Scarecrow & Other Anomalies by Oliverio Girondo Read Free Book Online

shudder, they embrocate
    they redden, they madden, they federate
    they repose, they loll, they oscitate
    they splice, they smolder, they colligate
    they abate, they alate and they transubstantiate.
     

THIRTEEN: A KICK
     
    THERE ARE DAYS when I am nothing more than a kick, purely and simply a kick. Is there a motor scooter speeding past? Goal!... in through a fifth-floor window. Is there a baldy hanging around? There he goes, sailing through the air until he’s impaled on some lightning rod. An automobile slams on its brakes to pull up at the curb? With one good kick it’s installed in some garret.
    To hell with pharmacists’ flasks, electrical lights and such, numbers on the doors in the street!
    When I begin to kick, it’s useless to try to restrain me. I need to tear down the cornices, the pool halls, the streetcars. I need to get in—by kicks—the shop windows and take out—by kicks—all the mannequins into the street. I can’t rest, or be happy, until I have thoroughly demolished those monuments to sanitation, the public urinals. Nothing contents me so much as the crash, induced by a kick, of gasometers, of electric arcs. I would rather die than renounce the act of making street lamps describe trajectories like skyrockets and plummet, legs upmost, into the outstretched arms of the trees in the municipal park.
    A swift kick to firemen, to artificial flowers, to bicarbonate of soda. A swift kick to water reservoirs, to pregnant women, to test tubes.
    Families dissolved by a single kick; consumer cooperatives; shoe factories; people who couldn’t get insurance, who couldn’t be bothered to change the water for the olives... or for the tiny goldfish...
     

FOURTEEN: GRANDMOTHER’S ADVICE
     
    MY GRANDMOTHER—who wasn’t one-eyed—used to tell me:
    “Women give you too much trouble or they’re not worth the effort. People your dreams with those you like, and they’ll be yours while you sleep!
    “Don’t floss your teeth with pubic hair. Shun, as much as possible, venereal diseases, but if you must choose between a prize for virtue or one for syphilis, don’t hesitate an instant: mercury isn’t half as heavy as abstinence!
    “When somebody’s buttocks are smiling at you, keep it under your hat. Remember that you’ll never find a better place to put your tongue than in your very own pocket, and that a cock in hand is worth two in the bush.”
    But my grandmother was fond of contradicting herself and, after asking me to help her find the eyeglasses that were propped on her wrinkled forehead, she would add in her daguerreotype voice:
    “Life—and I say this from experience—is one long imbrutishment. This much must be already obvious from the state and the style in which you find your poor grandmother. I don’t know how I’d go on if it weren’t for the hope of seeing things a little better after death!
    “Habit encrusts us daily, plastering spider webs over our eyes. Little by little, syntax and the dictionary begin to confine us, and though mosquitoes blow their horns as they fly about, it’s a bit of a stretch to call them archangels. When an aunt takes us on a visit, we greet the whole world, but we’re ashamed toextend our hand to mister cat and, later on, should we feel the urge to travel, we buy tickets at a steamship agency, rather than metamorphose an armchair into a transatlantic liner.
    “By that—though at this point you probably think me a senile old bat—I mean to say, and I will never tire of repeating, that you must not renounce anything, including your right to renunciation. An aching molar, urban statistics, the proper use of sawdust, wood chips and other discards can afford us an unsuspected pleasure. Open your arms and don’t look down on the clarinet or faulty handwriting. Confect a new virginity every five minutes and follow these counsels as if they were engraved in stone, yet, though experience is a sickness offering little danger of contagion, you must not expose