Paperback(1ST DALKEY)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781564783202 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Deep Vellum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/01/1995 |
| Series: | Latin American Literature |
| Edition description: | 1ST DALKEY |
| Pages: | 331 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.48(h) x 0.79(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
AVALOVARA
By OSMAN LINS
DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS
Copyright © 2002 Gregory Rabassa.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-56478-320-0
R?? and Abel: Meetings, Routes, and Revelations 1
In the still dark space of the room, in this kind of limbo or night hour created by the thick curtains, I can only see the halo of the face that the glowing sockets of the eyes seem to light up—or perhaps it is my eyes: I love her—and the reflections of the strong, thick hair, gold and steel. A clock in the room and the sound of vehicles. Does the vague, dusty, wavering odor come from Time or from the furniture? She beside the door, silent. Meteorites, dark during their pilgrimage, light up as they pass through the air of Earth. In just that way, after a short while, we lose opacity, she and I. Her brow emerges from the shadows—bright, narrow, and somber.
S
The Spiral and the Square 1
Where do they really rise up from—having come, as everybody and everything, from the beginning of curves—these two characters, still larval and yet already bearing? One cannot tell, whether in their voices or in their silences or on their hazy faces, the sign of what they are and what they are charged with. The door beside which they look at or appraise each other, face to face, surrounded by sounds and dust and darkness—what is it the threshold to?
Both go into the room and at the same time, perhaps, into the broader though equally limited space of the textthat reveals and creates them.
R
?? and Abel: Meetings, Routes, and Revelations 2
The curtains hide two broad windows with wooden Venetian blinds and glass panes. One window is shut and by it are the faded damask easy chairs, the coffee table in between, and the gold velvet couch. The other one, which is open, sheds light on the long table that has been set: on small oval mats—red, blue, and green—between the plates and the silverware, are two candlesticks, a bottle of wine, and the vase with yellow dahlias. Word and body, her face—fire and silk—next to mine: ??. I caress her hair, thick, strong, two heads of hair mingled. What links this hour to the vision of the City that comes down the valley like a bird? A distant explosion makes the pendants (some are missing) on the crystal chandeliers tinkle. I can also hear the slow movement of the grandfather clock. From the body in my arms, from the hair held tightly, the color of honey and steel, from the gay dress, a pungent perfume rises. The geometric motifs, the animals, and the foliage of the two huge rugs blend into a half-soiled pink. If the pendulum were removed, a child and his dog could hide in the wooden case of the clock.
S
The Spiral and the Square 3
To believe that the two characters and the parlor with its declining luxury where they meet are clearer for the narrator than the text—slowly put together, where every word is revealed little by little, step by step, along with the world reflected in them—would be illusory. There would be no dream cities if real cities had not been built. They lend consistency in man's imagination to the ones that exist only in name and in design. Cities seen on fabricated maps, however, placed in an unreal space with fictitious limits and an imaginary topography, lack walls and air. They do not have the consistency of the drawing board, the protractor, or the India ink with which the cartographer works: they are born with the design and take on reality on the blank sheet of paper. How far would the unwitting traveler who is unaware of this principle get? Putting together a map of imaginary cities or continents, with all their relief and configurations, is very similar, therefore, to undertaking a journey through the void. Little is known about the invention or the inventor until he is revealed with his work. This is how it is with the construction begun here. Only one element, for the time being, is clear and definitive: it is governed by a spiral, its starting point, its matrix, its nucleus.
R
?? and Abel: Meetings, Routes, and Revelations 3
The amusement park, with its lights lost in the surrounding darkness, she and I on the carousel that groans around its axle, the floorboards groan when one of the other rare guests passes; I attempt, without success, to cut an ox's rolling eye with a sharpened knife; the suitcase falls to the floor, the sea groans in the mouths and bellies of fish, I hear or think I hear, face against face, a crackle of flames, the oaken planks groan under our feet, I don't know whether ?? is pronouncing names she has invented or is giving shape to voices that seem to subsist in her flesh, the sound of the sea along the still half-savage coast spreads out in broad waves, embracing each other we whirl around on the carousel, the empty bed groans and the other one where we are; how can one comprehend that such hard instruments as the eyes retreat, burn each other, double over like a piece of silk?; the wind sporadically scatters the strident music from the park among the few houses of Praia Grande and makes the large window groan, the one with the hanging latches, maybe the heat of her face comes from her torrid eyes, I don't know the meaning of the names she scans with an artificial Latin eloquence (but does she scan them?), the chests and the bureau groan, the restless or circulating lights from the festival we spin around in are reflected on the cracked walls and on her face, no one knows this look which burns and does not go out, only I and some man whom she—in a different segment of Time—desires and loves, her voice is a breeze and it burns me, the bones inside me groan, a sound from the trunk on the floor in the sunset silence, birds of night pass by the window and groan, darkly, groan in the air.
S
The Spiral and the Square 3
Draw a spiral, with the help of a compass if it is your nature to be careful, or freehand if you tend toward easier solutions. Take a close look at the ends of the line, the inner and the outer. You will see at once that a spiral does not transmit a static impression to us; rather, it seems to come from far away, from forever, heading toward its centers, its point of arrival, its now; or, to enlarge upon it, to unwind in the direction of ever-vaster spaces until our minds can no longer grasp it. In truth, if we divide it into sections at its extremities, we do so arbitrarily; by doing so we save ourselves from madness. Eternity would not even be sufficient for us to reach the end of the spiral—or its beginning. The spiral has neither beginning nor end.
To a more candid look, which, we might say, deserves attention, the spiral would be without end outwardly; inwardly, however, there are the centers where it ends—or begins. Such a thought demands rectification. We are the ones who impose a limit on the spiral at both extremities. Ideally it begins at Always and Never is its end. By which we come to a conclusion even less trivial than the preceding ones; to wit, even though we see it drawn on paper in opposite directions, its extremities (if they really exist) will meet at some mysterious point that is inaccessible to our stony comprehension, just like a circle, a much less equivocal and disturbing representation. How, then, can one make the structure of a narrative, a limited object that tends toward the concrete, rest upon an unlimited entity, one that our senses, hostile to the abstract, repudiate?
R
?? and Abel: Meetings, Routes, and Revelations 4
Kneeling on the rug, I take off ??'s shoes, I take them off and I kiss her small, curved feet, feet with hollow soles. Her painted toenails glimmer under the sheer stockings. I take her feet in my hands, both of them (she, on the couch, half curved over, stroking my head), and I rest my face on them. Invisible violets sprout and bloom in her feet, inside her feet, among the thin bones: I can sense them. The City floats silently through the air, alights in the valley. Face to face, the City and I, mute. To whom do they really belong, these feet under my face and inside of which I can hear voices? She repeats my name softly: "Abel! Abel!"
The smell of dust is dissipated by her presence or by the lukewarm afternoon air coming in through the window. Our tongues repeat the game of advance and retreat. Our incisors touch at times and then our muscles retract. I suck successively her tongue and her neatly carved lips. She does the same. Our tongues swell and shrink, advance, expand, try to fill the other's mouth entirely. ?? presses my tongue between her strong teeth, delicately. A bird of imprecise shape or a black pennant fluttering on the horizon and drawing near, filling out and waving in the pure sky—birds?—and suddenly I see the outline of towers, walls, the river, or an arm of the sea. The smell of the air I breathe, tepid, from ??'s nostrils, reaches an almost unbearable intensity. Even greater is the pleasure of sucking it in. Am I inhaling over a glass of wine? Crushed grapes, freshly pruned vines, dry leaves of the arbor burning in the rain, linen sheets in the sun, among tall trellises and vine shoots—-there, among so many others, are some of the images brought forth by the breath that no one else possesses and that she herself, certainly, exhales only on rare moments with such intensity. The hot and agitated tongue, made to taste the flavors of the Earth, inverts that function and becomes food. It tastes like a liqueur. What kind? I drink in the ever-replenished juice of that living fruit. I steep myself in the noisy being I embrace—and on my chest I can feel her breasts growing as if they were part of me. Not only must they have the roundness but also the color of rose windows (two large rose windows over lesser ones), and in them is the glitter, I am sure, of most uncommon words.
S
The Spiral and the Square 4
As the spiral is infinite and human creations are limited, the novel inspired by this open geometric figure must have recourse to another one, which is closed—and evocative, if possible, of windows, rooms, and sheets of paper, spaces with precise limits through which the outside world passes or through which we observe it. The choice falls upon the square: it will be the enclosure, the precinct of the novel, of which the spiral is the motive force.
Conceive, therefore, a spiral that comes from impossible distances, converging on a determined place (or a determined moment). Upon it, delimiting it in part, place a square. Its existence beyond that area will not be taken into consideration: there, only there, is where it will govern with its mad whirl the succession of the constant themes of the novel. For the square will be divided into a certain number of other squares, ideally equal among themselves. And the passage of the spiral, successively, over each one, will determine the cyclical return of the themes spread out among them, in the same way that the entrance of the Earth into the signs of the Zodiac can generate, according to some, changes in the influence of the stars upon creatures. Let us adduce that the center of the square and the centers of the spiral will coincide, or, in other words, that is the imaginary point where—supposing that it is drawn from outside in—we arbitrarily interrupt it. Such are the foundations of the present work.
Other details will be added in due time. For now, we must suspend this explanation, imprisoned by the rigidity of the plan established more than two thousand years ago. Since our spiral comes from without, its spins become smaller and smaller. Inversely, because of a need for symmetry and balance in the conception, the one who constructs the work will always enlarge, in arithmetic progression, the space conceded each time to the various themes of the book, which are controlled in regard to the rhythm of their reappearances and the ex-
(Continues...)
Excerpted from AVALOVARA by OSMAN LINS. Copyright © 2002 by Gregory Rabassa. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.