The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine E-Book

Mario Levrero

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 184

Beschreibung

Widely viewed as one of the most inventive bodies of work from 20th-century Uruguay, Mario Levrero's writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination. In none other of the author's books is this imagination so clearly on display as in The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, his first book of stories. It gathers a variety of Levrero's earliest and most formally inventive publications, ranging from dazzling single paragraph micro-fictions à la Donald Barthelme, to adventurous Lewis Carroll-esque tales of forty pages' length. From the shocking surreal twists of 'Street of the Beggars' to the Escher-like grammatical maze of 'The Boarding House' to the pseudo-fairy tale classic 'The Basement', this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility.

Leseprobe

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First published in English in 2024 by And Other StoriesSheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

© 1970 heirs of Mario LevreroTranslation rights arranged by Agencia Literaria CBQ SLTranslation copyright © 2024 by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter

All rights reserved. The rights of Mario Levrero to be identified as the author of this work and of Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter to be identified as the translators of this work have been asserted.

ISBN: 9781916751064eBook ISBN: 9781916751071

Typesetter: Tetragon, London; Series Cover Design: Elisa von Randow, Alles Blau Studio, Brazil, after a concept by And Other Stories; Author Photo: Eduardo Abel Giménez

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England and that the translation of this book was partially funded by the support of a grant from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, which is supported by Arts Council England.

Contents

The Book and the Texts (Note on the 1995 edition)The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine Beggar Street One-Way Story No. 2 The Abandoned House The Basement That Green Liquid The Boarding House The Stiff Corpse Jelly The Golden Reflections The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine (Negative) Translator’s Afterword by Annie McDermottMario Levrero, Realist by Kit Schluter

‌The Book and the Texts

(Note on the 1995 edition)

For almost twenty-five years now, The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine has been practically non-existent. It was published in December 1970, just a few days after La Ciudad (The City), a novel that earned a mention in the weekly newspaper Marcha, and which, perhaps as a result, fared a bit better. Gladys, meanwhile, hardly made it into bookshops; according to some booksellers, the distributor’s reps said they hadn’t even heard of it. I never found out if a decision had been made not to promote it, or if it was just a general lack of interest from both the publishers and the reading public. It was a time of ‘topical issues’, and the books that were attracting attention tended to have very definite sources of inspiration. The really surprising thing, then, is that I managed to publish these books at all. The credit, or the blame, is due to one Marcial Souto, who worked hard to set up, within an ‘ideologically committed’ publishing house, a series called Literatura Diferente, which gave a home to works by José Pedro Díaz, Carlos Casacuberta, Dean Koontz and Robert Sheckley, among others.

Some of the pieces that make up this book were previously published in magazines and supplements (Señal, the El Popular newspaper’s Revista de los Viernes, Maldoror, El Lagrimal Trifurca), and the novella Jelly appeared in a chapbook insert of the magazine Los Huevos del Plata. After the book came out, and then vanished, the stories went on to be published elsewhere, some of them many times, in magazines, newspapers and anthologies from various countries.

Meanwhile, the publishing house Tierra Nueva had moved from Uruguay to Argentina, and for some reason thought to take along the copies of Gladys they had in storage. Several friends spotted the book on the sale tables of the bookshops on Calle Corrientes in Buenos Aires, and that’s how more Argentines than Uruguayans came to have copies in their possession. Later on, it’s said, the remaining copies – that is, almost the entire print run – were turned back into pulp, and that very paper pulp might just be supporting a worthy book today.

Allow me, then, to dedicate this second edition of The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine to everyone who looked for the first one, whether or not they found it in the end. For all those years, it meant a lot to know that people were out there looking for it.

ML, February 1995Tr. KS

‌The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine

Before going to bed I made my daily rounds of the house, to check everything was in order; the window was open in the small bathroom at the back, so the polyester shirt I was going to wear the next day could dry overnight; I shut the door (to prevent draughts); in the kitchen, the tap was dripping and I tightened it; the window was open and I left it that way – though I did close the blind – and the rubbish had been taken out; the three knobs on the stove were all at zero; the dial on the fridge was at three (light refrigeration) and the half-drunk bottle of mineral water was sealed with its plastic cap; in the dining room, the big clock wouldn’t need winding for several more days and the table had been cleared; in the library I had to turn off the amp, which someone had left on, but the turntable had switched itself off automatically; the ashtray on the armchair had been emptied, the thinking-about-Gladys machine was plugged in and purring away softly as usual, and the high little window that looks onto the air shaft was open, with the smoke from the day’s cigarettes slowly drifting through it; I shut the door; in the living room I found a cigarette butt on the floor and placed it in the standing ashtray, which it’s the maid’s job to empty every morning; in my bedroom I wound the alarm clock, making sure it was showing the same time as my wristwatch, and set it to go off half an hour later the next morning (because I’d decided to skip my shower; I could feel a cold coming on); I lay down and turned out the light.

In the early hours I woke up feeling anxious; an unusual noise had made me jump; I curled up in bed with all the pillows on top of me and clutched the back of my neck and waited tensely for the end: the house was falling down.

Tr. AM

‌Beggar Street

I take out a cigarette and put it to my lips, but when I bring the lighter close and spin the wheel, it won’t light. I’m surprised, because it was working perfectly just a few moments ago, with a strong flame, and there wasn’t any sign the fuel was running low; what’s more, I remember replacing the flint and refilling it only a couple of hours ago.

Over and over, I flick the wheel without success; I make sure it’s producing a spark, and then refill the tank with an eye-dropper.

Still, it won’t light.

It hasn’t failed like this for years. I decide to locate the defect.

Once again, I use a coin to take out the screw that keeps the tank shut; this doesn’t seem to help dismantle it. With the same coin, I go on to remove the screw from the flint tube; a spring pops out as well, propped on the end of the screw. On the other end of the spring, there’s a piece of metal resembling the flint (which also comes out, along with a few white filaments the same length as the spring, which I’d never noticed before). The lighter is still in one piece; removing those screws hasn’t got me anywhere.

Looking more closely, I notice a third screw: the one that serves as an axle for the lever that turns the wheel and produces the spark. I decide to take it out as well, but the coin is no help; I have to use a small screwdriver instead.

I have a whole collection of screwdrivers. There are plenty of them, organised by size, and each proportionate to the next. I use the smallest – though I could have achieved the same result with the no. 2 or the no. 3.

Several parts come out now: the lever, the screw in question (with a nut on its other end, though from the outside this nut looks just like a screw; the hidden part is hollow), two or three springs and the little serrated wheel, which rolls merrily over the table, falls to the floor, and now I can’t find it anywhere.

Even so, the lighter still looks whole to me; there’s something aggressive about its solidity – a kind of challenge. And the defect remains a mystery. I stick the screwdriver into various holes; first, it goes all the way through the flint tube, and pokes out of the top; I find some cotton wool in the tank, and explore no further; then I inspect the holes in the upper section of the lighter. There are two: one is the end of another tube, whose function I am unaware of; this tube has a bend in it, which the screwdriver can’t get past. The other tube is wider, and straight; at the end of it – at a distance I estimate to be about half the length of the lighter – the tool stops suddenly mid-spin, caught on the head of a screw, which I decide to remove; it’s short and wide. Then I pull on a small protruding part with my fingertips, while holding the outer shell of the lighter with my left hand. Much to my satisfaction, I see something sliding out.

The thin metal case is still in my left hand. When the inner section emerges, the metal contraption suddenly expands with a click (and I’m surprised to see it grow around four times larger). My right hand is now holding a giant replica of the lighter, which more or less retains its proportions and general appearance, though with a great many new nooks and crannies. I imagine the system of springs I’m going to have to squeeze back together in order to return this contraption to its casing (and I have no idea how I’m going to manage it, though I suspect it won’t be easy); only springs could explain such startling growth.

By poking the screwdriver into a number of holes, I discover some unexpected screws, but by now the no. 1 is too small for them. It doesn’t apply an even force and I’m worried they might get stripped. I choose another; the no. 4 is ideal, though I could just as well use the no. 3 or the no. 5, maybe the no. 6, or even the no. 7.

I remove several screws. More springs fall out, and a single oiled metal piece (resembling a piston) drops out of a tube, along with a couple of cogs.

I discover that this contraption is also made up of two parts, an outer and an inner; when I can’t find any more screws, I go ahead and pull them apart, following the same process as before. The whole phenomenon repeats right on cue, and I find myself holding a structure some four times larger than the last (and sixteen times larger than the lighter itself), though still of more or less the same weight. I’d even say this structure weighs less than the whole lighter, which may seem strange at first – especially when you’re holding it in the palm of your hand – but the logic stands. By law, the contents must weigh less than the lighter as a whole, even if they’ve increased in size by means of that ingenious spring mechanism and so appear heavier.

I decide to take out the cotton wool; it seems extremely tightly packed (which explains how the fluid can last for so many days inside the tank – much longer than in other lighters). The tank has grown proportionally, and now the cotton wool is looser; all in all, there must be several large bags’ worth in there. Removing it doesn’t require much effort, because my whole hand can fit inside the tank now.

By this point, I can tell it’s going to be very difficult indeed to put the lighter back together; I may not be able to use it again. But that doesn’t matter; my curiosity about the mechanism drives me on. I’m no longer interested in finding the cause of the problem (and I doubt I’m in any state even to notice where that problem is), but rather in getting a general sense of the structure of certain lighters.

I’m not using a screwdriver to explore the tubes any more; my hand can now fit comfortably inside most of them. Some have a curious, almost labyrinthine intricacy; my hand sometimes lands on several openings along the same tube, and begins feeling around inside one, only to find that it’s the beginning, or end, of another, which itself contains several openings to various other tubes. There aren’t as many screws now, and there seem to be fewer springs at play.

Following one of the pipes and some of its offshoots with my hand and part of my arm, I reach a place that seems to be near the structure’s centre. There, my fingers land on a number of little metal balls. They have the peculiarity of being half-exposed, like the tips of ballpoint pens; I can make them spin by rolling my finger over them.

I press down harder on one and it pops loose from the metal plate holding it in place. It starts rolling along the tubes, and drops out of the structure. I notice it’s the same size as one of those marbles kids play with. Lots come tumbling out after it. Ten or twelve – maybe more. I pick one up and its weight surprises me; it seems as heavy as the rest of the structure. But if it were, then I wouldn’t be able to explain how it fitted inside the lighter in the first place. I expect these balls also expanded by means of a system of springs. Their weight continues to intrigue me.

All of a sudden, I feel sleep coming on. I look at my watch and see that it’s two in the morning. It’s amazing how you can lose track of time when you’re distracted by something interesting. I think I ought to go to bed, but I can’t give up on my project. I’ll keep going, I decide, until I reach the final structure, or until the lighter is completely dismantled, broken down into each of its constituent parts.

Now, after a couple more operations, by means of which I separate the structure into two parts again (one layer, or shell, and one quadruple-sized structure), the lighter takes up more than half the room. This latest structure doesn’t resemble the original lighter at all; its forms are less rigid, there are curves. If the space allowed me to look at it from a distance, I might find it’s almost spherical.

My only route from one side of the room to the other is now through the lighter. I can make it across fairly easily, though I do need to crawl. It strikes me that if I were to separate it into two again, I’d end up with a structure I could walk around in standing up. But I fear, indeed I’m almost certain, that it would no longer fit inside the room.

So far I’ve only used one of the tubes, which runs in a straight line from one side of the lighter to the other; but there are more, and I’m tempted to explore them as well. Labyrinths terrify me, so I take a spool of thread, tie one end to a handle on the chest of drawers, and make my way into a tube, which quickly changes direction and leads me to others.

They’re soft, despite being made of metal. Or, rather than ‘soft’, I should say they’re ‘springy’; the spring action is still tangible. I swear aloud at myself: I didn’t think to bring a flashlight or even a box of matches. I work my hand laboriously into my pocket, and then burst out laughing. I’d instinctively reached for my lighter, forgetting that I was inside it.

‘I have to go back for the flashlight,’ I think, and just as I’m getting ready to follow the thread out, I see a faint light ahead. ‘An exit, or maybe the same hole I came in by,’ I wonder, and keep on crawling towards the light, which grows brighter and brighter.

By now, I’m able to make out some of my surroundings. The place isn’t exactly a tunnel, in the sense of a closed, tubular channel. Rather, it’s made up of countless tiny sections, though there are large metal beams running through it, some wider than my body; I can’t tell where they begin or end.

I keep going, without reaching the outside. The light has grown more intense – which is to say, it’s a little brighter than a candle. I still can’t work out where it’s coming from.

At this point, I find I’m able to stand up and walk – though hunching over slightly.

I hear moans.

‘This is the street of the beggars,’ I think to myself, turning the corner, and then I see the light source – a streetlamp – and overhead, the stars.

And sure enough, there are beggars asking for change, with ulcers all over their arms and legs. The street is cobbled and sloping. The shops are closed, the shutters down.

‘I’ve got to find a bar that’s open,’ I think. ‘I need cigarettes, and matches.’

August 1967Tr. KS

‌One-Way Story No. 2

A dog, Champion. I lived alone with him and he started getting on my nerves. I walked him out to the woods, left him tied up with some rope he could break without too much persistence, and went back home.

A couple of days later I found him pawing at the door; I let him in.

That’s when he became completely unbearable. I took him out to a more distant wood and tied him to a tree with thicker rope (I knew the problem didn’t lie in the rope, but in the animal’s loyalty; maybe I secretly hoped he wouldn’t be able to break free this time and would die of hunger).

He came back again in a few days.

I realised then that the dog would always come back. I didn’t dare kill him for fear of regret; even if I did manage to lose him, I thought, in some even more distant wood, I would live in constant fear of his return; it would torment my nights and spoil all my happy moments. I’d be tied up more by his absence than by his presence.

I hesitated for just a moment, faced with the majesty of the dense forest that stood before my eyes – gloomy, imposing, mysterious. Then, resolutely, I started walking in, and kept walking until, finally, I was lost.

Tr. KS

‌The Abandoned House

Location

On a central street where most of the buildings are modern, there is, however, one old abandoned house. In front is a garden, separated from the pavement by a fence, and in the garden a bright white fountain, adorned with little angels. The fence looks like a row of rusty spears, joined together by two horizontal bars. As for the house, all you can see from outside is the once pink, now dirty-green colour of the façade, and part of a very dark blind.

This house only interests the select few people who fall under its influence. These people, among whom I count myself, know about certain things that happen there.

Little men

An inch of pipe can be seen protruding from the wall in one room, which most likely formed part of the gas system. If you’re lucky, or patient, you’ll spot the tiny men, four or so inches tall, who poke their heads out and gaze around, as if seeing the ocean for the first time through a porthole. They then try to extricate themselves, which is no easy task; to begin with, they have to lie on their backs and grip the top edge of the pipe, and then, with the help of their arm muscles, and also their legs, they gradually work their bodies free.

They hang in the air, swaying gently.

The little man glances down and gets a fright, because instead of the floor there’s an enormous hole (these activities have clearly, over time, made the battered wooden boards give way). Meanwhile, inside the pipe, you can see the round, gleaming eyes of the next little man, impatiently waiting his turn.

They hold out as long as they can, but eventually they take a deep breath, as if before a dive, then their hands let go of the edge of the pipe and the little men fall and fall.

Because you’re expecting it, you might – after a second – think you hear something, but those familiar with the spectacle know there’s no sound. Some people imagine a muffled plop, like the bounce of a rubber ball; others a sharp, skeletal crack. The more inventive describe a small explosion (like stepping on a match, they say, but without the ensuing blaze), and similarly, there are those who speak of implosion, because they’re reminded of an electric light blowing (as distinct from the shattering of the bulb). Others even swear they can clearly make out the sound of breaking glass.

We’ve been down to the basement, but its perimeter doesn’t quite seem to match the shape of the house. Nor are there any holes in the ceiling that might correspond to the one in the floor above, through which the little men vanish.

We suspect there are tiny corpses piling up somewhere in the house; we feel uneasy because we can’t find them.

My own, admittedly baseless theory, which I air in casual conversations, is that the little men don’t die when they fall, and that, what’s more, they are few in number and eternal and on an endless loop.

Spiders