Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (11 page)

Pureness.

(Enough. Come on. Go home, take a bath, read Our Lady of Paris or the She-Wolves of Machecoul, get off your binge. Extrapolation, what a word.)

Pureness. Horrible word. Pea-your, then ness. Think about it a bit. Brisset and his plays on words. Why are you crying? Who’s crying, huh?

Pea-your, understand it like an epiphany.
Maldita lengua.
To understand. Not to make sense: to understand. A hint of a paradise that can be won again: It cannot be that we are here in order not to be. Brisset? Man descends from the level of the frogs … Blind as a bat, drunk as a butterfly,
foutu, royalement foutu devant les portes que peut-être
…(An ice-cube on the back of his neck, go to bed. Problem: Johnny Dodds or Albert Nicholas? Dodds, he was almost sure of it. Note: ask Ronald.) A bad line of poetry floating down from the skylight:
“Antes de caer en la nada con el ultimo diástole
…” High as a kite. The doors of perception by Aldley Huxdous. Get yourself a tiny bit of mescaline, brother, the rest is bliss and diarrhea (all in English). But let’s get serious (yes, it was Johnny Dodds, you find the proof by indirection. The drummer had to be Zutty Singleton,
ergo
the clarinet is Johnny Dodds, jazzology, deductive science, particularly easy after four o’clock in the morning. Hardly advisable for ladies and clerics). Let’s get serious, Horacio, before we struggle up in a while and head for the street, let’s ask ourselves a question while we have our soul in the palm of our hand (the palm of the hand? In the palm of our tongue, like, or something like that. Toponymy, anatology, descriptology, two volumes with il-lus-tra-tions), let’s ask whether we should attack from above or from below (but, hey now, I’m making sense, the vodka has pinned them like butterflies onto a tray, A is A, a rose is a rose is a rose, April is the cruelest month, everything in its place and a place for every rose is a rose is a rose…).

Huf. Beware of the Jabberwocky my son.

Horacio slid down a little more and saw very clearly everything he wanted to see. He wasn’t sure whether he should attack from above or from below, with a concentration of all his forces or rather as now, dispersed and liquid, full forward to the skylight, against the green candles, or to La Maga’s sad, sheep-like face, or against Ma Rainey who was singing
Jelly Bean Blues.
Better this way, spread out and receptive, spongy, the way everything is spongy as long as a person looks a lot and has good eyes. He wasn’t so drunk that he didn’t have the feeling that his house was a shambles, that inside nothing was in place but at the same time—to be sure, marvelously sure—on the floor or on the ceiling, under the bed or floating in a washbasin there were stars and chunks of eternity, poems like suns and
enormous faces of women and cats where the fury of their species was fired up, in the mixture of garbage and jade plaques in their own language where words were woven night and day into furious battles between ants and centipedes, blasphemy existed with the pure mention of essences, the perfect image with the basest slang. Disorder was triumphant and ran through the rooms with its hair entangled in disgusting braids, glass eyes, its hands holding cards that would not meld, letters without heading or complimentary close, and the soup was getting cold upon the table, the floor was covered with cast-off pants, rotten apples, stained bandages. And suddenly from all this there came some horrid music, it was beyond the felted order of homes where untouchable kin put things in order, in the midst of the confusion where the past was incapable of finding a button on a shirt and the present shaved itself with pieces of a broken bottle because it could not find a razor stuck away somewhere in some flowerpot, in the midst of a time which opened up like a weather vane to whatever wind was blowing, a man breathed until he could no longer do so, he felt that he had lived until he reached the delirium of the very act of taking in the confusion which surrounded him and he asked himself if any of this had meaning. All disorder had meaning if it seemed to come out of itself, perhaps through madness one could arrive at that reason which is not the reason whose weakness is madness. “To go from disorder to order,” thought Oliveira. “Yes, but what kind of order can there be which does not mimic the basest, most debased, and most unhealthy of disorders? The order of the gods is called cyclone or leukemia, the poet’s order is called antimatter, firm space, flowers of trembling lips, God, I’m drunk, Jesus, I’ve got to get to bed.” And La Maga was crying, Guy had disappeared, Étienne had left after Perico, and Gregorovius, Wong, and Ronald were looking at a record that was spinning slowly, thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, no more no less, and in these revolutions there was
Oscar’s Blues,
Oscar himself on piano, of course, a certain Oscar Peterson, a certain pianist half tiger, half felt, a certain sad, fat pianist, a guy on piano and the rain on the skylight, all those things, literature, after all.

(–
153
)

“I THINK I understand you,” La Maga said, running her hand through his hair. “You’re looking for something you don’t know. I’ve been doing the same thing and I don’t know what it is either. But they’re two different things. What you were talking about the other night … Yes, you’re a Mondrian and I’m a Vieira da Silva.”

“So,” Oliveira said, “I’m a Mondrian after all.”

“Yes, Horacio.”

“You meant to say someone of a rigorous nature.”

“I said a Mondrian.”

“And didn’t it occur to you that behind this Mondrian there might lurk a Vieira da Silva reality?”

“Yes, but up till now you haven’t come out of the Mondrian reality. You’re afraid, you want to be sure of yourself. I don’t know … You’re more like a doctor than a poet.”

“Forget about poets,” Oliveira said. “And don’t try to hurt Mondrian with the comparison.”

“Mondrian is wonderful, but he doesn’t let you breathe. I always strangle a little bit inside. And when you start talking about the search for unity, then I start to see a lot of beautiful things, but they’re all dead, pressed flowers and things like that.”

“Let’s see, Lucía: are you quite sure what unity is?”

“My name is Lucía but you don’t have to call me that,” La Maga said. “Unity, of course I know what it is. You’re trying to say that everything in your life comes together so that you can see it all at the same time. Is that what you mean?”

“More or less,” Oliveira conceded. “It’s incredible how hard it is for you to grasp abstract ideas. Unity, plurality … Can’t you feel them without feeling the need for examples? Can’t you? Let’s see, now: your life, do you think it is a unity?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s pieces, things that happened to me.”

“But you in turn went through those things like the string went through those green stones. And speaking of stones, where did you get that necklace?”

“Ossip gave it to me,” La Maga said. “It was his mother’s, the one from Odessa.”

Oliveira sucked slowly on his
mate.
La Maga went over to the cot that Ronald had loaned them so that they could have Rocamadour in the apartment. With the cot and Rocamadour and the complaints of the tenants there was barely any living-space left, but nobody could tell La Maga that Rocamadour would have been better off in a children’s hospital. It had been necessary to go with her to the country the same day that Madame Irène had sent the telegram, wrap Rocamadour up in a bunch of rags and blankets, put him to bed, stoke up the fire in the stove, tolerate Rocamadour’s wailing when the time came for a suppository or a pill or the bottle which was useless in covering up the taste of the medicine he had to take. Oliveira made himself another
mate
and out of the corner of his eye looked at the cover of a
Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft
that Ronald had loaned him, wondering when he could listen to it without getting Rocamadour wailing and twisting. He was horrified by La Maga’s laziness in diapering and undiapering Rocamadour, the way she would sing at him to distract him, the smell that emanated from his bed, cotton, wails, the stupid assurance of La Maga that it wasn’t anything, that if she did what she should for her son he would be all right in a matter of days. It made no sense, it was all maybe, maybe not. What was he doing there? A month ago they both had had their places still, even after they had decided to live together. La Maga had said that they could save money this way, they only had to buy one paper a day, they wouldn’t waste food. She could iron his clothes, and heat, electricity … Oliveira had been about to admire that brusque attack on common sense. He finally accepted because old Trouille was having troubles and owed him close to thirty thousand francs, at the time it seemed just as logical to live with La Maga as by himself, he had been walking around thinking about every detail and pondering every little thing that seemed to come upon him like a great crisis. He had come to the conclusion that the continuous presence of La Maga
would stop him from speculating so much, but naturally he had not thought about the possibilities of Rocamadour. Even so, he had been able to keep to himself from time to time, until Rocamadour’s howls would bring him back to a healthy grouchiness. “I’m going to end up like a character out of Walter Pater,” Oliveira would think to himself. “One soliloquy after another, an endless vice. Marius the Epicurean, ‘pure vice.’ The only salvation left to me is the smell of that brat’s piss.”

“I always figured you would end up going to bed with Ossip,” Oliveira said.

“Rocamadour has a fever,” La Maga said.

Oliveira made himself another
mate.
He had to watch out for his
mate,
in Paris it cost five hundred francs a kilo in drugstores and it was terrible stuff, sold in the pharmacy of the Saint-Lazare station next to a gaudy sign that said
“maté sauvage, cueilli par les indiens,”
diuretic, antibiotic, and emollient. Luckily the lawyer from Rosario, who happened to be his brother, had sent him ten pounds of Cruz de Malta brand, but there wasn’t much left. “If my
mate
runs out I’ve had it,” Oliveira thought. “My only real conversation is with this green gourd.” He studied the strange behavior of the
mate,
how the herb would breathe fragrantly as it came up on top of the water and how it would dive as he sucked and would cling to itself, everything fine lost and all smell except for that little bit that would come up in the water like breath and stimulate his Argentinian iron lung, so sad and solitary. It had been some time now that Oliveira had been paying attention to unimportant things, and the little green gourd had the advantage that as he meditated upon it, it never occurred to his perfidious intelligence to endow it with such ideas as one extracts from mountains, the moon, the horizon, an adolescent girl, a bird, or a horse. “This
mate
might show me where the center is,” Oliveira thought (and the idea that La Maga and Ossip were seeing each other became frail and lost its strength, for a moment the green gourd was stronger, it proposed its own little petulant volcano, its smoky crater, an atmosphere which hovered over the other rather cold air of the flat in spite of the stove that had been lighted around nine o’clock that night). “And just what is this center that I don’t know what it really is; can it be the coordinates of some unity? I’m walking back and forth in an apartment whose floor is tiled with flat stones and one of these
stones is the exact spot where I ought to stop so that everything would come into its proper focus. The exact spot,” Oliveira said emphatically, kidding himself a little so as to know that he was not just playing with words. “A shapeless quadrilateral in which we must look for the precise angle (and the importance of this example is that the angel is horribly a cute and won must have his knows right up on to the canvas so that suddenly all the senseless lines will come together to form a portrait of Francis I or the Battle of Sinigaglia, something that deflies descrumption).” But that unity, the sum of all the actions which define a life, seemed to go into hiding in the face of any previous sign that life itself could end like a played-out drink of
mate,
that is to say that only those left behind, the biographers, would recognize the unity, and all that was really not of the least importance as far as Oliveira was concerned. The problem consisted in grasping that unity without becoming a hero, without becoming a saint, or a criminal, or a boxing champ, or a statesman, or a shepherd. To grasp unity in the midst of diversity, so that that unity might be the vortex of a whirlwind and not the sediment in a clean, cold
mate
gourd.

“I’m going to give him a quarter piece of aspirin,” La Maga said.

“If you can make him take it you’ll be better than Ambroise Paré,” said Oliveira. “Come have a
mate,
I just made some.”

The idea of unity was worrying him because it seemed so easy to fall into the worst traps. When he had been a student on the Calle Viamonte around 1930, he had found out (first off) to his surprise and (later) with irony, that an awful lot of people would set themselves up comfortably in a supposed unity of person which was nothing but a linguistic unity and a premature sclerosis of character. These people would set up a system of principles which had never been legalized basically, and which were nothing more than a concession to the word itself, to a verbal idea of strength; rejection and attraction were subjected, displaced, gotten out of the way, then replaced by their verbal equivalents. And in this way duty, morals, the immoral and the amoral, justice, charity, the European and the American, day and night, wives, sweethearts, and girlfriends, the army and the bar, the flag and Yankee or Moscow gold, abstract art and the Battle of Caseros came to be like teeth and hair, something accepted and inevitably incorporated,
something which was not alive or capable of being analyzed because
that’s the way it is
and it makes us what we are, fulfills and strengthens. Man’s rape by word, the masterful vengeance of word upon its progenitor, all this filled Oliveira’s thoughts with bitter lack of confidence, forced to seek help from the enemy itself to open a path to the point where he might just be able to be mustered out and follow it—but with what means, on what clear night or shady day?—until he could reach a complete reconciliation with himself and with the reality in which he lived. To arrive at the word without words (how far, how improbable), to grasp a deep unity without recourse to reasoning conscience, something that when all was said and done would be like sitting there sipping
mate
and looking at Rocamadour’s little ass up in the air as La Maga’s fingers came and went with bits of cotton, and Rocamadour wailed because he could not stand being plucked at.