Free Scarecrow & Other Anomalies by Oliverio Girondo Page B

demonstrated often enough by means of a sample of verses as worn out as the envelopes on which he had scribbled them.
    Although my lack of appetite reduced my intake to bits and pieces, I was not slow to ingest a number of more or less shady anecdotes from his life: the bankruptcy, followed by the suicide and other accessories, of his father; his transit through two or three jobs; his need to pawn his cufflinks, tuxedo and overcoat; the first symptoms of hunger—little shivers in the back, little mute and desperate cramps; a thousand incidents in all latitudes, in all climes, until he came to Buenos Aires, which, according to him, was a place of marvels! The only city in the world where one can live without working and without money, because there it was the rarest of things to have a bloodletting with no profit, even in the case of the most well-bled billfolds.
    Afflicted as it is by chronic anemia, mine could not rectify the matter even though it had taken preventative measures to keep its discharges from being overly copious and frequent. Due to this infirmity I had to maintain this regimen religiously, so that I was stricken by the contrast between his habitual skepticism and his hyperbolic enthusiasm for the country. This is illustrated by a consideration of how, prior to embarking for Argentina, he had imagined it an enormous cow with a million udders swollen with milk, and how, after ambling through Buenos Aires for a few days, he understood that, in spite of its appearance of a bombed-out fortress, it was the offspring of the pampas, with which the river had mingled in order to give it birth.
    “Europe is like me,” he was apt to say, “something rotten and exquisite; a Camembert with locomotive ataxia. It’s useless to try to smear it with bad odors. The land has nothing left to give. It’s overly old. It’s full of corpses. And, what’s worse, important corpses. In vain we try to avoid them. We trip over them everywhere. There isn’t a threshold or latch that hasn’t been corroded. We live beneath the same roofs where they have lived and died. And as much as it repulses us, we are left with no other remedy but to repeat their gestures, their words, their attitudes. Only a man capable of wearing a crow’s wing attached to his forehead, like Barrès, could take pleasure in learning to fornicate in such cemeteries.
    “Here, on the other hand, the earth is pure and unfurrowed. Not a churchyard, not a cross. Here we can gallop through life without encountering more deaths than our own. And if we stumble by chance upon a cadaver, it is so humble that it bothers no one. It lives an anonymous death: a death of the same shape and size as the pampas.
    “In the city, life is no less liberated. From all parts blows an air of improvisation that permits us to act on whatever inclination. All anyone talks about is foul depravity. Expectancy takes root in such untilled fields! Having said that, as one who has blossomed here, I have often felt tempted to do something myself, and you may as well know it! I may even come to be convinced that sweat is as respectable a secretion as is generally claimed. I prefer it, in any case, to the glister of European cities, so polished, so perfect, that no one would consent to move a stone out of place. Their cornices inspire in us an aptitude for excellent manners. Sooner or later they end up lacing us into a straitjacket. It’s impossible to commit an error of syntax, to yawn in public, to grab a flowerpot and smash it to bits on the sidewalk.”
    These sallies, and others of similar stripe, acquired an accent less rhetorical when they referred to some episode in his life. Because of this circumstance or, perhaps, because of the lamentable state into which he had fallen, I hope I will be able to recapture, with adequate accuracy, what he told me the last time we met.
    As I recall, it was in one of those cafés that never shuts its eyes. The chairs had already been stacked on the