Multi-column

2666

Thoughts

Highlights

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lacuna 🔗

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oeuvre 🔗

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effusive 🔗

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garret 🔗

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ascetic 🔗

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thrall 🔗

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intone 🔗

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abstruse 🔗

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deluge 🔗

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Used in a personal sense, the phrase “achieve an end” seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life, and, on rare occasions, happiness. If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it’s therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war. 🔗

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It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote. 🔗

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paltry 🔗

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Dionysian 🔗

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exegesis 🔗

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That night, before he fell asleep, Pelletier didn’t think back on the squabbles at the conference. Instead he thought about walking along the streets near the river and about Liz Norton walking beside him as Espinoza pushed Morini’s wheelchair and the four of them laughed at the little animals of Bremen, which watched them or watched their shadows on the pavement while mounted harmoniously, innocently, on each other’s backs. 🔗

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soporific 🔗

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insularity 🔗

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inviolable 🔗

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blithely 🔗

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it’s common knowledge that a conversation involving only a few people, with everyone listening to everyone else and taking time to think and not shouting, tends to be more productive or at least more relaxed than a mass conversation, which runs the permanent risk of becoming a rally, or, because of the necessary brevity of the speeches, a series of slogans that fade as soon as they’re put into words. 🔗

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redoubtable 🔗

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brusque 🔗

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“Because the rancher’s son,” said Archimboldi, “who surely rode better and had a better mount than your husband, was overcome at the last minute by selflessness. In other words, he chose extravagance, carried away by the impromptu festivities that he and his father had arranged. Everything had to be squandered, including his victory, and somehow everyone understood it had to be that way, including the woman who came looking for you in the park. Everyone except the little gaucho.”
“Was that all?” asked the lady.
“Not for the little gaucho. If you’d spent any longer with him, I think he would have killed you, which would have been an extravagant gesture in its own right, though certainly not the kind the rancher and his son had in mind.” 🔗

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“Let’s suppose,” said Mrs. Bubis, “that at this very moment there’s a knock on the door and my old friend the art critic comes in. He sits here on the sofa beside me, and one of you brings out an unsigned drawing and tells us it’s by Grosz and you want to sell it. I look at the drawing and smile and I take out my checkbook and buy it. The art critic looks at the drawing and isn’t depressed and tries to make me reconsider. He thinks it isn’t a Grosz. I think it is. Which of us is right?
“Or let’s tell the story a different way. You,” said Mrs. Bubis, pointing to Espinoza, “present an unsigned drawing and say it’s by Grosz and try to sell it. I don’t laugh, I look at it coldly, I appreciate the line, the control, the satire, but nothing about it tickles me. The art critic examines it carefully and gets depressed, in his normal way, and then and there he makes an offer, an offer that exceeds his savings, and that if accepted will condemn him to endless afternoons of melancholy. I try to change his mind. I tell him the drawing strikes me as suspicious because it doesn’t make me laugh. The critic says finally I’m looking at Grosz like an adult and gives me his congratulations. Which of the two of us is right?” 🔗

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They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn’t laugh or be sad with him, partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers. 🔗

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Pelletier remembered a long-ago afternoon when he and Espinoza had watched a horror film in a room at a German hotel. 🔗

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purloined 🔗

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peremptorily 🔗

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The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton’s name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). 🔗

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tenuously 🔗

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Hecate 🔗

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Zapatista 🔗

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simulacrum 🔗

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scatology 🔗

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coprophagy 🔗

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licentious 🔗

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Mnemosyne 🔗

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impious 🔗

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Morini had a nightmare. 🔗

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anodyne 🔗

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The next day was much like the first. 🔗

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“Let’s suppose,” said Mrs. Bubis, “that at this very moment there’s a knock on the door and my old friend the art critic comes in. He sits here on the sofa beside me, and one of you brings out an unsigned drawing and tells us it’s by Grosz and you want to sell it. I look at the drawing and smile and I take out my checkbook and buy it. The art critic looks at the drawing and isn’t depressed and tries to make me reconsider. He thinks it isn’t a Grosz. I think it is. Which of us is right?
“Or let’s tell the story a different way. You,” said Mrs. Bubis, pointing to Espinoza, “present an unsigned drawing and say it’s by Grosz and try to sell it. I don’t laugh, I look at it coldly, I appreciate the line, the control, the satire, but nothing about it tickles me. The art critic examines it carefully and gets depressed, in his normal way, and then and there he makes an offer, an offer that exceeds his savings, and that if accepted will condemn him to endless afternoons of melancholy. I try to change his mind. I tell him the drawing strikes me as suspicious because it doesn’t make me laugh. The critic says finally I’m looking at Grosz like an adult and gives me his congratulations. Which of the two of us is right?” 🔗

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An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.
—Charles Baudelaire 🔗

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exalted 🔗

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tumbledown 🔗

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The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less. 🔗

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symbiosis 🔗

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One morning, after two days of feverish work on the self-portraits, the painter cut off his painting hand. 🔗

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convalescent 🔗

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facsimile 🔗

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pachyderm 🔗

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amniotic 🔗

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misanthropic 🔗

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pedantic 🔗

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stilted 🔗

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brusquely 🔗

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It’s unclear whether Pelletier or Espinoza made the call. In theory, it must have been the one with the strongest sense of loyalty, or of friendship, which amounts to the same thing, but in truth neither Pelletier nor Espinoza had a strong sense of any such virtue. Both of them paid it lip service, of course. But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed in passion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both voted Socialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in the possibility of self-realization. 🔗

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interlocutor 🔗

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lycée 🔗

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“A bastard may have no imagination and then do one imaginative thing when you least expect it 🔗

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catatonic 🔗

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pejorative 🔗

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love me, let me love you, 🔗

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captious 🔗

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concatenation 🔗

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rending 🔗

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circumspectly 🔗

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And then Pelletier began to weep and he watched as what was left of a statue emerged from the bottom of the metallic sea. A formless chunk of stone, gigantic, eroded by time and water, though a hand, a wrist, part of a forearm could still be made out with total clarity. And this statue came out of the sea and rose above the beach and it was horrific and at the same time very beautiful. 🔗

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perfunctory 🔗

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They, afraid of falling in love, or of falling out of love with Norton, turned to whores. 🔗

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provincials 🔗

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languor 🔗

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providential 🔗

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“It’s as if you were giving me a part of you,” said Vanessa.
This remark left Pelletier a bit confused, since in a way it was perfectly true, Archimboldi was by now a part of him, the author belonged to him insofar as Pelletier had, along with a few others, instituted a new reading of the German, a reading that would endure, a reading as ambitious as Archimboldi’s writing, and this reading would keep pace with Archimboldi’s writing for a long time, until the reading was exhausted or until Archimboldi’s writing—the capacity of the Archimboldian oeuvre to spark emotion and revelations—was exhausted (but he didn’t believe that would happen), though in another way it wasn’t true, because sometimes, especially since he and Espinoza had given up their trips to London and stopped seeing Norton, Archimboldi’s work, his novels and stories, that is, seemed completely foreign, a shapeless and mysterious verbal mass, something that appeared and disappeared capriciously, literally a pretext, a false door, a murderer’s alias, a hotel bathtub full of amniotic liquid in which he, Jean-Claude Pelletier, would end up committing suicide for no reason, gratuitously, in bewilderment, just because. 🔗

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Vanessa was perfectly suited to live in the Middle Ages, emotionally as well as physically. For her, the concept of “modern life” was meaningless. She had much more faith in what she could see than in the media. She was mistrustful and brave, although paradoxically her bravery made her trust people—waiters, train conductors, friends in trouble, for example—who almost always let her down or betrayed her trust. These betrayals drove her wild and could lead her into unthinkably violent situations. She held grudges, too, and she boasted of saying things to people’s faces without beating around the bush. She considered herself a free woman and had an answer for everything. Whatever she didn’t understand didn’t interest her. She never thought about the future, even her son’s future, but only the present, a perpetual present. She was pretty but didn’t consider herself pretty. More than half her friends were Moroccan immigrants, but she, who never got around to voting for Le Pen, saw immigration as a danger to France. 🔗

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Everything around them that had stopped and grown creaky and rusted sprang into motion again. The lives of other people grew visible, to a point. Their remorse vanished like laughter on a spring night. 🔗

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Lilliputian 🔗

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interregnum 🔗

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evinced 🔗

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“For the cover,” said Johns. “The drawing is by Hans Wette, a fine painter. And as far as coincidence is concerned, it’s never a question of believing in it or not. The whole world is a coincidence. I had a friend who told me I was wrong to think that way. My friend said the world isn’t a coincidence for someone traveling by rail, even if the train should cross foreign lands, places the traveler will never see again in his life. And it isn’t a coincidence for the person who gets up at six in the morning, exhausted, to go to work; for the person who has no choice but to get up and pile more suffering on the suffering he’s already accumulated. Suffering is accumulated, said my friend, that’s a fact, and the greater the suffering, the smaller the coincidence.” 🔗

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circles that faded like mute explosions. 🔗

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“Coincidence isn’t a luxury, it’s the flip side of fate, and something else besides,” said Johns. 🔗

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Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence, if you’ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us.” 🔗

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presentiment 🔗

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“I’ll tell you why I did it,” said Johns, and for the first time his body relaxed, abandoning its stiff, martial stance, and he bent toward Morini, saying something into his ear. 🔗

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meteroidian 🔗

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“For money,” said Morini.
“Money?”
“Because he believed in investments, the flow of capital, one has to play the game to win, that kind of thing.” 🔗

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forlornness 🔗

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One of these Mexico City friends, said Alatorre, and he said it innocently, with that slight hint of clumsy boasting typical of minor writers, had met Archimboldi just the other day. 🔗

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He wondered how the old man had gotten his phone number, who had given it to him. Simply posing the question, a question to which he didn’t expect an answer, made him happy, filled him with a happiness that somehow vindicated him as a person and a writer. 🔗

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Piranesi 🔗

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munificent 🔗

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“That’s right,” said El Cerdo. “I must have given her my A card. The B card only has my office number. And it’s just my secretary’s number on the C card.”
“I understand,” said Espinoza, mustering patience.
“There’s nothing on the D card, it’s blank, just my name, that’s all,” said El Cerdo, laughing. 🔗

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recognizance 🔗

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baroness 🔗

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retinue 🔗

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situationists 🔗

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Tacitly 🔗

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misanthropic 🔗

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homonymous 🔗

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epistolary 🔗

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Morini might have called Norton, but before his friends set off on their search for Archimboldi, he, in his own way, like Schwob in Samoa, had already begun a voyage, a voyage that would end not at the grave of a brave man but in a kind of resignation, what might be called a new experience, since this wasn’t resignation in any ordinary sense of the word, or even patience or conformity, but rather a state of meekness, a refined and incomprehensible humility that made him cry for no reason and in which his own image, what Morini saw as Morini, gradually and helplessly dissolved, like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, not knowing that it’s burning. 🔗

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virile 🔗

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expectant 🔗

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They were sitting at the hotel bar, next to one of the big windows that overlooked the street. Outside the air had a liquid texture. Black water, jet-black, that made one want to reach out and stroke its back. 🔗

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feigned 🔗

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Before they went back to the hotel they took a drive around the city. It made them laugh it seemed so chaotic. Until then they hadn’t been in good spirits. They had looked at things and listened to the people who could help them, but only as part of a grander scheme. On the ride back to the hotel, they lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although hostile wasn’t the word, an environment whose language they refused to recognize, an environment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldn’t make their presence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless they argued, something they had no intention of doing. 🔗

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The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border. Espinoza and Pelletier saw him as a failed man, failed above all because he had lived and taught in Europe, who tried to protect himself with a veneer of toughness but whose innate gentleness gave him away in the act. But Norton’s impression was of a sad man whose life was ebbing swiftly away and who would rather do anything than serve them as guide to Santa Teresa. 🔗

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the movements of horses and riders—were barely perceptible, as if they were living in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched the painting from losing his mind. 🔗

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brief moans shooting like meteorites over the desert 🔗

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In Norton’s dream she saw herself reflected in both mirrors. 🔗

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grandiloquently 🔗

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“Exile must be a terrible thing,” said Norton sympathetically.
“Actually,” said Amalfitano, “now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate.”
“But exile,” said Pelletier, “is full of inconveniences, of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and interfere with anything you try to do that’s important.”
“That’s just what I mean by abolishing fate,” said Amalfitano. “But again, I beg your pardon.” 🔗

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proscenium 🔗

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They only hear the sounds that come from deep in the mine. And they translate or reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they sense a hurricane, they try to be eloquent where they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there’s only a deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they’re incapable of imagining an animal of colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal. Meanwhile, the stage on which they work is very pretty, very well designed, very charming, but it grows smaller and smaller with the passage of time. 🔗

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Sometimes the performers from the stage where the intellectuals give their talks are invited to perform on the television stage. On this stage the opening of the mine is the same, the perspective slightly altered, although maybe the camouflage is denser and, paradoxically, bespeaks a mysterious sense of humor, but it still stinks. This humorous camouflage, naturally, lends itself to many interpretations, which are finally reduced to two for the public’s convenience or for the convenience of the public’s collective eye. Sometimes intellectuals take up permanent residence on the television proscenium. 🔗

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flagellants 🔗

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with a spindly tree planted every sixty feet, like a bad joke on the part of the mayor or city planner. 🔗

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parquet 🔗

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fatalist 🔗

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lassitude 🔗

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arcaded 🔗

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To the south they discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of the starving to death 🔗

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maquiladoras 🔗

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gully 🔗

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orography 🔗

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socratic 🔗

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deign 🔗

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Upon the appearance of Rector Negrete, who had been shut up in the main house with a man who seemed to be the ranch foreman, they dug up the barbecue, and a smell of meat and hot earth spread over the patio in a thin curtain of smoke that enveloped them all like the fog that drifts before a murder, and vanished mysteriously as the women carried the plates to the table, leaving clothing and skin impregnated with its aroma. 🔗

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coolly 🔗

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That night, maybe because of the barbecue and all they’d had to drink, the three had nightmares, which they couldn’t remember when they woke, no matter how hard they tried. Pelletier dreamed of a page, a page that he tried to read forward and backward, every which way, turning it and sometimes turning his head, faster and faster, unable to decipher it at all. Norton dreamed of a tree, an English oak that she picked up and moved from place to place in the countryside, no spot entirely satisfying her. Sometimes the oak had no roots, other times it trailed long roots like snakes or the locks of a Gorgon. Espinoza dreamed about a girl who sold rugs. He wanted to buy a rug, any rug, and the girl showed him lots of rugs, one after the other, without stopping. Her thin, dark arms were never still and that prevented him from speaking, prevented him from telling her something important, from seizing her by the arm and getting her out of there. 🔗

Together, these dreams encapsulate the characters’ shared sense of displacement and the broader themes of the novel: the inability to find clarity, the search for meaning in a fragmented world, and the human struggle against forces that defy comprehension or control. They also subtly hint at the novel’s overarching concerns with violence, colonialism, and exploitation, as seen in the symbols of incomprehension, uprootedness, and labor.

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Not believing your ears, though, thought Espinoza, is a form of exaggeration. You see something beautiful and you can’t believe your eyes. Someone tells you something about … the natural beauty of Iceland … people bathing in thermal springs, among geysers … in fact you’ve seen it in pictures, but still you say you can’t believe it … Although obviously you believe it … Exaggeration is a form of polite admiration … You set it up so the person you’re talking to can say: it’s true … And then you say: incredible. First you can’t believe it and then you think it’s incredible. 🔗

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lassitude 🔗

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diminutive 🔗

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solicitude 🔗

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More than once I felt the urge to rush to the airport and catch the first plane to Mexico. 🔗

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fervor 🔗

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The guests were waiting for the poet to make his entrance. They were waiting for him to pick a fight. Or to defecate in the middle of the living room, on a Turkish carpet like the threadbare carpet from the Thousand and One Nights, a battered carpet that sometimes functioned as a mirror, reflecting all of us from below. I mean: it turned into a mirror at the command of our spasms. Neurochemical spasms. 🔗

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His poems weren’t bad. His only problem was that he wrote just like the poet. These things can’t have happened to you, I said, you’re too young to have suffered this much. He made a gesture as if to say that he didn’t care whether I believed him or not. What matters is that it’s well written, he said. No, I told him, you know that isn’t what matters. Wrong, wrong, wrong, I said, and finally he had to cede the point. 🔗

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And then she told him what she had really come to say: that she knew he wasn’t gay, she knew he was a prisoner and wanted to escape, she knew that love, no matter how mistreated or mutilated, always left room for hope, and that hope was her plan (or the other way around), and that its materialization, its objectification, consisted of his fleeing the asylum with her and heading for France. 🔗

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mendicants 🔗

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Ariadne 🔗

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ecclesiastical 🔗

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Well, well, well, said the poet. He who laughs last, laughs best, said the poet. The early bird doesn’t always catch the worm, the poet said. 🔗

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Larrazábal said he’d never read a poem. He added that he didn’t understand Lola’s obsession with the poet. I don’t understand your fascination with fucking in the cemetery either, said Lola, but I don’t judge you for it. True, Larrazábal admitted, everyone’s got obsessions. 🔗

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She imagined her stopped at a crossroads as the trucks with their many tons of cargo passed at full speed, raising dust clouds that didn’t touch her, as if her hesitance and vulnerability constituted a state of grace, a dome that protected her from the inclemencies of fate, nature, and her fellow beings. 🔗

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Madness really is contagious, and friends are a blessing, especially when you’re on your own. 🔗

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tremulous 🔗

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osteology 🔗

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For her, those days were like a prolonged parachute landing after a long space flight. 🔗

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I’ll give you everything I’ve got, he answered, but I can’t give you money to go away so I never see you again. 🔗

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he saw Lola’s fingers, Lola’s wrists, Lola’s blank eyes, he saw another Lola reflected in the quicksilver of the window, floating weightless in the skies of Paris, like a trick photograph that isn’t a trick, floating, floating pensively in the skies of Paris, weary, sending messages from the coldest, iciest realm of passion. 🔗

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Clytemnestra 🔗

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Agamemnon 🔗

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Medon 🔗

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Strophius 🔗

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Pylades 🔗

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Orestes 🔗

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It said: “Of the books that make up Dieste’s varied but in no way uneven body of work, which always cleaves to the demands of a personal process in which poetic creation and speculative creation are focused on a single object 🔗

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I wouldn’t remember the Testamento geométrico, but I would remember whatever had made me forget the Testamento geométrico. 🔗

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desultory 🔗

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Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity. 🔗

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readymade 🔗

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Duchamp instructed the couple by letter to hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could “go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.” 🔗

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Duchamp told one interviewer in later years that he had liked disparaging “the seriousness of a book full of principles,” and suggested to another that, in its exposure to the weather, “the treatise seriously got the facts of life.” 🔗

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🔗

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🔗

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Drawing 1

Or like this:
Drawing 2

Or like this:
Drawing 3

When 🔗

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🔗

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🔗

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🔗

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🔗

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ontological 🔗

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🔗

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🔗

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🔗

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occluded 🔗

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as if I were approaching Guyau’s sickbed and asking him for advice. What would his response have been? Be happy. Live in the moment. Be good. Or rather: Who are you? What are you doing here? Go away. 🔗

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Help 🔗

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Why is it there? asked Rosa. It occurred to me all of a sudden, said Amalfitano, it’s a Duchamp idea, leaving a geometry book hanging exposed to the elements to see if it learns something about real life. You’re going to destroy it, said Rosa. Not me, said Amalfitano, nature. You’re getting crazier every day, you know, said Rosa. Amalfitano smiled. 🔗

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I have to go back now, he said to himself, but where? And then he asked himself: what made me come here? Why did I bring my daughter to this cursed city? Because it was one of the few hellholes in the world I hadn’t seen yet? Because I really just want to die? And then he looked at Dieste’s book, the Testamento geométrico, hanging impassively from the line, held there by two clothespins, and he felt the urge to take it down and wipe off the ocher dust that had begun to cling to it here and there, but he didn’t dare. 🔗

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Italians were brave individually. In large numbers, he admitted, they were hopeless. And this, he explained, was precisely what gave a person hope. 🔗

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ex-votos 🔗

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At that same moment the Santa Teresa police found the body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the neighborhoods on the edge of the city, and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano’s shirts and pants and slipping into his daughter’s underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geométrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind. 🔗

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The voice said: I beg you to forgive me. I beg you to relax. I beg you not to consider this a violation of your freedom. Of my freedom? thought Amalfitano 🔗

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Amalfitano felt tired and overwhelmed by the landscape, a landscape that seemed best suited to the young or the old, imbecilic or insensitive or evil and old who meant to impose impossible tasks on themselves and others until they breathed their last. 🔗

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something the voice in the dream called “history broken down” or “history taken apart and put back together,” although clearly the reassembled history became something else, a scribble in the margin, a clever footnote, a laugh slow to fade that leaped from an andesite rock to a rhyolite and then a tufa, and from that collection of prehistoric rocks there arose a kind of quicksilver, the American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain. 🔗

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the red and black dusk, like a thick chili whose last simmer was fading in the west. 🔗

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Pico della Mirandola Hobbes Boecio Husserl Locke Alexander of Hales Eugen Fink Erich Becher Marx Merleau-Ponty Wittgenstein Lichtenberg Bede Llull Sade St. Bonaventure Hegel Condorcet John Philoponus Pascal Fourier Saint Augustine Canetti Lacan Schopenhauer Freud Lessing 🔗

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truism 🔗

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Ethics lets us down? The sense of duty lets us down? Honesty lets us down? Curiosity lets us down? Love lets us down? Bravery lets us down? Art lets us down? That’s right, said the voice, everything lets us down, everything. Or lets you down, which isn’t the same thing but for our purposes it might as well be, except calm, calm is the one thing that never lets us down, though that’s no guarantee of anything, I have to tell you. You’re wrong, said Amalfitano, bravery never lets us down. And neither does our love for our children. Oh no? said the voice. No, said Amalfitano, suddenly feeling calm. 🔗

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Call me pops, said the voice. So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end. 🔗

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sinew 🔗

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Wittgenstein 🔗

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Everything is fine, said the voice. It’s all a question of getting used to it. Without making a fuss. Without sweating and flailing around. 🔗

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My excitement and my happiness are growing under the wing of a storm, he said to himself. I may be going crazy, but I feel good, he said to himself. 🔗

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impunity 🔗

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The marriage was celebrated according to Admapu law, with the traditional Gapitun (abduction ceremony). 🔗

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aegis 🔗

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Well, said Marco Antonio Guerra, if you want to know what I think, I don’t believe it. People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath. I’m telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest thing there is to a rat. 🔗

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unwonted 🔗

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norteño 🔗

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Primitive man was ignorant of language; he communicated by brainwaves, as animals and plants do. When he resorted to sounds and gestures and hand signals to communicate, he began to lose the gift of telepathy, and this loss was accelerated when he went to live in cities, distancing himself from nature. 🔗

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apropos 🔗

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cherubim 🔗

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cretinous 🔗

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But I pretend that’s what I am. An arrogant little faggot with money who looks down on everyone. And then the inevitable happens. Two or three vultures ask me to step outside. And then the shit kicking begins. I know it and I don’t care. Sometimes they’re the ones who get the worst of it, especially when I have my gun. Other times it’s me. I don’t give a fuck. I need the fucking release. 🔗

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Only poetry—and let me be clear, only some of it—is good for you, only poetry isn’t shit. 🔗

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Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench. 🔗

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Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that’s what it all boils down to, but that’s no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it’s also sex and Dionysian mists and play. 🔗

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“I think it’s time for a little drink.” 🔗

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3THE PART ABOUT FATE 🔗

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2THE PART ABOUT AMALFITANO 🔗

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1THE PART ABOUT THE CRITICS 🔗

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When did it all begin? he thought. When did I go under? A dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake. The nightmare. How do I get away? How do I take control? And the questions kept coming: Was getting away what he really wanted? Did he really want to leave it all behind? And he also thought: the pain doesn’t matter anymore. And also: maybe it all began with my mother’s death. And also: the pain doesn’t matter, as long as it doesn’t get any worse, as long as it isn’t unbearable. And also: fuck, it hurts, fuck, it hurts. Pay it no mind, pay it no mind. And all around him, ghosts. 🔗

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When he woke up he thought he’d dreamed about a movie he’d seen the other day. But everything was different. The characters were black, so the movie in the dream was like a negative of the real movie. And different things happened, too. The plot was the same, what happened was the same, but the ending was different or at some moment things took an unexpected turn and became something completely different. Most terrible of all, though, was that as he was dreaming he knew it didn’t necessarily have to be that way, he noticed the resemblance to the movie, he thought he understood that both were based on the same premise, and that if the movie he’d seen was the real movie, then the other one, the one he had dreamed, might be a reasoned response, a reasoned critique, and not necessarily a nightmare. All criticism is ultimately a nightmare, he thought as he washed his face in the apartment where his mother’s body no longer was. 🔗

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Then he opened the door and went out. He looked back into the restaurant, but with the glass in between everything was different. 🔗

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Instead of ghosts, now the passengers in front of him were talking about a person they called Bobby. This Bobby lived in Jackson Tree, Michigan, and had a cabin on Lake Huron. One time this Bobby had gone out in a boat and capsized. He managed to cling to a log that was floating nearby and waited for morning. But as night went on, the water kept getting colder and Bobby was freezing and started to lose his strength. He felt weaker and weaker, and even though he did his best to tie himself to the log with his belt, he couldn’t no matter how hard he tried. It may sound easy, but in real life it’s hard to tie your own body to a floating log. So he gave up hope, turned his thoughts to his loved ones (here they mentioned someone called Jig, which might have been the name of a friend or a dog or a pet frog he had), and clung to the branch as tightly as he could. Then he saw a light in the sky. He thought it was a helicopter coming to find him, which was foolish, and he started to shout. But then it occurred to him that helicopters clatter and the light he saw wasn’t clattering. A few seconds later he realized it was an airplane. A great big plane about to crash right where he was floating, clinging to that log. Suddenly all his tiredness vanished. He saw the plane pass just overhead. It was in flames. Maybe a thousand feet from where he was, the plane plunged into the lake. He heard two explosions, possibly more. He felt the urge to get closer to the site of the disaster and that’s what he did, very slowly, because it was hard to steer the log. The plane had split in half and only one part was still floating. Before Bobby got there he watched it sinking slowly down into the waters of the lake, which had gone dark again. A little while later the rescue helicopters arrived. The only person they found was Bobby and they felt cheated when he told them he hadn’t been on the plane, that he’d capsized his boat when he was fishing. Still, he was famous for a while, said the person telling the story. 🔗

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On the side of a neighboring building he saw a mural that struck him as odd. It was circular, like a clock, and where the numbers should have been there were scenes of people working in the factories of Detroit. Twelve scenes representing twelve stages in the production chain. In each scene, there was one recurring character: a black teenager, or a long-limbed, scrawny black man-child, or a man clinging to childhood, dressed in clothes that changed from scene to scene but that were invariably too small for him. He had apparently been assigned the role of clown, intended to make people laugh, although a closer look made it clear that he wasn’t there only to make people laugh. The mural looked like the work of a lunatic. The last painting of a lunatic. In the middle of the clock, where all the scenes converged, there was a word painted in letters that looked like they were made of gelatin: fear. 🔗

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noncommittally 🔗

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They fixed the fight. The promoter told me to go down in the fifth. And to let myself get knocked around some in the fourth. For that, they’d give me double what they’d promised, which wasn’t much. I told Bird about it that night, eating supper. It don’t matter none to me, he said. I don’t give a damn. The problem is, most times these people don’t pay their bills. So it’s up to you. 🔗

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Seaman said he didn’t like rap because the only out it offered was suicide. But not even meaningful suicide. I know, I know, he said. It’s hard to imagine meaningful suicide. It isn’t a common thing. Although I’ve seen or been near two meaningful suicides. At least I think I have. I could be wrong, he said.
“How does rap lead to suicide?” asked Fate. 🔗

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I’m going to address five subjects, said Seaman, no more and no less. The first subject is DANGER. The second, MONEY. The third, FOOD. The fourth, STARS. The fifth and last, USEFULNESS. 🔗

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He’s standing at a lookout point, looking away. It’s winter, off-season. The Panthers are young, none of us even twenty-five. We’re all armed, but we’ve left our weapons in the car, and you can see the deep dissatisfaction on our faces. The sea roars. Then I go up to Marius and I say let’s get out of here now. And at that moment Marius turns and he looks at me. He’s smiling. He’s beyond it all. And he waves his hand toward the sea, because he’s incapable of expressing what he feels in words. And then I’m afraid, even though it’s my brother there beside me, and I think: the danger is the sea. 🔗

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The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with newfound riches. We have to give it our all. We have to squeeze water from the rocks, and from the desert too. But we can never forget that money remains a problem to be solved 🔗

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Ribs were not the answer. You have to change. You have to turn yourself around and change. You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for. 🔗

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Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80, on the way from Des Moines to Lincoln, would live for probably millions of years. Either that or it might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn’t matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn’t know whether what he’s staring up at in the vast night are stars or whether they’re dreams. In a way, he said, the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave. 🔗

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Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. 🔗

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Now, as we know, our worst enemy might be hiding behind a smile. Or to put it another way, we don’t trust anybody, least of all people who smile, since we know they want something from us. 🔗

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Useless things are forced upon us, and it isn’t because they improve our quality of life but because they’re the fashion or markers of class, and fashionable people and high-class people require admiration and worship. Naturally, fashions don’t last, one year, four at most, and then they pass through every stage of decay. But markers of class rot only when the corpse that was tagged with them rots. 🔗

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Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach. 🔗

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Scottsboro trials 🔗

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“We’ve gotten used to death,” he heard the young man say.
“It’s always been that way,” said the white-haired man, “always.” 🔗

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Everything was passed through the filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear. What does a child do when he’s afraid? He closes his eyes. What does a child do when he’s about to be raped and murdered? He closes his eyes. And he screams, too, but first he closes his eyes. Words served that purpose. And the funny thing is, the archetypes of human madness and cruelty weren’t invented by the men of our day but by our forebears. 🔗

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Everything changes, you say. Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes. 🔗

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In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. 🔗

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the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren’t part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn’t tell you. 🔗

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ineffable 🔗

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“The offices are empty,” she said.
She had a hoarse, nasal voice and she didn’t talk like a New York secretary but like a country person who has just come from the cemetery. This woman has firsthand knowledge of the planet of the dead, thought Fate, and she doesn’t know what she’s saying anymore. 🔗

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Here not only the weeds were different but even the flies seemed to belong to a different species. 🔗

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deigning 🔗

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Fate imagined the masseur reading in a dark room and a shudder passed through him. It must be something like happiness, he thought. 🔗

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Then he went out with his beer and hot dog. As he waited by the highway for three trucks to go by on their way from Santa Teresa to Arizona, he remembered what he’d said to the cashier. I’m American. Why didn’t I say I was African American? Because I’m in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn’t even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I’m American and in some places I’m African American and in other places, by logical extension, I’m nobody? 🔗

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Her face, however, was always in shadows, as if in some way she were already dead or as if she were telling him, in actions instead of words, that faces weren’t important in this life or the next. 🔗

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“Every so often the numbers go up and it’s news again and the reporters talk about it. People talk about it too, and the story grows like a snowball until the sun comes out and the whole damn ball melts and everybody forgets about it and goes back to work.”
“They go back to work?” asked Fate.
“The fucking killings are like a strike, amigo, a brutal fucking strike.” 🔗

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Morphology 🔗

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amorphous 🔗

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mestizos 🔗

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monograph 🔗

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Those Spaniards believed in a mongrel whiteness. But they overestimated their semen and that was their mistake. You just can’t rape that many people. It’s mathematically impossible. It’s too hard on the body. You get tired. Plus, they were raping from the bottom up, when what would’ve made more sense would be raping from the top down. They might have gotten some results if they’d been capable of raping their own mongrel children and then their mongrel grandchildren and even their bastard great-grandchildren. But who’s going to go out raping people when you’re seventy and you can hardly stand on your own two feet? 🔗

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penitence 🔗

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climacteric 🔗

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flacking 🔗

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Why were you carrying a poster of bin Laden? asked Fate. Because Osama bin Laden was the first to understand the nature of the fight we face today. Then they talked about bin Laden’s innocence and Pearl Harbor and about how convenient the attack on the Twin Towers had been for some people. Stockbrokers, said Khalil, people with incriminating papers hidden in their offices, people who sell arms and needed something like that to happen. 🔗

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Before he left, Fate told them that they would probably never be forgiven for having marched under the effigy of Osama bin Laden. Ibrahim and Khalil laughed. He thought they looked like two black stones quaking with laughter.
“They’ll probably never forget it,” said Ibrahim.
“Now they know who they’re dealing with,” said Khalil. 🔗

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“What makes them interesting to us?” asked his editor.
“Stupidity,” said Fate. “The endless variety of ways we destroy ourselves.” 🔗

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“It’s like a dream,” said Guadalupe Roncal. “It looks like something alive.”
“Alive?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. More alive than an apartment building, for example. Much more alive. Don’t be shocked by what I’m about to say, but it looks like a woman who’s been hacked to pieces. Who’s been hacked to pieces but is still alive. And the prisoners are living inside this woman.”
“I understand,” said Fate.
“No, I don’t think you do, 🔗

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He has the face of a dreamer, but of a dreamer who’s dreaming at great speed. A dreamer whose dreams are far out ahead of our dreams. And that scares me. Do you understand?”
“I can’t say I do,” 🔗

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busy washing the dishes she had just used and the pot she had just used and the fork and spoon she had just used, peaceful in a way that seemed to go beyond simple peacefulness, thought Fate, or maybe not, maybe her peacefulness was just peacefulness and a hint of weariness, peacefulness and banked embers, peacefulness and tranquillity and sleepiness, which is ultimately (sleepiness, that is) the wellspring and also the last refuge of peacefulness. But then peacefulness isn’t just peacefulness, thought Fate. Or what we think of as peacefulness is wrong and peacefulness or the realms of peacefulness are really no more than a gauge of movement, an accelerator or a brake, depending. 🔗

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Omar Abdul smiled. A cocky, teasing smile. A Cheshire cat smile, as if instead of being perched on a tree branch, the Cheshire cat were out in an open field in a storm. The smile of a young black man, thought Fate, but also a very American smile. 🔗

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The tone, he thought, was solemn and defiant, the battle hymn of a lost war sung in the dark. In the solemnity there was only desperation and death, but in the defiance there was a hint of corrosive humor, a humor that existed only in relation to itself and in dreams, no matter whether the dreams were long or short. Sonoran jazz. 🔗

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Rosa Amalfitano lifted a paper cup, probably full of water or vodka or tequila. Fate thought about asking her which it was, but right away he realized it was a bad idea. You didn’t ask women like Rosa Amalfitano that kind of question. Chucho Flores and Corona were the only two members of the group still standing, as if they hadn’t yet lost hope of seeing the missing girl appear. Rosa Méndez asked him whether he liked Santa Teresa a lot or too much. Rosa Amalfitano translated. Fate didn’t understand the question. Rosa Amalfitano smiled. Fate thought she smiled like a goddess. The beer tasted worse than before, bitter and warm. He was tempted to ask to take a sip from her cup, but that, he knew, was something he’d never do. 🔗

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But instead Fate followed the convoy of cars driving around and around an alien city, with the faint suspicion that the only object of all that driving was to wear him down and get rid of him, although they’d been the ones to ask him along, they’d been the ones who’d said come eat with us and then you can leave for the United States, a last supper in Mexico, speaking without conviction or sincerity, trapped by the formulas of hospitality, a Mexican rite, to which he should have responded by thanking them (effusively!) and then driving away down a nearly empty street with his dignity intact. 🔗

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Why am I here, eating tacos and drinking beer with some Mexicans I hardly know? thought Fate. The answer, he knew, was simple. I’m here for her. 🔗

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And there’s no sense of the abyss anymore, there’s no vertigo before the movie begins, no one feels alone inside a multiplex. Then, Fate remembered, he began to talk about the end of the sacred. 🔗

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Do I know anything about innocence or pain? 🔗

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What’s sacred to me? thought Fate. The vague pain I feel at the passing of my mother? An understanding of what can’t be fixed? Or the kind of pang in the stomach I feel when I look at this woman? And why do I feel a pang, if that’s what it is, when she looks at me and not when her friend looks at me? 🔗

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Do I see the sacred anywhere? All I register is practical experiences, thought Fate. An emptiness to be filled, a hunger to be satisfied, people to talk to so I can finish my article and get paid. And why do I think the men Rosa Amalfitano is out with are peculiar? What’s peculiar about them? And why am I so sure that if a Hollywood actress appeared all of a sudden Rosa Amalfitano’s beauty would fade? What if it didn’t? What if it sped up? And what if everything began to accelerate from the instant a Hollywood actress crossed the threshold of El Rey del Taco? 🔗

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Fate thought about Spain. He was going to ask her what part of Spain she was from when he saw a man hit a woman in a corner of the room. 🔗

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In Charly Cruz’s garage there was a mural painted on one of the cement walls. The mural was six feet tall and maybe ten feet long and showed the Virgin of Guadalupe in the middle of a lush landscape of rivers and forests and gold mines and silver mines and oil rigs and giant cornfields and wheat fields and vast meadows where cattle grazed. The Virgin had her arms spread wide, as if offering all of these riches in exchange for nothing. But despite being drunk, Fate noticed right away there was something wrong about her face. One of the Virgin’s eyes was open and the other eye was closed. 🔗

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The face of the old whore, who smiles at the camera now as if to say: did I do it right? did I look good? is everybody happy? A redbrick staircase comes into view. A linoleum floor. The same rain, but filmed from inside a room. A plastic table with nicked edges. Glasses and a jar of Nescafé. A frying pan with the remains of scrambled eggs. A hallway. The body of a half-dressed woman sprawled on the floor. A door. A room in complete disarray. Two men sleeping in the same bed. A mirror. The camera zooms in on the mirror. The tape ends. 🔗

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Fate held out his hand to the girl. Rosa got up and took it. Her hand felt warm, its temperature evoking other scenarios but also evoking or encompassing their current sordid circumstances. When he took it he became conscious of the coldness of his own hand. I’ve been dying all this time, he thought. I’m as cold as ice. If she hadn’t taken my hand I would’ve died right here and they would’ve had to send my body back to New York. 🔗

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“So fucking a policeman is like being fucked by a mountain and fucking a narco is like being fucked by the air.”
“Yes,” said Rosa Méndez, “but not the air we breathe or the air we feel when we go outside, but the desert air, a blast of air, air that doesn’t taste the same as the air here and doesn’t smell like nature or the country, air that smells the way it smells, that has its own smell, a smell you can’t explain, it’s just air, pure air, so much air that sometimes it’s hard to breathe and you feel like you’re going to suffocate.”
“So,” concluded Rosa Amalfitano, “if a policeman fucks you it’s like being fucked by a mountain inside the mountain itself, and if a narco fucks you it’s like being fucked by the desert air.”
“That’s right, mana, if a narco fucks you it’s always out in the open.” 🔗

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paean 🔗

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bucolic 🔗

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deference 🔗

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“Dump him,” said Óscar Amalfitano.
“Oh, Dad, you just keep getting crazier,” said Rosa.
“It’s true,” said Óscar Amalfitano.
“So what are we going to do? What can we do?”
“You: leave that ignorant, lying piece of shit. Me: I don’t know, maybe when we get back to Europe I’ll check into the Clínico for an electroshock treatment.” 🔗

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in Rosa’s memory the conversation between her father and Charly began to take on sharper outlines, as if time, in the classic embodiment of an old man, were blowing incessantly on a flat gray stone covered in dust, until the black grooves of the letters carved into the stone were perfectly legible. 🔗

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“Well, there was a little old drunk, laughing. That was the picture on one side of the disk. And on the other side was a picture of a prison cell, or the bars of a cell. When you spun the disk the laughing drunk looked like he was behind bars.”
“Which isn’t really a laughing matter, is it?” said Óscar Amalfitano.
“No, it isn’t,” said Charly Cruz with a sigh.
“Still, the drunk (by the way, why do you call him a little old drunk and not just a drunk?) was laughing, maybe because he knew he wasn’t in jail.” 🔗

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“The little old drunk is laughing because he thinks he’s free, but he’s really in prison,” said Óscar Amalfitano, “that’s what makes it funny, but in fact the prison is drawn on the other side of the disk, which means one could also say that the little old drunk is laughing because we think he’s in prison, not realizing that the prison is on one side and the little old drunk is on the other, and that’s reality, no matter how much we spin the disk and it looks to us as if the little old drunk is behind bars. In fact, we could even guess what the little old drunk is laughing about: he’s laughing at our credulity, you might even say at our eyes.” 🔗

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“Did you stay for me?” asked Rosa.
“I don’t know,” said Fate.
They both yawned.
“Have you fallen in love with me?” asked Rosa with disarming naturalness.
“Maybe,” said Fate. 🔗

id822243479

“Did you stay for me?” asked Rosa.
“I don’t know,” said Fate.
They both yawned.
“Have you fallen in love with me?” asked Rosa with disarming naturalness.
“Maybe,” said Fate. 🔗

id822243559

The card for the Santa Teresa cybercafé was a deep red, so red that it was hard to read what was printed on it. On the back, in a lighter red, was a map that showed exactly where the café was located. He asked the receptionist to translate the name of the place. The clerk laughed and said it was called Fire, Walk With Me.
“It sounds like the title of a David Lynch film,” said Fate.
The clerk shrugged and said that all of Mexico was a collage of diverse and wide-ranging homages.
“Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even the things that haven’t happened yet,” he said. 🔗

id822244914

oneiric 🔗

id822246068

pall 🔗

id822246238

Fate remembered the words of Guadalupe Roncal. No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them. Did Guadalupe Roncal say that, or was it Rosa? At moments, the highway was like a river. The suspected killer said it, thought Fate. The giant fucking albino who appeared along with the black cloud. 🔗

id822246282

polyglot 🔗

id822246297

I’m a giant lost in the middle of a charred forest. And yet only I know where I’m going, only I know my destiny. 🔗

id822246447

id823166271

sexton 🔗

id823197738

sacraphobic 🔗

id824129405

ostensible 🔗

id824130207

Sergio González asked one girl he ended up with whether she liked to dance, and she said she liked it more than anything in the world. The answer struck him as illuminating, though he couldn’t say why, and also devastatingly sad. 🔗

id824130514

Sacraphobia, said the inspector. And what’s that? asked González. Fear and hatred of sacred objects, said the inspector. According to him, the Penitent didn’t desecrate churches with the premeditated intent to kill. The deaths were accidental. The Penitent just wanted to vent his rage on the images of the saints. 🔗

id824130671

litany 🔗

id824186496

gephyrophobia 🔗

id824186547

peccatophobia, fear of committing sins. 🔗

id824186560

verbophobia, fear of words. Which must mean it’s best not to speak, said Juan de Dios Martínez. There’s more to it than that, because words are everywhere, even in silence, which is never complete silence, is it? 🔗

id824186592

Then there are two fears that are really very romantic: ombrophobia and thalassophobia, or fear of rain and fear of the sea. And two others with a touch of the romantic: anthophobia, or fear of flowers, and dendrophobia, fear of trees. 🔗

id824186616

Or gynophobia, which is fear of women, and naturally afflicts only men. Very widespread in Mexico, although it manifests itself in different ways. Isn’t that a slight exaggeration? Not a bit: almost all Mexican men are afraid of women. 🔗

id824186641

tropophobia, or the fear of making changes or moving. 🔗

id824186648

anthrophobia, or fear of people. 🔗

id824186675

But the worst phobias, in my opinion, are pantophobia, which is fear of everything, and phobophobia, fear of fear itself. If you had to suffer from one of the two, which would you choose? Phobophobia, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Think carefully, it has its drawbacks, said the director. Between being afraid of everything and being afraid of my own fear, I’d take the latter. Don’t forget I’m a policeman and if I was scared of everything I couldn’t work. But if you’re afraid of your own fears, you’re forced to live in constant contemplation of them, and if they materialize, what you have is a system that feeds on itself, a vicious cycle, said the director. 🔗

id824186807

Fifteen days later they would see each other again and everything would be just as it had been the time before. Of course, there wasn’t always a party at a house nearby and sometimes the director couldn’t or didn’t want to drink, but the dim light was always the same, the shower was always repeated, the sunsets and the mountains never changed, the stars were the same stars. 🔗

id824187665

Behind him rose a giant plume of dust, like the tail of a hallucinogenic coyote. 🔗

id824189161

A Salvadorean immigrant found the body behind the Francisco I School, on Madero, near Colonia Álamos. It was fully dressed, and the clothes, except for the shirt, which was missing several buttons, were intact. The Salvadorean was accused of the homicide and spent two weeks in the cells of Police Precinct #3, at the end of which he was released. When he got out he was a broken man. A little later he crossed the border with a pollero. In Arizona he got lost in the desert and after walking for three days, he made it to Patagonia, badly dehydrated, where a rancher beat him up for vomiting on his land. He was picked up by the sheriff and spent a day in jail and then he was sent to a hospital, where the only thing left for him to do was die in peace, which he did. 🔗

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Then Lalo Cura turned and saw the figures of his two ex-partners in the distance. He aimed carefully and fired. The man from Juárez realized they were being shot at and ran faster. At the first corner they disappeared. 🔗

id824191710

circumspect 🔗

id824191770

vivacity 🔗

id824191778

the days were long, slow, and the world (perceived as an endless shipwreck) showed her its brightest face and made her aware, as a matter of course, of the brightness of her own. 🔗

id824191828

insolent 🔗

id824192073

tenement 🔗

id824192107

arcades 🔗

id824514234

I think nothing ever disappears, said the Mexican. There are people, and animals, too, and even objects, that for one reason or another sometimes seem to want to disappear, to vanish. Whether you believe it or not, Harry, sometimes a stone wants to vanish, I’ve seen it. But God won’t let it happen. He won’t let it happen because He can’t. Do you believe in God, Harry? Yes, Señor Demetrio, said Harry Magaña. Well, then, trust in God, He won’t let anything disappear. 🔗

id824520360

assiduously 🔗

id824522425

The perfect happiness, goddamn it, thought Juan de Dios Martínez. But Elvira Campos wouldn’t even hear of a public relationship. Phone calls to the psychiatric center, yes, so long as they were short. Meetings in person every two weeks. A glass of whiskey or Absolut vodka and nocturnal landscapes. Sterile goodbyes. 🔗

id824523594

seer 🔗

id824546437

botanomancy, or the art of predicting the future through plants, 🔗

id824546821

Every hundred feet the world changes, said Florita Almada. The idea that some places are the same as others is a lie. The world is a kind of tremor. 🔗

id824547637

Inside that book with a yellow cover everything was expressed so clearly that sometimes Florita Almada thought the author must have been a friend of Benito Juárez and that Benito Juárez had confided all his childhood experiences in the man’s ear. If such a thing were possible. If it were possible to convey what one feels when night falls and the stars come out and one is alone in the vastness, and life’s truths (night truths) begin to march past one by one, somehow swooning or as if the person out in the open were swooning or as if a strange sickness were circulating in the blood unnoticed. What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? asks the little shepherd in the poem. What are you doing, tell me, silent moon? Aren’t you tired of plying the eternal byways? The shepherd’s life is like your life. He rises at first light and moves his flock across the field. Then, weary, he rests at evening and hopes for nothing more. What good is the shepherd’s life to him or yours to you? Tell me, the shepherd muses, said Florita Almada in a transported voice, where is it heading, my brief wandering, your immortal journey? Man is born into pain, and being born itself means risking death, said the poem. And also: But why bring to light, why educate someone we’ll console for living later? And also: If life is misery, why do we endure it? And also: This, unblemished moon, is the mortal condition. But you’re not mortal, and what I say may matter little to you. And also, and on the contrary: You, eternal solitary wanderer, you who are so pensive, it may be you understand this life on earth, what our suffering and sighing is, what this death is, this last paling of the face, and leaving Earth behind, abandoning all familiar, loving company. And also: What does the endless air do, and that deep eternal blue? What does this enormous solitude portend? And what am I? And also: This is what I know and feel: that from the eternal motions, from my fragile being, others may derive some good or happiness. And also: But life for me is wrong. And also: Old, white haired, weak, barefoot, bearing an enormous burden, up mountain and down valley, over sharp rocks, across deep sands and bracken, through wind and storm, when it’s hot and later when it freezes, running on, running faster, crossing rivers, swamps, falling and rising and hurrying faster, no rest or relief, battered and bloody, at last coming to where the way and all effort has led: terrible, immense abyss into which, upon falling, all is forgotten. And also: This, O virgin moon, is human life. And also: O resting flock, who don’t, I think, know your own misery! How I envy you! Not just because you travel as if trouble free and soon forget each need, each hurt, each deathly fear, but more because you’re never bored. And also: When you lie in the shade, on the grass, you’re calm and happy, and you spend the great part of the year this way and feel no boredom. And also: I sit on the grass, too, in the shade, but an anxiousness invades my mind as if a thorn is pricking me. And also: Yet I desire nothing, and till now I have no reason for complaint. And at this point, after sighing deeply, Florita Almada would say that several conclusions could be drawn: (1) that the thoughts that seize a shepherd can easily gallop away with him because it’s human nature; (2) that facing boredom head-on was an act of bravery and Benito Juárez had done it and she had done it too and both had seen terrible things in the face of boredom, things she would rather not recall; (3) that the poem, now she remembered, was about an Asian shepherd, not a Mexican shepherd, but it made no difference, since shepherds are the same everywhere; (4) that if it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion. And that was what she did, listen and talk 🔗

id824547862

penitents 🔗

id824548202

autodidact 🔗

id824548249

Deep inside, all of us ventriloquists, one way or another, know that once the bastards reach a certain level of animation, they come to life. They suck life from the performances. They suck it from the ventriloquist’s capillaries. They suck it from the applause. And especially from the gullibility of the audience! Isn’t that right, Andresito? Yes, sir. And are you good or are you sometimes an evil little bastard, Andresito? Good, very good, very very good. And you’ve never tried to kill me, Andresito? Never, never, never! 🔗

id824548314

surreptitious 🔗

id824548829

The silence must be broken, friends. José Andrés Briceño is a good man and a wise man and he won’t let so many killers go unpunished. Such terrible apathy and such terrible darkness. Then, in a little girl’s voice, she said: some are driven away in black cars, but they kill them anywhere. Then she said, in a normal voice: can’t they at least leave the virgins in peace? A moment later, she leaped from her chair, perfectly captured by the cameras of Sonora TV’s Studio 1, and dropped to the floor as if felled by a bullet. Reinaldo and the ventriloquist hurried to her aid, but when they tried to help her up, each taking an arm, Florita roared (never in his life had Reinaldo seen her like this, a real fury): don’t touch me, you coldhearted wretches! Don’t worry about me! Haven’t you understood what I’ve said? Then she got up, turned toward the audience, went to Reinaldo and asked him what had happened, and a moment later she apologized, gazing straight into the camera. 🔗

id824580732

presentiment 🔗

id824580762

excrescences 🔗

id824581238

Things aren’t the way they seem, whispered Ramírez. Do you think things are the way they seem, as simple as that, no complicating factors, no questions asked? No, said Harry Magaña, it’s always important to ask questions. Correct, said the Tijuana cop. It’s always important to ask questions, and it’s important to ask yourself why you ask the questions you ask. And do you know why? Because just one slip and our questions take us places we don’t want to go. Do you see what I’m getting at, Harry? Our questions are, by definition, suspect. But we have to ask them. And that’s the most fucked-up thing of all. That’s life, said Harry Magaña. 🔗

id824582625

He got on a chair and dug with the knife until plaster fell to the floor. He made the hole bigger and stuck in his hand. He found a plastic bag with ten thousand dollars and a notebook inside. He put the money in his pocket and began to leaf through the notebook. There were phone numbers without name or label, seemingly set down at random. 🔗

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fatalism 🔗

id824586925

frivolity 🔗

id824587029

And then she said: I’m talking about visions that would take away the breath of the bravest of brave men. In dreams I see the crimes and it’s as if a television set had exploded and I keep seeing, in the little shards of screen scattered around my bedroom, horrible scenes, endless tears. 🔗

id824588179

decumbent 🔗

id824588559

pestilential 🔗

id824588660

Sometimes, he thought, being an arts reporter in Mexico was the same as reporting on crime. And being on the police beat was the same as working for the arts page, although in the minds of the crime reporters, all the arts reporters were faggots (assthetes, they called them), and in the minds of the arts reporters, all the crime reporters were scum. 🔗

id824588700

louche 🔗

id824601474

If he opened his eyes, though, and gazed at the real world and tried to control his own jitters, everything stayed more or less in place. 🔗

id825000424

calumny 🔗

id825000478

porcine 🔗

id825017063

It’s like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious. Suddenly someone dreams it and after a while half the prisoners dream it. But the noise you hear isn’t part of the dream, it’s real. The noise belongs to a separate order of things. Do you understand? First someone and then everyone hears a noise in a dream, but the noise is from real life, not the dream. The noise is real. Do you understand? 🔗

id825019690

esplanade 🔗

id825020475

paramour 🔗

id825021772

obelisk 🔗

id825021925

verisimilitude 🔗

id825022640

impunity 🔗

id825023390

incontrovertible 🔗

id825024184

That same night, in bed in his cell, Haas said: the killer is on the outside and I’m on the inside. But someone worse than me and worse than the killer is coming to this motherfucking city. Do you hear his footsteps getting closer? Do you hear them? 🔗

id825463450

modicum 🔗

id825463553

aspersions 🔗

id825496284

auricle 🔗

id825500702

They moved like commandos lost on a toxic island on another planet. 🔗

id825500730

tacitly 🔗

id825500792

harangued 🔗

id825504924

That was all the money she had. Despondent, she went back to her house, to the other neighbor woman and the girls, and for a while the four of them experienced what it was like to be in purgatory, a long, helpless wait, a wait that begins and ends in neglect, a very Latin American experience, as it happened, and all too familiar, something that once you thought about it you realized you experienced daily, minus the despair, minus the shadow of death sweeping over the neighborhood like a flock of vultures and casting its pall, upsetting all routines, leaving everything overturned. 🔗

id825507828

It’s an odd thing, Juan de Dios said to himself. The bodies are there and you shake. Then they take the bodies away and you stop shaking. 🔗

id825875808

For many days Juan de Dios Martínez thought about the four heart attacks Herminia Noriega had suffered before she died. Sometimes he thought about it while he was eating or while he was urinating in the men’s room at a coffee shop or one of the inspector’s regular lunch spots, or before he went to sleep, just at the moment he turned off the light, or maybe seconds before he turned off the light, and when that happened he simply couldn’t turn off the light and then he got out of bed and went over to the window and looked out at the street, an ordinary, ugly, silent, dimly lit street, and then he went into the kitchen and put water on to boil and made himself coffee, and sometimes, as he drank the hot coffee with no sugar, shitty coffee, he turned on the TV and watched late-night shows broadcast across the desert from the four cardinal points, at that late hour he could get Mexican channels and American channels, channels with crippled madmen who galloped under the stars and uttered unintelligible greetings, in Spanish or English or Spanglish, every last fucking word unintelligible, and then Juan de Dios Martínez set his coffee cup on the table and covered his face with his hands and a faint and precise sob escaped his lips, as if he were weeping or trying to weep, but when finally he removed his hands, all that appeared, lit by the TV screen, was his old face, his old skin, stripped and dry, and not the slightest trace of a tear. 🔗

id825875988

surreptitiously 🔗

id825876180

regaled 🔗

id825881343

in Mexico we don’t know how to be good sports. Of course, if you lose you die and if you win sometimes you die too, which makes it hard to keep up a sporting attitude, but still, the general reflected, some of us try to fight the good fight. 🔗

id825881347

January 1997, five members of the Los 🔗
4THE PART ABOUT THE CRIMES 🔗

id826221631

Epstein, who returned to the United States, tried to exploit the gruesome element, but a TV commentator demonstrated, frame by frame, that the purportedly real crime had been faked. The actress, concluded the critic, deserved to die for her poor acting, but the truth is, in this film at least, no one had the good sense to do away with her. 🔗

id826223652

Anthropometric 🔗

id826226595

hypovolemic 🔗

id826227820

calamitous 🔗

id826228859

Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn’t read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don’t believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? 🔗

id826230135

the streets swallowed it up like a commonplace lament. 🔗

id826232528

medicaments 🔗

id826232902

Living in this desert, thought Lalo Cura as the car, with Epifanio at the wheel, left the field behind, is like living at sea. The border between Sonora and Arizona is a chain of haunted or enchanted islands. The cities and towns are boats. The desert is an endless sea. This is a good place for fish, especially deep-sea fish, not men. 🔗

id826233234

listlessly 🔗

id826233283

Sergio asked her if people were afraid. The mothers are, said the woman. Some fathers, too. But not people in general, I don’t think. 🔗

id826233521

Haas liked to sit on the ground, against the wall, in the shady part of the yard. And he liked to think. He liked to imagine that God didn’t exist. For three minutes, at least. He also liked to think about the insignificance of human beings. Five minutes. If pain didn’t exist, he thought, we would be perfect. Insignificant and ignorant of pain. Fucking perfect. But there was pain to fuck everything up. Finally he would think about luxury. The luxury of memory, the luxury of knowing a language or several languages, the luxury of thinking and not running away. 🔗

id826234114

But what are good times? Sergio González asked himself. Maybe they’re what separate certain people from the rest of us, who live in a state of perpetual sadness. The will to live, the will to fight, as his father used to say, but fight what? The inevitable? Fight who? And what for? More time, certain knowledge, the glimpse of something essential? As if there were anything essential in this shitty country, he thought, anything essential on this whole self-sucking motherfucker of a planet. 🔗

id826285557

rapt 🔗

id826290069

posthumous 🔗

id826291136

I remember I went out onto the balcony and gazed at the bay. There was a full moon. It’s so pretty, the coast, I reflected, but the sad thing is we notice it only at the worst of times, when we can scarcely enjoy it. 🔗

id826291522

everything was so cozy, everything made sense, the TV on, the open door, the night like a glove over the hotel, the perfect wetback, the wetback I wanted to have on my show and who maybe the host in love with José Patricio wanted to have on his show, the appalling wetback, the king of bad luck, the man carrying the fate of Mexico on his shoulders, the smiling wetback, that toadlike creature, that dumb, helpless greasy illegal, that lump of coal who in some other reincarnation could have been a diamond, that untouchable born in Mexico instead of India, everything made sense, suddenly everything made sense, so why commit suicide now? 🔗

id826291610

helicoidal 🔗

id826291648

conjugal 🔗

id826292184

She said that sometimes, like anybody, she saw things, and the things she saw weren’t necessarily visions but things she imagined, like anybody, things that sprang into her head, which was supposedly the price you paid to live in modern society, although she believed that anybody, no matter where they lived, at certain moments saw or pictured things, and all she could picture recently, as it happened, were the killings of women. 🔗

id826296293

As I understand it, he works with computers. Interesting work. He’s also a consultant or adviser on some action movies. I haven’t seen any of them, because it’s been a long time since I went to the movies and Hollywood trash just puts me to sleep. But according to my grandson, they’re plenty of fun and the good guys always win, said Professor García Correa. 🔗

id826296356

abnegation 🔗

id826297135

Did he know her or didn’t he? He knew her, of course he did, it was just that sometimes reality, the same little reality that served to anchor reality, seemed to fade around the edges, as if the passage of time had a porous effect on things, and blurred and made more insubstantial what was itself already, by its very nature, insubstantial and satisfactory and real. 🔗

id826297542

imperious 🔗

id826687954

nouveaux 🔗

id826688427

arriviste 🔗

id826688983

fetid 🔗

id826689108

aquiline 🔗

id826689439

obstinate 🔗

id826732420

I could write a treatise on the secret sources of Mexican sentimentalism. What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes and the eyes of others, we Mexicans. And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what? 🔗

id826732449

retinue 🔗

id826732857

At first La Venada probably just wanted to hurt or scare or warn her, thus the bullet in the right thigh, then, upon seeing Angélica’s expression of pain or surprise, he felt not only rage but amusement, the darkest expression of humor, which manifested itself in a desire for symmetry, and then he shot her in the left thigh. After that he lost control. The floodgates were open. Juan de Dios rested his head on the steering wheel and tried to cry but couldn’t. 🔗

id826734172

pieties 🔗

id826734376

mealymouthed 🔗

id826735450

zealous 🔗

id826735458

impunity 🔗

id826735754

as if an atomic bomb had dropped nearby and no one had noticed, except the victims, thought Kessler, but they didn’t count because they’d lost their minds or were dead, even though they still walked and stared, their eyes and stares straight out of a Western, the stares of Indians or bad guys, of course, in other words lunatics, people living in another dimension, their gazes no longer able to touch us, we’re aware of them but they don’t touch us, they don’t adhere to our skin, they shoot straight through us, thought Kessler as he moved to roll down the window. No, don’t open it, said one of the inspectors. Why not? The smell, it smells like death. It stinks. Ten minutes later they reached the dump. 🔗

id826736735

All names are ordinary, they’re all vulgar. Whether your name is Kelly or Luz María, it makes no difference in the end. All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we’re afraid to teach them. 🔗

id826737983

haughty 🔗

id826739616

The really unbelievable part of the story (the sad story of Mexico or Latin America, it makes no difference). The part you can’t believe. When you make mistakes from inside, the mistakes stop mattering. Mistakes stop being mistakes. Making a mistake, butting your head against the wall, becomes a political virtue, a political tactic, gives you political presence, gets you media attention. At the moment of truth—which is every moment, or at least every moment from eight a.m. to five p.m.—it makes just as much sense to be present and to err as to hunker down and wait. You can do nothing, you can fuck things up—it doesn’t matter, so long as you’re there. Where? Why, there, the place to be. 🔗

id826743448

vaunted 🔗

id826744518

I paced the room. I noticed there were two mirrors. One at one end and the other by the door, and they didn’t reflect each other. But if you stood in a certain place, you could see one mirror in the other. What you couldn’t see was me. Strange, I said to myself, and for a while, as sleep began to overtake me, I made calculations and experimented with positions. That was where I was when five o’clock struck. The more I studied the mirrors, the more uneasy I felt. 🔗

id826744896

For fuck’s sake, you’re either dead or you’re not! In Mexico a person can be more or less dead, he answered very seriously. 🔗

id826744981

haughtily 🔗

id826745273

dogmatic 🔗

id826746323

I’m a Mexican. And also a Mexican congresswoman. We’ll fight it out among ourselves, as always, or we’ll go down together. 🔗

id826746353

incredulous 🔗

id826746608

5THE PART ABOUT ARCHIMBOLDI 🔗

id827069072

pedunculated 🔗

id827070808

dells 🔗

id827103083

paterfamilias 🔗

id827103306

puerile 🔗

id827103822

interlocutor 🔗

id827103835

centurion 🔗

id827104300

baron 🔗

id827104344

inculcated 🔗

id827104415

voracious 🔗

id827104747

valise 🔗

id827105253

Hans said he didn’t know anything about his father.
“True,” said Halder, “one never knows anything about one’s father.”
A father, he said, is a passageway immersed in the deepest darkness, where we stumble blindly seeking a way out. 🔗

id827108165

purloinings 🔗

id827108175

diadems 🔗

id827108392

confers 🔗

id827108405

vassalage 🔗

id827108444

vassals 🔗

id827108536

curt 🔗

id827108727

Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone. Hans Reiter was an exception. He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased. He never got bored. He was always eager to help and he greatly valued the notion—so vague, so malleable, so warped—of friendship. The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too. 🔗

id827108752

pittance 🔗

id827108861

legation 🔗

id827109133

revelry 🔗

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Sometimes, however, as they sat on a café terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who’ve just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn’t more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then, naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to talking about inventions, women, Finnish philology, the building of highways across the Reich. 🔗

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subterfuge 🔗

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The fourth dimension, he liked to say, encompasses the three dimensions and consequently puts them in their place, that is, it obliterates the dictatorship of the three dimensions and thereby obliterates the three-dimensional world we know and live in. The fourth dimension, he said, is the full richness of the senses and the (capital S) Spirit, it’s the (capital E) Eye, in other words the open Eye that obliterates the eyes, which compared to the Eye are just poor orifices of mud, absorbed in contemplation or the equation birth-training-work-death, whereas the Eye sails up the river of philosophy, the river of existence, the (fastflowing) river of fate.
The fourth dimension, he said, was expressible only through music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. 🔗

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According to the director, life qua life in the fourth dimension was of an unimaginable richness, etc., etc., but the truly important thing was the distance from which one, immersed in this harmony, could contemplate human affairs, with equanimity, in a word, and free of the artificial travails that oppress the spirit devoted to work and creation, to life’s only transcendent truth, the truth that creates more and more life, an inexhaustible torrent of life and happiness and brightness. 🔗

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“Don’t speak of burned books, my dear young man.”
To which Hans responded:
“Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.” 🔗

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philatelists 🔗

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ignominious 🔗

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avarice 🔗

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sangfroid 🔗

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Maginot Line 🔗

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wonderful, wonderful, yet again the sword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance. 🔗

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reapprised 🔗

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They talked about death. Hoensch said that death itself was only an illusion under permanent construction, that in reality it didn’t exist. The SS officer said death was a necessity: no one in his right mind, he said, would stand for a world full of turtles or giraffes. Death, he concluded, served a regulatory function. The young scholar Popescu said that death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn’t clear, he said, or at least not to him, was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.
“The question,” he said, “is where. The answer,” he answered himself, “is wherever my merits take me.”
General Entrescu was of the opinion that this hardly mattered, the important thing was to keep moving, the dynamic of motion, which made men and all living beings, including cockroaches, equal to the great stars. Baroness Von Zumpe said, and perhaps she was the only one to speak frankly, that death was a bore. 🔗

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Then they talked about murder. 🔗

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Then they talked about art, about the heroic in art, about still lifes, superstitions, and symbols.
Hoensch said that culture was a chain of links composed of heroic art and superstitious interpretations. The young scholar Popescu said culture was a symbol in the shape of a life buoy. The Baroness Von Zumpe said culture was essentially pleasure, anything that provided or bestowed pleasure, and the rest was just charlatanry. The SS officer said culture was the call of the blood, a call better heard by night than by day, and also, he said, a decoder of fate. General Von Berenberg said culture was Bach and that was enough for him. One of his general staff officers said culture was Wagner and that was enough for him too. The other general staff officer said culture was Goethe, and as the general had said, that was enough for him, sometimes more than enough. The life of a man is comparable only to the life of another man. The life of a man, he said, is only long enough to fully enjoy the works of another man. 🔗

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Then they talked about art, about the heroic in art, about still lifes, superstitions, and symbols.
Hoensch said that culture was a chain of links composed of heroic art and superstitious interpretations. The young scholar Popescu said culture was a symbol in the shape of a life buoy. The Baroness Von Zumpe said culture was essentially pleasure, anything that provided or bestowed pleasure, and the rest was just charlatanry. The SS officer said culture was the call of the blood, a call better heard by night than by day, and also, he said, a decoder of fate. General Von Berenberg said culture was Bach and that was enough for him. One of his general staff officers said culture was Wagner and that was enough for him too. The other general staff officer said culture was Goethe, and as the general had said, that was enough for him, sometimes more than enough. The life of a man is comparable only to the life of another man. The life of a man, he said, is only long enough to fully enjoy the works of another man.
General Entrescu, who was highly amused by the general staff officer’s claim, said that for him, on the contrary, culture was life, not the life of a single man or the work of a single man, but life in general, any manifestation of it, even the most vulgar 🔗

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postprandial 🔗

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said it wasn’t strange, if one cast a dispassionate glance over the great deeds of history (even the blank deeds of history, although this, of course, no one understood), that a hero should be transformed into a monster or the worst sort of villain or that he should unintentionally succumb to invisibility, in the same way that a villain or an ordinary person or a good-hearted mediocrity should become, with the passage of the centuries, a beacon of wisdom, a magnetic beacon capable of casting a spell over millions of human beings, without having done anything to justify such adoration, in fact without even having aspired to it or desired it (although all men, including the worst kind of ruffians, at some moment in their lives dream of reigning over man and time). Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one’s village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one’s eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time. 🔗

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The mathematician laughed. There is no such thing as madness, he said. But you’re here, said Popescu, and this is a madhouse. The mathematician didn’t seem to be listening: the only real madness, if we can call it that, he said, is a chemical imbalance, which is easily cured by treatment with chemical products. 🔗

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wizened 🔗

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forlorn 🔗

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self-abnegation 🔗

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curtly 🔗

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Beneath a naked man with an abundance of hair on his upper back and legs, they glimpsed the Baroness Von Zumpe 🔗

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At the top is the sacrificial stone. Can you guess what it’s made of?”
“Obsidian,” said Reiter.
“Precisely,” said the girl, “a stone like a surgeon’s table, where the Aztec priests or doctors lay their victims before tearing out their hearts. But now comes the part that will really surprise you. This stone bed where the victims were laid was transparent! It was a sacrificial stone chosen and polished in such a way that it was transparent. And the Aztecs inside the pyramid watched the sacrifice as if from within, because as you’ll have guessed, the light from above that illuminated the bowels of the pyramids came from an opening just beneath the sacrificial stone, so that at first the light was black or gray, a dim light in which only the inscrutable silhouettes of the Aztecs inside the pyramids could be seen, but then, as the blood of the new victim spread across the skylight of transparent obsidian, the light turned red and black, a very bright red and a very bright black, and then not only were the silhouettes of the Aztecs visible but also their features, features transfigured by the red and black light, as if the light had the power to personalize each man or woman, and that is essentially all, but that can last a long time, that exists outside time, or in some other time, ruled by other laws. 🔗

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portents 🔗

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The city in the distance was a black mass with red mouths that opened and closed. The soldiers called it the bone crusher, but that night it didn’t strike Reiter as a machine but as the reincarnation of a mythological being, a living creature struggling to draw breath. 🔗

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sovkhoz 🔗

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convalescents 🔗

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caroused 🔗

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The rescued, thought Reiter, and the rescuer. The survivor and the victim. The one who flees when night falls and the one who stays and surrenders. 🔗

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In those days Ansky thought it wouldn’t be long before the revolution spread all over the world, because only an idiot or a nihilist could fail to see or sense the potential it held for progress and happiness. Ultimately, thought Ansky, the revolution would abolish death.
When Ivanov told him that this was impossible, that death had been with man from time immemorial, Ansky said that was precisely it, the whole point, maybe the only thing that mattered, abolishing death, abolishing it forever, immersing ourselves in the unknown until we found something else. Abolishment, abolishment, abolishment. 🔗

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cloyingly 🔗

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arcadian 🔗

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Remoras 🔗

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They think they’re suns, setting everything ablaze, but they aren’t suns, they’re just plunging meteors and in the end no one pays them any heed. They spread humiliation, not conflagration. And ultimately it’s always they who are humiliated, truly humiliated, bludgeoned and spat upon, execrated and maimed, thoroughly humiliated, taught a lesson, humiliated utterly. 🔗

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For Ivanov, a real writer, a real artist and creator, was basically a responsible person with a certain level of maturity. A real writer had to know when to listen and when to act. He had to be reasonably enterprising and reasonably learned. Excessive learning aroused jealousy and resentment. Excessive enterprise aroused suspicion. A real writer had to be someone relatively cool-headed, a man with common sense. Someone who didn’t talk too loud or start polemics. He had to be reasonably pleasant and he had to know how not to make gratuitous enemies. Above all, he had to keep his voice down, unless everyone else was raising his. A real writer had to be aware that behind him he had the Writers Association, the Artists Syndicate, the Confederation of Literary Workers, Poets House. What’s the first thing a man does when he comes into a church? Efraim Ivanov asked himself. He takes off his hat. Maybe he doesn’t cross himself. All right, that’s allowed. We’re modern. But the least he can do is bare his head! Adolescent writers, meanwhile, come into a church and don’t take off their hats even when they’re beaten with sticks, which is, regrettably, what happens in the end. And not only do they not take off their hats: they laugh, yawn, play the fool, pass gas. Some even applaud. 🔗

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“Well, anyway, once a week, no matter the weather, this man (who wasn’t young, either) went into the forest to look for his penis and testicles. Everyone thought he would die someday, caught in the snow, but the man always came back to the village, sometimes after an absence of months, and always with the same news: he hadn’t found them. One day he decided to stop looking. Suddenly, he seemed to age: one night he looked fifty and the next morning he looked eighty. My detachment left the village. Four months later we passed through again and asked what had happened to the man without attributes. They told us he had married and was leading a happy life. One of my comrades and I wanted to see him: we found him preparing his gear for another long stay in the forest. He looked fifty again, instead of eighty. Or perhaps even forty in certain parts of his face: around the eyes, the lips, the jaw. Two days later, when we left, I believed the hunter had managed to impose his desires on reality, which, in their fashion, had transformed his surroundings, the village, the villagers, the forest, the snow, his lost penis and testicles. I imagined him on his knees, pissing, his legs well apart, in the middle of the frozen steppe, northward bound, striding toward the white deserts and blizzards with his knapsack full of traps, utterly oblivious of what we call fate.” 🔗

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frenetic 🔗

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Your novel, he said, has afforded me some … very amusing moments. One detects in it … a faith, a hope. Your imagination cannot be called … stifled. No, in no way whatsoever … can that be said. There are those who speak of … the Soviet Jules Verne. After long reflection, however, I think you are … better than Jules Verne. A more … mature writer. A writer guided by … revolutionary instincts. A … great writer. As one could only expect of a … Communist. But let’s speak frankly … as Soviets. The literature of the proletariat speaks to … today’s man. It sets out problems that perhaps will only be solved … tomorrow. But it is addressed … to today’s worker, not the worker … of the future. In your next books you must … bear that in mind. 🔗

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The novel, so unanimously acclaimed, was called Twilight and its plot was very simple: a boy of fourteen abandons his family to join the ranks of the revolution. 🔗

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How were the stars created? Who are we in the middle of the boundless universe? What trace of us will remain? 🔗

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Suddenly the Chinese leader falls off his horse. The young Russian examines him. The Chinese leader is like a burning doll. The young Russian touches the Chinese leader’s forehead and then his own forehead and understands that the fever is devouring them both. With no little effort he ties the Chinese leader to his mount and sets off again. The silence of the snow-covered plain is absolute. The night and the passage of stars across the vault of the sky show no signs of ever ending. In the distance an enormous black shadow seems to superimpose itself on the darkness. It’s a mountain range. In the young Russian’s mind the certainty takes shape that in the coming hours he will die on that snow-covered plain or as he crosses the mountains. A voice inside begs him to close his eyes, because if he closes them he’ll see the eyes and then the beloved face of the hypnotist. It tells him that if he closes his eyes he’ll see the streets of New York again, he’ll walk again toward the hypnotist’s house, where she sits waiting for him on a chair in the dark. But the Russian doesn’t close his eyes. He rides on. 🔗

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dacha 🔗

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Sometimes, when he was alone, and more often when he was alone in front of a mirror, poor Ivanov pinched himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming, that it was all real. And in fact it was all real, at least in appearance. Black thunderclouds hovered over him, but he noticed only the long-yearned-for breeze, the scented breath of wind that wiped his face clean of so much misfortune and fear. 🔗

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Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers. Irrational fears, thought Ansky, especially when the fearful soothed their fears with semblances. As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were inhabited by semblances. As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and the versts traveled on horseback by Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming. 🔗

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suprematism 🔗

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ignominy 🔗

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On the subject of art, a politician with power is like a colossal pheasant, able to crush mountains with little hops, whereas a politician without power is only like a village priest, an ordinary-sized pheasant. 🔗

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bucolic 🔗

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pedagogic 🔗

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exegetes 🔗

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oeuvre 🔗

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belies 🔗

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Acmeist 🔗

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prodigious 🔗

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In one of his last notes he mentions the chaos of the universe and says that only in chaos are we conceivable. In another, he wonders what will be left when the universe dies and time and space die with it. Zero, nothing. But the idea makes him laugh. Behind every answer lies a question, Ansky remembers the peasants of Kostekino say. Behind every indisputable answer lies an even more complex question. Complexity, however, makes him laugh, and sometimes his mother hears him laugh in the attic, like the ten-year-old boy he once was. Ansky ponders parallel universes. Around this time Hitler invades Poland and World War II begins. Warsaw falls, Paris falls, the Soviet Union is attacked. Only in chaos are we conceivable. One night Ansky dreams the sky is a great ocean of blood. On the last page of his notebook he sketches a map to join the guerrillas. 🔗

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Prussian soldiers may masturbate, but they don’t commit suicide. 🔗

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From a hill he saw a column of German tanks moving east. They looked like the coffins of an extraterrestrial civilization. 🔗

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disconcerted 🔗

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He felt free, as he never had in his life, and although malnourished and weak, he also felt the strength to prolong as far as possible this impulse toward freedom, toward sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people’s souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules (in uprisings that could be bloody, but didn’t therefore cease to be semblance), it set new rules. 🔗

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National Socialism was the ultimate realm of semblance. As a general rule, he reflected, love was also semblance. My love for Lotte isn’t semblance. Lotte is my sister and she’s little and she thinks I’m a giant. But love, ordinary love, the love of a man and a woman, with breakfasts and dinners, with jealousy and money and sadness, is playacting, or semblance. Youth is the semblance of strength, love is the semblance of peace. Neither youth nor strength nor love nor peace can be granted to me, he said to himself with a sigh, nor can I accept such a gift. Only Ansky’s wandering isn’t semblance, he thought, only Ansky at fourteen isn’t semblance. Ansky lived his whole life in rabid immaturity because the revolution, the one true revolution, is also immature. 🔗

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In the last corner was Reiter himself, with a long blond beard, peering out the window of the Anskys’ farmhouse at the passing parade of an elephant, a giraffe, a rhinoceros, and a duck. In the middle of the fresco, if it could be called that, was a paved square, an imaginary square that had never existed in Kostekino, crowded with women or the ghosts of women, their hair standing on end, who ran back and forth wailing as two German soldiers oversaw the work of a squad of young Ukrainians raising a stone statue whose shape couldn’t yet be made out. 🔗

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The painter clearly believed that it was he who had gone mad, he concluded. The figure of the duck, bringing up the rear of the procession headed by the elephant, suggested as much. He remembered that in those days he hadn’t yet recovered his voice. He also remembered that in those days he had ceaselessly read and reread Ansky’s notebook, memorizing each word, and feeling something very strange that sometimes seemed like happiness and other times like a guilt as vast as the sky. And he accepted the guilt and happiness and some nights he even weighed them against each other and the net result of his unorthodox reckoning was happiness, but a different kind of happiness, a heartrending happiness that for Reiter wasn’t happiness but simply Reiter. 🔗

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One night, three days after he had come to Kostekino, he dreamed that the Russians had taken the village and to escape them he had plunged into the stream, Sweet Spring, and swum until he came to the Dnieper, and the Dnieper, the banks of the Dnieper, were swarming with Russians, to the left as well as the right, and they all laughed to see him appear in the middle of the river and fired at him, and he dreamed that to escape the bullets he ducked underwater and let himself be carried along by the current, coming up only to breathe and going under again, and in this way he traveled miles and miles of river, sometimes holding his breath for three minutes or four or five, the world record, until the current had carried him away from the Russians, but even then Reiter kept going under, coming up, taking a breath, and going under again, and the bottom of the river was like a gravel road, every so often he saw schools of little white fish and every so often he bumped into a corpse already picked clean, just the bare bones, and these skeletons that dotted the river could be German or Soviet, it was impossible to say, because their clothes had rotted and the current had swept them downriver, and in Reiter’s dream the current swept him downriver, too, and sometimes, especially at night, he came up to the surface and did the dead man’s float, to rest or perhaps to sleep for five minutes as the river carried him incessantly southward in its embrace, and when the sun came up Reiter went under again and dove down, returned to the gelatinous bottom of the Dnieper, and so the days went by, sometimes he passed a city and saw its lights, or if there were no lights he heard a vague noise, like the clatter of furniture, as if sick people were moving furniture around, and sometimes he passed under military pontoons and he saw the frozen shadows of the soldiers in the night, shadows cast on the choppy surface of the water, and one morning, at last, the Dnieper flowed into the Black Sea, where it ceased to exist or was transformed, and Reiter approached the shore of the river or the sea with shaky steps, as if he were a student, the student he had never been, who flops down on the sand after swimming to the point of exhaustion, dazed, at the zenith of the holidays, only to discover with horror, as he sat on the beach contemplating the immensity of the Black Sea, that Ansky’s notebook, which he was carrying under his jacket, had been reduced to a kind of pulp, the ink blurred forever, half of the notebook stuck to his clothes or his skin and the other half reduced to particles washed away by the gentle waves.
Then Reiter woke and decided he should leave Kostekino as quickly as possible. He dressed in silence and gathered his few belongings. He didn’t light a lamp or stir the fire. He thought about how far he would have to walk that day. Before he left the farmhouse he returned Ansky’s notebook carefully to the chimney hiding place. Let someone else find it now, he thought. Then he opened the door, closed it with care, and left the village with great strides. 🔗

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disquisitions 🔗

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rivulet 🔗

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lothario 🔗

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capricious 🔗

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vicissitudes 🔗

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“We do things, say things, that later we regret with all our souls,” Sammer said to him one day 🔗

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taciturn 🔗

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“I did,” said Ingeborg. “So long as the men looked healthy, so long as they didn’t seem to be rotting away from cancer or syphilis,” said Ingeborg. “The peasant women who roamed the station, the factory workers, the madwomen who were lost or had fled their homes, we all believed that semen was a precious nutrient, an extract of all kinds of vitamins, the best remedy for a cold,” said Ingeborg. “Some nights, before I went to sleep, huddled in a corner of the station, I would think about the country girl who first came up with the idea, an absurd idea, although certain respected doctors say a daily dose of semen can cure anemia,” said Ingeborg. “But I would think about that country girl, that desperate girl who arrived at the same idea by the process of deduction. I imagined her awestruck in the silent city contemplating the ruins of everything and saying to herself that this was how she had always dreamed the city would look. I imagined her as industrious, with a smile on her face, helping anyone who asked, and curious, too, walking the streets and squares and reconstructing the outline of the city where she had secretly always wanted to live. Some nights, too, I imagined her dead, of any disease, a disease that led not to a long, drawn-out death or to a death that was too sudden but to a reasonably prolonged death, one that gave her time to stop sucking dicks and retreat into her own chrysalis, her own sorrows.” 🔗

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Ingeborg liked to do it in bed, where she cried and writhed and came six or seven times, with her legs on Reiter’s bony shoulders, calling him my darling, my love, my prince, my sweetheart, words that embarrassed Reiter, because he found them precious and in those days he had declared war on preciousness and sentimentality and softness and anything overembellished or contrived or saccharine, but he didn’t object, since the despair he glimpsed in Ingeborg’s eyes, never entirely dispelled even by pleasure, paralyzed him as if he, Reiter, were a mouse caught in a trap. 🔗

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soliloquies 🔗

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habitués 🔗

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reconnoiter 🔗

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incredulity 🔗

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licentious 🔗

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“What can they do to me? bomb me?”
And then she laughed and Reiter laughed too.
“The worst thing they can do to me is what you’ve done to Ingeborg,” she said once, and Reiter spent a long time turning her answer over in his head.
What I’ve done to Ingeborg. But what had he done to Ingeborg but love her? 🔗

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“My name is Benno von Archimboldi.”
The old man looked him in the eye and said don’t play games with me, what’s your real name?
“My name is Benno von Archimboldi, sir,” said Reiter, “and if you think I’m joking I’d better go.” 🔗

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“This country,” he said to Reiter, who that afternoon, perhaps, became Archimboldi, “has tried to topple any number of countries into the abyss in the name of purity and will. As far as I’m concerned, you understand, purity and will are utter tripe. Thanks to purity and will we’ve all, every one of us, hear me you, become cowards and thugs, which in the end are one and the same. Now we sob and moan and say we didn’t know! we had no idea! it was the Nazis! we never would have done such a thing! We know how to whimper. We know how to drum up sympathy. We don’t care whether we’re mocked so long as they pity us and forgive us. There’ll be plenty of time for us to embark on a long holiday of forgetting. Do you understand me?”
“I understand,” said Archimboldi.
“I was a writer,” said the old man. 🔗

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“But I gave it up. This typewriter was a gift from my father. An affectionate and cultured man who lived to the age of ninety-three. An essentially good man. A man who believed in progress, it goes without saying. My poor father. He believed in progress and of course he believed in the intrinsic goodness of human beings. I too believe in the intrinsic goodness of human beings, but it means nothing. In their hearts, killers are good, as we Germans have reason to know. So what? I might spend a night drinking with a killer, and as the two of us watch the sun come up, perhaps we’ll burst into song or hum some Beethoven. So what? The killer might weep on my shoulder. Naturally. Being a killer isn’t easy, as you and I well know. It isn’t easy at all. It requires purity and will, will and purity. Crystalline purity and steel-hard will. And I myself might even weep on the killer’s shoulder and whisper sweet words to him, words like ‘brother,’ ‘friend,’ ‘comrade in misfortune.’ At this moment the killer is good, because he’s intrinsically good, and I’m an idiot, because I’m intrinsically an idiot, and we’re both sentimental, because our culture tends inexorably toward sentimentality. But when the performance is over and I’m alone, the killer will open the window of my room and come tiptoeing in like a nurse and slit my throat, bleed me dry. 🔗

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“Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces. Who writes the minor work? A minor writer, or so it appears. The poor man’s wife can testify to that, she’s seen him sitting at the table, bent over the blank pages, restless in his chair, his pen racing over the paper. The evidence would seem to be incontrovertible. But what she’s seen is only the outside. The shell of literature. A semblance,” said the old man to Archimboldi and Archimboldi thought of Ansky. “The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece. 🔗

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“Our good craftsman writes. He’s absorbed in what takes shape well or badly on the page. His wife, though he doesn’t know it, is watching him. It really is he who’s writing. But if his wife had X-ray vision she would see that instead of being present at an exercise of literary creation, she’s witnessing a session of hypnosis. There’s nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty. There’s nothing in the guts of the man who sits there writing. Nothing, I mean to say, that his wife, at a given moment, might recognize. He writes like someone taking dictation. His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter! 🔗

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Every work that isn’t a masterpiece is, in a sense, a part of a vast camouflage. You’ve been a soldier, I imagine, and you know what I mean. Every book that isn’t a masterpiece is cannon fodder, a slogging foot soldier, a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design of the masterpiece. 🔗

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Most writers are deluded or playing. Perhaps delusion and play are the same thing, two sides of the same coin. The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life. One might also say: we’re theater, we’re music. By the same token, few are the writers who give up. We play at believing ourselves immortal. We delude ourselves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell. 🔗

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“Play and delusion are the blindfold and spur of minor writers. Also: the promise of their future happiness. A forest that grows at a vertiginous rate, a forest no one can fence in, not even the academies, in fact, the academies make sure it flourishes unhindered, as do boosters and universities (breeding grounds for the shameless) and government institutions and patrons and cultural associations and declaimers of poetry—all aid the forest to grow and hide what must be hidden, all aid the forest to reproduce what must be reproduced, since the process is inevitable, though no one ever sees what exactly is being reproduced, what is being tamely mirrored back. 🔗

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Plagiarism as camouflage as some wood and canvas scenery as a charade that leads us, likely as not, into the void. 🔗

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“In a word: experience is best. I won’t say you can’t get experience by hanging around libraries, but libraries are second to experience. Experience is the mother of science, it is often said. 🔗

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The day came when I decided to give up literature. I gave it up. This was in no way traumatic but rather liberating. Between you and me, I’ll confess that it was like losing my virginity. What a relief to give up literature, to give up writing and simply read! 🔗

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crepuscular 🔗

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I remarked that working at the morgue must surely prompt wise or at least original reflections on human fate. He looked at me as if I were mocking him or speaking French. I insisted. These surroundings, I said, with a gesture that encompassed the whole morgue, are in a certain way the ideal place to contemplate the brevity of life, the unfathomable fate of mankind, the futility of earthly strife.
“With a shudder of horror, I was suddenly aware that I was talking to him as if he were the great German writer and this was the conversation we’d never had. I don’t have much time, he said. I looked him in the eye again. There could be no doubt about it: he had the eyes of my idol. And his reply: I don’t have much time. How many doors it opened! How many paths were suddenly cleared, revealed to me!
“I don’t have much time, I have to haul corpses. I don’t have much time, I have to breathe, eat, drink, sleep. I don’t have much time, I have to keep the gears meshing. I don’t have much time, I’m busy living. I don’t have much time, I’m busy dying. As you can imagine, there were no more questions. I helped him open the locker. I wanted to help him slide the corpse in, but my clumsiness was such that the sheet slipped and then I saw the face of the corpse and I closed my eyes and bowed my head and let him work in peace. 🔗

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“Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.” 🔗

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surreptitiously 🔗

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“I get the idea perfectly, Mickey,” said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they’ve been present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness. 🔗

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but with penises, thought Archimboldi, because the penis, sexual desire, is unfortunately the last thing man loses, when it should be the first, but no, human beings keep fucking, fucking or fucking themselves, which amounts to the same thing, until their last breaths, like the soldier who was trapped under a pile of corpses and there, beneath the corpses and the snow, he dug a little cave with his regulation shovel, and to pass the time he jerked off, more boldly each time, because once the fear and surprise of the first few instants had vanished, all that was left was the fear of death and boredom, and to stave off boredom he began to masturbate, first timidly, as if he were seducing a peasant girl or a little shepherdess, then with increasing determination, until he managed to bring himself off to his full satisfaction, and he went on like that for fifteen days, in his little cave of corpses and snow, rationing his food and indulging his urges, which didn’t make him weaker but rather seemed to retronourish him, as if he had drunk his own semen or as if after going mad he had found a forgotten way back to a new sanity 🔗

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they slipped into recollections of historic events, which in this case were also manly reminiscences punctuated by disillusioned laughter, as if to say I’ve seen it all, you can’t fool me, I know human nature, the endless clash of wills, my memories are written in letters of fire and they’re my only capital 🔗

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That night, as he was working the door at the bar, he amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was almost imperceptible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archimboldi’s only wish was never to inhabit either. 🔗

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Until that moment Archimboldi had never thought about fame. Hitler was famous. Göring was famous. The people he loved or remembered fondly weren’t famous, they just satisfied certain needs. Döblin was his consolation. Ansky was his strength. Ingeborg was his joy. The disappeared Hugo Halder was lightheartedness and fun. His sister, about whom he had no news, was his own innocence. Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame’s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies. 🔗

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puerile 🔗

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because with every shelf crammed full, books and manuscripts collected on the floor in stacks and towers, some so precarious that they in turn spilled over, a chaos that was a reflection of the world, rich and magnificent despite war and injustice, a library of glorious books that Archimboldi would have given anything to read, first editions of the works of great writers with handwritten dedications to Mr. Bubis, books of degenerate art that other publishing houses were once again issuing in Germany, books published in France and England, paperbacks from New York and Boston and San Francisco, as well as American magazines with mythical names that for an impecunious young writer were a treasure trove, the ultimate display of wealth, and turned Bubis’s office into something like Ali Baba’s cave. 🔗

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execrable 🔗

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the notion of destiny wasn’t something that could be separated from the destiny of an individual (a wretched individual), but that the two things were essentially the same: destiny, ungraspable until it became inevitable, was each person’s notion of his own destiny. 🔗

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decadent 🔗

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Archimboldi’s writing, the process of creation or the daily routine in which this process peacefully unfolded, gathered strength and something that for lack of a better word might be called confidence. This “confidence” didn’t signify the end of doubt, of course, much less that the writer believed his work had some value, because Archimboldi had a view of literature (though the word view is too grand) as something divided into three compartments, each connected only tenuously to the others: in the first were the books he read and reread and considered magnificent and sometimes monstrous, like the fiction of Döblin, who was still one of his favorite authors, or Kafka’s complete works. In the second compartment were the books of the epigones and authors he called the Horde, whom he essentially saw as his enemies. In the third compartment were his own books and his plans for future books, which he saw as a game and also a business, a game insofar as he derived pleasure from writing, a pleasure similar to that of the detective on the heels of the killer, and a business insofar as the publication of his books helped to augment, however modestly, his doorman’s pay. 🔗

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for a long time he kept Thanatos in chains and during all that time not a single human being died on the face of the earth, a golden age in which men, though still men, lived free of the anxiety of death, in other words, free of the anxiety of time, because now they had more than enough time, which is perhaps what distinguishes a democracy, spare time, surplus time, time to read and time to think, until Zeus had to intervene personally and Thanatos was freed and then Sisyphus died. 🔗

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“All this light is dead,” said Ingeborg. “All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It’s the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn’t exist, life on Earth didn’t exist, even Earth didn’t exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It’s the past, we’re surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can’t do anything to stop it.”
“An old book is the past, too,” said Archimboldi, “a book written and published in 1789 is the past, its author no longer exists, neither does its printer or the ones who read it first or the time when it was written, but the book, the first edition of that book, is still here. Like the pyramids of the Aztecs,” said Archimboldi.
“I hate first editions and pyramids and I hate those bloodthirsty Aztecs,” said Ingeborg. “But the light of the stars makes me dizzy. It makes me want to cry,” said Ingeborg, her eyes damp with madness. 🔗

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revelry 🔗

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dalliances 🔗

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threnody 🔗

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epicede 🔗

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sclerotic 🔗

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soliloquize 🔗

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pedantic 🔗

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posterity 🔗

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lapsus calami 🔗

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According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise something and he’ll come back to Earth, Archimboldi ended his letter. 🔗

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callow 🔗

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The essayist, who had remained standing in the doorway as Archimboldi examined the room, handed him the keys and assured him that here, though he might not find happiness, which in any case didn’t exist, he would find peace and quiet. 🔗

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As if reading his thoughts, the essayist met his eyes. His expression was perplexed. He knows what I’m thinking and now he thinks the same thing and can’t understand it, just as I can’t understand it, thought Archimboldi. Actually, the look on their faces was more a look of sadness than perplexity. But there’s the apple on the white plate, thought Archimboldi.
“That apple has a scent at night,” said the essayist. “When I turn out the light. It smells as strongly as Rimbaud’s ‘Voyelles.’ But everything collapses in the end,” said the essayist. “Everything collapses in pain. All eloquence springs from pain.” 🔗

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The one who was talking struck him as a lyric poet, full of things to say that she hadn’t been able to say in her poems, and the silent one struck him as a distinguished novelist, tired of pointless sentences and meaningless words. 🔗

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epistolary 🔗

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Sometimes, in an excess of sentimentalism, the baroness asked him to come back to Germany. I have come back, Archimboldi answered. I’d like you to come back for good, answered the baroness. Stay for longer. Now you’re famous. A press conference wouldn’t hurt. Though perhaps that might be too much for you. But at least an exclusive interview with some top cultural reporter. Only in my worst nightmares, Archimboldi wrote her. 🔗

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“I’ll never die,” the baroness said once to Archimboldi. “Or I’ll die at ninety-five, which is the same as never dying.” 🔗

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The second column was made up of ghosts, corpses just risen from a graveyard, specters in gray or verdigris uniforms and steel helmets, invisible to all eyes except Lotte’s, and she repeated her question, which a few scarecrows deigned to answer, saying yes, they’d seen him in Soviet country, fleeing like a coward, or they’d seen him swimming in the Dnieper and then drowning, as he well deserved, or they’d seen him on the Kalmuk Steppe, gulping water as if he were dying of thirst, or they’d seen him crouching in a forest in Hungary, wondering how to shoot himself with his own rifle, or they’d seen him on the edge of a cemetery, the stupid bastard, not daring to go in, pacing back and forth until night fell and the cemetery emptied of relatives and only then, the faggot, did he stop pacing and climb the walls, digging his hobnailed boots into the red, crumbling bricks and poking his nose and blue eyes over the edge, peering down at where the dead lay, the Grotes and the Kruses, the Neitzkes and the Kunzes, the Barzes and the Wilkes, the Lemkes and the Noacks, discreet Ladenthin and brave Voss, and then, emboldened, he climbed to the top of the wall and sat there for a while, his long legs dangling, and then he stuck out his tongue at the dead, and then he took off his helmet and pressed both hands to his temples, and then he closed his eyes and howled, that was what the specters told Lotte, as they laughed and marched behind the column of the living. 🔗

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For a while she thought about becoming a vegetarian. Instead, she took up smoking. 🔗

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surfeit 🔗

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“It’s unfathomable and hostile,” she told him, and only then did she realize that she was a girl again, a girl who lived in a Prussian village between the forest and the sea.
“No,” said Archimboldi, and he seemed to whisper in her ear, “it’s just boring, boring, boring …” 🔗

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“And isn’t it too hard for you to bear?” asked Lotte.
“No harder than it is for you,” said Isabel Santolaya.
“I don’t understand,” said Lotte, “I’m his mother but you’re free to choose.”
“No one’s free to choose in love,” said Isabel Santolaya. 🔗

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As the plane crossed the Atlantic, Lotte realized in astonishment that she was reading a part of her childhood.
The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn’t lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely. 🔗

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sluice 🔗

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“I hope you’ll hear soon from your brother. It’s been a pleasure speaking to you. Goodbye.”
And she hung up. In Mexico Lotte sat for a while longer with the phone pressed to her ear. The sounds she heard were like the sounds of the abyss. The sounds a person hears as she plummets into the abyss. 🔗

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cloying 🔗