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

pains practically to exhibit during postprandial conversation, while enjoying his demitasse, when a distant onlooker might imagine he was descended from rural nobility; and this was justified, almost as much as the paradox of Burgess’s mundane beauty, or his own treatment of realistic tragedy according to the conventions of fantasy, imagining there was neither conflict nor contradiction. True, conflict—which was real in the case of the Smiths—brought with it a kind of superfluous scaffolding, so that the course of events, whether suspended or delayed by that cumbrous stage machinery, forced him to anticipate every flaw, every error in that machinery. How instructive and misleading are errors! How the terricolous Hardy erred in believing he had to bury his hands in the loam of misfortune to prove that he had suffered! Dirt under the nails was the ultimate proof. But Jurisprudence was for him a secondary calling, one whose emblems solicitously evoked a fealty to justice and the public weal, and whose symbolic acts were so amply displayed during the ceremonial openings of law firms, whose founders took care to choose a splendid Latin motto to suit the heraldic monogram surmounting the doors of their establishment, an establishment whose end was not justice but commerce.
     
    In any event, planning the married couple’s future allowed him to distance himself from a problem only Addison or Ibbetson could resolve, each one of whom dealt with the kinds of technicalities he believed were at the core of the issue, but which he could never fully apprehend, since, from the time of his earliest instruction until his removal from the Polytechnic school in Zurich, such things were always lost on him due to his natural inaptitude for systemized learning. No, for him, any attempt at indagation or inquiry into such matters would condemn him to circumambulation, frustration, and endless raving. And, after some time following his own steps, he would find himself once again going down the path already beaten by Musset, who discovered il s’absente trop de l’Acad é mie parce qui’l s’ absinthe trop . Although, he could adduce in his defense a monastic temperance so commendable, the casual drinker’s tipsiness—or if he be Irish, the not so casual, for an Irishman would pursue the matter along an entirely different course without ever encountering a Musset—would seem Bacchic by comparison. In this sense, his sorrow, grandiosity, and style were all consistent. And someone who wasn’t even intelligent, but were only a link in a system devised by others, a man who maintained his place only by fear and trembling, would have no difficulty in recognizing him. Even in anticipating him. This is style, and cannot be taught at the academy. If he could hold a conversation with his brother without the usual pretenses or recriminations, they could surely come to some agreement. And especially now he had begun reading The Varieties of Religious Experience .
     
    There was always gossip concerning the two of them, whispers sprayed like shrapnel, for without at least one of their deaths, there cannot be an autopsy, or afterwards, a museum of commemoration. It was said that it was impossible to mistake one for the other, since “one was a novelist who wrote treatises on psychology,” and the other, “a professor of psychology who wrote novels.” The derisive chiasmus of fools.
     
    Tomorrow , enough
     
    The other benefit was to incur an immeasurable indebtedness to life for visiting on him so many woes. Curious he would think it a life’s work, and not a novelist’s, to repay that debt, as if his writing could remedy or at least assuage the wounds he accumulated with experience. What is certain is that all his possessions together could not discharge that debt, of which the most valuable, the most powerful, was also the least ponderous—his splendid art, his sad profession.
     
    The days passed, the ceremonies were repeated, the guests