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PARTISAN REVIEW
promising strictness which Clementina Villar demanded of herself.
Like any Confucian adept or Talmudist, she strove for irreproach–
able correctness
in
every action; but her zeal was more admirable
and more exigent than theirs because the tenets of her creed were not
eternal, but bound up with the shifting caprices of Paris or Holly–
wood. Clementina Villar appeared at the correct places, at the cor–
rect hour, with the correct appurtenances and the correct boredom;
but the boredom, the appurtenances, the hour and the places would
almost immediately become
passe
and would provide Clementina
Villar with the material for a definition of cheap taste. She was in
search of the Absolute, like Flaubert; only hers was an Absolute of a
moment's duration. Her life was a strict pattern, yet she was ravaged
unremittingly by an inner despair. She was forever experimenting
with new metamorphoses, as though trying to get away from herself:
the color of her hair and the shape of her coiffure were celebratedly
unstable. She was always changing her smile, her complexion, the
slant of her eyes. Mter '32 she was scrupulously slender. ... The
war gave her much to think about: with Paris occupied by the
Germans, how could one follow the fashions? A foreigner whom she
had always distrusted presumed so far upon her good faith as to sell
her a great number of cylindrical hats; a year later it turned out that
those absurd creations
had never been worn in Paris at all/-conse–
quently they were not hats, but arbitrary, unauthorized eccentricities.
And troubles never come singly: Dr. Villar had to move way off to
Araoz street, and his daughter's portrait was now adorning .advertise–
ments for cold cream and automobiles. She knew that the successful
exercise of her art demanded a large fortune, and she preferred re–
tirement from the scene to halfway effects. Moreover, it pained her
to have to compete with giddy little nobodies. The gloomy Araoz
apartment was too much to bear: on the sixth of June Clementina
Villar committed the solecism of dying in the very middle of the
South End. Shall I confess that I-moved by that most sincere of
Argentinian passions, snobbery-shall I confess that I was enamored
of her, and that her death affected me to tears? Probably the reader
has already suspected as much.
At a wake, the progress of corruption brings it about that the
corpse reassumes its earlier faces. At some stage of that confused night
