Free Scarecrow & Other Anomalies by Oliverio Girondo Page A

“it appears.”
    I don’t guarantee a thing.
     

NARROW PURPOSE
     
    Too corporeal,
    limited,
    compact.
     
    I’ll have to open up these pores
    and disintegrate a little.
     
    I’m not saying too much.
     

LUNARLUDE
     
            to Norah Lange
     
    I SAW HIM leaning against a wall, his eyes almost phosphorescent and, at his feet, a shadow much twitchier and raggedier than that of a tree.
    How can I account for his weariness, that look of a dilapidated and anonymous house that is known only by objects condemned to the worst humiliations?
    Would it suffice to say that his muscles sought relief from the strain of supporting a skeleton so gangly that it was capable of wearing out even the most recently donned clothes? Would it take any special persuading to see that this same artificiality of effect ended up by giving the impression of a mannequin lumbered in the corner of a storeroom?
    Eyelashes brimming with the sickly climate of his pupils, he hung around this café where we used to meet, and, rooted at the far end of the table, stared at me as though through a cloud of gnats.
    One certainly would not have needed a well-developed archaeological instinct to confirm that I am not exaggerating or overstating the case when I describe the fascinating seduction of his allure as an impudence and impunity recalling something extinct... except that the wrinkles and the shiny veneer of these corroded vestiges, corresponding to the same premature decrepitude suffered by public edifices, were all too real.
    Although accustomed to abiding hour after hour in silence, he could at times be prevailed upon to relate some episode from his life, or to recite a poem by Corbière or Mallarmé. Never was it more dreadful to be in his vicinity! Amid the incessant fumes of a cigarette, his voice, full of soot, resonated as if it were belched from a chimney, while his immobility lent him the murky intrepidity of a portrait of someone whom no one remembers and his dentures stubbornly persisted in contriving the most grossly inopportune smiles. In vain would we try to bring the content of some verse to life. After the silence of each strophe came his breath of an unmade bed, the misgiving each time his skeleton emitted some noise, while his beard grew with the same susurration as that of beards growing on the dead... And for someone already on that slippery slope, it took but a gesture or glance, in which we could see something akin to those pairs of stockings that hang in hotel wardrobes next to desperately twisting dickeys, to prompt thoughts of suicide.
    Even if we resisted these excesses, how could we contemplate, on the other hand, the bramble patch of his wrinkles without imagining all the lost nights, all the hollow and helpless murmurs that, stratifying themselves with the slowness of stalactites, had formed creases of fatigue that not even death itself would iron flat?
    In order to survey them from one extreme to the other without losing myself in the process, I found myself forced to examine them with the same concentration with which I follow routes on a map and, thoroughly absorbed by this outward record of his mishaps, rarely heard what he was saying. Even on those occasions when we found ourselves alone, when I didn’t miss entire phrases, they reached me with the same intermittence as when, through an opened window, one hears the chopped-up noises of the street. It was useless to refocus my attention! Always some word leaked away, some particular so essential that, before I could answer, I had to undertake an endeavor equivalent to translating an encrypted document. Garnished with the same premeditation as those dishes that arrive elaborately mummified at a dinner table, his dialectic—aside from other things—did not stimulate my appetite too much, since he compounded an abusive employment of paradox with an insistence upon quoting from as many books as had fostered his fearsome ability to handle rhymes, an ability that he