Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (25 page)

“Oh, shit, we should have prepared her for it,” Ronald said. “There wasn’t any reason, it’s a disgrace. Everybody spouting nonsense and this, this …”

“Don’t get hysterical,” Étienne said sharply. “Act like Ossip, at least, he hasn’t lost his head. Get some cologne if there’s something like it around. I heard the old man upstairs. He’s started again.”

“He’s got good reason,” Oliveira said, looking at Babs who was struggling to get La Maga off the bed. “What a night we’ve been giving him, Jesus.”

“He can go fuck himself,” Ronald said. “I’d like to go out and bust his face in, the old son of a bitch. If he hasn’t got any respect for other people’s troubles …”

“Take it easy,” Oliveira said in English. “There’s your cologne, take my handkerchief even if it’s not the whitest in the world. Well, we’ll have to notify the police.”

“I can go,” said Gregorovius, who had his raincoat over his arm.

“But of course, you’re a member of the family,” Oliveira said.

“If you could just cry,” Babs was saying, stroking La Maga on the forehead as she laid her head on the pillow and was staring at Rocamadour. “Give me a handkerchief with alcohol on it, please, something to bring her around.”

Étienne and Ronald began to bustle around the bed. The thumps were coming rhythmically on the ceiling and Ronald looked up each time and once shook his fist hysterically. Oliveira had withdrawn to the stove and was watching and listening from there. He felt that he had been saddled with fatigue and that it was pulling him down, making it hard for him to breathe, to move. He lit another cigarette, the last one in the pack. Things began to get a little better. Babs had rummaged in a corner of the room and after making a sort of cradle out of two chairs and a blanket was conferring with Ronald (it was strange to watch their gestures over La Maga, who was lost in a cold delirium, in a vehement but dry and spasmodic monologue); at one point they covered La Maga’s eyes with a handkerchief (“If that’s cologne they’re going to blind her,” Oliveira
said to himself), and with extraordinary quickness they helped Étienne lift up Rocamadour and carry him to the improvised cradle while they pulled the bedcover out from under La Maga and put it on top of her, speaking to her softly, caressing her, making her inhale what was on the handkerchief. Gregorovius had gone over to the door and was standing there, not having made up his mind to go out, looking furtively at the bed and then at Oliveira, who had his back turned towards him but sensed that he was looking at him. When he decided to leave, the old man was already on the landing with a stick in his hand, and Ossip jumped back inside. The stick clattered against the door. “That’s the way things can keep on piling up,” Oliveira said to himself, taking a step towards the door. Ronald, who had guessed what was going on, threw himself furiously towards the door while Babs shouted something at him in English. Gregorovius tried to stop him, but it was too late. Ronald, Ossip, and Babs went out followed by Étienne, who glanced at Oliveira as if he were the only one who still had some common sense left.

“Don’t let them do anything stupid,” Oliveira said to him. “The old man must be eighty and he’s crazy.”

“Tous des cons!”
the old man was shouting on the landing.
“Bande de tueurs, si vous croyez que ça va se passer comme ça! Des fripouilles, des fainéants. Tas d’enculés!”

It was odd that he was not shouting very loudly. Through the half-open door Étienne’s voice bounced back like a return shot:
“Ta gueule, pépère.”
Gregorovius had grabbed Ronald by the arm, but in the light that came from the apartment Ronald had been able to see that the old man really was very old and all he did was shake his fist in his face with less conviction each time he did it. Once or twice Oliveira glanced at the bed where La Maga was very still beneath the covers. She was sobbing heavily with her mouth plunged into the pillow, on the exact spot where Rocamadour’s head had been.
“Faudrait quand même laisser dormir les gens,”
the old man was saying.
“Qu’est-ce que ça me fait, moi, un gosse qu’a claqué? C’est pas une façon d’agir, quand même, on est à Paris, pas en Amazonie.”
Étienne’s voice came on louder and swallowed up the other as he convinced him. Oliveira told himself that it would not be so difficult to go over to the bed, squat down beside it and say a few words in La Maga’s ear. “But I would be doing it for myself,” he thought. “She’s beyond anything. I’m the one who would sleep better
afterward, even if it’s just an expression. Me, me, me. I would sleep better after I kissed her and consoled her and repeated everything these people here have already said.”

“Eh bien, moi, messieurs, je respecte la douleur d’une mère,”
the old man’s voice said.
“Allez, bonsoir messieurs dames.”

The rain was slicing down on the window. Paris must be a great gray bubble in which dawn would come up little by little. Oliveira went over to the corner where his lumberjacket was looking like the torso of a quartered criminal, oozing dampness. He put it on slowly, looking all the while towards the bed as if he expected something. He thought of Berthe Trépat’s arm on his, the walk in the rain.
“¿De qué te sirvió el verano, oh ruiseñor en la nieve?”
he quoted ironically. “Stinking, absolutely stinking. And I’m out of cigarettes, damn it.” He would have to go all the way to the Bébert café, but still and all, dawn would be just as repugnant there as anywhere else.

“What an old fool,” Ronald said, closing the door.

“He went back to his flat,” Étienne said. “I think Gregorovius went out to tell the police. Are you staying?”

“No, what for? They won’t like it if they find so many people here at this hour. It would be better for Babs to stay, two women are always more convincing in these cases. It’s more intimate, understand?”

Étienne looked at him.

“I’d like to know why your mouth is quivering so much,” he said.

“Nervous tics,” Oliveira said.

“Tics don’t go well with the cynical air. I’ll go with you, come on.”

“Let’s go.”

He knew that La Maga had sat up in bed and was looking at him. Putting his hands in the pockets of his lumberjacket, he went to the door. Étienne made a sign as if to hold him back and then followed him out. Ronald saw them leave and shrugged his shoulders, furious. “This is all so absurd,” he thought. The idea that everything was absurd made him uncomfortable, but he couldn’t tell why. He began to help Babs, made himself useful, wetted compresses. The pounding on the ceiling started up again.

(–
130
)

“TIENS,”
said Oliveira.

Gregorovius was huddled by the stove, wrapped up in a black bathrobe, reading. He had hung a lamp on a nail in the wall and with a shade made out of a newspaper was guiding the light just where he needed it.

“I didn’t know you had a key.”

“Leftovers,” said Oliveira, tossing his lumberjacket in the usual corner. “I’ll let you have it, now that the place is yours.”

“Just for a while. It’s too cold in here, and besides, I’ve got that old man upstairs. He pounded on the floor five times this morning. Why, I don’t know.”

“Habit. Everything has a longer overlap than it should. Take me, for example. I climb the stairs, I take out my key, I open the door … It stinks in here.”

“Cold as hell,” said Gregorovius. “After they finished fumigating I had to keep the window open for forty-eight hours.”

“And you were here all the time?
Caritas.
What kind of a guy are you?”

“That wasn’t why. I was afraid somebody from the landlady might use that time to get in here and cause trouble. Lucía told me once that the landlady is an old nut and that a lot of tenants have owed her rent for years. When I was in Budapest I was reading law and things like that stick with you.”

“You’ve made a real posh setup for yourself.
Chapeau, mon vieux.
I hope they didn’t throw out my
yerba mate.”

“No, it’s over there in the night-table, among the stockings. There’s lots of space now.”

“So it seems,” said Oliveira. “La Maga had an attack of neatness. I don’t see any records or books. But now that I think of it …”

“She took everything,” said Gregorovius.

Oliveira opened the drawer of the night-table and took out the
yerba mate
and the gourd that went with it. He began to fill the gourd slowly, looking all around. The lyrics of
Mi noche triste
began to run through his head. He counted on his fingers: Thursday, Friday, Saturday. No. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. No. Thursday night, Berthe Trépat,
me amuraste/en lo mejor de la vida
, Wednesday (a wild binge;
n.b.
, don’t mix vodka and red wine),
dejándome el alma herida / y espina en el corazón.
Thursday, Friday, Ronald and a rented car, a visit to Guy Monod, like an old glove come home, buckets of green vomit, out of danger,
sabiendo que te quería / que vos eras mi alegría / mi esperanza y mi ilusión.
Saturday, where? where? somewhere near Marly-le-Roi, five days in all; no, six, a week more or less, and the room still cold in spite of the stove. Wily old Ossip, king of convenience.

“So she’s gone,” said Oliveira, plumping down in the easy chair and keeping the little kettle within reach.

Gregorovius nodded. He had his book open on his knees and gave the posed impression that he would like to keep on reading.

“And she left her place to you.”

“She knew I was in delicate shape,” said Gregorovius. “My great-aunt stopped sending me my allowance, she’s probably dead. Miss Babington hasn’t said anything, but with the situation in Cyprus … And you know what that can mean to Malta, censorship and all that. Since you had said you were going away, Lucía offered to share the room with me. I wasn’t sure, but she insisted.”

“It doesn’t tie in too well with her leaving.”

“But that was before all this happened.”

“Before they fumigated?”

“Exactly.”

“You’ve hit the jackpot, Ossip.”

“It’s all very sad, really,” said Gregorovius. “It could have been quite different.”

“Don’t complain. A room twelve by ten for five thousand francs a month, with running water …”

“I want everything to be perfectly clear between us,” said Gregorovius. “This room …”

“Doesn’t belong to me. Take it easy. And La Maga has gone.”

“Anyway …”

“Where did she go?”

“She said something about Montevideo.”

“She hasn’t got enough money for that.”

“She mentioned Perugia.”

“You must mean Lucca. Ever since she read
Sparkenbroke
she’s been crazy about those things. Once and for all, tell me where she went.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea, Horacio. Last Friday she filled a suitcase with books and clothes, bundled a lot of things together, and then two Negroes came and took it all away. She told me I could stay here, but since she was crying all the time you can imagine how hard it was to talk to her.”

“I’d like to bust you in the face,” said Oliveira, sucking on his
mate.

“It’s not my fault.”

“It’s not a matter of fault, damn it. You’re so damned Dostoevskian, repulsive and pleasant at the same time. A kind of metaphysical ass-kisser. When you put on a smile like that who in hell would ever want to hurt you.”

“Oh, I’m one up on you,” said Gregorovius. “The mechanics of ‘challenge and response’ is a bourgeois trait. You’re like me, that’s why you can’t hit me. Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know what’s happened to Lucía. One of the Negroes I mentioned always hangs out in the Café Bonaparte. I’ve seen him there. He could probably tell you. But why are you looking for her now?”

“What do you mean, ‘now’?”

Gregorovius shrugged his shoulders.

“It was a very proper wake,” he said. “Especially after we got rid of the police. Socially speaking, people were commenting about the fact that you weren’t there. The Club was on your side, but the neighbors and the old man upstairs …”

“You mean to tell me that the old man came to the wake?”

“It wasn’t really a wake. They let us keep the body until noon, then the authorities came. Efficient and quick, I must admit.”

“I can picture the whole thing,” said Oliveira. “But there’s no reason for La Maga to move without so much as a word.”

“She thought you’d been with Pola all the time.”

“Ça alors,”
said Oliveira.

“People do get ideas, you know. It’s all your fault that we’re using the familiar form and that makes it harder for me to tell you certain things. It’s obviously a paradox, but that’s the way it
is. It must be because it’s a false familiarity. You started it the other night.”

“I don’t see any reason not to be familiar with the man who’s been sleeping with my girl.”

“I’m getting sick of telling you it wasn’t that way. So there’s no reason for us to use the familiar form. If La Maga had really drowned, I can see how in the grief of the moment, while we were embracing and consoling each other … But that’s not how it was. At least I don’t think so.”

“You saw something in the paper,” said Oliveira.

“The description doesn’t match at all. We can still use formal address. There it is over there, on the mantel.”

The description, in fact, did not match. Oliveira took the newspaper and prepared himself another
mate.
Lucca, Montevideo,
la guitarra en el ropero / para siempre está colgada
…And when she puts everything in a suitcase and makes up bundles one might deduce that (take care: all deductions are not necessarily proofs),
nadie en ella toca nada / ni hace sus cuerdas sonar.
Or makes music on its strings.

“Well, I’ll find out where she’s gone. She couldn’t get very far.”

“This will always be her home,” said Gregorovius, “even though Adgalle is coming to stay with me this spring.”

“Your mother?”

“Yes. She sent an emotional telegram in which she mentioned the tetragrammaton. It so happened that I had been reading the
Sefer Yetzirah
, trying to trace its Neoplatonic influences. Adgalle knows her kabala. There’ll be some wild arguments.”