twins, heralded by a pageantry of signs. The first born, having already deprived my mother of her prime, and fifteen years of working life, I would be the son that, after a difficult labor, deprived her of her life. The place of my birth was the village of Yeste, at the house of the Inaudi, the which being my grandparents’ home, in the distant far away, and I know not how my father came to traverse that distance for the conception. He was the court bailiff, and was never at home. That I grew up beset by poverty, but in the tender care of one of my mother’s sisters, was the will of the omnipotent and simpleminded Lord. In my works, by contrast, the reader will discover in the disarray that life is not disposed as verse or prose, and for a man to persist in trying to arrange it thus, makes him vain, obstinate, and deficient in skill, in reason, and in memory.” Those works include the sonnets and décimas from La semana horizontal, which was dedicated the duke of Osuna, and is often compared with the Devotions of Donne (1573–1631), since the Spaniard’s work was also the product of a lengthy convalescence; the comedy in verse, La ceñida visitada; the long meditative work, Ejercicio malogrado en homenaje a la vista, which, between 1608 and 1611, was translated and exported all the way to America (where it was used by certain schools of thought for matutinal instruction), and sometimes known by the title Lengua de pájaros, after one of its longest chapters: it was his most frequently printed book. A victim of mild insanity — the Spirochaete way — Inauda inaugurated a mode of free expression that belongs more to the twentieth century, which is the reason why he’s been variously celebrated as a precursor. Much of Inauda’s oeuvre remains secreted and unpublished by his estate, which is kept by a fanatically religious descendant who prevents “their being known to a wider public, which is neither here nor there, since the works themselves aren’t aware of being read, or that they risk my soul’s place by the side of the righteous.”