Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (45 page)

“The hole ends in the basement,” Talita said. “There are cockroaches, if you want to know, and colored rags on the floor. Everything is dark and damp, and a little beyond is where the dead people start. Manú told me about it.”

“Is Manú asleep?”

“Yes. He had a nightmare, he shouted something about a lost necktie. I already told you.”

“It’s a great night for confiding,” Oliveira said, looking at her slowly.

“Very great,” Talita said. “La Maga was just a name, and now she already has a face. The color of her clothes may still be wrong, though.”

“Her clothes are the least important, when I see her again who knows what she’ll be wearing. She’ll be naked, or she’ll be walking with her child in her arms singing him
Les Amants du Havre
, a song you don’t know.”

“Oh yes I do,” Talita said. “They used to play it a lot on Radio Belgrano. La-lá-la, la-lá-la …”

Oliveira sketched out a soft slap which turned into a caress. Talita threw her head back and bumped it against the wall of the hallway. She frowned and rubbed the back of her neck, but she kept on humming the tune. She heard a click and then a buzzing that seemed blue in the half-light of the hallway. They heard the freight elevator coming up, they looked at each other for a second before jumping up. Who could it be at that hour … Click, it passed the second floor, the blue buzzing. Talita drew back and got behind Oliveira. Click. The pink pajamas were perfectly visible in the cube of wired glass. Oliveira ran over to the freight elevator and opened the door. An almost cold breath of air came out. The old man looked at him as if he didn’t know him and kept on petting the pigeon; it was easy to see that the pigeon had been white once and that the continuous caressing of the old man’s hand had turned it ash-gray. Motionless, with wild eyes, it was resting in the hollow of the hand that held it at chest level, while the fingers kept passing over it from neck to tail, from neck to tail.

“Go to bed, Don López,” Oliveira said, breathing heavily.

“It’s hot in bed,” Don López said. “Look how happy she is when I take her for a walk.”

“It’s very late, go to your room.”

“I’ll bring you a cool glass of lemonade,” Talita Nightingale promised.

Don López petted the pigeon and came out of the freight elevator. They heard him go down the stairs.

“Everybody does what he wants around here,” Oliveira muttered, closing the door to the freight elevator. “One of these days there’s going to be a general throat-cutting. You can smell it, no matter what they say. That pigeon looked like a revolver.”

“We ought to tell Remorino. The old man came up from the basement, it’s strange.”

“Look, you stay here a while on guard, I’m going down to the basement to have a look; I hope one of the others isn’t up to any tricks.”

“I’m going down with you.”

“O.K., the ones up here are fast asleep.”

Inside the elevator the light was vaguely blue and it went down with a science-fiction buzz. There wasn’t a living soul in the basement, but one of the doors of the freezer was ajar and a beam of light was coming out through the opening. Talita stopped in the doorway, with her hand to her mouth, while Oliveira went over. It was Number 56, he remembered very well, the family must have been ready to come by from one moment to the next. From Trelew. And in the meantime Number 56 had had a visit from a friend; one could imagine the conversation with the old man with the pigeon, one of those pseudo-dialogues in which the speaker doesn’t care whether or not the other party speaks as long as he’s there opposite, as long as there’s something there opposite, anything, a face, feet sticking out of the ice. The same way as he had just been talking to Talita, telling her what he had seen, telling her that he was afraid, talking all the time about holes and passageways, to Talita or to anybody else, to a pair of feet sticking out of the ice, to any opposite appearance capable of listening and agreeing. But while he was closing the door of the freezer and for some reason holding on to the edge of the table, a vomit of memory began to take hold of him; he told himself that only a day or two before, it had seemed impossible to arrive at the point of telling anything to Traveler, a monkey couldn’t tell anything to a man, and suddenly, without knowing why, he had heard himself talking to Talita as if she were La Maga, knowing that she wasn’t but talking to her about the hopscotch, his fear in the hallway, the tempting hole. Then (and Talita was there, fifteen feet away, behind him, waiting) it was all like an ending, the appeal to outside pity, the re-entry into the human family, the sponge landing with a repulsive squish in the center of the ring. He felt as if he had been going away from himself, abandoning himself so he could throw himself—the prodigal son (of a bitch)—into the arms of easy reconciliation, and from there the even easier step into the world, into the possible life,
into the time of his years, into the reason that guided the actions of good Argentines, of the human animal in general. He was in his little, comfortable, refrigerated Hades, but there was no Eurydice to look for, apart from the fact that he had come down peacefully in a freight elevator and now, while he was opening a freezer and taking out a bottle of beer, king of the castle, anything to put an end to that comedy.

“Come have a drink,” he invited. “Much better than lemonade.”

Talita took a step and stopped.

“Don’t be necrophilic,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“It’s the only place that’s cool, you’ve got to admit that. I think I’ll bring a cot down here.”

“You’re pale with the cold,” Talita said coming over. “Come on, I don’t like your staying here.”

“Don’t like it? They’re not going to come out and eat me, the ones upstairs are much worse.”

“Come on, Horacio,” Talita repeated. “I don’t want you to stay here.”

“You …” Oliveira said, looking at her angrily, and he stopped to open the beer with a blow of his hand against the edge of a chair. He could see with great clarity a boulevard in the rain, but instead of leading somebody along by the arm, talking to her with pity, he was being led, they had given him a compassionate arm and they were talking to him so that he would be happy, they had so much concern for him that it was absolutely delightful. The past had become turned around, it was changing its sign, it was finally going to happen at last that Pity would not destroy. That woman who played hopscotch had pity on him, it was so obvious that it burned.

“We can talk some more on the third floor,” Talita said by way of explanation. “Bring the bottle along and give me a little.”

“
Oui madame, bien sûr madame
,” Oliveira said.

“You finally said something in French. Manú and I thought that you had taken an oath. Never …”

“Assez,” Oliveira said.
“Tu m’as eu, petite, Céline avait raison, on se croit enculé d’un centimètre et on Vest déjà de plusieurs mètres.”

Talita looked at him with the look of one who didn’t understand, but her hand rose up without her feeling it rise, and she
held it for an instant on Oliveira’s chest. When she took it away, he started to look at her as if from below, with eyes that looked from somewhere else.

“Who can tell,” Oliveira said to someone who was not Talita. “Who can tell if you’re the one who spit so much pity out at me tonight. Who can tell if after all the only thing left is to cry over love until you fill four or five buckets. Or let them cry into them for you, the way they’re crying into them for you.”

Talita turned her back on him and went towards the door. When she stopped to wait for him, upset and at the same time needing to wait for him because to go away at this instant would be like letting him fall into the well (with cockroaches, with colored rags), she saw that he was smiling and that the smile was not for her either. She had never seen him smile like that, faintheartedly and at the same time with his whole face open and frontward, without the usual irony, accepting something that must have come to him from the center of life, from that other well (with cockroaches, with colored rags, with a face floating in dirty water?), going up to her in the act of accepting that thing impossible to name that was making him smile. And his kiss was not for her either, it wasn’t happening there grotesquely next to a freezer full of corpses, so close to the sleeping Manú. It was as if they were coming together from somewhere else, with some other part of themselves, and it wasn’t a question of themselves, as if they were paying or collecting something for others, as if they were the golems of an impossible meeting between their masters. And the Phlegrean Fields, and what Horacio had muttered about the descent, a madness so absolute that Manú and everything that was Manú and was on the level of Manú could not take part in the ceremony, because what was starting there was like the caress on the dove, like the idea of getting up to make some lemonade for the one on guard, like bending a leg and kicking a stone from the first to the second square, from the second to the third. In some way they had got into another thing, into that something where one could be dressed in gray and be dressed in pink, where one could have died of drowning in a river (and she was no longer the one who was thinking about that) and appear in a Buenos Aires night to reproduce on the hopscotch the very image of what they had just attained, the last square, the center
of the mandala, the dizzy Ygdrasil through which one came out onto an open beach, an extension without limit, the world beneath the eyelids that the eyes turned inward recognized and obeyed.

(–
129
)

BUT Traveler was not asleep, after one or two attempts the nightmare kept circling around him and finally he sat up in bed and turned on the light. Talita was not there, somnambulist, sleepless moth, and Traveler drank a glass of
caña
and put on his pajama top. The wicker easy chair looked cooler than the bed, and it was a good night to stay up reading. Sometimes he heard walking in the hallway, and Traveler twice went to the door that opened onto the administrative wing. Nobody was there, not even the wing. Talita must have gone to do some work in the pharmacy, it was incredible how enthusiastic she was about her return to science, scales, antipyretics. Traveler began to read for a while between drinks of
caña.
Still, it was strange that Talita had not come back from the pharmacy. When she did reappear, with a frightening ghostly air, the bottle of
caña
was so low that Traveler didn’t much care whether he saw her or didn’t see her, and they chatted for a while about many things, while Talita unfolded a nightgown and other diverse theories, almost all of them tolerated by Traveler who tended towards benevolence in the state he was in. Then Talita fell asleep on her back, a restless sleep interrupted by sharp hand movements and moans. It was always the same, it was hard for Traveler to sleep when Talita was restless, but as soon as he was overcome by fatigue she would wake up and at once become fully awake, because he would be complaining or twisting in his dreams, and that’s how they would pass the night, as if they were on a seesaw. To make things worse the light had been left on and it was very complicated getting to the switch, that’s why they ended up awakening completely, and then Talita turned out the light and squeezed herself a little up against Traveler who was sweating and twisting.

“Horacio saw La Maga tonight,” Talita said. “He saw her in the courtyard, two hours ago, when you were on guard duty.”

“Oh,” said Traveler, lifting up his shoulders and looking Braille system for his cigarettes. He added a confused phrase that had come out of what he had just been reading.

“I was La Maga,” Talita said, snuggling closer to Traveler. “I don’t know if you’re aware of that.”

“Most likely yes.”

“It had to happen some time. What surprises me is that he’s become so startled by the mixup.”

“Oh, you know, Horacio gets something started and then he looks at it with the same look puppies put on when they’ve taken a crap and stand there amazed looking at it.”

“I think it happened the very day we went to meet him at the dock,” Talita said. “It’s hard to explain, because he didn’t even look at me and between the two of you you treated me like a dog, with the cat under my arm.”

Traveler muttered something unintelligible.

“He had me confused with La Maga,” Talita insisted.

Traveler listened to her talk, alluding as all women do to fate, to the inevitable concatenation of events, and he would have preferred for her to shut up but Talita resisted feverishly, squeezed up against him and insisted on telling things, telling herself, and naturally, telling him. Traveler let himself be carried along.

“First the old man with the pigeon came, and then we went down to the basement. Horacio kept talking all the time we were going down, about those hollows that worry him. He was desperate, Manú, it was frightening to see how peaceful he seemed, and all the time … We went down on the freight elevator, and he went over to shut one of the freezers, it was horrible.”

“So you went downstairs,” Traveler said. “O.K.”

“It was different,” Talita said. “It wasn’t like going down. We were talking, but I felt as if Horacio were somewhere else, talking to someone else, to a drowned woman, for example. It comes back to me now, but he’d never said that La Maga had been drowned in the river.”

“She isn’t the least bit drowned,” Traveler said. “I’m sure of that, although I have to admit I haven’t got the slightest idea. Knowing Horacio is enough.”

“He thinks she’s dead, Manú, and at the same time he feels her close by and tonight it was me. He told me that he’d seen her on the ship too, and under the bridge on the Avenida San Martín … He doesn’t say it as if he were talking about a hallucination, and he doesn’t expect you to believe it either. He says it, that’s all, and it’s true, it’s something that’s there. When he closed the freezer and I was afraid and I said something or other, he began to look at me and it was the other one he was looking at. I’m nobody’s zombie, Manú, I don’t want to be anybody’s zombie.”

Traveler stroked her hair, but Talita pushed him away impatiently. She had sat down on the bed and he could feel her trembling. Trembling, in that heat. She told him that Horacio had kissed her, and she tried to explain the kiss and since she couldn’t find the words she kept touching Traveler in the darkness, her arms fell like cloths over his face, over his arms, slipped down along his chest, rested on his knees, and out of all this came a kind of explanation that Traveler was incapable of rejecting, a contagion that came from farther off, from some place in the depths or on the heights or in some place which was not that night and that room, a contagion that possessed him in turn through Talita, a babbling like an untranslatable announcement, the suspicion that he was facing something that could be an announcement, but the voice that brought it was broken and when it spoke the message it spoke it in some unintelligible language, and yet it was the only necessary thing there within hand’s reach, demanding recognition and acceptance, beating itself against a spongy wall of smoke and of cork, unseizable and offering itself naked between the arms but like water pouring down among tears.