Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (22 page)

“I can’t close it,” Babs said. “I’ll stick it in this corner.”

“It looks like a bat,” La Maga said. “Give it to me, I’ll close it. See how easy?”

“She broke two ribs,” Babs said to Ronald.

“Quit belly-aching,” Ronald said. “Besides, we’ll be leaving right away, we only came to tell you that Guy swallowed a tube of gardenal.”

“Poor dear,” said Oliveira, who didn’t care very much for Guy.

“Étienne found him half-dead, Babs and I had gone to a
vernissage
(I have to tell you about that sometime, it was fabulous), and Guy had gone up to the apartment, got into bed, and poisoned himself.”

“He has no manners at all,” Oliveira said in English.
“C’est regrettable.”

“Étienne had come by to look for us, luckily everybody has a key,” Babs said. “He heard someone vomiting, went in, and found Guy. He was dying. Étienne ran out to get help. They’ve taken him to the hospital now and he’s in critical condition. And with all this rain,” Babs added, flustered.

“Sit down,” La Maga said. “Not there, Ronald, there’s a leg missing. It’s so dark in here because of Rocamadour. Speak softly.”

“Fix them some coffee,” Oliveira said. “Great weather, eh?”

“I’ll have to be going,” Gregorovius said. “I wonder where I put my raincoat—no, not there, Lucía …”

“Stay and have some coffee,” La Maga said. “The subway has stopped running and it’s comfortable here. You can grind some fresh coffee, Horacio.”

“It smells shut in here,” Babs said.

“She always misses the pure outside ozone,” Ronald said furiously. “She’s like a horse, she only loves pure and unadulterated things. Primary colors, the seven-note scale. I don’t think she’s human.”

“Humanity is an ideal,” said Oliveira, feeling around for the coffee grinder. “Air has its story too. Coming from a wet street with lots of ozone, as you said, into an atmosphere whose
temperature and make-up have been fifty centuries in the making … Babs is a kind of Rip van Winkle of respiration.”

“Oh, Rip van Winkle,” Babs said delighted. “My grandmother used to read me stories about him.”

“In Idaho, we all know,” Ronald said. “Well, what happened next was that Étienne called us at the bar on the corner a half-hour ago and told us that it would be best if we stayed away from our place for the night, at least until they know whether Guy is going to die or is going to vomit up the gardenal. It could be bad if the cops came by and found us there, they’re pretty good at putting two and two together, and lately all the business with the Club has got them in a bad mood.”

“What’s wrong with the Club?” La Maga asked, as she dried some cups with a towel.

“Nothing, but that’s precisely why we have no defense. The neighbors have complained so much about the noise, the record sessions, the coming and going at all hours … And besides, Babs has run-ins with the concierge and all the other women in the building, fifty or sixty of them.”

“They’re awful,” Babs said, chewing on a piece of candy she had taken out of her pocket. “They smell marijuana even if you’re only cooking a goulash.”

Oliveira was tired of grinding the coffee and passed the grinder to Ronald. Speaking softly, Babs and La Maga were discussing the motives behind Guy’s attempted suicide. After fussing so much about his raincoat, Gregorovius had flopped in the easy chair and was very quiet, keeping his unlit pipe in his mouth. The rain was beating on the window. “Schoenberg and Brahms,” Oliveira thought, taking out a Gauloise. “It’s O.K., usually under these circumstances one hears Chopin or the
Todesmusik
for Siegfried. Yesterday’s tornado killed between two and three thousand people in Japan. Statistically speaking …” But statistics didn’t stop his cigarette from tasting oily. He examined it as best he could, lighting another match. It was a perfect Gauloise, very white, with its delicate writing and shreds of its harsh caporal tobacco coming out of the wet end. “I always wet my cigarettes when I’m nervous,” he thought. “When I think about things like Rose Bob … Yes, it’s been a daddy of a day, and look what’s ahead of us.” The best thing would be to tell Ronald so that Ronald could pass it on to Babs in one of those almost telepathic messages that startled Perico Romero so.
The theory of communication, one of those fascinating themes that literature had not gone into much until the Huxleys and the Borgeses of the new generation came along. Now Ronald was counting in time to the whispers passing between Babs and La Maga, spinning the grinder vigorously, the coffee wouldn’t be ready until doomsday. Oliveira slid off the horrible
art nouveau
chair and made himself comfortable on the floor, with his head resting on a pile of newspapers. There was a strange glow on the ceiling which must have been more subjective than anything else. When he closed his eyes the glow would last for a moment, then great purple spheres would begin to explode, one after another,
voof, voof, voof
, each sphere evidently corresponded to a systole or a diastole, who could tell. And somewhere in the building, probably on the third floor, a telephone was ringing. An extraordinary thing in Paris at that hour. “Another death,” Oliveira thought. “That’s the only reason anybody calls up in this city so considerate of sleep.” He remembered the time a recently arrived friend from Argentina had thought it quite natural to call him up at ten-thirty in the evening. God knows how, but he had managed to get the number of some telephone in the building from the Bottin guide and he gave a call then and there. The face of the gentleman from the fifth floor in his bathrobe, knocking at the door, an icy stare,
quelqu’un vous demande au téléphone
, Oliveira confused, putting on a wrap, going up to the fifth floor, finding a steadfastly annoyed woman, learning that old buddy Hermida was in Paris and when can we get together, man, I’ve got news from everybody, Traveler, and the boys in the Bidú bar, etc., and the woman hiding her irritation as she waited for Oliveira to start crying when he learned of the death of somebody very close, and Oliveira without knowing why,
vraiment je suis tellement confus, madame, monsieur, c’était un ami qui vient d’arriver, vous comprenez, il n’est pas du tout au courant des habitudes
…Oh, Argentina, generous schedules, open house, time to throw away, the whole future in front, all of it,
voof, voof, voof
, but in back of the eyes of that one six feet away there was nothing, there couldn’t ever be anything, the whole theory of communication ended, no mamma, no dada, no papa, no peepee no
voof voof
no nothing, just
rigor mortis
and people hanging around who didn’t even come from Salta or Mexico and so could organize a wake for the
angelito
while they still could listen to
music, who couldn’t find out like them a way out of the whole death business, people who had never been primitive enough to rise above the distress by means of acceptance or identification, nor yet developed enough to deny all distress and put this “one minor casualty” alongside the three thousand swept away by typhoon Veronica, for example. “But this is all dime-store anthropology,” Oliveira thought, conscious of a cold feeling in his stomach which was giving him cramps. It was always the solar plexus in the end. “These are the real messages, the warnings beneath the skin. And there is no dictionary for them.” Who had turned out the Rembrandt lamp? He couldn’t remember, a while back there had been a kind of old-gold dust on the floor, try as he could, he couldn’t reconstruct what had happened since Ronald and Babs had come, nothing to do, at some moment La Maga (because it must have been La Maga) or perhaps Gregorovius, someone had turned off the lamp.

“How are you going to make coffee in the dark?”

“I don’t know,” La Maga said, getting out some cups. “There was some light before.”

“Turn it on, Ronald,” Oliveira said. “It’s underneath your chair there. You have to turn the bulb, it’s the classic way.”

“This is all quite idiotic,” Ronald said, without anyone’s knowing whether he meant the way the lamp had to be turned on or not. The light made the purple spheres go away, and Oliveira began to like his cigarette better. Now everything was really comfortable, it was warm, there would be coffee.

“Come on over here,” Oliveira told Ronald. “You’ll be more comfortable than in that chair, it has a kind of point in the middle of it that pricks your ass. Wong would include it in his Peking collection if he knew about it, I’m sure.”

“I’m all right here,” Ronald said, “at the risk of being misunderstood.”

“You’re not all right. Come here. And how’s that coffee doing, ladies?”

“He’s being very masculine tonight,” said Babs. “Is he always like that with you?”

“Most of the time,” La Maga said without looking at him. “Help me dry this tray.”

Oliveira waited for Babs to start the usual comments on the job of making coffee, and when Ronald got off his chair and squatted down near him, he said something in his ear. Listening
to them, Gregorovius joined in the conversation about the coffee, and Ronald’s answer was lost in the praise of Mocha and how the art of making it had degenerated. Then Ronald got back up on his chair in time to take the cup La Maga was holding out to him. There was a soft pounding on the ceiling, twice, three times. Gregorovius shuddered and drank his coffee down in one gulp. Oliveira was trying not to burst out laughing, which just might have eased his cramps. La Maga looked surprised, in the shadows she looked at everybody in succession and then reached for a cigarette on the table, groping around as if she wanted to get out of something she didn’t understand, something like a dream.

“I hear steps,” Babs said with a marked Blavatsky tone. “That old man must be crazy, you have to watch out. In Kansas City once … No, it’s someone coming up the stairs.”

“The stairway makes a pattern in your ear,” La Maga said. “I feel very sorry for deaf people. It’s as if I had my hand on the stairs now and were moving it up the steps one by one. When I was a girl I got an A on a theme I wrote, the story of a little sound. It was a nice little sound, it came and went, things happened to it …”

“I, on the other hand …” said Babs. “O.K., O.K., you don’t have to pinch me.”

“My love,” Ronald said, “be still a moment so we can tell whose steps those are. Yes, it’s the king of pigments, it’s Étienne, it’s the great apocalyptic beast.”

“He took it calmly,” Oliveira thought. “The spoonful of medicine is for two o’clock, I think. We have more than an hour of calm left.” He did not understand and he did not want to understand the reason behind the delay, that sort of denial of something already known. Negation, negative…“Yes, it’s like the negative of reality just-as-it-ought-to-be, that is … But don’t go getting metaphysical, Horacio. Alas, poor Yorick,
ça suffit.
I can’t help it, I think it’s better this way than if we turned on the light and released the news like a dove from its cage. A negative. Complete reversal … What’s most likely is that he’s alive and we’re all dead. A more modest proposition: he has killed us because we are responsible for his death. Responsible, accomplices in a state of affairs, that is … Oh, dear boy, where are you taking yourself, you’re the donkey with the
carrot hanging down in front of its eyes. And it was Étienne, no less, it was the great painting beast.”

“He’s out of danger,” Étienne said. “Son of a bitch, he’s got more lives than Cesare Borgia. And what a job of vomiting …”

“Tell us, tell us,” Babs said.

“A stomach wash, all kinds of enemas, jabs all over with a needle, a bed with springs, to keep his head down. He threw up the whole menu of the Orestias restaurant, where it seems he had lunch. What a mess, even stuffed grape leaves. Has anyone noticed that I’m soaked?”

“We’ve got some hot coffee,” Ronald said, “and a foul drink called
caña
.”

Étienne snorted, tossed his raincoat in a corner, and went over to the stove.

“How’s the baby, Lucía?”

“He’s asleep,” La Maga said. “He’s sleeping quite soundly, fortunately.”

“Let’s speak low,” Babs said.

“He regained consciousness around eleven o’clock,” Étienne explained in a sort of tender way. “He was a mess, that’s for sure. The doctor let me go over to the bed and Guy recognized me. ‘You idiot,’ I said to him. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he answered. The doctor whispered to me that that was a good sign. There were other people in the ward, I got through it pretty well, and you know what hospitals do to me …”

“Did you go back to the flat?” Babs asked. “Did you have to go to the police station?”

“No, everything’s all taken care of. In any case, it would be wiser if you spent the night here, you should have seen the face on the concierge when they carried Guy out …”

“The lousy bastard,” Babs said in English.

“I put on a virtuous air and when I passed her I lifted up my hand and said: ‘Madame, death is always respectable. This young man has tried to kill himself because he was lovesick over Kreisler.’ She just hardened up, believe me, and she kept on looking at me with a pair of eyes that looked like two hard-boiled eggs. And just as the stretcher was going out the door, Guy raised up a little, put his hand to his pale cheek, just like a statue on an Etruscan tomb, and puked up some green vomit in the direction of the concierge that landed smack in the middle
of the doormat. The stretcher-bearers doubled up laughing, it was fantastic.”

“More coffee?” Ronald asked. “And sit down over here on the floor, it’s the warmest spot in the room. Give poor Étienne a good cup of coffee.”

“I can’t see anything,” Étienne said. “And why do I have to sit on the floor?”

“To keep Horacio and me company, we’re keeping a sort of knight’s vigil,” Ronald said.

“Come off it, you fool,” Oliveira said.

“Pay attention to me, sit down here, and you will learn things that not even Wong knows about. The
Libri Fulgurales
, the writings of the ancient seers. Just this morning I was having so much fun reading the
Bardo.
They’re amazing creatures, the Tibetans.”

“Who initiated you?” Étienne asked, sliding down between Oliveira and Ronald and drinking his coffee down in one gulp. “A drink,” Étienne said, putting his hand out imperiously towards La Maga, who put the bottle of
caña
in it. “Terrible,” Étienne said after taking a swig. “Product of Argentina, I suppose. What a country, my God.”