Free No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) by Darren Koolman Luis Chitarroni Page A

incredulity.
     
    Since then, having succeeded in restoring them to that previous state in which their livelihoods depended on a meager spring (one that delivers only on a monthly basis), he eases a vellication of remorse with the thought that they would be amply remunerated with freedom of time and leisure, although he knows the leisure of redundancy cannot truly be enjoyed. He could dissimulate that his reason for dismissing them was to allow them the opportunity to find better employment, but he could not deny that the pension afforded them but little subsistence, and encouraged too much idleness. Worse still, a cocktail of sherry and idleness could precipitate their ruin. They could of course argue that an everyday existence vitiated by poverty, fatigue, and disenchantment need not be altogether intolerable. They could very well relieve the sting of privation by beginning a regimen of more healthful distractions. If they manage to sustain it, he could call on the Smiths now and then to check on their progress, update his case study, in situ . And yet, he would still call on them, even if their regimen came to nothing. The one certainty is there will always be a story. And no matter how long or short, it would always be interesting, for the events in their lives continually rapt the attention of the curious. And curiosity should be considered, in the case of these rigorously factual stories, the means by which their factuality, their consistency, is proven: for curiosity questions every revelation, accepts nothing on trust.
     
    If—this very morning—Mr. and Mrs. Smith were to arrive again at his door, exhibiting all the symptoms of delirium tremens, despite their avowed sobriety, and if they came recommended by the same authority—the same Lucien Sordido who was unable to exchange a broken reputation for a new one— he would certainly receive them with the same apprehension, the same mistrust, and the same pretense of goodwill as during that first interview, suspecting that, due to Sordido’s notoriety as an author of operatic librettos (a craft not dissimilar to his own: the only variant being the notoriety), they were introduced to one another at a party, and considering them too dull and tasteless to be among his own cast of caricatures, or believing, almost superstitiously, that they were practicing the art of evasion, of dissimulation, and that this was the means by which truly singular personalities concealed their exceptionality, he recommended them to him—perhaps naïvely—as living models. Living models, indeed, but for a novelist. And as always, he —disinterestedly—availed of them.
     
    If his memory were as reliable an instrument as his imagination, he would have recalled that Lucien Sordido had in fact sent the couple at his request, and that he had afterwards muttered to Sordido in a restaurant—during one of those myriad occasions they dined out that year—a slight of their aristocratic pose , which required an almost anonymous fealty to borrowed habits, a wavering confidence in the performance of those habits, and a similar irregularity in the upholding of one’s convictions and scruples.
     
    For now, he could dream of Mr. George Smith, with his threadbare coat and perfumed breath, as a citizen borne of his own inventive memory: as a guide or cicerone to a gallery of facetiae chosen with more haste than judgment, and afterwards replaced with variants whose verisimilitude relied more on his degree of inebriation than on the appraisal of critics, or, above all, of future biographers. The biographer, in particular—being tethered to the past—is a class of professional whose imagination retards his recognition of the present moment, though this is the first door on which every casual observer knocks. As George himself—although not a biographer—had done …
     
    By contrast, he was never wanting in charm and elegance; indeed, it could be said he had more than his share, something he made