fateful day... we shall see...

Seven years today he’s gone









So, I’m phoning the baroness, listen, seven years today since he left us... I mean... after Reig’s death, and not a peep from anybody; nobody caring a fig; the sites, the newspapers... never acknowledging his immense contributions to the culture; ignored by one and all; neither Agathon nor I getting a single (good or bad) reaction to our efforts...



The baroness too dignified, as ever, to chastise my abruptness... The truth will out, she says, never you worry, O’Donovan. We all die as mayflies but the reflection of a few of them lingers and rebounds in the recesses of the vast dark matter... Why would Carles’ brilliancy have to irrupt now and not later...? His time will come sooner than the end is due, and by a long long stretch, and we, the proper props properly relaying his shining, will also be remembered as rays of his very own light... Don’t feel bamboozled, O’D... Don’t feel, tout court; and, instead, do; feeling is for crickets and other disgusting beings whose feelers feel... spread along and hither and thither... but never go anywhere the clean ideas of their absent brains... And anyway, all good things are slow in coming... Tell me about Catalonian Independence... Why should Carles’ glory come before his country’s...? An artist, a talented artist, a genius, has to be epigonous to the group, no doubt... What would Shakespeare be without the English Independence behind him...? Do you imagine Shakespeare and his works recognized even as extant nowadays if his country had been still under the thrall of some fascist concern...?



Ah, the baroness, she cracks me... she’s so well versed in things Reigian! I see her stately face in my mind while we are talking on the phone... Notice her face’s windows: very much as a face made of hidden cards, only that instead of cards, it’s all open dark windows... Very suggestive of the intimate wishing of the empty bodies... They all long to be replenished in a single being, where everyone has ITS place... A face of nothings... or rather... a faith of nothings, of souls, of emptinesses, but a faith nonetheless, where what’s contained is the being that otherwise would have escaped us... She contains the uncontainable...



And she’s got amazing insight... She was very ironic, it appears; when she said “fascist,” she was playing with the red-neck / charred-neck dichotomy, I surmised... For there is that enigmatic, very controversial bit, in the texts: the strange exclusion of what Reig calls the “charred-necks” (who must be much worse than red-necks, no doubt,) whom biased, fed-up Catalonians, after almost three centuries of “sap-niard” misrule, thirsting for freedom, want to identify with what other freedom-fighters facetiously call “spics,” meaning: the sappy sap-niards, whom they pretend (quite untruly no doubt!) that Reig wants (at least in his more offensive writings) already non-extant anymore, or at the very least converted to something that is not so awful-sounding as that... for who in his right mind wants to be still, after all those decades and decades of opprobrium and ridicule, a fascist, a charred-neck, a spic, a sap-niard...?



But notice that all the pawns are red-necked. With a bit of imagination we could see them with charred necks... and that would go totally smoothly on the way of what Reig’s “religion” aims at: total inclusion...



It’s been widely known for ages that Reig was very fond of pulling your leg... He was also a jocose fellow... He had his morose and depressive moons, moods... but also his high, victorious, overreaching... spans.



That’s why there are pundits who believe this “charred-necks” business might be just a joke. Jocose in the jacuzzi, you know, inventing denunciatory epithets just for the sake of it... for fun, in a word, while wallowing in the healing mud, against boredom... Even when pretty wizened and loaded with years, he was known to feign having lain for days rotting on the ground to the despair of his scant followers – never more than two or three, for he would discourage them to follow anybody but themselves in self-realization, which after all is the realization of an ultimate “all-there”… In those occasions, as the youngsters would plow into what they thought to be a stinking carrion, Carles Reig would arise as if from the sulfurous pool in a cool spa: refreshed, always ready to teach the too-sticky a lesson in detachment.



I wont despair then... I’ll keep at it a while longer too... Even... until my own December 18th maybe...



I told the baroness, I’m sure you are right, baroness; I’m with you also here... Your approximation has got to be the most inspired... I’ll sign under... When Reig, in his marvelous novel “the Sky Assumes the Value,” depicts the truest death of a wife perhaps ever depicted in writing... and in such a gut-wrenching truthful manner, and so nakedly... that you feel yourself reduced to bones and entrails... and you see yourself as the dead wife... and then the husband enters into that desolate panoramic view of a world of worming souls... where the cruelty of children toward their own mirror selves... reduced to the size of insects... with feelers instead of brains... lost in the desert... myriads upon myriads of grains of sameness... what a striking allegory... how the Sun itself is the witless magnifying-glass that sooner or later will finish by roasting each of us... and then he shakes himself... he has no patience for the Sun to finish him... and finishes himself it such a way as to leave a lasting impression... In a burst of flames... We are still warmed by his pluck... He’s indeed one the shiniest bricks for the ulterior construction of a god who shall outshine the Sun... I mark your wise prophetic words, baroness...



My pledge must have pleased the baroness... She chirped...



And then nothing... A few sparse leaves that the wind brought down from the roof rapped on the glass... Sparse leaves, eh...? Questioning their being... “Here...” “here...” say their knuckles on the glass... sounding the glass... There is the never-ending quandary again: is the end god constructed as if by itself, in a self-understood manner...? or… is it constructed at the end of time by the mass alive…? Nothing is sure, nothing is mechanical… The mass of life... either succeeds... or... fails... ok…?



The striving... indeed... only the striving’s what matters for the while.

Last Tale; or How Reig Died December the 18th in New Orleans

Last Tale; or How Reig Died December the 18th in New Orleans.










Seven years ago, the entrails of the warrior were spilt. He’d been in New Orleans for about two weeks already. That day he’d gone out with a ticklish whore. She’d laughed like a neurotic hen at everything he’d say. “I’m bursting with comicality – my fallopian tubes are crammed with ingenuity and wit – wit! – twitted like my parroty aunt: wit, wit!” Reig would intone, gay and euphoric, and the whore, Naboniqua, exploding, her cackle like a lurid spark swollen into insane fireworks above the din of the rabble around.




Reig, I’m told, had been calling her a “goddess,” and Naboniqua was at first ensorcelled by the word. Then, with the heroin, the goddess moniker would just elicit floods of giggles.




Afterward, numbing syrupy flummery cloyingly lingered while they stood in the hotel lobby, full of popinjays and, much worse, some stinking clusters of abrasive kooks, utterly given to the sin of bigotry, at the same hotel seemingly for another obscene Congress about some supine stupidity or other related to the habitual sacred book of imbecilities for assholes. And there was, as always, both in mufti and uniformed, the sempiternally cruel bureaucracy – just watching, trying to catch somebody at something, the damned unadulterated creeps.




Reig and Naboniqua had been fucking and shooting up up there, in his monkish cell.




Now they went strolling in the sunshine. Enticing little girls were playing at the curb with dibs. The whore, “clothed in radiance,” Reig, patting his pocket, said, “wistful virgin exalted, salubrious palatable morsel of heaven unhinged, would be easy target for the scandal-prone ignoramuses that overrated every divine image that happened to walk among them... after the first incredulous tooted, alas, turning into a derisive throng of tarnishers the lot of them. That’s why I’m packing my revolver.”




Naboniqua, her scudding countenance bruised with the wanton balm of his toothy kisses, guffawed, the glint of flint of her black teeth, painted and buffed with shoe polish, then dazzling Reig’s eyes.




Meanwhile, the walk, instructive, of course.




Suddenly, thunder, squiggles of lightning in the grim sky, hisses of squirmy winds... and yonder the resentfully whispering hills, the frothy shores, the frowning horizon afire... everywhere tempestuous embers brought back from the grills of Vulcan on the clumsy busks of umbrellas...




Whining whores and their mangy beaus avidly circling every available threshold...




Reig and Naboniqua flying instead toward some ruins, romantic in the rainswept twilight. Here, over the dancing leaves and the crisp kernels of hardy trees, they also danced, a stifled minuet on tiptoe.




“You want to see my mother. I could marry you,” said the whore above the sizzling squeals and raucous expectorations of the raging storm.




“Open your mouth, I want to look inside your craw, so dark and foreboding, like a tyrant’s bent on some type of relentless guzzling of his own. Or aiming to swallow up a row of blazing beehives abundantly inhabited with sweating drones.”




But the ruins, I’m told, were the mother’s house. Normalcy had been forfeited; Reig became suddenly jittery. He was dismissing the idea of a visit to the matriarch. “Too soon no doubt; after all, we only know each other since early this afternoon.”




Infallibly, darkening farther in the dusk, the whore said: “Loathe to see you so remiss. My brothers are sure to take the idle procrastination awry. Unseemly for a gentleman to utter such unworthy obfuscations, insipidly seasoned with those too tempered words of caution, and that just after having shamelessly debouched himself even such as to unfathomably burn his brand all over my awed face.”




I must exude confidence, soar over the slump, he told himself. But how? Ah, maybe my comicality...? He tried joking to save himself from a sworn fate. And the pistol was clicking in his fingers. “Same as not all mothers are lovable, not all mothers are loving either – don’t take for granted your mother’s easy love,” he perorated, with an fake air of pedantry that nonetheless had always suited him fine.




“Your pistol is bulletless,” said the whore. “In between bland amenities, I furtively if awkwardly emptied the drum.”




“Look, the impetuous fluids sedulously sieved through the teeming baskets of the sky show patent signs of exhaustion, the fracas of the farting spirits of the burdensome air also wanes, the inexhaustible beauty of the renegade sun righteously scorches the bashful bloom of our reborn perceptions through the cyclopean clouds which are the fluffy atrium to the temple behind which the blue spy-mirror stands where the eye of the revengeful plenty-headed god watches non-stop for our reprobate’s glaring misdeeds, for our iniquitous sins to pop up like cursedly splashed flowers in incriminating exhibition.”




“Cut the crap already,” the powerful lady screechingly braked.




Reig caught glimpses of envious and hostile shadows behind the soiled and cracked glasses of the windows of mum’s house. A gathering of wolves and vultures peering from the dark. “Are those offerings...?” he said, pointing firmly, I’m told, at several little mounts of beer-colored big turds that surrounded the house. “Do fairies then come in the impish light of the rising moon, enveloped themselves in sparkling garments of tiny noons, to plant those other flowers of increased loftiness as the heavens, assuaged, only show zeniths of shiny sphincters shitting...? Or...?”




No time for an answer, I’m told. Instead, he heard a roar. Heavy corpses of dogs poured from a flashing door. He patted his bleeding womb, weaned off knives since his last operation, where his cancerous prostate had been excised. He drove out his hands against the glints of tusks and sharp eye teeth. Those dead dogs were surely hungry, though. A forest of blades... Knives, knives hyperbolic. A Cesarean without other spontaneous birth than the one of fairy death, whose red fat lips are the lips of my wound, he thought, dying...





(...)





Less the four years later an also insatiable hurricane took it all to itself.




Reig’s grave, the flat gray stone that said “Carles Reig, Catalonian Poet,” the remains of his rotting body... all swallowed for ever, down the spiraling crusher of a ravenous tyrant’s inexhaustible black craw.

[Follows a last poem (maybe) that showed later, encrusted with some dry snot, on his hotel’s night table.



It is surely pertinent to note that roughly six months before his own demise, he had buried his last wife... His last one, of course, before he then, utterly destitute, had married the charitable baroness on the 18th of November.]

devoid of dormitives, nonetheless I slumbered...












truculent glimpses has the witness

as resurgent he scrounges for relief in its shabby shelter

where he vouched to mourn for all the spilled bile

of so much now elapsed comfort, and whiny self-esteem...



let him now fret and sigh and frown

let him tame the moils, conflicts, feuds, as he discerns the outrage

that erudition is...



moldering perpetual succinct processes:

downtrodden decoys all wed to the void

a stew of thorns titivated with masking so-called beautifying saponacities...



gloat the muscles of indulgence at the decay of so many intimacies:

insistent wrinkles elude the glowering mien



I used to be awesome, strict...



though uxorious enough, sure

equality my credo

lavish quarrels sway and wield the affable steels

of chronic second prizes...



now all are fled, the blanks to be leisurely filled in

with so many on the nose certitudes...



a succession of superb spell-bindings



the smoke gels into a maiden bride:

she’s very passionate – must be a great fuck...



confounding now shoveling shit with the bitter delight of gone dreams

the rigor of despair with

the exuberant phenomenon of the kneeling down in the quiet of night...



bedridden the scream of the invalid as an uptight horse that bolted from her skin!



my eyes open wide:

dazzled I crawl to the more garish naked plot of the visible...



a chill of oddity – misfits do so stimulate us, don’t they?

the answers flow then, their attitude so deranged

(goosebumps a burden the spooky fling, load the frightened with)



from the seals of monstrous senility frothily are gestated the realizations...



the seamy seams all faded, one looks already like a bug

the shelter assailed by daggers

of sculpted temper...



a gasp, a grunt

the momentum scalping oboes

(or are they other easy gadgets of dotage?)

the throat too tender then...



the caresses of worms, their nibbling

forsaken dalliance now revived...



with animosity, a slaughter as I shake myself:

gutsy obsolete opportunists, the worms

blundering, subservient, kissing up in the middle of the bloodbath...



contaminated, I drove suddenly (a genius, austere

saddened by no grudges, poised) a hand over my traits...



I shrunk at the touch:

a battlefield of dozens of extinct (such a selfish tomb) creatures

too big for their britches, their raging hormones

(such a folly)

kept at bay...



in the hollow of the bedrock I seem to have lain fallow for hours

in bars and bathrooms, the sick honey of proud grapes of dripping jokes

harsher than balloons (their uncharted hafts tugging as I tug at the mirror

the hairs of my beard)

kindred biles in atmospheric bursts...



baboons reign in a country of assholes:

glad we sang, fought, taught, were born...



leaning at the fence, weeping for our fate the busy guests:

the worms, the worms...



robbed by lightning

our ashes

hid like stories hit also with potentialities that averred themselves inviable...



unleashed ash burglars, bullies:

their oily chests balking at such heavy-lifting tasks...



my wrath subsiding at last:

relish the lithe risky blow of wealthy wealth

impress on the pecky culprit the improvement of strife...



get up and cleanse her wound:

be good, don’t shrink at the new poverty...



by the morn flummoxed, I admonish myself:

restrain thy killing stump

drown the marring hammer

stay a bit, maybe longer, until the gist pours freely...



as I glibly tug at recalcitrant shrubs sparkle the sour calluses

a quarrel of oaths down the fraudulent slope of chores

(I seem to have fused the old frauds with cloudier squanderings)



riveting tough nuts:

I’m panting in my cashmeres

(what an hypocritical castration, I think, unchallenged

as I clobber at the stones in the hoary graveyards where our enemies rot

and the splinters turn into dry manna)

an inept cobbler fueled at ease with obstacles impossible to stomach...



ah, but pleasantly surprised as I dwell now on a fund of upset strengths:

manifestations of health are so awful in a moribund, Lavinia!

they are often prohibited, often aborted, often...



moaning meretrix with henna on her hair:

a modest ride smoking the boss’ money, that’s what it all amounted really to

(the pregnant truth always a disappointed enraged broken-hearted fever

that never kills its prey)

she wound up healthily gossiping about all the tawdry comic heroes

outrageously failing to rivet her attention on the newly brought cheaper chapter

of regrets...



repulsive humiliations erupted, outstretched, rampant:

how to salvage the ontological broodings-over now?



I enjoyed hearing the hints of envy eager to rely on the allusive code:

ah, the glamorous outgrowths of my up-standing



I won, unexposed as a whole, a waterfall of severances...



fist of the would-be murderer:

skittish around a panoply, a bulk of atrocious tokens

of rapt lifeless morbidity...



rise up from the languor and malaise under which you crawl and creep:

a scolding lame rained-over worm

too beholden to the parochial scraps of hierarchy



my fingers eidola in turmoil:

mourning the earlier firm grasp of the conked out head



she used to be so smashingly beautiful, didn’t she?



but that’s never finishing, and she’s suing for more laudanum:

once and for all let my ass be moved, ok?



rousant knuckles:

hunched arthritic hands that struggle with the several deliriants

on the shivering salver near the bed



we are wavering, our hostilities toward each other sweetened now



all that’s left from the conjugal fretting:

a frail tottering server and her catching snaggle-toothed mouth

a farce about to finish as I say:



we’ll yet eke by, all hazards numbed.

Last poem from molybdenous borborygms

Last poem from molybdenous borborygms

Inabastable Fi Fi professional







Ve-te’m aquí, nou arúspex que destrio / els palters / que hi ha damunt / les voreres / i dins ... les garangoles.



Ve-te’m / em caragolo arrugat perquè sóc una eruga. / No! / Sóc un gos escombriaire. / Sóc un palter. / Sóc un arúspex. / Sóc una vo ... re ... ra. / Sóc una ga ... ran ... go ... la. / No em xafis perquè xafaràs merda! / Agafa les sabatetes i passa / i passa i passa



passa ... passa ... passa ... passa ...



damunt catifes vellutades / dessota aranyes i enllumenats / acollonants / enmig de perfums i ròssecs i estossecs finets / per sobre / rodes rabents_____________>







EL CEL / és un verdanc al cul de déu. / I els núvols són pets d’àngels petaners.



LA MAR / és un tramvia aigualit. / T’imagines?



i suors nafres pixums / menstrus lleterades / de proletaris i proletàries. I ceba. Suc / de ceba. Pudor de ceba ... (Sóc / una ceba.) ... (Sóc / de la ceba!)




EL TERRA / és un wàter absolut i a la raseta, iè! / I escullo tostemps enterrar-me enterrar-me enterrar-me. / Escarboto adelerat! Bufo! / Veig passar les bragues de la mar i del cel! / Ja sóc terra ran de terra, / no te m’apropis! / No em xafis! Aquest palter de gos, / Se m’assembla? / vist d’aquesta part? / té el meu perfil? / No! / No té només una retirada a mi! Som idèntics! / Som u! / Sóc jo!




Jo / pa ... s ... sa ... pa ... s ... sa ... pa ... s ... allunya-te’m! sa ... pa ... s ... sa allunya-te’m! ... pa ... s .... sa ... pa ... allunya-te’m s ... sa .... pa ... s ... sa ... allunya-te’m! allunya pa ... s ... -te’m! sa ... pa ... s ...




allunya-te’m! / allunya-te’m! / a l l u n y a - t e ’ m !




encaraquejasàpiguiquetutambé / ca-cagues.

Unreachable Professional Fine Fine






Here’s I, the new haruspex who sorts out / the turds / over / the sidewalks / and inside ... the treewells.



See me / as I screw myself because I am a caterpillar. / No! / I’m a garbage-rummaging dog. / I’m a turd. / I’m an haruspex. / I’m a si ... de ... walk. / I’m a tr ... ee ... w ... ell. / Don’t tread on me because you’ll tread on shit! / Take your little shoes and pass on / and on and on



on ... on ... on ... on ...



over velvet carpets / under wonderful chandeliers / and other fixtures / a-swarm in perfumes and lingering smells and delicate coughs / atop / wheels that speed away________>





THE SKY / is a bruise on god’s ass./ And the clouds are farts that farting angels fart.



THE SEA / is a watered down tramway. / Can you imagine?



plus sweats wounds piss-soaked / menses-soaked jizzms-soaked / patches from proletarians of both sexes. And onion. / Onion / juice. Onion stink ... (I’m an onion.) ... (I’m / a Catalonian patriot!)



THE SOIL / is an outhouse, totally, and totally full, yeah! / And I choose always to bury myself bury myself bury myself. / Franticly I’m digging! I’m panting! / I see the panties of the sea and the sky passing aloft! / I’m already dirt on the level with the dirt, / don’t come near me! / Don’t tread on me! That dog shit / Looks like me? / perhaps from this angle? / does it have my profile? / No! / It doesn’t just look like me! We are one! / Identical! / It is I!



I / just go ... go ... g ... o ... g ... o ... g... away! far from me! o ... g ... o ... g ... o ... far from me! go... g ... g ... o ... o .... g ... away ... o ... g ... o ... far! away ! from me! just g ... o ... g ... far ... o ... way ... g ... far ... g ...



be gone far from me! / far from me! / f a r f r o m m e !



evenifIknowthatyoudoalso / shi-shit.

last of "bo-botons de plom plom plom"

page 37-49.

still a few more

pages 28 to 36

third batch of 9 - balls of lead

the unraveling coming soon...

plumbeous - next batch of 9 pages

and later, soon enough one hopes, one will try to make his best in unciphering 'em all, ok?

Rated "S" for Sex

Rated “S” for sex














Or just another little bit of ephemera – a little “biblical parable” that C. R. wrote for the handbill offered to patrons at the opening of Travessa deserts, in the event delayed until February of 1979. The paltry or spare handbill was prepared for a different venue than the one that ultimately proved valid, but anyhow it was kept as is, probably for lack of resources. After the delay, the handbill, printed for the first venue (Teatre Nord,) stood. It seems that during the couple of months of rehearsals, a bunch of scurrilous fascist christians meantime had time to take over the management of the locale and just happened to find the play “objectionable in all fronts, on all counts,” and banned it forthwith, flaunting the previous contract and what have you. The representation of the play was about to be scrapped when the exiled found a new venue, the Cupula of the lower Rambla, in Barcelona...



Travessa deserts, although obviously too “dirty” for the bigoted, right-thinking, folks from the northern districts, proved a great success... As a written play, it had already been banned by the censors... (All of Reig’s plays were at a time banned for publication. The system works perfectly, it’s excellent for silencing authors without the need to kill them. Banning a book means that, except for a tiny few that are later vindicated, it is taken away from the mind of the people at hand. People die or get to something else. So, most banned works are lost in time, forgotten; even if somebody tries to revive them once the particular dictatorship that banned them is gone, they’ve become irretrievably obsolete.) Travessa deserts had remained unpublished until a rebellious though inept publisher from Mataró, having little to lose, dared brave the censors, and issued the play in a flimsy volume which sold “like tigernuts” (that’s a Catalonian saw meaning a lot.)




...





[“Inept” publisher? Or should one say a “rather incurious” one? Whole chunks of the play missing – not censored, mind you, just mislaid. Same thing with the other plays published by the helpful, volunteering, naive and very necessary guy. His name was Jordi Casals (he was a dyed in the wool communist, so somebody else acted as his front at the time).]





...





Also, Travessa deserts was the first play in the whole of the Catalonian show-circuit to be rated S. (S for Sex.) This dubious honor (a windfall, really, in those years of pornographic penury,) of which the producers made a big to-do, was duly and gleefully emphasized in all the ads that appeared in newspapers and on the radio.



...





The vicissitudes the play went through are reported in the letters C. R. wrote to his girlfriend Jocelyn. Jocelyn had two little children from a botched marriage, and those must we assume to be the dying “meus fillets” (my children) in the parable...




...





Concerning the doomed locale from which they were tossed away by the demonic supersticians that took over its punishing reins, there’s this vignette in a letter to Jocelyn by Carles Reig.

“They had one of these ‘moral’ gatherings, and they wanted us to attend, perhaps to reckon up to which level of malignity and vice we’d reach... Something was brewing, and most of them were on the know... So I found myself practically alone, I knew nobody there. None of the main actors had shown up. The director, of course, I had already surmised that he wouldn’t be there. Probably drunk, for it was Saturday night...



“Then I saw the devout regulars all there, queuing on the dance floor, five in front facing the wall flowers, the rest of the guys queuing as I say behind the five fast ones up front. The wall flowers were the expectant girls (the females, rather, for there were some there that were really old gals; same thing with the guys, some of them eighty if a day.)



“They encouraged me to queue also... I went and put myself behind one of the longest lines... But then, luckily, before I had a chance to dance with any of the women that would get up with a flourish of skirts and a giggle as any (any at all) of the pretenders came to ask... a bell rang. It was time for the syrupy punch... All ran away toward the tables... Well regimented, the whole bunch; while the bosses of management kept an eye on the proceedings, never allowing a misplaced hand or a flying peck.



“I’m not going to drink any of that dross, I said to myself, and I went toward the toilets... A girl was approaching up the corridor from the same toilets I was going to... ‘Are you alone...? Want to make it...?’ And she apparently meant for the two of us to go fuck each other inside the reeking cabinets. I said: ‘Alas, unfortunately not... Came in with the lady...’ But of course I was only charitable, making her believe she was a better choice than whatever I already had me over there, poisoning herself around the bowl of punch.



“The toilets stank. There was shit everywhere: the walls, the floor... I don’t know what took me over... I took my handkerchief out, I started wiping shit off the walls... Then I took hold of one of those brushes to scour the toilet bowl... Shit was dripping from it... Instead of cleaning the floor, I was making it worse... The stink overpowered me... I started retching... I felt awful... I had chosen to make their locale a bit cleaner behind the pious façade... cleaning the hidden shit that nobody else seemed ever to clean... but now the horrible reek was puncturing my soul... I couldn't any longer... I couldn’t stay... I had to go... I had to leave them to their own resources... Much as I endeavored to gain control over myself, I couldn’t obtain, I couldn’t deliver... The retching was raking my membranes inside... I fled... A strange noise followed me outside... It seemed to me that inside now everyone was laughing, fighting, carousing, fucking, drunk... gone... As if the punch had been spiked or something... I couldn’t make myself go back though... Damn, no way; the memory of all that shit makes me retch and pule even now...”

The frightened ones are not allowed reentry










Says the parable: Whoever imputes scandal, he’s just despicable.




Because it is verily true that not long ago there was one who, in the dark night, felt himself to be full of sorrows. Slowly a heavy sleep took hold of him and made him numb, until he lost conscience and found himself sailing along a very long emptiness...



But suddenly you wake up full of anguish. You are fighting to breathe. “What am I doing, here inside, locked?” franticly you are asking yourself. Out of whack, grappling in the void, you manage at last to clutch your tatterdemalion throat. Breathing is becoming too wearing an exercise. There’s a mephitic gas that thickens around you; as if encasing you, as it becomes solid... Horrified, you see now the congealed bodies of the members of your family. “I must be the one that does it! I have to rise to the occasion!” you hear telling yourself, as your commendable sense of responsibility calls you to duty, damn the sundry ordeals that chose to come your way at this wrong moment. For you are inherently heroic. Now you are thinking fast... Air, that’s what’s needed: air! Here inside the poison only piles up with the passing of the seconds... The poison comes directly from a corpse enclosed in the premises... progression brings death... there are pipes leaking, cracked butane canisters... I’VE GOT TO SAVE MY LITTLE CHILDREN... I’VE GOT TO SAVE MY WIFE... So, crawling along, with a last effort, you reach the panes of the balcony... But you can hardly move any more, too exhausted... and the lethal gas has you already practically paralyzed... you’ll be unable to open the shutters... you’re stuck, like tied up with the ropes of apoplexy... that’s why your maximum wish is now to fly away, aloft, lost in a dream... “Reality...!” you invoke, pulling yourself together in a supreme fling, now that you realize that your dear ones are already smiling at death... “Save them...!” you ordain, burning your last flicker of energy.



And now, in an epical burst, you break the glass by throwing all your weight at it!



You asshole! A malignant asphyxiating flight invades your space. Instantaneous death touches each you. An agonizing convulsion crosses the happy sleepers, and now they all remain as mommified.



With an ultimate thread of deathrattle, ephemerally, you call yourself the worse you could call anyone. That’s how you die: like a nitwit, and hating yourself to death. For you had never had time enough to think... You had been living instead in fast, transient, nightmares.



Because I say verily unto you that outside is always worse... And what are you going to do about it? Are you going to fight against the constant contamination that seeps inside your from the outside, are you going to fight against it with the useless noise of the unreasonable, UNREFLECTED FLURRY...?

L’espantat no torna pas a entrar.







(Paràbola:) Ai, desgraciat d’aquell qui s’escandalitza...!



Perquè s’escau no fa pas gaire que hom era afligidament torbat dins la sinistra nit. Lentament, una son feixuga se li empara esmorteint-lo. Fins que perd l’esment i navega llarguíssima buidor...



De sobte et despertes en l’angoixa. Estàs mig asfixiat. “Què hi faig, aquí tancat...?” et demanes esbalaït. Esborneiat, t’arrapes la gola. Respires com més va més difícilment. Un gas mefític es densifica al teu voltant. Esgarrifat, veus els cossos inerts de la teva família. “Sóc jo! Haig de fer-ho jo...!” el teu insigne sentit de la responsabilitat et dóna forces. Ets heroic. Penses ràpid... Cal aire. Aquí dintre s’hi congria el verí; s’escapa d’un cadàver; el progrés duu la mort; bombones, canonades... HAIG DE SALVAR ELS MEUS FILLETS... HAIG DE SALVAR LA MEVA DONA... Amb un esforç final t’arrossegues fins al vidre del balcó... t’has exhaurit... El gas letal ja et paralitza. No podràs pas obrir els batents. Restes garratibat que voldries fugir, volar, perdre’t en el somni... “Realitat...!” t’ordenes en un suprem esforç, ara que veus que els teus ja somriuen a la mort. “Salvar-los...!” t’imposes cremant-te...



I esbotzes el vidre en llençar-t’hi tot èpic!



Carallot! Un vol maligne i xafogós ha envaït el teu espai. La mort instantània toca tothom. Una convulsió agònica travessa els feliços dorments... i rígids romanen. Amb un postrem filet de ranera t’increpes efímer. Mors odiant-te i tan ruc...



No t’havies parat a pensar. Has viscut tothora en veloços malsons...



Perquè us dic en veritat que fora sempre és pitjor...



I lluitaràs contra la contaminació que se’t filtra amb l’inútil soroll de l’escarafall desraonat, IRREFLEXIU...?

In honor of Manuel de Pedrolo, by Carles Reig

[This article appeared for the first time in Diari de Lleida, shortly after Manuel de Pedrolo’s passing, August 1990.]








PEDROLO





By Carles Reig






Tell me if you know, who is the envious fellow who deceives the critic Seymour-Smith, under whose name the massive work called “Guide To Modern World Literature” recently appeared. For it’s plain that somebody must have lied to him. You are not going to tell me that the poor guy has read all the books in the “modern world.” For starters (and that’s the damnedest doozy,) you won’t find the references to the Catalan Literature under the letter C. Find them instead mislaid under the letter S, as an appendix to “spain”! Even if the author acknowledges that: “Catalonian literature is huge enough that it could have deserved an independent section in the present book,” he states that, due to questions related to maps and provisional political situations, he prefers to take it easy and throngs us with the spaniards. Only that there’s worse: the way he treats Pedrolo himself. Gives him just one small paragraph. And finds almost nothing of praise to say about him. There’s this of mildly complimentary: “According to the critic Tasis (1954,) Manuel de Pedrolo is the more considerable Catalan writer since Narcís Oller.” But immediately he counterattacks: “His plays, written in Beckett’s style, are totally derivative.” And continues pounding hard, though not only over Pedrolo’s head, over the whole of Catalonian Literature: “All things considered, Catalan Literature perhaps is not at the moment neither too interesting nor original.”



We must be wondering where did Seymour-Smith find, among “our” shitty mass of critics, such a “luminary” who dared nonetheless serve him this damned cant. You must suspect more or less who if you realize that in that ridiculous book such a banal dwarf as Josep Maria Castellet [little castle,] for instance, receives more attention than Pedrolo, when the latter is one of the biggest castles in all our history.



Pedrolo alone is equivalent to a whole generation of writers that together would have successfully dealt with all sorts of literary genres. And, taking his work in bulk, he is the best novelist that we have ever had. Among the contemporaneous writers, he is the more consequential, respected and influential. He’s never surrendered, never diminished himself to write in the enemy’s language. And as a commentator, he’s a winner all the way through; nothing goes to waste of what he writes – an exemplary and patriotic ideologue. From the word go to the last word. The articles he’s written lately for the magazine “El Temps” have to be anthological. Also, in his works, you’ll find all the strata of the geography of the resistance, and of the traitors’ interlude when the freedom from francoism was compromised by the cowardice of our leaders, so that from the francoist dictatorship we went straight to the monarchic dictatorship, no solution of continuity – and if you doubt my words take a peak outside and tell me to whom if not to the enemy belong the occupying soldiers and police you see so well-armed against us.



Personally I hold Pedrolo to be up in the Olympus of the classics. And that, to be more precise, since 1967. The year of “Let me bury myself in the bedrock” and “All the beasts of burden.”



Ah, the remembered glory of starting to read that last book! We, my friend Joan Ardèvol and I, were going back to Lleida from Barcelona. At a small station, not far yet from the big city, our sorry derelict of a train stalled, and just side by side forthwith another garbage of a train, the cars of which were crammed with poor spanish soldiers ludicrously scalped, also stalled. As I happened to lean outside the window, the shit-colored assholes in front, seeing my svelte-shape and my elegance, my long flowing hairs, my rich powerful beard..., they became delirious with envy, and they started hurling my precious way all kind of lame insults. Emboldened and filled with pride thanks to my Pedrolo, I replied with the most obnoxious and beautiful and convoluted slurs and oaths of the Catalonian language. When their train started off again, and then ours did the same, I went back to my wooden unhinged seat... John and I were laughing, each of us holding our own Pedrolo, when lo, the little man seated in front of us (he must have been only five or six years older than us,) got up, let go of his bible, or gospel, o whatever the collection of moorish claptrap that he was pretending to read, one of those bad kitschy novels of ancient times that this type of bigoted wetblanket always happens to have under his bloody nose when in public, took his arms up, as in an invocation to the clattering heavens, reached for his bag, extracted from it a soutane, and slipped under it. All of a sudden the little nitwit had become a regular priest full of self-given authority. Disguised with the fucking priest’s frock, he thought he could stab us with one of his silly sermons. “As an ethics professor in our holy seminary, I feel obliged to upbraid you for all those grave swear-words so unfit, so unbecoming in the mouth of a well brought-up member of our youth...” I couldn’t take it. I jumped: “And why the fuck are those words not good enough? Perhaps not in you jerk’s world. Here!” And with this I threw over his lap full of skirts Pedrolo’s book, in order that he had a taste of the real world. He stopped, rather surprised, confused. Meanwhile I had started telling him about some of the salient points in the book... “While in school the teachers, instead of teaching the world to the children, choose to cut their tongues, the elders have decided never to lift even the pinky finger if not on behalf of the mother... And listen, you know who this mother is...? Catalonia, the same Catalonia now occupied by those same teachers and the armed fascists that impose them to us. A Catalonia that is the whole Catalonia, that’s the mother. The Catalonia that includes the little Catalunya, and the Lands Over the Mountains and the Toll Line, and the Land of the Sheiks and the Isles Altogether... That’s the complete Catalonia, which has never, not morally, not mentally, not culturally, been part of asspain; the name itself says it all, asspain, or the nausea and the uselessness of it all. Do you get it now? That’s what you must read and teach, and not the hogwash you are selling now.”



Well, all that – and certainly much more, as for instance his indefatigable and essential push to bring us up-to-date in reference to the current literary styles – all that Pedrolo managed, with outstanding skill, during all those years, to communicate to us. When, a few years later, I was working for the publishers of “Edicions 62,” one day I was given to correct the proofs of one of his books (Analytic Situation was its name;) fine, and, besides the fact though that there was nothing of note to correct, what really astounded me was the amount of pages, whole pages and pages, crossed out with red pencil, forbidden thus publication by the “previous” or preemptive censure (religious and political.) Amazing. And then I understood that that must have been one of Pedrolo’s schemes, devised in order to manage to pass on some symbolic fine points, which, in the minds of well-informed people, could later be construed (reconstructed) into proper information; that was his technique: he would pour it on in a few pages that were bound to dazzle the censors, both the censors from the ecclesiastic branch and the invading army’s branch, and thus, blinded by the garish light of the burning pages, both miss the little disguised pokes, of as much or more import, hidden elsewhere. One of the strategies proposed by one of the characters of this book was to infiltrate, with Catalonians ready to sabotage the enemy’s organizations from the inside, the terrorist state’s institutions, as the repugnant fascist party (“la falange,”) or the sham “educational” system. Naturally, all that was censored outright. Indeed Pedrolo must have been the most censored of all our writers. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s no better sign of goodness. When you see who are the dismal poor creeps that wield the red pencil like a useless little prick, the more you are censured, the more valuable’s gotta be what you proffer.



Anyhow, Pedrolo’s has to be the mirror for every writer that starts writing. Not those damned puny whores sold to the enemy, appendicular, bilingual, self-righteous, shitted all over, licking the thrones, traitorous and bigoted. He has got to be our best example – he has never sold out, not to any of the occupying regimes, neither the one before, nor the present one. True that, because he chose never to lick up the sphincters of the oppressors, others less delicate than him hogged the glaring light of official propaganda, but all those bastards, all those mongrel turd-eaters that write for the treasonous newspapers of Barcelona, as the “Rat-Guard for the Shitholer’s Army” [La Vanguardia Espanola,] explaining most boringly the pretty consistence of the stinking piece of lint they fished from their rotten navels..., they amount to what...? Yikes!



And that’s what I’m telling you, that without Pedrolo and his skill at communicating far and wide the hardy and fearless messages, truths deprived of the clerical and divine crutches of paralysis, truths never predetermined by lying rubbish of conjoint destinies and falsified historicisms..., many of us wouldn’t have had even the stamina to start writing in Catalonian. For, believe me, those days without Pedrolo, you can’t imagine the dead plumbeous atmosphere: unbreathable. Outside of his writings, the rest of stuff that would appear (what wouldn’t come out, couldn’t be known, of course; the fascistic censure busy as hell the whole time,) weren’t but worthless christian or marxist pieties, and even worse: plain fascist shit.



So, now that we were talking about providential gifts to humanity, here you’ve got Pedrolo himself, not a better gift for us, strong and erect – as a great cathedral – or actually much better, for sure.

PEDROLO





Carles Reig






Quin envejós enganya el crític M. Seymour-Smith, qui signa l’obra massissa que se’n diu “Guide To Modern World Literature”? Perquè bé cal que algú l’hagi enganyat. No em direu pas que aquest pobre home s’ha llegits tots els llibres del món modern. Per començar (farem goig), heu d’anar a cercar les referències que pertanyen a “Catalan Literature” no pas a la “C”, sinó perdudes per la “S”, en un apèndix a “Spain”! Tot i que l’autor reconeix que: “–El català prou s’hauria pogut merèixer, amb totes les de la llei, un tractament separat en aquest llibre”, en realitat, per coses de mapes i polítiques, ens encabeix amb els espanyols. Però encara és pitjor la manera com tracta En Pedrolo. Un paragrafet, i gairebé només hi troba a dir males coses. Una de les bones que hi posa és: “–Segons Tasis (al 1954), Manuel de Pedrolo és el novel·lista català més considerable d'ençà d’Oller.” Però de seguida ataca: “–Les seues obres de teatre, a l’estil de Beckett, són totalment derivatives.” I continua atacant, en el paragrafet dedicat a En Pedrolo: “–Tot fet i dit, la literatura catalana potser no és, de moment, ni gaire interessant ni gaire original.”



Cal demanar-se quin altre “savi” entre la merda de crítics que tenim ha passada aquesta maleïda informació. Penseu que En Pedrolo, en aquest llibre desgraciat, hi és menys considerat que alguns dels més banals dels nostres intel·lectuals, un nan com En Castellet, per exemple. Quan En Pedrolo és un dels castells més grans de tota la història catalana.



Ell tot sol equival a tota una generació d’escriptors que toqués tota mena de gèneres. Pres en la seua obra total, és, de lluny, el millor novel·lista que mai hem tingut. I, entre els contemporanis, el més conseqüent, respectable i influent. Mai no s’ha rebaixat a escriure en la llengua de l’enemic. Com a comentarista, no té pas pèrdua. Un ideòleg exemplar i patriòtic. Des del començament fins ara. Els Fulls de Diari que treu al “Temps” han d’ésser antològics. A les seues obres, s’hi troba tota la geografia detallada de la resistència, i llavors la de l’alliberament traït de la post dictadura franquista, és a dir, la que tenim ara, la dictadura monàrquica (o, si això no, ja em direu per què estem ocupats de policies i de soldats que no són gent de la nostra?).



Per a mi, fa anys que En Pedrolo és a l’Olimp dels clàssics. D’ençà de l’any 67, per a ésser exacte, l’any de “M'enterro en els fonaments” i de “Totes les bèsties de càrrega”.



Amb quina glòria vaig començar a llegir aquest darrer! Me’n recordo que aquella tarda, tornava a Lleida, amb tren, amb el meu amic, En Joan Ardèvol, des de Barcelona. En una estacioneta de prop la sortida, la nostra carraca de tren s’aturà davant part davant d’una altra carregada de pobres soldats espanyols pelats al zero. Jo m’havia arropenjat a la finestra. Quan els putejats pelacanyes em van veure tan elegant amb els meus cabells llargs i esponerosa barba, es van posar a delirar i a dir-me de tot. Jo, orgullós i valent gràcies al meu Pedrolo, els contestava amb els renecs i gruixuts insults més bells i cargolats del català. Quan llur tren engegà, i llavors el nostre, vaig tornar al banc de fusta esbalandrada. Ens em rèiem amb En Joan, ell amb el seu Pedrolo a la mà, jo amb el meu a la meua, quan l’homenet qui teníem assegut al davant (només cinc o sis anys més vell que nosaltres), s’aixecà, deixà de banda la bíblia, l’evangeli o alguna altra d’aquestes males novel·les de moro de l’any de la quica que sempre fan veure (en públic) que llegeixen aquesta mena de gent colltorta, allargà els braços cap al cel, abastà la seua bossa, en tragué una sotana, i se l’encabí. Tot de sobte, l’homenoi s’havia tornat un capellà amb tots els ets i uts. Llavors, amb allò, es cregué facultat a etzibar-nos un sermó: “–Com a professor d’ètica que sóc del seminari, us haig de reptar per totes aquestes paraulotes, que no són gens dignes d’un jovent com cal, etc.” Vaig saltar: “–Que collons, no han d’estar bé, aquests paraules? A quin món vius, gamarús?” I li vaig llençar a les faldilles, perquè aprengués de la vida, el llibre sagrat d’En Pedrolo. Va restar una mica esbalaït. Jo li citava alguns punts colpidors del llibre secret: “–Dementre que els mestres, per comptes d’ensenyar el món als infants, els tallen la llengua a cop de ganivet, els grans s’han resolt a no aixecar ni el dit menut que no sigui per la mare…; i sabeu quina mare és aquesta? La Catalunya ocupada per aqueixos mestrots i els armats que ens els encolomen. Una Catalunya que és la totalitat (és a dir, que inclou la Catalunyeta, les Terres de dellà les Muntanyes i la Ratlla, la Terra dels Xes i les Illes), i, ni moralment ni mentalment ni culturalment, mai no ha formada part d’Espanya, que és el nom per antonomàsia de la nosa i la inutilitat. Compreneu? Ve-t’ho aquí, el que heu de llegir i ensenyar, i no pas les vostres rucades.”



Tot això (i molt més, com ara la intervenció cabdal i contínua de posar-nos al dia pel que fa als estils literaris de cada moment al món), tot això En Pedrolo ens ho comunicava amb la traça més gran. Passant per la vora de la censura més criminal. Quan, uns anys més tard, vaig treballar per a Edicions 62, un dia em van fer esmenar un llibre d’ell (Situació Analítica, es deia); doncs bé, a part que tot hi era perfectament correcte, me’n recordo que allò que em deixava acollonit era el pilot de pàgines senceres ratllades de vermell, que la censura prèvia li prohibia de publicar. Aquesta era una de les tècniques d’En Pedrolo per a poder passar detalls simbòlics que, en l’esment de la gent prou assabentada, poguessin ésser traduïts en informació: carregava les tintes en unes quantes pàgines que obnubilessin prou els censuradors eclesiàstics i invasors, i així de vegades no s’adonaven pas d’entretocs més dissimulats, però tant o més colpidors. Una de les astúcies que un dels personatges propugnava en aquest llibre era la d’infiltrar, amb catalans preparats a sabotejar-les des de dins, la repugnant falange, el fals sistema educatiu, i tota mena d’altres organitzacions feixistes. És clar, li ho censuraven en bloc. De fet, En Pedrolo deu haver estat el més profusament censurat dels nostres escriptors. Ara, ep, aquest és un bon senyal, que et censurin. Vistos qui són els desgraciats qui et censuren, com més censurat, més ha de valer el que dius.



Ell ha d’ésser el mirall per a qualsevol escriptor qui comenci. Res de meuques dolentes i venudes a l’enemic, res de sucursalistes, bilingües, hipòcrites, cagats, llepacorones, caragirats i colltorts. Ha d’ésser l’exemple més fort que tenim; mai s’ha venut a cap dels règims ocupants, ni al d’abans ni al d’ara. És veritat que, perquè no llepa les crestes fastigoses del règim, d’altres li prenen el lloc a la propaganda; tots aquests apama’m-el-cul híbrids, bords, qui escriuen pels diaris dels botiflers de Barcelona (“La Rata-Guàrdia de l’Exèrcito Ethpanyol”), explicant carregosament les entremaliadures d’un pessic de borra adorablement perdut pel forat de llur melic... Ecs!



Guaiteu què us dic, que, sense En Pedrolo i la seua habilitat de fer-nos arribar els missatges valents i sense crosses divines ni clericals, ni predeterminades per ximpleries de destins i historicismes, molts de nosaltres ni haguéssim començat a escriure en català. En aquells dies foscs, quin avorriment esgarrifós, vós. Tret d’ell, tot el que sortia (el que no sortia pas, és clar, era com si tampoc no hi fos) eren pietats cristianes, marxistes i (encara pitjor) ja purament feixistoides.



Així que, parlant de dons providencials, amb En Pedrolo ací en teniu un fet i dret, com una catedral, o millor.

pl-pl-plu-plumbeous balls - 00 - [first 9 pages]

here’s the book... or at least our copy of the book... transcriptions and translations of each poem or page will follow apace...



acording to the last page... “this book... Pl-pl-plu-plumbeous Balls... finished the 28th of October 1971...” also... “added [those poems] to the novel Every Little Flower A Coffin... using the pseudonym Santiago Tell [?]” plus... “presented to the Carles Riba poetry prize given the 13th of December 1971... got a single miserable vote in favor...”