Scarecrow & Other Anomalies by Oliverio Girondo Read Free Book Online Page A

yourself to the influence of others, and that includes your own shadow.
    “Imitation has prostituted everything, right down to the pin in your cravat!”
     

FIFTEEN: THE PROPHET
     
    HE COMMANDED his slaves to spit on his forehead and, dangling from the feet of a stork, abandoned his customs and sandalwood coffers.
    But how could he have known that perfume can leave a bitter taste on the tongue? How could he have known that the solitude of asceticism is filled with naked women, and that all knowledge is humbled before the physiomechanics of a mosquito?
    During his seclusion in the desert, his navel succeeded in representing the better part of the universe. There even the spiders carry crosses on their back to preserve themselves from foraging succubi. There he became intimate with phantoms who dash about on stilts through all eternity and with cacti exhibiting the quirks of scarecrows, but despite holding consultations with the Devil and with the Lord he could not discover a single new virtue or a single new vice.
    Did his fasting and abstinence from all concupiscence permit him to savor the feverish adulation that is everywhere accompanied by a miasma of submission and grief?
    Preceded by a breeze that cuts a swath through the filth of the roadway, he passed before the astonished populace, laden with boredom and parasites.
    His presence ripened the grain and brought the harvest to fruition. The mere touch of his hands revived virility and his glance instilled in prostitutes the rustic tenderness of quails.
    How many times his words fell on the multitude with the mildness of rain calming the ocean!
    With a phosphorescent splendor shining around his bald pate and with thousands of bees lodged in the hair of his chest, he appeared simultaneously in different places, each time with a disdain ever more conscious of the pointlessness of all that exists.
    His perfection became as repugnant to him as taking a bath or swallowing caviar. He no longer found voluptuous pleasure in taking his siesta or in savoring the backwaters incarnated as a caiman. He derived not the slightest comfort from the fact that lepers waited for him so as to embrace his shadow, nor that the stars stopped twinkling when confronted by the size of his tenderness and his beard.
    One afternoon, at a bend in some road, he decided to stop moving for all eternity.
    In vain the pilgrims flock from everywhere to his sermons and oblations. In vain they persist, in the face of his indifference, in performing the rites of the cabala and in acts of mortification. Neither their self-abasements nor their ticklings succeed in drawing from him so much as a yawn, and the scare intensifies as a spreading green scum covers his extremities and his modesty, and his body is transformed, little by little, into one of those clods that embeds itself into the road so as to hatch worms and slime.
     

SIXTEEN: TRANSMIGRATION
     
    SOME HAVE a taste for mountain climbing. Others like to play dominoes. For me, nothing compares with transmigration.
    While others spend their lives pulling a rope or pounding a tabletop, I spend my time transmigrating from one body to another, and I never tire of the process.
    Up at the crack of day, I install myself in a eucalyptus tree to inhale the morning breeze. I take a mineral siesta inside the first boulder I happen across, and before going to bed I’m thinking of the night and its chimneys with the spirit of a cat.
    How delicious it is to metamorphose into a bumblebee, so as to sniff up the pollen of the roses! What voluptuousness to be one with the soil, so as to feel the penetrations of the tubercles and roots, and the percolations of a latent life that fecundate... and tickle us.
    To appreciate ham, isn’t it indispensable to be a pig? Can he who has not transformed himself into a horse know the simple pleasure of ruminating in a pasture or fully grasp what it means to “horse around?”
    Possessing a virgin is very different from experiencing