Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (57 page)

Why stop? For fear of starting fabrications, they’re so easy. You get an idea from there, a feeling from the other shelf, you tie them together with the help of words, black bitches, and it turns out that I want you. Partial total: I want you. General total: I love you. That’s the way a lot of my friends live, not to mention an uncle and two cousins convinced of the love-they-feel-for-their-wives. From words to deeds, hey; in general without the
verba
there isn’t any
res.
What a lot of people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I’ve seen them. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. You’ll probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it’s just the siteoppo. Beatrice wasn’t picked out, Juliet wasn’t picked out. You don’t pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert. But I’m alone in my room, I’m falling into tricks of writing, the black bitches get their vengeance any way they can, they’re biting me from underneath the table. Do you say underneath or under? They bite you just the same. Why, why,
pourquoi, por qué, warum, perchè
this horror of black bitches? Look at them there in that poem by Nashe, transformed into bees. And there in two lines from Octavio Paz, thighs of the sun, corners of summer. But the same body of a woman belongs to Mary and to La Brinvilliers, eyes that cloud up looking at a beautiful sunset are the same optical instrument that gets pleasure from the twisting of a man being hanged. I’m afraid of that pimping, of ink and of voices, a sea of tongues licking the ass of the world. There’s milk and honey underneath your tongue … Yes, but it’s also been said that dead flies make the perfumer’s perfume stink. At war with words, at war, keep everything that might be necessary even though intelligence must be renounced, stick with the simple act of ordering some fried potatoes, and Reuters dispatches, in letters from my noble brother and movie dialogues. Curious, very curious that Puttenham should have had a feeling for words as if they were objects, and even creatures with a life of their own. I too sometimes think that I’m engendering streams of ferocious ants that will devour the world. Oh but that the Roc could breed in
silence…
Logos, faute éclatante!
To conceive a race that could express itself in drawings, the dance, the
macramé
, or abstract mimicry. Could they avoid connotations, the root of deception?
Honneur des hommes
, etc. Yes, but an honor that dishonors itself in every phrase, like a brothel of virgins, if such a thing were possible.

From love to philology, you’re brilliant, Horacio. It’s Morelli’s fault, he’s like an obsession with you, his crazy experiment makes you catch a glimpse of the lost paradise, poor pre-Adamite, in a cellophane-wrapped golden age.
This is the age of plastics, man, the age of plastics.
Forget about the bitches. Beat it, the pack of you, we have to think, what’s called thinking, that is to say, feeling, locating yourself, and confronting yourself before you let pass the minutest main or subordinate clause. Paris is a center, you understand, a mandala through which one must pass without dialectics, a labyrinth where pragmatic formulas are of no use except to get lost in. Then a
cogito
which may be a kind of breathing Paris in, getting into it by letting it get in you,
pneuma
and not
logos.
Argentine big buddy, disembarking with the sufficiency of a three-by-five culture, wise in everything, up to date in everything, with acceptable good taste, good knowledge of the history of the human race, the periods of art, the Romanesque and the Gothic, philosophical currents, political tensions, Shell Mex, action and reflection, compromise and liberty, Piero della Francesca and Anton Webern, well-catalogued technology, Lettera 22, Fiat 1600, John XXIII. Wonderful, wonderful. It was a little bookstore on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, it was a soft sense of spinning slowly, it was the afternoon and the hour, it was the flowering season of the year, it was the
Verbum
(in the beginning), it was a man who thought he was a man. What an infinite piece of stupidity, my God. And she came out of the bookstore (I just now realize that it was like a metaphor, her coming out of a bookstore, no less) and we exchanged a couple of words and we went to have a glass of
pelure d’oignon
at a café in Sèvres-Babylone (speaking of metaphors, I a delicate piece of porcelain just arrived,
HANDLE WITH CARE
, and she Babylonia, root of time, something previous,
primeval being
, terror and delight of beginnings, the romanticism of Atala but with a real tiger waiting behind the tree). And so Sèvres went with Babylonia to have a glass of
pelure d’oignon
, we looked at each other and I think we began to desire each other (but that was later on, on the Rue Réamur) and a memorable dialogue resulted, clothed from head to toe in misunderstandings, maladjustments that dissolved into vague moments of silence, until our hands began to chat, it was sweet stroking hands while we looked at each other and smiled, we lit Gauloises, each in the other’s mouth, we rubbed each other with our eyes, we were so much in agreement on everything that it was shameful, Paris was dancing there outside waiting for us, we’d barely disembarked, we were barely alive, everything was there without a name and without a history (especially Babylonia, and poor Sèvres made an enormous effort, fascinated by that Babylonia way of looking at the Gothic without putting labels on it, of walking along the banks of the river without seeing the Norman ducks take flight). When we said goodbye we were like two children who have suddenly become friends at a birthday party and keep looking at one another while their parents take them by the hand and lead them off, and it’s a sweet pain and a hope, and you know the name of one is Tony and the other one Lulu, and that’s all that’s needed for the heart to become a little piece of fruit, and…

Horacio, Horacio.

Merde, alors.
Why not? I’m talking about then, about Sèvres-Babylone, not about these elegiac scorecards where we know that the game has been played already.

(–
68
)

MORELLIANA

A piece of prose can turn rotten like a side of beef. For some years now I have been witness to the signs of rot in my writing. Just like me, it has its angina, its jaundice, its appendicitis, but it is ahead of me on its way to final dissolution. After all, rotting means the end of the impurities in the component parts and the return of rights to chemically pure sodium, magnesium, carbon. My prose is rotting syntactically and is heading—with so much work—towards simplicity. I think that is why I no longer know how to write “coherent”; the bucking of a verbal bronco leaves me on foot after a few steps.
Fixer les vertiges
, how good. But I get the feeling that I should establish elements. Poems are waiting for that, and certain kinds of novel or short story or theater. The rest is the job of stuffing and it does not work out well for me.

“Yes, but elements, are they the essential thing? Establishing carbon is not worth as much as establishing the Guermantes family.”

“I think in a vague sort of way that the elements I am aiming for are a result of
composition.
The Schoolbook chemistry point of view has been turned inside out. When composition has reached its extreme limit, the territory of the elemental opens up. Establish them and if it is possible, be them.”

(–
91
)

IN some note or other, Morelli had shown himself to be curiously explicit about his intentions. Giving evidence of a strange anachronism, he became interested in studies or nonstudies such as Zen Buddhism, which in those years was the rash of the beat generation. The anachronism did not lie in that, but in the fact that Morelli seemed much more radical and younger in his spiritual exigencies than those California youngsters getting drunk on Sanskrit words and canned beer. One of the notes referred Suzukianly to language as a kind of exclamation or shout that rises directly out of an inner experience. There followed several examples of dialogues between teachers and pupils, completely unintelligible for a rational ear and for all dualistic and binary logic, just like the answers that teachers give their pupils, consisting in the main of whacking them over the head with a pointer, throwing a pitcher of water in their faces, throwing them out of the room or, in the best cases, throwing the question back at them. Morelli seemed to move about at will in that apparently demented universe, and took it for granted that this pedagogical behavior constituted the real lesson, the only
manner
in which one could open the pupil’s spiritual eye and reveal the truth to him. This violent unnaturalness seemed
natural
to him, in the sense that it abolished the structures which made up the specialty of the Western world, the axes on which man’s historical understanding rotated and which in discursive thought (including aesthetic and even poetic feeling) find their instrument of choice.

The tone of the notes (jottings with a view to mnemotechny or an end not too well explained) seemed to indicate that Morelli had gone off into an adventure analogous to the work that he had been painfully writing and publishing over the years. For some of his readers (and for himself) it was laughable
to try to write the kind of novel that would do away with the logical articulations of discourse. One ended up by divining a kind of transaction, a proceeding (even though the absurdity of choosing a narration for ends that did not seem to be narrative might remain standing).*

* Why not? Morelli himself put the question on a sheet of graph paper in the margin of which there was a list of vegetables, probably a
memento buffandi.
Prophets, mystics, dark night of the soul: the frequent use of a story in the form of an apology or a vision. Of course a novel … But that scandal was born more from the generic and classificatory mania of the Western monkey than from a real internal contradiction.**

** Without saying that the more violent the internal contradiction, the more efficiently it would be able to supply a technique, as it were, in the Zen manner. Instead of a whack on the head, an absolutely antinovelish novel, with the subsequent scandal and shock, and perhaps with an opening for those best alerted.***

*** As if a hope for this last item, another scrap of paper continued the Suzukian quotation in the sense that the comprehension of the strange language used by the teachers means the comprehension of one’s self on the part of the pupil and not that of the sense of the language. Just the reverse of what an astute European philosopher might deduce, the language of the Zen teacher transmits ideas and not feelings or intuitions. That is why it is of no use as far as language as such is concerned, but since the choice of phrases comes from the teacher, the mystery comes to a head in the region best suited for it and the pupil opens himself up, understands himself, and the pedestrian phrase becomes a key.****

**** That is why Étienne, who had made an analytical study of Morelli’s tricks (something which had seemed a guarantee of failure to Oliveira), thought he recognized in certain passages of the book, including entire chapters, a kind of gigantic amplification
ad usum homo sapiens
of certain Zen slaps on the face. Those sections of the book Morelli called “archapters” and “chaptypes,” verbal nonsense in which one could deduce a mixture that was not in the least Joycean. As for what archetypes had to do with it, it was a theme of restlessness for Wong and Gregorovius.*****

***** An observation by Étienne: In no way did Morelli appear to climb the
bodhi
tree or Sinai or up to any other platform of revelation. No pedagogical attitudes were set forth by which the reader might be guided towards new and green meadows. Without servility (the old man was of Italian origin and he was quick to pick up on what came from the heart, it must be said) he wrote as if he himself, in a desperate and moving attempt, had pictured the teacher who was to enlighten him. He turned loose his Zen phrase, and one kept on listening to it—sometimes for fifty pages, the old monster—, and it would have been absurd and of
little faith to suspect that those pages were directed at a reader. If Morelli published them it was partly because of his Italian side (
“Ritorna vincitor!”
) and partly because he was enchanted at how gaudy they had turned out.******

****** Étienne saw in Morelli the perfect Western man, the colonizer. When his crop of Buddhist poppies had been harvested, he would return with the seeds to the
Quartier Latin.
If the last revelation was perhaps the one that he had been hoping for most, one would have to recognize that his book was before anything else a literary undertaking, precisely because it was set forth as the destruction of literary forms (formulas).*******

******* Also Western, although it should be said as praise, from the Christian conviction that there is no individual salvation possible, and that one’s faults stain everyone else and vice versa. Perhaps that is why (Oliveira had a hunch) he chose the novel form for his meanderings, and published in addition what he kept on finding or unfinding.

(–
146
)

THE newsspreadlikewildfire, and practically the whole Club was there at ten o’clock that night. Étienne had the key, Wong bowed down to the ground to counteract the furious reception they got from the concierge,
mais qu’est-ce qu’ils viennent ficher, non mais vraiment ces étrangers, écoutez, je veux bien vous laisser monter puisque vous dites que vous êtes des amis du vi … de monsieur Morelli, mais quand même il aurait fallu prévenir, quoi, une bande qui s’amène à dix heures du soir, non, vraiment, Gustave, tu devrais parler au syndic, ça devient trop con
, etc. Babs armed with what Ronald called the alligator’s smile, Ronald excited and slapping Étienne on the back, pushing him so he would hurry up, Perico Romero cursing out literature, second floor
RODEAU, FOURRURES
, third floor
DOCTEUR
, fourth floor
HUSSENOT
, it was all too fantastic, Ronald nudging Étienne in the ribs and putting Oliveira down, the bloody bastard, just another of his practical jokes, I suppose,
dis donc, tu vas me foutre la paix, toi
, this is all that Paris is,
coño
, one fucking staircase after another, you get fed up to the fifth shit with all of them.
Si tous les gars du monde
…Wong bringing up the rear, Wong has a smile for Gustave, a smile for the concierge,
bloody bastard, coño, ta gueule, salaud.
On the fifth floor the door on the right opened a few inches and Perico saw a gigantic rat in a white nightgown peeking out with one eye and all of her nose. Before she could close the door again, he stuck his shoe in and recited for her that thing that among serpents, the basilisk had an organ so poisonous for all the others and so overwhelming that he frightened them just by hissing and they scattered and fled at his coming, he could kill them with his glance. Madame René Lavalette, née Francillon, did not understand much but she answered with a snort and a shove. Perico pulled out his shoe with an eighth of a second to
spare,
SLAM.
On the sixth they stopped to watch the solemnity with which Étienne inserted the key.