Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (30 page)

(And when they were almost out of sight down the Rue de Nevers, when they were coming perhaps to the exact spot where Pierre Curie had been run over by a truck (“Pierre Curie?” La Maga asked, baffled and ever ready to learn), they had turned slowly towards the steep river bank, leaning against the stall of
a
bouquiniste
, although Oliveira always found that the stalls of the
bouquinistes
took on a funereal tone at night, a string of makeshift coffins lined up along a stone railing, and one snowy night they’d had fun taking a stick and writing RIP on all of the lead boxes, and a policeman had been less amused and had told them so, speaking about things like respect and tourism, they couldn’t figure out why he had mentioned the last matter. In those days everything was still kibbutz, or at least the possibility of kibbutz, and walking through the streets writing RIP on the closed-up stalls of the
bouquinistes
and being amazed at the amorous
clocharde
who was a part of a confused series of against-the-grain exercises that had to be performed, approved, left behind. And that’s how it was, and it was cold, and there was no kibbutz. Except for the lie of going to Habeb’s and buying red wine and inventing a kibbutz like Kubla Khan’s, covering the distance between laudanum and old Habeb’s cheap wine.)

“A foreigner,” the
clocharde
said with diminishing sympathy for the newcomer. “Spanish, eh. Italian.”

“A mixture,” Oliveira said, making a manly effort to stand the smell.

“But you have a job, that’s obvious,” the
clocharde
accused him.

“Well, not exactly. I used to keep books for an old man, but I haven’t seen him for quite a while.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you don’t overdo it. When I was young …”

“Emmanuèle,” Oliveira said, putting his hand on the place where there must have been a shoulder deep down inside. The
clocharde
was startled at hearing her name; she looked at him suspiciously and then took a hand mirror out of her pocket and examined her mouth. Oliveira wondered what inconceivable chain of circumstances could have caused a
clocharde
to dye her hair. She was intent on the operation of painting her lips with the stub of a lipstick. There was plenty of time to think about himself and what an imbecile he was again. His hand on her shoulder after what had happened with Berthe Trépat. With results that were in the public domain. A self-administered kick in the ass that would flip him around like a glove.
Cretinaccio
, animal, hairy beast. RIP, RIP.
Malgré le tourisme.

“How did you know my name was Emmanuèle?”

“I don’t know. Somebody must have told me.”

Emmanuèle took out a pillbox full of pink powder and began to pat it on one cheek. If Célestin had been there, he would have certainly. Surely he would have. Célestin: tireless. Dozens of cans of sardines,
le salaud.
Suddenly she remembered.

“Ah,” she said.

“Probably,” Oliveira agreed, surrounding himself with smoke as best he could.

“I used to see you there together many times,” Emmanuèle said.

“We used to stroll around there.”

“But she would only talk to me when she was alone. A nice girl, a little crazy.”

“You said it,” Oliveira thought. He was listening to Emmanuèle who was remembering more and more, a bundle of odds and ends, a white sweater that still had some wear, a fine girl who didn’t work and wasn’t wasting her time studying for a degree, a little crazy sometimes, wasting her francs to feed the pigeons on the Ile Saint-Louis, sometimes quite sad, other times breaking up with laughter. Sometimes bad.

“We would argue,” Emmanuèle said, “because she told me not to bother Célestin. She never came back, but I liked her a lot.”

“Did she talk to you so much?”

“You didn’t like it, did you?”

“That’s not it,” Oliveira said, looking over at the other bank. But that’s just what it was, because La Maga hadn’t told him more about her dealings with the
clocharde
, and a basic generalization carried him off, etc. Retrospective jealousy,
cf.
Proust, subtle torture and so on. It was most likely going to rain, the willow began to look as if it was hanging there in the damp air. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be so cold, not quite so cold. Perhaps he said something like: “She never spoke about you much to me,” because Emmanuèle let out a satisfied and wicked laugh, and kept putting on pink powder with her blackened fingers; from time to time she would lift up her hand and give herself a pat on her matted hair which was wrapped up in a wool scarf with red and green stripes, actually a man’s muffler picked up in some trash can. Finally he had to go, go up into the city, so close by there, twenty feet above, where it began exactly on the other side of the Seine embankment, in back of the lead
RIP boxes where the pigeons were talking among themselves and fluffing up as they waited for the first rays of the bland, unforceful sun, the pale eight o’clock pablum that floats down from a mushy sky because it certainly was going to drizzle the way it always did.

When he was already on his way Emmanuèle shouted something at him. He stopped and waited for her, they went up the stairs together. At Habeb’s they bought two quarts of red wine, they took cover in the arcade along the Rue de l’Hirondelle. Emmanuèle was so kind as to take out a bundle of newspapers from under her coats, and this made a fine cushion to put down in a corner that Oliveira had explored with the help of some timid matches. From the other side of the archway there came some snoring that smelled of garlic and cauliflower and cheap forgetfulness; biting his lip, Oliveira stumbled into the corner and settled himself as comfortably as possible against the wall, close to Emmanuèle who was already sucking on the bottle and snorting with satisfaction after every gulp. Untrain the senses, open your mouth and nose wide and take in the worst of smells, human funkiness. One minute, two, three, easier and easier, like any apprenticeship. Keeping his nausea under control, Oliveira grabbed the bottle, even though he couldn’t see he knew the neck was anointed with spit and lipstick, the darkness sharpened his sense of smell. Closing his eyes to protect himself against something, he wasn’t sure what it was, he downed half a pint of wine in one gulp. Then they started to smoke, shoulder to shoulder, satisfied. The nausea went away, not conquered but humiliated, waiting there with its crooked head, and he was able to think about other things. Emmanuèle was talking right along, delivering herself of solemn discourses in between hiccups, giving a maternal scolding to a ghostly Célestin, taking inventory of the sardines, her face lighting up at every puff of the cigarette and Oliveira saw the spots of dirt on her forehead, her thick lips stained with wine, the triumphal scarf of the Syrian goddess that had been trampled on by some enemy army, a chryselephantine head rolling around in the dust, with spots of blood and gore but keeping all the while the diadem of red and green stripes, the Great Mother stretched out in the dust and trampled on by drunken soldiers who amused themselves by pissing on her mutilated breasts, until the greatest clown among them
knelt down to the accolade of all the others, his penis standing out erect above the fallen goddess, masturbating onto the marble and letting the sperm trickle into the eye-holes from which officers’ hands had already plucked the precious stones, into the half-open mouth which accepted the humiliation as a final offering before rolling off into oblivion. And it was so natural that in the darkness the hand of Emmanuèle should feel along Oliveira’s arm and alight there confidently while the other hand sought out the bottle and one could hear the glug-glug and a satisfied snort, so natural that everything ought to be like this with reverse and obverse, the opposite sign as a kind of survival. And even though Wholiveira might mistrust whinebriation, whastute whaccomplice of the Grand Whentrapment, something told him that there was a kibbutz there, that in back of it all, always in back, there was hope for a kibbutz. Not a methodical certainty, oh no, dear fellow, never that, much as you might want it that way, nor an
in vino veritas
nor a Fichte-like dialectic or other Spinozan precious stones, only an acceptance in nausea, Heraclitus had got himself buried in a pile of manure to cure himself of dropsy, somebody had told him about that that very night, somebody who already seemed like someone out of another life, someone like Pola or Wong, people he had annoyed only because he had wanted to make contact with the good side, reinvent love as the only way ever to enter his kibbutz. In shit up to his neck, Heraclitus the Obscure, just like the two of them except without wine, and besides, he wanted to cure himself of dropsy. Maybe that’s what it was, then, keeping yourself covered with shit up to the neck and also hoping, because Heraclitus certainly must have had to stay under the shit for days on end, and Oliveira was beginning to remember too that Heraclitus had said that if one did not expect he would never find the unexpected, wring the neck of the swan, Heraclitus had said, but no, of course he’d said no such thing, and while he was swallowing another long swig and Emmanuèle was laughing in the shadow as she heard the glug-glug and stroked his arm as if to show him that she was enjoying his company and his promise to take the sardines away from Célestin, there suddenly came up to Oliveira like a winy belch the double Mexican surname of the swan with the twistable neck, and he wanted to laugh so much and tell Emmanuèle, but instead he gave her back the almost empty bottle, and Eramanuèle
began to sing in a scrapy sort of way
Les Amants du Havre
, a song that La Maga used to sing when she was sad, but Emmanuèle sang it with a tragic crawl, out of tune and forgetting the words as she petted Oliveira who kept on thinking that only one who expected would be able to find the unexpected, and half-closing his eyes to reject the dim light that was coming in through the entranceway, he thought that far off (across the sea, or was it an access of patriotism?) there was that pure landscape of his kibbutz. It was obvious that he had to twist the swan’s neck, even if it hadn’t been Heraclitus who had demanded it. He was getting sentimental,
puisque la terre est ronde, mon amour t’en fais pas, mon amour, t’en fais pas
along with the wine and the thick voice that was singing as he was getting sentimental, it would all end up in tears and self-commiseration, like Babs, poor little Horacio
anclado en París
, set down in Paris, as the tango says,
cómo habrá cambiado tu calle Corrientes, Suipacha, Esmeralda, y el viejo arrabal.
But even though he put all his anger into the lighting of another Gauloise, very far away in the depth of his eyes he kept on seeing his kibbutz, not across the sea or even most likely across the sea, or there outside in the Rue Galande or in Puteaux or in the Rue de la Tombe Issoire, in any case his kibbutz was always there and it wasn’t a mirage.

“It’s not a mirage, Emmanuèle.”

“Ta guele, mon pote,”
said Emmanuèle, feeling down among her innumerable skirts looking for the other bottle.

Then they got off onto other things, Emmanuèle told him about a drowned girl that Célestin had seen from up on Grenelle, and Oliveira wanted to know what color her hair had been, but Célestin had only seen her legs sticking up a little bit out of the water, and he had got out of there before the police would start up with their damn bit of asking everybody questions. And when they had drunk up almost all of the second bottle and were happier than ever, Emmanuèle recited a passage from
La Mort du loup
, and Oliveira gave her a quick introduction to the sestinas of the
Martín Fierro.
Now and then a truck began to cross the square, they began to hear the sounds that Delius once … But it wouldn’t do any good to talk to Emmanuèle about Delius in spite of the fact that she was a sensitive woman, that she didn’t go along with poetry and expressed herself manually, rubbing up against Oliveira in order to get rid of the
cold, stroking his arm, mumbling parts of operas and obscene comments about Célestin. Biting the cigarette with his lips until it seemed to be almost a part of his mouth, Oliveira listened to her, let her rub up against him, kept repeating coldly that he was no better than she was and that if worst came to worst he could always cure himself like Heraclitus, it might have been that the Obscure’s most penetrating message was the one he had not written down, leaving it up to anecdotes, the voice of his disciples to transmit it so that perhaps some attuned ear might come to understand it one day. He was amused by the friendly and matter-of-fact way in which the hand of Emmanuèle was going to work unbuttoning him, and at the same time he was able to imagine that perhaps the Obscure one had sunk himself up to the neck in shit without even having been sick, without having dropsy at all, simply to sketch out a pattern that his milieu would never have condoned in the shape of a message or lesson, and which he had surreptitiously carried across the border of time until it had arrived, all mixed up with theory, noting nothing but a disagreeable and painful detail, to rest alongside the earth-shaking diamond of
panta rhei
, a barbarian therapy that Hippocrates had already condemned, just as for hygienic reasons he would have condemned the fact that Emmanuèle was little by little leaning more heavily on her drunken friend and with a tongue stained with tannin was humbly licking his deal, helping to maintain its understandable abandon with her fingers and murmuring things in the language one uses when holding cats or nursing babies, completely oblivious of the meditation that was going on up above, bent on a duty that would afford her little profit, following the line of some obscure feeling of pity, so that the newcomer would feel happy on his first night as a
clochard
and maybe he would fall a little in love with her to punish Célestin, would forget about the strange things he had been muttering in his barbarian American language as he slid down a little more against the wall and let himself slide with a sigh, putting his hand on Emmanuèle’s hair and imagining for a second (but that must have been hell) that it was Pola’s hair, that still once more Pola had thrown herself on top of him among Mexican ponchos and Klee postcards and Durrell’s
Quartet
, making him enjoy and enjoy from without, as she was attent, analytical, and alien, before she demanded her
share and stretched out against him trembling, demanding that he take her and injure her, with her painted mouth of a Syrian goddess, like Emmanuèle who was getting up, dragged to her feet by the policeman, sitting down suddenly and saying:
On faisait rien, quoi
, and all of a sudden underneath the gray that in some way was filling up the doorways Oliveira opened his eyes and saw the cop’s legs next to where he lay ridiculously unbuttoned, and with an empty bottle rolling away from the gendarme’s kick, the second kick on his thigh, the fierce whack right on the top of Emmanuèle’s head as she hunched over and moaned, and on his knees for some reason, the only logical position in which he could put the
corpus delicti
back into his pants as quickly as possible while it shrank prodigiously in a great spirit of co-operation and allowed itself to be closed in and buttoned up, and really now there was nothing wrong but how could you explain that to the policeman who was leading them off to the patrol wagon parked in the square, how could you explain to Babs that an inquisition was something else, and to Ossip, to Ossip most of all, how could you explain to him that everything still remained to be done and that the only decent thing to do was to take a step back in order to get a better start, let yourself fall down so that maybe you could get up again later on, Emmanuèle so that maybe later on…