Scarecrow & Other Anomalies Read Free Page A

identifiable trace.
    Not too long ago, moviegoers around the world felt Girondo’s charm when his anomalous works, quite unaccountably, inspired a full-length feature film, The Dark Side of the Heart (1994). Argentine director Eliseo Subiela tooks themes from Scarecrow and Lunarlude , added some inventions of his own and fused them together with an original plot. The film’s hero is Oliverio, a misunderstood poet and reluctant advertising man, who wanders in a long coat through Buenos Aires seeking the woman of his dreams and testing attractive nominees with his tricky tropes. The woman who appreciates them most turns out to be a prostitute named Ana, who possibly is Death, but she insists that their relationship remain platonic. Overcome with passion, he offers her his bleeding heart in his hand, and together they dance the tango.
    The chief scene I recall takes place in the apartment of his friend, an artist who has fashioned his doorway in the shape of a gigantic painted vagina, through which Oliverio enters. I can tell you these things because they are not found in this book, but I strongly recommend the movie nonetheless, especially for that grand entrance. After its showing in Argentina sales of poetry went up and young men began a craze of pursuing young women with verse. Although a big hit at international film festivals, it did not noticeably increase Girondo’s reputation abroad, probably because he was not yet translated.
     
    4. What Was Wrong With Him?
     
    There is one question I would like to address before I turn you over to the author—or let him loose on you. Why did Girondo, having written Espantapájaros in 1932 and a slimmer yet also amazing piece of prose, Interlunio [“Lunarlude”], five years later—why did he write nothing more in fiction? Why did this talent, equal in these two works to practically any fantast you can name, a talent who might have won world renown on the order of the indisputable greats and topped any list of outstanding Latin American authors, rather than sought inclusion in its addenda or footnotes; why did he produce only enough miscellanea to fill one average-sized, large-print volume of Obras completas ? No novel, no collections of stories, no literary essays, no book reviews that anyone recalls, no memoirs or biographies, no plays after the age of 25, only one translation—of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer —and that a collaboration with a friend, Enrique Molina.
    What was he up to? Was he such a pampered aristocrat, such a slick-haired fop and listless dilettante, that he couldn’t bring himself to raise his languid hand and write more than a hundred pages of fiction during the forty-five years of a professional literary career? Or did he consider himself a Rimbaud and value his poetry more—those anti-poetic effusions, actually not very numerous, some of which are included in this volume to shock, disgust and delight you. Or his art notes and occasional essays on social themes, destined like all such matter to yellow and become the province of antiquarians and pedants? (They have, however, been given fresh white pages in the 1999 Obra completa , published in Spain.) Or his drawings and paintings, which were accomplished, but rarely exhibited? One of his aphorisms, which are noteworthy but not profound, and which are included in this collection in lieu of any remaining prose of interest, perhaps gives us a clue: “No critic can compare with our desk drawer.” Was Girondo such a perfectionist, like the composer Paul Dukas, that he withheld most of his work and left posterity but one—or one and a half— Sorcerer’s Apprentice ? Or could there have been another reason why his output was so small? Let’s take a brief look at his life and work.
     
    5. A Biography of Sorts
     
    Born in Buenos Aires in August 1891, the last of five children, into a family of cattle barons. Spoiled rotten as a child, distinguishes himself by joining protests and throwing things at