“Explain, explain,” grumbled Étienne. “If you people can’t name something you’re incapable of seeing it. And this is called a dog and that’s a house, as the guy from Duino used to say. You’ve got to show, Perico, not explain. I paint, therefore I am.”
“Show what?” Perico Romero asked.
“The only reasons for our being alive.”
“This creature thinks that the only sense is the sense of sight and all that can come from it,” Perico answered.
“Painting is more than just a visual product,” Étienne said. “I paint with my whole body. In that sense I’m no different from your Cervantes or your Tirso de What’s-his-name. What I can’t stand is this mania for explanations, the Logos understood exclusively as a verb.”
“And so forth,” Oliveira said grumpily. “Speaking of senses, the pair of you sound like a dialogue between two deaf men.”
La Maga squeezed him tighter. “Now this one is going to come out with one of her asinine comments,” thought Oliveira. “She has to rub first, make an epidermic decision.” He felt a sort of hateful tenderness, something so contradictory that it must have been truth itself. “We ought to invent the sweet slap, the bee-kick. But in this world ultimate syntheses are yet to be discovered. Perico is right, the great Logos is watching. What a pity. We would have to have amoricide, for example, the real black light, the antimatter that troubles Gregorovius so much.”
“Say, is Gregorovius coming to the record session?” asked Oliveira.
Perico thought that he was, and Étienne thought that Mondrian.
“Think about Mondrian a minute,” Étienne was saying. “Next to him Klee’s magic symbols are nothing. Klee played with fate, the gifts of culture. Pure sensibility can be satisfied with Mondrian, but you need a whole bag of other tricks with Klee. A sophisticate for sophisticates. Chinese, really. Mondrian, on the other hand, paints the absolute. Stand naked in front of him and it’s one thing or the other: either you see or you don’t see. Pleasure, thrills, allusions, fears, delights are completely superfluous.”
“Do you understand what he’s saying?” La Maga asked. “It seems to me that he’s not being fair to Klee.”
“Fairness or unfairness has nothing to do with this,” said Oliveira. “He’s trying to say something else. Don’t go getting personal right away.”
“But why does he say that such beautiful things are no good for Mondrian?”
“He’s trying to say that basically a painting like one of Klee’s calls for a degree ès lettres, or at least ès poésies, while all that Mondrian wants is for a person to mondrianate and that’s all.”
“That’s not it,” said Étienne.
“Of course it is,” Oliveira said. “According to you a Mondrian canvas is sufficient unto itself. Therefore it calls upon your innocence more than on your experience. I mean Edenic innocence, not stupidity. Even that metaphor you used about standing naked in front of a picture has a pre-Adamite smell about it. Paradoxically, Klee is much more modest since he asks for the co-operation of the viewer and is not sufficient unto himself. The fact of the matter is that Klee is history while Mondrian is atemporality. And you’re dying to find the absolute. Do I make myself clear?”
“No,” said Étienne. “C’est vache comme il pleut.”
“You said it, coño,” said Perico, “and that son of a bitch of a Ronald lives all the way to hell and gone.”
“Let us stiffen our pace,” said Oliveira, mimicking his Spanish accent. “Let us sneak our bodies out from under this drizzle.”
“There you go. I almost like your rain and your chicken better. It sure knows how to rain in Buenos Aires.”
“The absolute,” La Maga was saying, kicking a pebble from puddle to puddle. “What is an absolute, Horacio?”
“Look,” Oliveira said, “it’s just that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting.”
“There comes Wong,” Perico observed. “The Chinaman’s wetter than a wonton in a soup.”
Almost at the same time, they spied Gregorovius coming around the corner of the Rue de Babylone, loaded down as usual with a briefcase bulging with books. Wong and Gregorovius stopped under the lamppost (and looked as if they were taking a shower together) and greeted each other with a certain solemnity. In the doorway of Ronald’s building there was an interlude of umbrella-closing, comment ça va, who’s got a match, the minuterie is broken, what a lousy night, ah oui c’est vache, and a rather confused ascent, broken at the first landing by a couple sitting on the steps and deeply engaged in the act of kissing.
“Allez, c’est pas une heure pour faire les cons,” said Étienne.
“Ta gueule,” answered a muffled voice, “montez, montez, ne vous gênez pas. Ta bouche, mon trésor.”
“Salaud, va,” Étienne said. “That’s Guy Monod, an old friend of mine.”
Ronald and Babs were waiting on the fifth floor, each holding a candle and smelling of cheap vodka. Wong made a sign and everybody stopped on the stairs and broke into an a capella version of the profane anthem of the Serpent Club. Then they ran into the apartment before the neighbors came to their doors.
Ronald was leaning against the door, redheadedly, wearing a checked shirt.
“The place is surrounded by telescopes, damn it. At ten o’clock at night the great god Silence is enthroned and woe to anyone who is irreverent. Yesterday some official came up to bawl us out. What did the gentleman tell us, Babs?”
“He mentioned ‘repeated complaints.’ ”
“So what are we going to do?” asked Ronald as he opened the door to let Guy Monod slip in.
“We’ll do this,” said Babs with a flawless gesture of the arm and a resonant oral fart.
“What about your chick?” Ronald asked.
“I don’t know, she got lost,” Guy said. “I think she’s gone. We were making out fine on the stairs, and all of a sudden. Farther up she just wasn’t there. What the hell anyway, she’s Swiss.”
(–104)
10
AT night the clouds were flat and red over the Latin Quarter, the air was still damp as a listless breeze blew a few last drops against the dimly lit window, the panes were dirty, one broken and patched up with a piece of pink adhesive. Up above, under the lead gutters, the pigeons must have been sleeping, also lead, wrapped up in themselves, perfect antigargoyles. Protected by the window was that mossy parallelepiped, smelling of vodka and candles, damp clothing and leftover food, which was a kind of studio for Babs the ceramicist and Ronald the musician, the seat of the Club, wicker chairs, stained pillows, bits of pencil and wire on the floor, a stuffed owl with half his head gone, a poorly played and corny tune on an old record with a deep needle-scratch, an incessant scratch rasp scrape, a terrible saxophone that one night in 1928 or 29 had played as if it were afraid of getting lost, backed up by schoolgirl drums, a mediocre piano. But then an incisive guitar came on which seemed to signal a transition to something else and suddenly (Ronald had alerted them by holding up his finger) a cornet broke loose from the rest of the group and blew the first notes of the melody, landing on them as on a diving board. Bix took off with everything he had, and the clear sketch was inscribed on the silence as if it had been scratched there. Two corpses sparred fraternally, clinching and breaking, Bix and Eddie Lang (whose real name was Salvatore Massaro) played catch with I’m Coming Virginia, and I wonder where Bix is buried, thought Oliveira, and Eddie Lang, how many miles apart are their two nothings that one future night in Paris were to fight, guitar against cornet, gin against bad luck, jazz.
“I like it here. It’s warm, it’s dark.”
“That Bix is a crazy son of a bitch. Put on Jazz Me Blues.”
“The influence of technique on art,” said Ronald, digging his hands into a pile of records, looking casually at the labels. “Before LP’s came out those guys had less than three minutes to play in. Nowadays a wild man like Stan Getz can come alo
ng in front of a mike and turn himself loose, blow anything he wants to. Poor Bix had to be satisfied with one chorus and as soon as he got warmed up, snap, it was all over. They must have got sore as hell when they cut records.”
“I don’t know,” said Perico. “It’s like writing a sonnet instead of an ode, and I don’t know a damned thing about this crap. I only came because I was sick of staying in my room reading an endless essay by Julián Marías.”
(–65)
11
GREGOROVIUS let his glass be filled with vodka and began to drink with dainty sips. Two candles were burning on the mantelpiece where Babs kept bottles of beer and her dirty stockings. Gregorovius admired the listless burning of the candles through the hyaline glass, it was so foreign to all of them and so out of their time, like Bix’s cornet, coming and going from a different time. He was annoyed by the feet of Guy Monod, who was on the couch either sleeping or listening with his eyes closed. La Maga came over and sat on the floor with a cigarette in her mouth. The green candles burned in her eyes. Gregorovius looked at her in ecstasy and remembered a street in Morlaix at dusk, a high aqueduct, clouds.
“This light is so much like you, something that comes and goes, always moving.”
“Like Horacio’s shadow,” La Maga said. “His nose grows and shrinks. It’s amazing.”
“Babs is a shepherdess of shadows,” Gregorovius said, “she works in clay, concrete shadows … Here everything breathes, a lost contact is established again; music helps, vodka, friendship … Those shadows in the cornice; the room has lungs, it palpitates. Yes, electricity is eleatic, it has turned our shadows to stone. Now they are part of the furniture and the faces. But here, on the other hand … Look at that molding, how its shadow is breathing, that volute that rises and falls. In those days man lived in a soft and porous night, in a continuous dialogue. The terrors, what a luxury for the imagination …”
He put his palms together, keeping only his thumbs apart: a dog began to open his mouth and move his ears on the wall. La Maga laughed. Then Gregorovius asked her what it was like in Montevideo, the dog suddenly dissolved, because he wasn’t sure that she was Uruguayan; Lester Young and the Kansas City Six. Shh…(Ronald, finger to his lips).
“Uruguay always sounded so strange to me. I picture Montevideo with lots of steeples all with bells cast after a battle. And you can’t tell me that Montevideo doesn’t have giant lizards along the river bank.”
“Certainly,” said La Maga. “All you have to do is take the bus to Pocitos.”
“And do people in Montevideo really know Lautréamont?”
“Lautréamont?” asked La Maga.
Gregorovius sighed and drank more vodka. Lester Young, tenor; Dickie Wells, trombone; Joe Bushkin, piano; Bill Coleman, trumpet; John Simmons, bass; Jo Jones, drums. Four O’Clock Drag. Yes, tremendous lizards, trombones on the river bank, blues crawling along, drag probably meant a lizard in time, an endless crawling at four o’clock in the morning. Or maybe something completely different. “Oh, Lautréamont,” La Maga said, suddenly remembering. “Yes, I think they know him quite well.”
“He was from Uruguay, although you wouldn’t think so.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” said La Maga, coming to.
“Actually, Lautréamont … But Ronald’s getting annoyed, he’s put on one of his idols. I guess we’ll have to shut up. But let’s talk very low while you tell me about Montevideo.”
“Ah, merde alors,” said Étienne, looking at them furiously. The vibes were testing the air, taking wrong steps upstairs, skipping a step, jumping five at once and coming down again on the top one. Lionel Hampton was balancing Save It Pretty Mama, letting it go as it fell down and spun around on the tip of his toe among pieces of glass, instant constellations, five stars, three stars, ten stars, he was putting them out with the tip of his slipper, he was rocking in a hammock twirling a Japanese parasol wildly in his hand and the whole band came in on the final fall, a hoarse trumpet, earth, down again, floating to a landing, finibus, all over. Gregorovius was listening to the whisper of Montevideo according to La Maga, and perhaps he would finally learn more about her, about her childhood, whether her name really was Lucía like Mimi in La Bohème; he was at that vodka level where the night began to become magnanimous and everything promised him fidelity and hope. Guy Monod had doubled up his legs and his hard soles no longer dug into Gregorovius’s spine. La Maga was leaning on him a bit and he felt the soft warmth of her body, every movement she made to follow the music or the rhythm of her speech. With his wits ajar Gregorovius managed to make out the corner where Ronald and Wong were selecting and passing records, Oliveira and Babs were on the floor, leaning against an Eskimo pelt on the wall, Horacio keeping cadence with the smoke, Babs lost to vodka, unpaid rent, and dyes that faded at three hundred degrees, a blue which melded into orangey rhombuses, something intolerable. Oliveira’s lips were moving in the silence of the smoke, he was talking to himself, backwards, to some other thing that imperceptibly twisted Gregorovius’s innards, he didn’t know why, probably because that apparent absence of Horacio’s was a fraud, which left him for La Maga to play with while he was there moving his lips in silence, speaking to La Maga through himself in the midst of the smoke and the jazz, laughing to himself inwardly at so much Lautréamont, at so much Montevideo.
(–136)
12
GREGOROVIUS had always enjoyed meetings of the Club because it was really not a club at all in the strictest sense. He liked Ronald because of his anarchy, because of Babs, because of the way they were carefully killing themselves without worrying about anything, given over to the reading of Carson McCullers, Miller, Raymond Queneau, to jazz as a quiet exercise in freedom, to the unrestricted knowledge that they both were failures in the arts. He liked, if that’s the word for it, Horacio Oliveira, with whom he had a sort of persecutive relationship in that Oliveira’s presence always exasperated Gregorovius from the moment they came together, even after he had been out looking for Horacio, although he would not admit it, and Horacio would be amused by the cheap mysteries Gregorovius used to cover up his origins and way of life, by the fact that Gregorovius was in love with La Maga and did not think that Horacio knew, and the two of them would accept and reject each other at the same time in a sort of tight bullfight which in the last analysis was one of the reasons for the Club’s get-togethers. They worked hard at being the knowing ones, at arranging a set of allusions to frustrate La Maga and infuriate Babs; all they had to do was mention something in passing, as now when Gregorovius was thinking that there really was a disillusioned persecution between him and Horacio, and right off one of them would quote the hound of heaven, “I fled him,” and so forth, and all the while La Maga would look at them with a kind of humble despair as one of them was in a state of I-flew-so-high-so-high-I-caught-my-prey and they would end up laughing at themselves. But it was too late because Horacio would be appalled at this exhibitionism of associative memory, and Gregorovius would feel himself touched with the annoyance that he had helped bring about, and between them both a certain resentment of accomplices would build up and two minutes later they would be at it again, and that, among other things, is what went on at meetings of the Club.
“This is one of the few times I’ve had such lousy vodka here,” said Gregorovius as he filled his glass. “Lucía, you were about to tell me about your childhood. It’s not hard for me to picture you on the river bank, with pigtails and rosy cheeks, like the girls I used to know in Transylvania, before they turned pale under the influence of this damned Lutetian climate.”
“Lutetian?” asked La Maga.
Gregorovius sighed. He began to explain and La Maga was listening humbly and in a studious sort of way, just as she always did and with great intensity until rescued by some distraction. Ronald had just put on an old Coleman Hawkins record and La Maga seemed resentful that the explanation was ruining the music, and besides, it wasn’t what she usually expected from an explanation, a tingling of the ski
n, a need to breathe deeply as Hawkins must have breathed just before taking another turn at the melody and as she would breathe when Horacio would deign to explain some really deep line of poetry for her, adding to it that other fabulous depth which could have been now if he instead of Gregorovius had been explaining this business about Lutetians, and how he would have made it blend into Hawkins’s music, along with the green candles, a tickle, a deep breath which would be the only thing she could be sure of, something comparable only to Rocamadour or Horacio’s lips or sometimes an adagio from Mozart that could barely be heard because the record was in such bad shape.
“Don’t be like that,” Gregorovius said humbly. “All I wanted was to understand your life a little better, what you are, how you happen to have so many facets.”
“My life,” said La Maga. “Even if I were drunk I wouldn’t tell you about it. And you won’t understand me any better after hearing about my childhood. Besides, I didn’t have any childhood.”
“I didn’t either. In Herzegovina.”
“Mine in Montevideo. I’ll tell you one thing. Sometimes I dream about grammar school, it’s so horrible I wake up screaming. And age fifteen, I don’t know whether you were ever fifteen years old.”