Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (52 page)

And so one can laugh, and think that it is not serious, but it is serious, laughter has dug more useful tunnels all by itself than all the tears on earth, even though it may barely be known to stiff-necked people, stubborn in their belief that Melpomene is more fruitful than Queen Mab. Once and for all it would be good to arrive at a disagreement in this matter. Perhaps there is one way out, but that exit ought to be an entrance. Perhaps there is a millenary kingdom, but you don’t storm a fortess by running away from an enemy charge. Until now this century has been running away from all sorts of things, it has been looking for doorways and sometimes it gets to the bottom of them. What happens afterwards no one knows; some may have managed to see and have perished, instantly erased by great black forgetfulness, others will have conformed to the small escape, the little house in the suburbs, literary or scientific specialization, travel. Escapes are planned, they become technologized, they are furnished with the Modulor or with the Nylon Law. There are imbeciles who still believe that drunkenness is a way, or mescaline, or homosexuality, anything magnificent and inane per se but stupidly elevated into a system, into a key to the kingdom. Maybe there is another world inside this one, but we will not find it cutting out its silhouette from the fabulous tumult of days and lives, we will not find it in either atrophy or hypertrophy. That world does not exist, one has to create it like the phoenix. That world exists in this one, but the way water exists in oxygen and hydrogen, or how pages 78, 457, 3, 271, 688, 75, and 456 of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy have all that is needed for the writing of a hendecasyllable by Garcilaso. Let us say that the world is a figure, it has to be read. By read let us understand generated. Who cares about a dictionary as dictionary? If from delicate alchemies, osmoses, and mixtures of simples there finally does arise a Beatrice on the riverbank, why not have a marvelous hint of what could be born of her in turn? What a useless task is man’s, his own barber, repeating
ad nauseam
the biweekly trim, opening the same desk, doing the same thing over again, buying the same newspaper, applying the same principles to the same happenings. Maybe there is a millenary kingdom, but if we ever
reach it, if we are it, it probably will not be called that any more. Until we take away from time its whip of history, until we prick the blister made of so many
untils
, we shall go on seeing beauty as an end, peace as a desideratum, always from this side of the door where it really is not always so bad, where many people find satisfactory lives, pleasant perfumes, good salaries, fine literature, stereophonic sound, and why then worry one’s self about whether the world most likely is finite, whether history is coming to its optimum, whether the human race is emerging from the Middle Ages and entering the era of cybernetics.
Tout va très bien, madame la Marquise, tout va très bien, tout va très bien.

As far as everything else is concerned, one must be an imbecile, one must be a poet, one must have a harvest moon in order to spend more than five minutes on those nostalgias that can be handled so perfectly in just a moment. Every meeting of international tycoons, of men-of-science, each new artificial satellite, hormone, or atomic reactor crushes these false hopes a little more. The kingdom will be made out of plastic material, that is a fact. And the world will not have to be converted into an Orwellian or Huxleyan nightmare; it will be much worse, it will be a delightful world, to the measure of its inhabitants, no mosquitoes, no illiterates, with enormous eighteen-footed hens most likely, each foot a thing of beauty, with tele-operated bathrooms, a different-colored water according to the days of the week, a nicety of the national hygiene service,

with television in every room, great tropical landscapes, for example, for the inhabitants of Reykjavik, scenes of igloos for people in Havana, subtle compensations that will reduce all rebellions to conformity,

and so forth.

That is to say, a satisfactory world for reasonable people.

And will any single person remain in it who is not reasonable?

In some corner, a vestige of the forgotten kingdom. In some violent death, the punishment for having remembered the kingdom. In some laugh, in some tear, the survival of the kingdom. Beneath it all, one does not feel that man will end up killing man. He will escape from it, he will grasp the rudder of the electronic machine, the astral rocket, he will trip up and then they can set a dog on him. Everything can be killed except
nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks.
Wishful thinking
, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.

(–
5
)

“IT was wise of you to come home, love, if you were so tired.”

“There’s no place like home,” Oliveira said.

“Have another little
mate
, it’s fresh.”

“When you have your eyes closed it tastes even more bitter, amazing. Why don’t you let me sleep a little and read a magazine.”

“All right, love,” Gekrepten said, drying her tears and out of sheer obedience looking for
Idilio
, even though she was in no shape for reading.

“Gekrepten.”

“Yes, love.”

“Don’t worry about all this, old girl.”

“Of course not, sweet. Wait and I’ll put on another cold compress.”

“I’ll get up in a while and we’ll take a walk along Almagro. They may be showing some technicolor musical.”

“Tomorrow, love, it’s better for you to get some rest now. The look on your face when you came in …”

“It’s part of the profession, what can you do about it. No need for you to worry. Listen to Cien Pesos singing down there.”

“They must be cleaning out his cage, little dear,” Gekrepten said. “He’s showing his gratitude …”

“Gratitude,” Oliveira repeated. “It’s nice to show gratitude to the people who keep you caged up.”

“Animals don’t understand any of that.”

“Animals,” Oliveira repeated.

(–
77
)

YES, but who will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette, emerging from the crumbling doorways, from the little entranceways, of the image-less fire that licks the stones and lies in wait in doorways, how shall we cleanse ourselves of the sweet burning that comes after, that nests in us forever allied with time and memory, with sticky things that hold us here on this side, and which will burn sweetly in us until we have been left in ashes. How much better, then, to make a pact with cats and mosses, strike up friendship right away with hoarse-voiced concierges, with the pale and suffering creatures who wait in windows and toy with a dry branch. To burn like this without surcease, to bear the inner burning coming on like fruit’s quick ripening, to be the pulse of a bonfire in this thicket of endless stone, walking through the nights of our life, obedient as our blood in its blind circuit.

How often I wonder whether this is only writing, in an age in which we run towards deception through infallible equations and conformity machines. But to ask one’s self if we will know how to find the other side of habit or if it is better to let one’s self be borne along by its happy cybernetics, is that not literature again? Rebellion, conformity, anguish, earthly sustenance, all the dichotomies: the Yin and the Yang, contemplation or the
Tätigkeit
, oatmeal or partridge
faisandée
, Lascaux or Mathieu, what a hammock of words, what purse-size dialectics with pajama storms and living-room cataclysms. The very fact that one asks one’s self about the possible choice vitiates and muddies up what can be chosen.
Que sí, que no, que en ésta está
…It would seem that a choice cannot be dialectical, that the fact of bringing it up impoverishes it, that is to say, falsifies it, that is to say, transforms it into something else. How many eons between the Yin and the Yang? How many, perhaps, between
yes and no? Everything is writing, that is to say, a fable. But what good can we get from the truth that pacifies an honest property owner? Our possible truth must be an
invention
, that is to say, scripture, literature, picture, sculpture, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures in this world. Values, tures, sainthood, a ture, society, a ture, love, pure ture, beauty, a ture of tures. In one of his books Morelli talks about a Neapolitan who spent years sitting in the doorway of his house looking at a screw on the ground. At night he would gather it up and put it under his mattress. The screw was at first a laugh, a jest, communal irritation, a neighborhood council, a mark of civic duties unfulfilled, finally a shrugging of shoulders, peace, the screw was peace, no one could go along the street without looking out of the corner of his eye at the screw and feeling that it was peace. The fellow dropped dead of a stroke and the screw disappeared as soon as the neighbors got there. One of them has it; perhaps he takes it out secretly and looks at it, puts it away again and goes off to the factory feeling something that he does not understand, an obscure reproval. He only calms down when he takes out the screw and looks at it, stays looking at it until he hears footsteps and has to put it away quickly. Morelli thought that the screw must have been something else, a god or something like that. Too easy a solution. Perhaps the error was in accepting the fact that the object was a screw simply because it was shaped like a screw. Picasso takes a toy car and turns it into the chin of a baboon. The Neapolitan was most likely an idiot, but he also might have been the inventor of a world. From the screw to an eye, from an eye to a star … Why surrender to Great Habit? One can choose his ture, his invention, that is to say, the screw or the toy car. That is how Paris destroys us slowly, delightfully, tearing us apart among old flowers and paper tablecloths stained with wine, with its colorless fire that comes running out of crumbling doorways at nightfall. An invented fire burns in us, an incandescent ture, a whatsis of the race, a city that is the Great Screw, the horrible needle with its night eye through which the Seine thread runs, a torture machine like a board of nails, agony in a cage crowded with infuriated swallows. We burn within our work, fabulous mortal honor, high challenge of the phoenix. No one will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette. Incurable, perfectly incurable, we select the Great
Screw as a ture, we lean towards it, we enter it, we invent it again every day, with every wine-stain on the tablecloth, with every kiss of mold in the dawns of the Cour de Rohan, we invent our conflagration, we burn outwardly from within, maybe that is the choice, maybe words envelop it the way a napkin does a loaf of bread and maybe the fragrance is inside, the flour puffing up, the yes without the no, or the no without the yes, the day without manes, without Ormuz
or
Ariman, once and for all and in peace and enough.

(–
1
)

THE nonconformist as seen by Morelli, a note clipped to a laundry bill with a safety pin: “Acceptance of the pebble and of Beta Centauri, from the pure-as-anodyne to the pure-as-excess. This man moves within the lowest and the highest of frequencies, deliberately disdaining those in between, that is to say, the current band of the human spiritual mass. Incapable of liquidating circumstances, he tries to turn his back on them; too inept to join those who struggle for their liquidation, he thinks therefore that this liquidation is probably a mere substitute for something else equally partial and intolerable, he moves off shrugging his shoulders. To his friends, the fact that he finds his happiness in the trivial, in the puerile, in a piece of string or in a Stan Getz solo indicates a lamentable impoverishment; they do not know that he is also at the other extreme, the approach towards a
summa
that denies itself and goes threading off and hiding, or that the hunt has no end and that it will not even end with the man’s death, because his death will not be a death as in the intermediate band, in frequencies that are picked up by ears that listen to Siegfried’s funeral march.”

Perhaps to correct the exalted tone of the note, a piece of yellow paper scribbled on in pencil: “Pebble and star: absurd images. But the intimate commerce with stones that have been rolled leads one to a passage; between the hand and the stone there vibrates a chord outside of time. Fulgurant…[an unreadable word]…of which Beta Centauri also partakes; names and magnitudes give way, dissolve, stop being what science thinks they are. And then one is into something that purely is (what? what?): a trembling hand that wraps up a transparent stone that also trembles.” (Farther down, in ink: “It is not a question of pantheism, delightful illusion, fall upward into a heaven set afire at the edge of the sea.”)

In another place, this clarification: “To speak of high and low frequencies is to give way again to the
idola fori
and to scientific language, an illusion of the Western world. For my nonconformist, the happy building of a kite and its raising for the joy of children present is not a lowly occupation (low in respect to high, little in respect to much, etc.), but rather a coming together of pure elements, and out of that a momentary harmony, a satisfaction which helps him raise up the rest. In like manner the moments of estrangement, of happy alienation which hurl him into very brief touches of something that could be his paradise, do not represent for him a higher experience than the making of the kite; it is like an end, but not on top or beyond. Nor is it an end that can be understood in time, an accession in which there culminates a process of enriching despoilment; it can come to him while he is sitting on the toilet, and it especially comes between a woman’s thighs, between clouds of smoke, and in the midst of reading things rarely treasured by the cultured Sunday rotogravure.

“On the level of day-to-day acts, the attitude of my nonconformist is translated into his refusal of everything that smells like an accepted idea, tradition, a gregarious structure based on fear and falsely reciprocal advantages. It would not be hard for him to be Robinson Crusoe. He is not a misanthrope, but merely accepts from men and women that part which has not been plasticized by the social superstructure; he himself is afraid of his body’s getting stuck in the mold and he knows it, but this knowledge is active and not that resignation that keeps time to the rhythm. With his free hand he slaps his own face for most of the day, and in spare moments he slaps the faces of others, and they pay him back in triplicate. He spends his time, therefore, in monstrous rows brought on by lovers, friends, creditors, and officials, and in the few moments he has left he makes use of his freedom in a way that startles everyone else and which always ends up in small ridiculous catastrophes, measured against himself and his attainable ambitions; another more secret and evasive freedom works on him, but only he (and then just barely) is conscious of its movements.”