A SONG FROM THE CYNCEPHALI
Peirene PressJune 2021Selected by Barbara Epler
Who can resist a book that begins: “Yesterday morning, here in the city of San Agustín, I saw at long last the spectacle I had so yearned to see: a beheading.” And, in a world full of books about miserable marriages, Yesterday features one of the happiest married couples in all of literature. At the end of each spasmodic episode, husband and wife lock eyes in perfect understanding and scamper off together. When that first chapter ends, our hero confides: “I began to feel very low. The weight of the blood spilled there seemed to fall on top of me. I said to my wife: ‘Enough already of executions, guillotines, and all the rest! Let’s get out of here! Let’s go!’ ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Enough already. Let’s go!’”
Next comes a riot in a zoo, where our friends first face a dozen escaped lionesses, and then save their skins by singing with the monkeys and, after scaling a tall tree, perch to witness the unspeakable sight of a murderous lion being thoroughly ingested, digested and expelled by a magnificent ostrich. Then, once again, off they go together to the next event – which, happily, is lunch. In Yesterday, the adventures become ever more elaborate, peculiar and metaphysical, as the couple’s healthy appetites and ever-fascinating menus recur pleasantly. The author, Juan Emar, was described by his compatriot Pablo Neruda as, “a quiet, cunning, singular man. He was a lazy man who worked his entire life. He went from country to country, with neither enthusiasm nor pride nor rebelliousness, exiling himself through his own decrees. Now we will try to give this exile what he never had: the nationality of love.” His novel – a never-before-in-English treat of a book for tomorrow – was first published in 1935. — Barbara Epler
The clouds – which some hours earlier had opened up a sliver and brought a song from the cynocephali, my wife and me; which had then closed to make us fall silent; which had grown transparent to shine a bright though tempered light onto the ferocious brawl; and which had finally withdrawn during lunch to help us devour our courses to the music of golden rays – had now grown heavy and dark again, and distilled into a confused fog that made of San Agustín de Tango an inhospitable metropolis, sticky and blue.
We walked laboriously, startled by the silhouettes of the street lights. Where to go? For a while we followed a random pedestrian until a bus or tram stopped us, putting too much mist between us and him, and we lost him. Then we turned, alternating right and left, after something, anything. But nothing. Where to go?
When, suddenly, an idea: we should go and see our friend, the painter Rubén de Loa, on Immaculate Conception Street.
We headed that way.
Rubén de Loa’s studio is located off the second courtyard on the ground floor of a fairly gloomy building. The light from the window filters in through climbing vines whose leaves are always in motion. The leaves turn the light green. The frosted glass turns the green aquatic.
That is the place that we entered.
Rubén de Loa was painting. What is more, for 24 years Rubén de Loa had been painting non-stop. When he saw us over the top of his canvas, he came towards us. We, out of courtesy, advanced towards him. And the three of us moved as if through water, smoothly lifting off from the floor and floating down again in slow motion.
He offered us a seat. He sat there, my wife here, and I sat across from them, in the middle.
I said: “Your studio is too green, Rubén de Loa.”
“Greenish,” he corrected me.
“Aquatic,” my wife emphasised.
We fell silent, all three of us smoking.
Then, through the smoke rings, I began to examine my dear old friend.
Because of the reflected green of the vines, his long black hair looked like neglected autumn grass. His jaguar features remained unchanged. His skin was still firm. To be sure, he is still young. He is 31 years old, given that he has painted for 24 years and that he has painted since he was 7. His gaze was 90% inward. The remaining 10%, as it poured out of him, was a little hollow and very kind. He smoked a pipe, as a painter should. He did not sneeze or cough. Only every quarter of an hour he would say: “Well, well, well.”
To which I would respond: “Yes, sir.”
And my wife: “That’s how it goes.”
After an hour, Rubén de Loa began to look at she who is my better half. I followed suit. She looked transparent, like a small tomb. Her hair, brown in the streets of San Agustín de Tango, now took on the green of the studio and the sight of it started to make me feel nauseous. But such was not the case for my dear old friend, who looked at her always and longed for her.
Then I looked at my hands, wanting to see some living part of me as well in that studio. They were likewise suffering the window’s effects, which plunged me into a deep meditation on death.
My meditation was uninterrupted except, very infrequently, by my friend’s “Well, well, well” and my wife’s “That’s how it goes.” Until, partially returning to life, I wondered: “What is this ‘it’ that goes?”
I thought that it could be nothing other than Rubén de Loa’s sinful desire. And then I thought a change of subject would be wise. I started right in on the art of good painting, saying to my friend: “You’re headed in the wrong direction, Rubén de Loa.”
In speaking this way, not for an instant, not even deep down inside, was I referring to his sinful desire. It was a sincere statement directed solely at his art, or more accurately at the atmosphere in which his art came to be, since, in all honesty, he had shown us nothing yet of his work, and the last canvas of his I had seen was from five years prior. I was speaking, then, of the atmosphere. Let that be perfectly clear.
“You’re headed in the wrong direction, Rubén de Loa, for you live and work in an artificial atmosphere. Nothing that is done exclusively under the influence of the colour green can turn out well. This is less a studio than the depths of a jungle, or – even worse! – it’s how we imagined the jungle’s depths as children. I’ve spent this whole long hour surprised by the silence in here, for I kept expecting to hear the cry of a macaw, the yelp of a white-eared possum, the whistle of an anteater. Is it possible to paint like this?”
“There is no danger,” answered Rubén de Loa. “Of course this colour is not green, and it has nothing to do with the jungle. This is a grey-green, or better yet a greenish grey, and it has nothing of the jungle beyond the hue of a young eucalyptus – hardly green at all, hardly. And this hue, upon reflection, has just as much right to live as the bronze of sunny days or the violet of thunderstorms.”
“Let us compromise, my friend,” I continued. “Your greenish grey, I cannot accept. Let us compromise on a greyish green, with the caveat that I have reservations about this latter term in particular. But you must admit, I’m compromising.
Why don’t you compromise a bit as well?”
“How so?” he asked indifferently.
“By cutting away those leaves that cover the window.”
Rubén de Loa let out a scornful laugh and asked me: “Have you gone mad?”◉
A cynocephalus is a creature with the body of a human and the head of a dog. Examples include Anubis, the Ancient Egyptian god of the dead, and Saint Christopher as he is portrayed in the iconography of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Juan Emar was the pen name of Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi. Having spent some time in Paris with surrealist artists, he chose the pseudonym because of its similarity to the phrase J’en ai marre (“I’m fed up”).
Yesterday was one of three novels Emar published in 1935. Frustrated with their limited reception, he published little else for the rest of his life, but continued to write everyday. Umbral, the 4,135-page result of this undertaking, was eventually published in 1996, 32 years after Emar’s death.