Juan Rodolfo Wilcock and his Cat

Don't forget to re-read Vittorio Gasman's Meta Milonga dedicated to Wilcock's cat.

A Wilcock poem against verbose man.

Repulsive being, you merit

Your verbal acquaintance with grief

Unlike the ants, unlike the porcupine.

You, man of words, merit

Your mnemonic acquaintance with death;

Unlike chickens, unlike the tortoise.

Con man and liar, earths vomit,

Ineffable reasoning sleazebag,

Shame of the primates, carcinogenic tongue,

Learn from pigs to be angelic,

From the jackals, from worms

Learn majesty, learn from the beetroot

To keep quiet, you, nature's spittle.

Putrescent inventor of a language

To describe your decrepitude,

You roll around in your putridness

That other beasts avoid, if not nutritious

Yet you have everything there in your mind

in self ambush with clutches of words,

scrofulous in speech, greased in dialects,

You, final arsehole on the zoological scale,

mystical carrion in the tinfoil

of your coins, sole hypocritical beast,

Vile being, you merit your own

mnemonic acquaintance with grief;

and above all you merit

your verbal acquaintance with death.

In the Dark

The most modern techniques in the field of phosphorescence are at the service of Rapimio and his night. It has become clear that, in the past twenty years, industry has made great progress in this field, such progress that it is now possible to furnish an entire apartment with phosphorescent objects at very accessible prices making it possible to lead a normal life in total darkness. In fact, Rapimio doesn’t tolerate light: perhaps it’s a defect of his, of his retina, or else of the nerves that link his retina to his brain or of his own brain. The truth is that light for him is like water for cats: not necessarily fatal, but, in any case, an element to avoid or to lap up in its right measure at the right moment. Sure, one needs to leave one’s house to carry out life’s various obligations, at least the more bothersome ones, those whimpering obligations like a newly born baby abandoned at one’s door and which, beyond the door, whimpers and scampers until one squashes it with a frying pan or an encyclopedia that comes to hand. At times one needs to go out and Rapimio can not simply turn off the sun, nor dim the street lamps, semaphores, neon adverts and thousands of other manifestations of electric energy of which this miserable city is so prodigious. So he leaves his house with a brown visor over his eyes and an umbrella open over his head, a nice black umbrella that is liable to draw forth comments and foolishly perplexed glances, especially in the summer. The glances, under the umbrella, are not visible and Rapimio is deaf to any comments. Being in that glare is a bit like being in a French Revolution: one can expect everything. One knows that refraction dulls the brain, so it’s better to rush those few chores one has under a shower of unsustainable photons, an implacable cosmic flux that the umbrella  – imperfectly lined – holds back and that, in any case, the pavement and the air itself reflects and shoots in every direction like machine gun fire, a light that grabs your throat, and insinuates itself into the brain like red hot lava. And so Rapimio always returns home from these sorties with their unleashed energy, with a blinding headache. He closes the door, hermetically sealed by large padded cords, but for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour he continues to see red. At the end, though, black wins out and he is at peace again.

In front of the dark, shadowy mirror, with phosphorescent sticks of pasta and other gadgets and widgets of fitting beauty, Rapimio repairs the broken lighting. Beneath the bluish green of his supple hair, chemically treated, appears, little by little, the thin line that marks the edge of his empty eyes, of his unreal mouth. The quadrant of the clock is particularly visible, almost embarrassingly luminescent, and equally useless, given that Rapimio cares little about time anymore: in the dark all hours are the same. Portraits of his mother and father hang on the walls, pure bluish contours of enigmatic figures, to fill up with his thoughts, or not to do so, as Rapimio sees fit. The most necessary objects are all phosphorescent: metals, keys and the door handles: in the black living room two luminous fish inside a cold tub add a spectrally vivacious touch of tropical life. Many a poet has praised blindness, the conciling tenebra: it’s not necessary to gouge out one’s eyes though, it is enough simply to close one’s windows and cut the wires of the electric current. Until a few years ago, Rapimio was forced to leave all his lamps lit, because phosphorescence even of the best varnish doesn’t remain long if it is not opportunely recharged in light. But one day new radioactive isotopes, of unlimited fluorescence, appeared. Since they caused well known illnesses, Rapimio pondered for a moment whether to use them or not. Reason, the advocate of inclination, as always won out in the end. Others get themselves wounded in battles, as a special treat to themselves. Rapimio, instead, offers himself as a hussar to alfa, beta and x-rays and even to cosmic rays. He has already lost the point of two fingers: needles of ice run along his back: he can’t bend his left knee. And yet, and yet, laying down in his black infinity without distances, surrounded by greenish pale forms that, at times, seem to get closer and at others to grow distant, Rapimio has defeated time and with time, suffering, anxiety, fear.       

Vittorio Gassman's Meta Milonga for Rodolfo Wilcock and his Cat

The tale of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's 'talking cat' was explained in another post. Below is my rather rapid and careless translation of the poem that Vittorio Gassman wrote regarding this incident and his homage to Wilcock. Mixed with my shame at the bad translation (all too prosy and literal), is the wish, at least, that something comes through of Gassman's reading of Wilcock and his cat:

Meta Milonga for Rodolfo Wilcock and his Cat.

Rodolfo Wilcock: I know of no other mind

More geometric, more mercurial

I doubt there was another thinker

So funereally intelligent.

It’s little surprise that he was formed

Alongside Luis Borges and Bioy Casares,

Alchemists of the square maze of Daedalus,

Of the great circular ruin.

Moreover it’s not by chance that the word

Death is the symmetric summit,

The greatest of poetic challenges

And the paradigm of another madness.

It’s hardly surprising that his repetition

Is allied with the zeugma and the anastrophe,

That the anagram and the epistrophe

Sound in him as natural scansion;

That from that cryptic rhythm

Larva-like words (non words) were born

“FUTSIRI” … “SERTYVED” … and declined

The hieroglyphics of the great logarithm.

There’s no wonder if in things and people

Contact with his secret code book,

Inoculated the visionary root,

The absurd unicum of mutation.

In the unadorned salon at Velletri

(they spoke of Marlowe for hours)

The Visitor, startled and muted,

Amidst a spurt of dark blasphemies:

For it seemed that a large cat

With a red stomach passed by and

“I’m bored…”  he cursed

… “SERTYVED!” with a perfect pronouncation.

“But I’ve…just seen a cat…” he exclaimed

Wiping his eyes. And Rodolfo,

A little annoyed “Always the same old story.

Yes, it’s my cat … so what?” he muttered.

“Well, a cat… but it’s a cat that talks!”

And the poet “But not always”.

He turned the page and cited a blank verse

Returning to Marlowe.

Bathing

Submerged up to his armpits in shit, Coriolino has an air of self-gratification and pours an extra smattering on his head. On the shore the faithful clap joyfully, and he utters some salty witticisms when replying to the applause so as to demonstrate his basic gravitas, his worldliness (in particular his acquaintance with the ways of the beau monde), his practical approach to life. His followers redouble their applause. Upon the marsh of manure gently hang the branches of some diarrhoea of the spirit or other. From time to time, Coriolino stretches out his arm and, extracting some sludgy fruit, throws it to the applauding crowd. He then gets out to a stir of whispered admiration. Noble ladies accost him to lick off the excrement covering him; youngsters wish to copy him and dive into the brownish pulp. They are always laughing, laughing above all at those incompetents who still bathe in clear waters: the idea of having to splash around in odourless waters almost makes them faint, shrieking with laughter.

They lunch by candle light, a tureen full of suppli’: they would love to wear a farthingale and travel around in a carriage but since they are no longer to be found, they travel in Fiat 600’s dressed up as a lizard or a bedouin. Moreover, they follow Coriolino everywhere: gratified, he feigns to be interested in their artistic excrement with the air of one who throws a bone to a dog since he too is a musician; he tries his hand at writing plays, and designs a few quick sketches with a paintbrush inserted into his anus. Yet his great fame doesn’t depend so much on his own faeces but on the quantity of international dung which he manages to collect at his own Gathering of the Foul Ones. The elderly smeared in manure and directors from the sewers arrive to bathe from every antipode of the earth. 

The Island

Inspired by his reading of Robinson Crusoe, Gromibo decided to turn his flat into a desert island. Initially his wife Crabua didn’t object, but later, when one evening he returned from his job at the bank with the news that the removal men were coming to take away the furniture the next morning,  she was distraught and even started to cry. She, too, had read Robinson’s inspiring story and went to fetch a copy of the novel pointing out to her husband that in reality Robinson really had some items of furniture and sundry objects salvaged from the shipwreck. These included an inkpot, some weapons, cheeses, coils of lead piping, hammocks, a small cupboard, silver cutlery and, in short, more things than they owned while living in their apartment block. So husband and wife together came to a common agreement to draw up a list of items to salvage from the shipwreck. Drafting this list what was really shipwrecked was any common agreement. Crabua wanted to hold on to everything, in fact she even talked of making new purchases such as deckchairs, beach umbrellas, mosquito nets. Gromibo, on the contrary, wished to start from scratch, that is, with only a hammer and a kilogram of nails of varying sizes. Crabua also feared that the slow procession of her furniture downstairs would be accompanied by a rapid decline in her personal standing amongst the women of the neighbourhood, but Gromibo tried to explain to her that, as soon as they land on the island, such a thing as a neighbourhood would cease to exist by definition. Besides, he with his hammer and those trunks – those strong, bulky ones which people sometimes thoughtlessly leave out at night alongside the rubbish and which the rubbish collectors simply refuse to take away – will mean that she won’t lack anything. The expulsion of the furniture turned into a terribly distressing scene. Caruba grabbed on to the bedside tables as though they were her own sons and brothers; she threatened fainting fits from which she immediately recovered to throw herself on to the oven with all the pots and pans in her arms. She spat out feathers and tufts of wool in her patriotic attempt to defend with her teeth the mattresses and pillows. With the fridges first steps into exile she completely lost her mind for about a quarter of an hour. In spite of this she managed to save something  though not it should be said the respect of her neighbours which, more than any consideration about the natural isolation of the islands, resulted in her no longer leaving the house at least during the daytime. She now prefers to do her shopping between four and five in the morning in a small market open at night-time.

There then followed a period of absolute conjugal bliss for this shipwrecked couple. Upon hearing the first shrieks of the macaques soon to be drowned out by the screeches of the early morning parrots, Gromibo gets up from his fresh straw mattresses made from carbon paper, washes himself with some leftover lard and then merrily awakens his wife with a few cudgel blows and then leaves to go to the bank. Caruba has been renamed Friday and sleeps in the bathtub because of the cockroaches which have invaded the island. He is never one to return from work without some useful object or titbit gathered in the early morning from the trashcans along the way: a car hub cap, an exotic looking banana, a charming little animal to keep them company or keep them fed, potato peelings which they can sow, a theodolite with a single arm, even a dead sheep he found one evening after closing his account books. Friday does her best to keep his clothes clean and tidy, as a job in a bank entails but she goes around with any old rags even those gathered by her husband in the course of his forays to the surroundings of the small fort or in mountainous zones in outlying areas. For example, he may bring her a modern lampshade with a frieze of tanks for her to wear as a dress during the day and another with the ancient map of Dacia and Sarmatia as an evening dress as well as those wonderful combinations of doormats that the island women wear. Fairly often, Gromibo adds to his usual gifts a sack of bones or chicken heads which can be crushed with flint and then gnawed on along with the scraps of watermelon found under swarms of flies and birds of prey in the archipelago. In the evening under the mystical glow of endless advertising, Friday will light the sharp oil lamp and, in the dream-like light, will beckon to the delight of her husband with the paces of a Gregorian dance. After this they will sit on the floor lovingly wrapped in each others embraces by the last embers of the firebrick hearth and listen together  to the magnificent silence of the night interrupted only by the bloodcurdling screams coming from television sets, and from the measured howls of distant hyenas. But now and again, Gromibo will get up and, turning his trustful gaze towards the windowpane, misting over with the cold and veiled by the rain, he will murmur “oh, if only a ship would pass by…”

Liberation

Heir to varied and easy fortunes, a lover of sport and life in the open-air, Serten is nevertheless afflicted by annoying inhibitions, the sad legacy of the urbane type as well as a logical consequence of a flawed upbringing. To free himself from this, and lacking neither in means nor in willpower, the young man has placed himself trustingly in the hands of the best neurosurgeons. At first, the neurosurgeons advised him to go for the simplest operation, a series of electric shocks. However, Serten objected that one could only expect commonplace results from such a commonplace operation. Moreover, a colleague at university, after his third electric shock treatment, had been seen walking around with his tongue sticking out of his mouth and arms grazing the pavement. Even if his tongue has begun to return to its proper position recently, his family has long since despaired of ever returning him on the right track. Therefore, Serten opted for a lobotomy, a very fine operation invented in Portugal: a small hole has been made in his right temple and another in his left, then a thread was introduced through the hole, and the able surgeon cut the connection between his thalamus and his frontal lobes with two swift tears. This operation took place a few years ago: since then neurosurgical techniques have changed a lot and been perfected, and Serten, too, has changed and been made more perfect.

He is often in very high spirits and has become rather waggish. On the occasion of the recent solemn funeral of a palatine cardinal, he tailed the procession in his car with his umbrella open inside the car while wearing no trousers. Fortunately, the crowd, in its deep mourning, was unaware of this. The only embarassing moment came when Serten started to hurl some artichokes, a few dozen of them, in front of the monumental gates of the cemetery of the Beati Rapiti. He remembers perfectly well where he lives, and fully recognizes the members of his family, who are all rather perturbed by his perpetual displays of good humour and have all gradually, one by one, begun to move elsewhere. A brother of his tried to banish him using a salmon full of gunpowder which exploded at lunch. This attempt met with no success, however, because Serten has remained miraculously lucid, he knows how to count to 14, distinguishes the letters S & M and painting a certain sexual organ with Indian ink on a female cousins coat is certainly not enough to justify banishing a healthy, rich young man.

Given the success of the first operation, Serten has got other regions of his brain pricked, dissected and isolated. Several times, in order to reach a particularly intricate part of his cortex, they had to open the top of his skull using the typical horseshoe cut with a hand drill and saw, upsetting the parietal lobe. In this way he has managed to fully eliminate his sense of duty, shame, submission, remorse, fear, modesty, piety, insomnia and other such similar anomalies, all of them as rare as they are undesirable. Soft platinum protruberances stick out from his hair as trophies of a long battle for liberation. Most recently, ultrasonic techniques have opened the door to interesting new operations in the most secluded parts of the brain where the hypothalamus, hypophysis and putamen of the striated muscle is hidden. After the second application of the ultra-wave therapy, Serten has almost entirely lost his sense of direction as well as the few remaining social and sexual inhibitions he still had. Sometimes he finds himself in the fog in some meadow somewhere in the distant suburbs where  suddenly he, forgetful and happy, will begin to make love to a sheep or even (it’s all the same to him) a ram, stoic and thoughtful beasts. Finally exhausting himself, ragged, unkempt and dirty he runs into a local policeman on night duty and kissing him passionately on the mouth, or on his stomach, he asks him to take him home or, at least, to call him a taxi.