8
Hobbies and Training
The piano. Arcimboldi learned to play the piano when he was forty-five. His teachers were Jacques Soler and Marie Djiladi. He never had a piano at home or felt the need for one. And yet when he went out at night and came upon a piano at a bar or a friend’s house he would do anything to be allowed to play it. Then he would sit down and run his fingers over the keys and although he played very badly he forgot everything and sang-in a cracked and barely audible voice-blues, ballads, love songs.
Magic. From the time he was very young he was interested in magic tricks. His apprenticeship was anarchic and ad hoc. He never followed any particular method. At the age of fifty he decided to apply himself to the School of Thought, which should really be called the School of Hidden Words, and involves guessing the objects that an audience member is carrying in his or her purse or wallet. For this trick it’s necessary to have an assistant who uses coded language to inquire after the objects. But it can also be performed without an assistant, according to the magician Arturo De Sisti, by working solely from a person’s external appearance, an alphabet that leads via unexpected yet clear channels to the things he keeps in his pockets. In this case the hidden words aren’t those uttered by an assistant but those spoken by a tie, a handkerchief, a shirt, a hat, a dress, a necklace: words barely whispered, concise words that hardly ever lie. This is not, let it be said, a matter of judging by appearances, but rather of establishing a correlation, a continuity, between what is in plain sight and what-by virtue of its small size or for the sake of convenience-is tucked away. He also developed an interest in the art of making people disappear. Theories on this tricky maneuver were developed by many schools, from the Chinese to the Italian and the Arab to the American (which was itself divided into two schools: the classic school that made people disappear and the modern school that made trains disappear). It’s not known which school interested Arcimboldi. No one ever saw him make a person disappear, though with some friends he talked about it quite a bit.
9
Sworn Enemies of Arcimboldi
Lisa Julien, whom he met in 1946 and with whom he lived from 1947 to 1949. Their breakup was violent: Arcimboldi, in a conversation recorded in 1971, acknowledged having slapped Miss Julien twice, first with his open palm and then with the back of his hand. Between the first and second blows there were punches (Arcimboldi ended up with a black eye), kicks, scratches, and strong words that the writer describes as a limit experience. From beneath the hail of blows, he says, he managed to catch a curious and distracted glimpse of pure nothingness. Miss Julien’s hatred was lasting: in a rare interview conducted in 1992 by a pseudoliterary scandal sheet as part of a feature titled “The Long-Suffering Companions of Creative Men,” she referred to the writer as “that loathsome, impotent dwarf.”
Arthur Laville, reader for Gallimard and art critic for various European and American trade publications, who saw the main character of The Librarian as a malicious portrayal of himself. Laville, in an uncharacteristic fit of rage, launched a feud with Arcimboldi that lasted from 1966 to 1970. He was also presumably the author of a number of anonymous death threats and countless phone calls during which he showered the writer with insults and mockery or was silent, breathing heavily and noisily. At the end of 1970, Laville’s anger subsided as abruptly as it had arisen. In 1975 they ran into each other in a hallway at Gallimard and exchanged civil remarks.
Charles Dubillard, patriotic poet, huckster, and inveterate Pétain supporter. In 1943 he gave a public thrashing to the young Arcimboldi, who, it’s worth mentioning, had done nothing to avoid the fight, assuring the friends who tried to talk him out of it that nothing in the world would deprive him of the pleasure of bashing out the brains of that fascist pig Dubillard. In 1947 they met again, this time in Paris, at a poetry reading at which Dubillard, converted to Gaullism, read a poem about the hills of Languedoc, the traces of time, and the light of the motherland (according to Arcimboldi every messiah of fascism got his start and finish under the rustling petticoats of the motherland). The fight, this time, was at the back door of the hall. Arcimboldi was alone, which meant that no one tried to stop him. Dubillard was accompanied by three college friends, one of whom ended his brilliant career as a socialist minister in the eighties, and together they tried to convince Arcimboldi, first, that times had changed, and second, that Dubillard was much stronger and bigger than he and therefore, objectively speaking, it wasn’t a fair fight. They fought anyway, and Arcimboldi lost again. Their next encounter was in 1955, at a well-known Paris restaurant. Dubillard had given up literature and become a businessman. This time all they did was shove each other and shout insults, until Arcimboldi’s friends broke things off by taking him away. Their final encounter was in the fall of 1980. Dubillard was out for a walk with his grandson and his grandson’s nanny and they ran into Arcimboldi. The latter considered spitting at the boy but he thought better of it and contented himself with spitting at a wheel of the baby carriage. Dubillard showed no reaction. They never saw each other again.
Raoul Delorme, concierge of the building where Arcimboldi lived from 1959 to 1962. Amateur writer of poems about horses and meticulous crime stories in which the killer is never caught. For a while Arcimboldi tried to convince some magazines to publish his work. According to him, Delorme might have been an extraterrestrial boy scout, or perhaps just a telepath. There soon sprang up between them a cool and contained hatred. Delorme, according to Arcimboldi, performed Black Masses in his cramped concierge quarters: he defecated on books by Gide, Maupassant, pissed on books by Pierre Louÿs, Mendès, Banville, shot his wad between the pages of books by Barbusse, Hugo, Chateaubriand, all with the sole intent of improving his French.
Marina Libakova, architect, literary agent, and poet. One month of passion and five years of hard feelings. One night, according to Madame Libakova, in her house in Thézy-Glimont where they were spending the weekend, Arcimboldi, without provocation or explanation, tossed into the fire a poetry manuscript that she had kindly and eagerly presented for his consideration. 1969-1973. She also admits that Arcimboldi asked her forgiveness for his stupidity something like three hundred times over the course of those five years. No letters were preserved.
V. KILLERS of SONORA
1
Pancho Monje was born in Villaviciosa, near Santa Teresa, in the state of Sonora.
One night, when he was sixteen, he was woken up and led half-asleep to the Monte Hebrón, a bar where Don Pedro Negrete, the police chief of Santa Teresa, was waiting for him. He had heard of him but never seen him. Accompanying Don Pedro were two old women and three old men from Villaviciosa, and lined up before him were ten boys about the same age as Pancho, waiting for Don Pedro’s decision.
The superintendent was sitting in a high-backed chair like a throne, though it was covered in frayed fabric, different from all the other chairs at the Monte Hebrón, and he was drinking whiskey from a bottle that he had brought from home, because no one at the Monte Hebrón drank whiskey. Behind the chief and the old men, in the shadows, was another man who was also drinking. But he wasn’t drinking whiskey, he was drinking Los Suicidas mescal, a rare brand that couldn’t be found anywhere anymore, except in Villaviciosa. The mescal drinker’s name was Gumaro and he was Don Pedro’s driver.