Exercises in Style (20 page)

eat

Whee! Whee! The bus curled up to the curb with a mad tragic kind of
screech and me and Jenny Lou get on behind a guy sporting a baggy blue suit and
a blue hat with a hemp band and I can see right away he’s not hip but a square
fidgeting every time someone jostles him and squirming when more people crowd
into the bus but me and Jenny Lou dig being packed in with all the maids and
busboys and car wash kids all the holy ones who work in the dark obsidian
laundries and then someone steps on this guy’s foot and he lets out a howl like
a naked coyote who’s seen the invisible night and finally I say to him be cool
man and dig the scene dig all the angels here dig the holy chicks and dig the
whole ride because the ride is life and then Jenny Lou who’s got the greatest
knees in the world whispers to me dig it his jacket’s missing two buttons and I
knew she meant that I should open my
Anahata
sympathy chakra to him
because he’s just another cat lost in a motherless world and so I say man let’s
split at the next stop and get you a tailor and he makes a fist at me and grabs
the seat just left by a teenager heavy with sexdream eyes and me and Jenny Lou
get off at the next stop but not before digging that the driver’s got a book of
Blake’s poems stuck in his jacket pocket and me and Jenny Lou wonder about the
miracle of this and wish we could have an all day all night talkie with the cat
and his reading Blake and maybe others who also toot their godly horns and see
angels dancing on pins but then we hitch our way to the Greyhound waiting for
the bus to saintly San Fran and there’s the guy with the missing buttons
grooving with the old station master with a cap over his sad eyes who’s telling
him better no buttons at all than two on and two off awakening me and Jenny Lou
to crash through the great screen of
Maya
and see the vast buttonless
void that is the world, that is the world

Frederic Tuten

etaliterario

I bought
Exercises in Style
, by Raymond Queneau, in
Barcelona on October 26, 1987. I didn’t know what it was about, but I’d heard a
lot about the book. Carrying my brand new copy of
Exercises in Style
I
boarded the Number 24 bus, which went near my house. I bought a ticket from the
conductor and, afraid I’d be asked to show it and unable to find it, put the
ticket in my mouth. I thought that way it would be in plain sight if the
inspector showed up. Halfway home, I began to flip through
Exercises in
Style
and saw that the book recounted, in a hundred different styles,
the same trivial anecdote. Trivial it might be, but the story amused me very
much, probably because it took place on a bus and I was on a bus, and maybe
that’s why the story stuck in my head so quickly, as if I were riding around
with a shoehorn, not one for shoes, but a shoehorn for stories that take place
on buses. The story was very silly, but I found it totally captivating. On a
Paris bus, a young man with a felt hat and a long neck becomes angry every time
people get off the bus because there is one passenger—always the same one—who
takes advantage of the circumstances to step on his foot. There is a big fuss,
until the complaining crybaby finds a free seat and sits down. Two hours later,
we come across the same foolish young man, now in the Cour de Rome; he is
sitting on a bench with a friend, no less idiotic, who is telling him: “You
ought to get an extra button sewn on your overcoat.” Well, like I said, the
story was very silly, but the fact that the narration started on a bus
captivated me. I’d never read a story on a bus that took place in the same
space. I was so fascinated that without noticing, due to the satisfaction I got
from reading what could be happening on the very bus I was traveling on, I
started sucking on the ticket and finally swallowed it. When the inspector
arrived, it was no use telling him I’d swallowed it because of a stupid story
I’d been reading that made me laugh a lot. I had to pay a huge fine.

Enrique Vila-Matas

Translated from the Spanish by Anne
McLean

Also by Raymond Queneau

from New Directions

The Blue Flowers

The Flight of Icarus

The Sunday of Life