Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (6 page)

Since they would never normally be in certain places, they would agree to meet there and they almost always found each other. The meetings were so incredible at times that Oliveira
once more brought up the problem of probability and examined the case cautiously from all angles. La Maga could not possibly have decided to turn that corner of the Rue de Vaugirard at the precise moment in which he, five blocks down the street, decided not to go along the Rue de Buci and headed for the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince for no apparent reason, letting himself go along until suddenly he saw her stopped in front of a shop window, absorbed in the contemplation of a stuffed monkey. Seated in a café they carefully reconstructed their routes, the quick changes, trying to find some telepathic explanation and always failing, and yet they had met in that labyrinth of streets, they almost always met and they laughed wildly, certain of some enriching power. Oliveira was fascinated by La Maga’s store of nonsense, her calm disdain for the simplest calculation. What for him had been analysis of probabilities, choice, or simply faith in himself as a dowser, for her was simple chance. “And what if you hadn’t met me?” he would ask her. “I don’t know, but you’re here, you see …” For some reason the answer made the question worthless, it showed the logical basis of ordinary common sense. After that Oliveira would feel better able to resist his bookish prejudices, and paradoxically La Maga would fight off her disdain for scholarly knowledge. Thus they went along, Punch and Judy, attracting each other and repelling, as love must do if it is not to end up as calendar art or a pop tune. But love, that word…

(–
7
)

I TOUCH your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.

You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth, playing in corners where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.

(–
8
)

IN the afternoon we used to go to see the fish on the Quai de la Mégisserie, in March, the leopard month, the crouching month, but now with a yellow sun which took on a little more red each day. From the sidewalk on the riverside, paying no attention to the
bouquinistes
who give nothing without pay, we would wait for the moment when we could see the fishbowls (we went along slowly, delaying), all the fishbowls out in the sun, and as if hung in the air hundreds of pink and black fish, motionless birds in their round air. An absurd joy would take us by the waist and you would sing, dragging me across the street to enter the world of fish hanging in the air.

They bring out the bowls, those great pitchers, onto the street and there among tourists and excited children and ladies who collect types (550
fr. pièce
) are the fishbowls underneath the sun, spheres of water which the sun mixes with the air and the pink and black birds dance around softly in a little chunk of air, slow cold birds. We would look at them, trying to bring our eyes up to the glass, touching it with our noses, annoying the old women who sell them, as they go about with their nets to hunt aquatic butterflies, and we understood less and less what a fish is. We went along that path of not understanding and getting closer to those creatures that could not understand each other. We walked through the fishbowls and were as close as our friend, the woman in the second shop as you come from the Pont Neuf, who told you: “Cold water kills them, cold water is a sad thing …” And I remember the maid in the hotel who told me about a fern: “Don’t water it, put a plate of water under the pot, then when it wants to drink it can, and when it doesn’t want to, it doesn’t …” And I thought about that unbelievable bit that we had read, that a single fish will get sad in its bowl
and that all one has to do is put a mirror next to it and the fish is happy again…

We used to go into the shops where the more delicate species would have special tanks with thermometers and red worms. We would find out along with exclamations which used to infuriate the saleswomen—they were so sure that we were not going to buy anything at
550 fr. pièce
—all about the behavior, the love, and the shape of the fish. The moment was delicately delicious, something like very thin chocolate or orange paste from Martinique, and we were getting drunk on metaphors and analogies, always trying to get into it. And that perfectly Giotto fish, do you remember, and those two that played about like jade dogs, or a fish which was the exact shadow of a violet cloud … We found out how life goes on in shapes without a third dimension, that they disappear when they face you, or at most leave a thin motionless pink line in the water. A flick of a fin and there he is miraculously again with eyes, whiskers, fins, and from his belly sometimes coming out and floating a transparent ribbon of excrement which has not come loose, ballast which suddenly puts them amongst us, which plucks them out from the perfection of their pure imagery, which compromises them, to use one of those fine words we so much liked to use around there in those days.

(–
93
)

THEY came into the Rue Vaneau from the Rue de Varennes. It was drizzling and La Maga clutched Oliveira’s arm even tighter, pressing herself against his raincoat, which smelled like cold soup. Étienne and Perico were arguing over the possibility of explaining the world through painting and words. Oliveira put his arm carelessly around La Maga’s waist. That might be an explanation too, an arm squeezing a thin, warm waist. As they walked he could feel the light play of her muscles, a sort of monotonous and persistent speech, an insistent Berlitz, I-love-you, I-love-you. Not an explanation: a pure verb, to-love, to-love. “And always following the verb, the copulative,” Oliveira thought grammatically. If La Maga could only have understood how suddenly he was bothered by obedience to desire, “useless solitary obedience,” as a poet had once called it, a waist so warm, wet hair against his cheek, the Toulouse-Lautrec way that La Maga used to walk snuggled up to him. In the beginning was the copulative, to rape is to explain, but not always the other way around. To discover the anti-explanatory method, so that this I-love-you, I-love-you would be the hub of the wheel. And Time? Everything begins again, there is no absolute. Then there must be feed or feces, everything becomes critical again. Desire every so often, never too different and always something else: a trick of time to create illusions. “A love like a fire which burns eternally in the contemplation of Totality. But suddenly one breaks out into wild babble.”

“Explain, explain,” grumbled Étienne. “If you people can’t name something you’re incapable of seeing it. And this is called a dog and that’s a house, as the guy from Duino used to say. You’ve got to show, Perico, not explain. I paint, therefore I am.”

“Show what?” Perico Romero asked.

“The only reasons for our being alive.”

“This creature thinks that the only sense is the sense of sight and all that can come from it,” Perico answered.

“Painting is more than just a visual product,” Étienne said. “I paint with my whole body. In that sense I’m no different from your Cervantes or your Tirso de What’s-his-name. What I can’t stand is this mania for explanations, the Logos understood exclusively as a verb.”

“And so forth,” Oliveira said grumpily. “Speaking of senses, the pair of you sound like a dialogue between two deaf men.”

La Maga squeezed him tighter. “Now this one is going to come out with one of her asinine comments,” thought Oliveira. “She has to rub first, make an epidermic decision.” He felt a sort of hateful tenderness, something so contradictory that it must have been truth itself. “We ought to invent the sweet slap, the bee-kick. But in this world ultimate syntheses are yet to be discovered. Perico is right, the great Logos is watching. What a pity. We would have to have amoricide, for example, the real black light, the antimatter that troubles Gregorovius so much.”

“Say, is Gregorovius coming to the record session?” asked Oliveira.

Perico thought that he was, and Étienne thought that Mondrian.

“Think about Mondrian a minute,” Étienne was saying. “Next to him Klee’s magic symbols are nothing. Klee played with fate, the gifts of culture. Pure sensibility can be satisfied with Mondrian, but you need a whole bag of other tricks with Klee. A sophisticate for sophisticates. Chinese, really. Mondrian, on the other hand, paints the absolute. Stand naked in front of him and it’s one thing or the other: either you see or you don’t see. Pleasure, thrills, allusions, fears, delights are completely superfluous.”

“Do you understand what he’s saying?” La Maga asked. “It seems to me that he’s not being fair to Klee.”

“Fairness or unfairness has nothing to do with this,” said Oliveira. “He’s trying to say something else. Don’t go getting personal right away.”

“But why does he say that such beautiful things are no good for Mondrian?”

“He’s trying to say that basically a painting like one of Klee’s calls for a degree
ès lettres,
or at least
ès poésies,
while all that Mondrian wants is for a person to mondrianate and that’s all.”

“That’s not it,” said Étienne.

“Of course it is,” Oliveira said. “According to you a Mondrian canvas is sufficient unto itself. Therefore it calls upon your innocence more than on your experience. I mean Edenic innocence, not stupidity. Even that metaphor you used about standing naked in front of a picture has a pre-Adamite smell about it. Paradoxically, Klee is much more modest since he asks for the co-operation of the viewer and is not sufficient unto himself. The fact of the matter is that Klee is history while Mondrian is atemporality. And you’re dying to find the absolute. Do I make myself clear?”

“No,” said Étienne.
“C’est vache comme il pleut.”

“You said it,
coño,
” said Perico, “and that son of a bitch of a Ronald lives all the way to hell and gone.”

“Let us stiffen our pace,” said Oliveira, mimicking his Spanish accent. “Let us sneak our bodies out from under this drizzle.”

“There you go. I almost like your rain and your chicken better. It sure knows how to rain in Buenos Aires.”

“The absolute,” La Maga was saying, kicking a pebble from puddle to puddle. “What is an absolute, Horacio?”

“Look,” Oliveira said, “it’s just that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting.”

“There comes Wong,” Perico observed. “The Chinaman’s wetter than a wonton in a soup.”

Almost at the same time, they spied Gregorovius coming around the corner of the Rue de Babylone, loaded down as usual with a briefcase bulging with books. Wong and Gregorovius stopped under the lamppost (and looked as if they were taking a shower together) and greeted each other with a certain solemnity. In the doorway of Ronald’s building there was an interlude of umbrella-closing,
comment ça va,
who’s got a match, the
minuterie
is broken, what a lousy night,
ah oui c’est vache,
and a rather confused ascent, broken at the first landing by a couple sitting on the steps and deeply engaged in the act of kissing.

“Allez, c’est pas une heure pour faire les cons,”
said Étienne.

“Ta gueule,”
answered a muffled voice,
“montez, montez, ne vous gênez pas. Ta bouche, mon trésor.”

“Salaud, va,”
Étienne said. “That’s Guy Monod, an old friend of mine.”

Ronald and Babs were waiting on the fifth floor, each holding a candle and smelling of cheap vodka. Wong made a sign and everybody stopped on the stairs and broke into an
a capella
version of the profane anthem of the Serpent Club. Then they ran into the apartment before the neighbors came to their doors.

Ronald was leaning against the door, redheadedly, wearing a checked shirt.

“The place is surrounded by telescopes, damn it. At ten o’clock at night the great god Silence is enthroned and woe to anyone who is irreverent. Yesterday some official came up to bawl us out. What did the gentleman tell us, Babs?”

“He mentioned ‘repeated complaints.’ ”

“So what are we going to do?” asked Ronald as he opened the door to let Guy Monod slip in.

“We’ll do this,” said Babs with a flawless gesture of the arm and a resonant oral fart.

“What about your chick?” Ronald asked.

“I don’t know, she got lost,” Guy said. “I think she’s gone. We were making out fine on the stairs, and all of a sudden. Farther up she just wasn’t there. What the hell anyway, she’s Swiss.”

(–
104
)

AT night the clouds were flat and red over the Latin Quarter, the air was still damp as a listless breeze blew a few last drops against the dimly lit window, the panes were dirty, one broken and patched up with a piece of pink adhesive. Up above, under the lead gutters, the pigeons must have been sleeping, also lead, wrapped up in themselves, perfect antigargoyles. Protected by the window was that mossy parallelepiped, smelling of vodka and candles, damp clothing and leftover food, which was a kind of studio for Babs the ceramicist and Ronald the musician, the seat of the Club, wicker chairs, stained pillows, bits of pencil and wire on the floor, a stuffed owl with half his head gone, a poorly played and corny tune on an old record with a deep needle-scratch, an incessant scratch rasp scrape, a terrible saxophone that one night in 1928 or 29 had played as if it were afraid of getting lost, backed up by schoolgirl drums, a mediocre piano. But then an incisive guitar came on which seemed to signal a transition to something else and suddenly (Ronald had alerted them by holding up his finger) a cornet broke loose from the rest of the group and blew the first notes of the melody, landing on them as on a diving board. Bix took off with everything he had, and the clear sketch was inscribed on the silence as if it had been scratched there. Two corpses sparred fraternally, clinching and breaking, Bix and Eddie Lang (whose real name was Salvatore Massaro) played catch with
I’m Coming Virginia,
and I wonder where Bix is buried, thought Oliveira, and Eddie Lang, how many miles apart are their two nothings that one future night in Paris were to fight, guitar against cornet, gin against bad luck, jazz.