Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (56 page)

It was all right, yes, but one also had to recognize that his character was like a foot that trampled all dialectics of action in the manner of the
Bhagavad-Gita.
Between preparing
mate
and having La Maga prepare it there was no possible doubt. But everything was fissionable and would immediately allow an opposite interpretation: to passive character there corresponded a maximum of freedom and availability, the lazy absence of principles and convictions made him more sensitive to the axial condition of life (what one calls a weather-vane type), capable of rejecting through laziness but at the same time of filling the hollow left by the rejection with a content freely chosen by conscience or by an instinct that is more open, more ecumenical, as it were.

“More whecumenical,” Oliveira wisely jotted down.

Besides, what was the true morality of action? A social action like that of the syndicalists was more than justified in the field of history. Happy were those who lived and slept in history. An abnegation was almost always justified as an attitude of religious origin. Happy were those who loved their neighbor as themselves. In every case Oliveira rejected that sally of the ego, that magnanimous invasion of somebody else’s corral, an ontological boomerang destined to enrich in the last instance the one
who threw it, to give him more humanity, more sainthood. One is always a saint at the expense of somebody else, etc. There was no objection to that action as such, but he pushed it aside with doubts about his personal conduct. He would suspect a betrayal the moment he gave in to posters on the street or activities of a social nature; a betrayal disguised as satisfactory work, daily happiness, satisfied conscience, fulfilled duty. He was too well acquainted with certain communists in Buenos Aires and in Paris, capable of the worst villainy but redeemable in their own minds by “the struggle,” by having to leave in the middle of dinner to run to a meeting or finish a job. Social action in those people seemed too much like an alibi, the way children are usually the alibi for mothers’ not having to do anything worth while in this life, the way learning with its blinders is useful in not learning that in the jail down the street they are still guillotining guys who should not be guillotined. False action is almost always the most spectacular, the kind that tears down respect, prestige, and whequestrian wheffigies. It’s as easy as putting on a pair of slippers, it can even become meritorious (“After all, it would be so nice if the Algerians got independence and we all ought to help a little,” Oliveira said to himself); the betrayal was something else, as always it was a denial of the center, one’s installation on the periphery, the marvelous joy of brotherhood with other men who were embarked on the same action. There where a certain human type could reach fulfillment as a hero, Oliveira knew that he was condemned to the worst of comedies. So it was better to sin through omission than through commission. Being an actor meant renouncing the orchestra seats, and he seemed born to be a spectator in the first row. “The worst of it,” Oliveira said to himself, “is that I always want to be an active onlooker and that’s where the trouble starts.”

Whactive whonlooker. He had to whanalyze the whaffair carefully. At that moment certain pictures, certain women, certain poems gave him hopes of someday reaching a position from which he could accept himself with less loathing and less doubt than at that moment. It was no mean advantage for him that his worst defects tended to be useful in that matter which was not a path but rather the search for a halt that comes at the beginning of every path. “My strength is in my weakness,”
Oliveira thought. “The great decisions I have always made were masks for flight.” Most of his undertakings (of his whundertakings) ended not with a bang but a whimper; the great breaks, the bangs without return were the nips of a cornered rat and nothing else. Otherness was rotating ceremoniously, dissolving into time or into space or into behavior, without violence, from fatigue—like the ending of his sentimental adventures—or from a slow retreat as when one begins to visit a friend less and less, read a poet less and less, go to a café less and less, taking mild doses of nothingness so as not to hurt one’s self.

“Nothing ever really happens to me,” Oliveira thought. “A flowerpot is never going to fall on my noggin.” Why the unrest, then, if it was not the stale attraction of the opposites, the nostalgia for vocation and action? An analysis of this unrest, as far as is possible, would always allude to a dislocation, to an excentration in regard to a kind of order that Oliveira was incapable of defining. He knew that he was a spectator on the edge of the spectacle, like being blindfolded in a theater: sometimes the secondary meaning of some word would come to him, or of some piece of music, filling him with anxiety because he was capable of sensing that it was the primary meaning. In moments like that he knew he was closer to the center than many people who lived convinced that they were the axle of the wheel, but his was a useless nearness, a tantalizing instant which did not even take on the quality of torture. Once he had believed in love as an enrichment, an exaltation of interceding forces. One day he realized that his loves were impure because they presupposed that expectation, while the true lover loved without expecting anything but love, blindly accepting that the day would become bluer and the night softer and the streetcar less uncomfortable. “I can make a dialectical operation even out of soup,” Oliveira thought. He ended up by making friends out of the women he had loved, accomplices in a special contemplation of the world around. The women started out by adoring him (they really whadored him), admiring him (a whunlimited whadmiration), then something would make them suspect the void, they would jump back, and he would make their flight easy for them, he would open the door so that they could go play on the other side. On two occasions he had been at the point of
feeling pity and letting them keep the illusion that they understood him, but something told him that his pity was not genuine, it was more a cheap trick of his selfishness and his laziness and his habits. “Pity is being auctioned off,” Oliveira would say to himself and let them go; he quickly forgot about them.

(–
20
)

PAPERS scattered on the table. A hand (Wong’s). A voice reads slowly, making mistakes, the
l
’s like hooks, the
e
’s indefinable. Notes, cards with words on them, a line of poetry in some language, the writer’s kitchen. Another hand (Ronald’s). A resonant voice that knows how to read. Greetings in a low voice to Ossip and to Oliveira who arrive contritely (Babs has gone to let them in, has received them with a knife in each hand). Cognac, golden light, the legend of the profanation of the Eucharist, a small De Staël. The topcoats can be left in the bedroom. A piece of sculpture by (perhaps) Brancusi. In the back of the bedroom, lost between a dressmaker’s dummy rigged out as a hussar and a pile of boxes with pieces of wire and cardboard in them. There are not enough chairs, but Oliveira brings over two stools. One of those silences is produced which is comparable, according to Genet, to those observed by refined people when they suddenly perceive in a living room the smell of a silent fart. Soon thereafter Étienne opens up the briefcase and takes out the papers.

“We thought it best to wait for you before we classified them,” he says. “In the meantime we’ve been looking over some odd pages. This bitch threw a beautiful egg into the garbage.”

“It was rotten,” said Babs.

Gregorovius places a visibly trembling hand on one of the folders. It must be very cold outside, a double cognac then. They are warmed by the color of the light, and the green folder, the Club. Oliveira looks at the center of the table, the ash from his cigarette starts to join the ones that fill the ashtray.

(–
82
)

NOW he realized that in his highest moments of desire he had not known how to stick his head into the crest of the wave and pass through the fabulous crash of his blood. Loving La Maga had been a sort of rite from which one no longer expected illumination; words and acts had succeeded one another with an inventive monotony, a dance of tarantulas on a moonlit floor, a viscous and prolonged manipulation of echoes. And all the time he had been waiting for a kind of awakening to come from out of that happy drunkenness, a clearer view of what was around him, whether the colored wallpaper in hotels or the reasons behind any one of his acts, without wanting to understand that by limiting himself to waiting he had abolished all real possibility, as if he had condemned himself in advance to a narrow and trivial present. He had gone from La Maga to Pola in one fell swoop, without offending La Maga or offending himself, without getting annoyed at caressing Pola’s pink ear with La Maga’s arousing name. Failure with Pola was the repetition of innumerable failures, a game that ultimately is lost but was beautiful to play, while with La Maga he had begun to come out resentful, with a taste of tartar and a butt that smelled of dawn in the corner of his mouth. That’s why he took Pola to the same hotel on the Rue Valette, they found the same old woman who greeted them understandingly, what else was there to do in that lousy weather. It still smelled of toilet soap, of soup, but they had cleaned the blue stain on the rug and there was room for new stains.

“Why here?” Pola asked surprised. She looked at the yellow bedspread, the dull and musty room, the pink-spotted lampshade hanging from the ceiling.

“Here or somewhere else …”

“If it’s because of money, all you had to do was say so, love.”

“If it’s a question of revulsion, all we have to do is cut out, sweet.”

“It doesn’t revolt me. It’s ugly, that’s all. Probably …”

She had smiled at him, as if she were trying to understand. Probably … probable … Her hand found Oliveira’s as they both bent over to remove the cover. All that afternoon he had again been present, another time, one of so many times, the ironical witness sorry for his own body, at the surprises, the enchantments, and the deceptions of the ceremony. Habituated without being aware of it to La Maga’s rhythms, suddenly a new ocean, a different set of waves shook him in his reflexes, confronted him, seemed to denounce in a vague way his solitude enmeshed in phantoms. The enchantment and the disenchantment of going from one mouth to another, of searching with his eyes closed for a neck where his hand had chastely slept, and feeling that the curve is different, a thicker base, a tendon that tightens briefly with the effort of getting up to kiss or bite. Every instant of his body was opposite a delightful lack of meeting, having to stretch out a little more, or lower his head to find the mouth that formerly was so close up there, to stroke a thinner hip, incite a reply and not get it, insist, confusedly, until he realized that everything had to be invented all over again, that the code has not been formulated, that the keys and the clues will take shape again, will be different, will respond to other things. Weight, smell, the tone in which she laughed and begged, time and precipitation, nothing coincides even if the same, everything is born again even if immortal, love plays at being invented, it flees from itself to return in its surprising spiral, the breasts tilt a different way, the mouth kisses more deeply or as if from far away, and in one moment where before there had been anger and anguish now there is pure play, an incredible frolic, or vice versa, at the moment when before one fell into dreaming, the babbling of sweet foolish things, now there is a tension, something that cannot be communicated but is present and which demands incorporation, something like an insatiable rage. Only the pleasure in his final wingbeat is the same; before and after, the world has broken into pieces and it will be necessary to rename it, finger by finger, lip by lip, shadow by shadow.

The second time was in Pola’s apartment, on the Rue Dauphine. If a few phrases had succeeded in giving him an idea of
what he was going to find, reality was way beyond the imaginable. Everything was in its place and there was a place for everything. The history of contemporary art was modestly inscribed on postcards: a Klee, a Poliakoff, a Picasso (with a certain kindly condescension already), a Manessier, and a Fautrier. Hung artistically with a good sense of distance. A small signoria David did not intrude either. A bottle of pernod and one of cognac. On the bed, a Mexican serape. Pola played the guitar sometimes, the memory of a love of high plateaus. In her flat she looked like Michèle Morgan, but she was resolutely dark. Two bookshelves included Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet
, well-read and annotated, translations from Dylan Thomas stained with lipstick, copies of
Two Cities
, Christiane Rochefort, Blondin, Sarraute (uncut), and a few NRF’s. The rest gravitated about the bed, where Pola wept a little while she recalled a girlfriend who had committed suicide (photos, a page torn out of an intimate diary, a pressed flower). It did not seem strange to Oliveira afterwards that Pola had seemed perverse, that she had been the first to open the door to different kinds of love-play, that night found them like two people stretched out on a beach where the sand slowly yields to the algae-laden water. It was the first time that he called her Pola Paris, as a joke, and she liked it and repeated it, and bit him on the lip whispering Pola Paris, as if she had assumed the name and wanted to be worthy of it, pole of Paris, Paris of Pola, the greenish light of a neon sign going on and off against the yellow raffia curtain, Pola Paris, Pola Paris, the naked city with its sex in tune to the palpitation of the curtain. Pola Paris, Pola Paris, every time more his, breasts without surprise, the curve of the stomach traced exactly by his caress, without the slightest fear of reaching the limits before or after, a mouth found now and defined, a smaller and more pointed tongue, less saliva, teeth less sharp, lips which opened so that he could touch her gums, enter and run over every warm ripple where it smelled a little of cognac and tobacco.

(–
103
)

BUT love, that word
…Horacio the moralist, fearful of passions born without some deep-water reason, disconcerted and surly in the city where love is called by all the names of all the streets, all the buildings, all the flats, all the rooms, all the beds, all the dreams, all the things forgotten or remembered. My love, I do not love you for you or for me or for the two of us together, I do not love you because my blood tells me to love you, I love you because you are not mine, because you are from the other side, from there where you invite me to jump and I cannot make the jump, because in the deepest moment of possession you are not in me, I cannot reach you, I cannot get beyond your body, your laugh, there are times when it torments me that you love me (how you like to use the verb to love, with what vulgarity you toss it around among plates and sheets and buses), I’m tormented by your love because I cannot use it as a bridge because a bridge can’t be supported by just one side, Wright or Le Corbusier will never make a bridge that is supported by just one side, and don’t look at me with those bird’s eyes, for you the operation of love is so simple, you’ll be cured before me even if you love me as I do not love you. Of course you’ll be cured, because you’re living in health, after me it’ll be someone else, you can change things the way you do a blouse. So sad to listen to Horacio the cynic who wants a passport-love, a mountain pass-love, a key-love, a revolver-love, a love that will give him the thousand eyes of Argos, ubiquity, the silence out of which music is possible, the root out of which a language can be woven. And it’s foolish because all that is sleeping a little in you, all you would have to do is submerge yourself in a glass of water like a Japanese flower and little by little colored petals would begin to bloom, the bent forms would puff up, beauty would grow. Infinite giver, I do not know how to take, forgive
me. You’re offering me an apple and I’ve left my teeth on the night-table. Stop, it’s fine that way. I can also be rude, take note of that. But take good note, because it’s not gratuitous.