Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (69 page)

From the anonymous commentary on the Chamber Concerto for violin, piano, and 3 wind instruments by
ALBAN BERG
(Pathé Vox recording PL 8660)

(–
133
)

IN hopes of something more exciting, exercises in profanation and the far-out, in the pharmacy between midnight and two in the morning, once Cuca had gone off to get-a-good-night’s-sleep (or before, so she would go: Cuca sticks it out, but she gets terribly tired from the effort of resisting with a bounteous smile and a sort of turning her back on the monsters’ verbal assaults. Every time she leaves a little earlier to get some sleep, and the monsters smile pleasantly as they wish her good night. Talita, with her greater neutrality, is pasting on labels or consulting the
Index Pharmacorum Gottinga).

The sort of thing they do: Translating with Manichaean inversion a famous sonnet:

Reading a page from Traveler’s notebook: “Waiting my turn in the barber shop, spotting a UNESCO publication, and picking up on the following names: Opintotoveri/Työläisopiskelija/Työväenopisto. It seems that these are the names of some pedagogical journals from Finland. Complete unreality for the reader. Does it all really exist? For millions of blond-headed people, Opinotoveri means the Supervisor of General Education. For me…(Wrath). But they don’t know what
cafisho
means (Buenos Aires satisfaction). Irreality multiplies. To think that specialists can foretell from the fact that one can reach Helsinki in a few hours in a Boeing 707 … The results of personal extrapolation. Give me a crew-cut, Pedro.”

Linguistic forms of alienation. Pensive Talita, face to face with Genshiryoku Kokunai Jijo, that in no way seems to resemble the development of nuclear activity in Japan. She is just becoming convinced by superposition and differentiation when her husband, that malignant provider of material picked up in
barber shops, shows her the variant Genshiryoku Kaigai Jijo, evidently the development of nuclear activities abroad. Talita’s enthusiasm, convinced analytically that Kokunai = Japan and Kaigai = abroad. The confusion on the part of Matsui, the drycleaner on the Calle Lascano, when he is confronted with a polyglot exhibition by Talita, who turns away, poor thing, with her tail between her legs.

Profanations: starting with such suppositions as the famous line: “Christ’s visible homosexuality,” and building up to a coherent and satisfactory system. Postulating that Beethoven was a coprofage, etc. Defending the undeniable sainthood of Sir Roger Casement, as it is evident in
The Black Diaries.
The bewilderment of Cuca, confirmed and practicing.

Basically it’s a question of alienating one’s self out of purely professional abnegation. They still laugh too much (impossible for Attila to be a stamp collector) but that business about
Arbeit macht Frei
will still have results, believe me, Cuca. For example, the rape of the Bishop of Fano must be a case of…

(–
138
)

IT didn’t take many pages to see that Morelli was aiming at something else. His allusions to the profound blanket of the
Zeitgeist
, the passages where lo(co)gic ended up by hanging itself by its own shoelaces, unable to deny the incongruity that has become a law, were evidence of the work’s speleological intent. Morelli advanced and retreated in such an open violation of equilibrium and principles of space that should really be called
moral
, that it well might have happened (although, in fact, it did not happen, but nobody could be sure) that the happenings he spoke about might have all happened in five minutes that were capable of linking the Battle of Actium with the
Anschluss
of Austria (the three A’s may have had something to do with his choice or, more probably, the acceptance of those historic moments), or the fact that a person who rang the doorbell of a house on the Calle Cochabamba, at number twelve hundred, would be able to open the door into a courtyard of Menander’s house in Pompeii. That was all rather trivial and Buñuel, and its value as a mere incitement or as a parabola open to a deeper and more scabrous sense was not lost on those in the Club. Thanks to those exercises in flying around, so like the ones that get so showy in the Gospels, the Upanishads, and other matter loaded with shamanistic trinitrotolulene, Morelli allowed himself the pleasure of continuing to pretend a literature that he would mine, undermine, and ridicule at its very inner base. Suddenly the words, a whole language, the superstructure of a style, a semantic, a psychology, and a factitiousness rushed towards hair-raising hara-kiris.
Banzai!
Even towards a new order, or no guarantee whatsoever: finally, there would always be a thread stretched out to the beyond, coming out of the book, pointing towards a perhaps, a maybe, a who knows, which would leave any petrifying aspect of the work in
abeyance. And the thing that distressed Perico Romero, a man in need of certainties, made Oliveira tremble with delight, heightened the imagination of Étienne, Wong, and Ronald, and obliged La Maga to dance barefoot with an artichoke in each hand.

Along the route of arguments stained with Calvados and tobacco, Étienne and Oliveira had wondered why Morelli hated literature, and why he hated it from the standpoint of literature itself, instead of repeating Rimbaud’s
exeunt
or exercising on his left temple the notorious effectiveness of a Colt .32. Oliveira was inclined to believe that Morelli had been suspicious of the demoniacal nature of all re-creative writing (and what literature wasn’t like that, even if it was something like the excipient that would make a person swallow a gnosis, a praxis, or an ethos out of all the ones that were wandering around or that could be invented?). After hefting the most inciting passages, he had ended by becoming sensitive to a special tone of Morelli’s writing. The first possible description of that tone was one of disenchantment, but underneath one could sense that the disenchantment did not refer to the circumstances and happenings narrated in the book, but rather to the way they were narrated, that—Morelli had disguised it as much as possible—he was reverting definitively to what was being told. The elimination of the pseudo-conflict between content and form came up again to the degree that the old man was denouncing formal material and using it in his own way; when he doubted his tools he was at the same time disqualifying the work he did with them. What the book told about had no use whatsoever, because it was poorly told, simply because it was told, it was literature. Again one turned to the irritation of the author with his writing and with writing in general. The apparent paradox lay in that Morelli was accumulating episodes that were imagined and focused in the most diverse forms, trying to attack them and resolve them with every skill of a writer worthy of the name. He didn’t seem to be proposing a theory, it offered no difficulty for intellectual reflection, but from everything he had written there would appear with an efficiency infinitely greater than that of any statement or analysis, the profound corrosion of a world denounced as false, the attack by accumulation and not by destruction, an almost diabolical irony that might be suspicious of the success of great passages of bravado, episodes rigorously
constructed, the apparent feeling of literary happiness that for years had been building up his fame among readers of short stories and novels. For those with a delicate sense of smell, a world sumptuously orchestrated was being resolved into nothingness; but right there the mystery began, because at the same time one was presented with the total nihilism of the work, a more careful intuition might suspect that this was not Morelli’s intent, that the virtual self-destruction found in every fragment of his work was a kind of search for the noble metal among the slag. One had to pause here, for fear of mixing up the doors and going out on a limb. The fiercest arguments between Oliveira and Étienne would occur at this level of their hopes, because they feared they were making mistakes, that they were a pair of perfect cretins insisting on the belief that the Tower of Babel could not be built if in the end it was meaningless. Occidental morality at this point seemed like a pimp to them, as one by one it insinuated all the illusions of thirty centuries that had been inevitably inherited, assimilated, and digested. It was hard to deny belief in the fact that a flower could be beautiful to no end; it was bitter to accept the fact that one could dance in darkness. Morelli’s allusions to an inversion of signs, to a world seen with other and from other dimensions, as an inevitable preparation for a purer vision (and all of this in a resplendently written passage, and at the same time suspicious of the farce, of icy irony before the mirror) exasperated them as it offered them the roost of an almost hope, of a justification, but at the same time denied them total security, keeping them in an unbearable ambiguity. If there was any consolation left it was the thought that Morelli too moved about in that same ambiguity, orchestrating a work whose legitimate first hearing could well have been the most absolute of silences. That’s how they went along through the pages, cursing and fascinated, and La Maga would always end up curling herself up like a cat in an easy chair, tired of uncertainties, looking at how dawn was breaking over the slate roofs, through all the smoke that fills in among a pair of eyes and a closed window and an ardently useless night.

(–
60
)

1. “I can’t tell what she was like,” Ronald said. “We’ll never know. All we know about her is the effect she had on other people. We were something like her mirrors, or she was our mirror. I can’t explain it.”

2. “She used to be so silly,” Étienne said. “Blessed be the silly, et cetera. I swear to you that I’m speaking seriously, I’m quoting seriously. Her silliness used to irritate me. Horacio insisted it was just a lack of information, but he was wrong. There’s a well-known difference between ignorance and silliness, and everybody knows that, except somebody who’s silly, luckily for him. She thought that by studying, her famous studying, she could get to be intelligent. She confused knowledge with understanding. The poor girl had a good understanding of so many things that we don’t sense because we know so much about them.”

3. “Don’t fall into echolalia,” Ronald said. “That whole deck of antinomies, polarizations. For me, her silliness was the price she paid for being so vegetative, so much of a snail, so stuck onto the most mysterious of things. That’s it, think about it: she wasn’t capable of believing in names, she had to put her finger on something and only then would she admit that it was. You don’t get very far that way. It’s like turning your back on the whole Western world, all of the Schools. It’s no good for living in a city, having to earn your keep. That’s what was gnawing at her.”

4. “Yes, yes, but on the other hand she was capable of infinite moments of happiness, I used to watch her with envy. The shape of a glass, for example. What else am I looking for in painting, tell me. Killing myself, driving myself along such frightening paths, all I do is come out with a fork and two olives. Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth. She’d arrive and sense it. One night she
came over to my studio, I found her in front of a painting I’d finished that morning. She was crying the way she used to cry, with her whole face, horrible and marvelous. She was looking at my painting and crying. I wasn’t enough of a man to tell her I had cried that morning too. To think that it could have given her so much tranquillity, you know how much she doubted, how small she felt, surrounded by our clever brilliance.”

5. “One cries for many reasons,” Ronald said. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

6. “At least it proves a contact. How many others looking at that painting had shown their appreciation with polished phrases, a list of influences, all the possible commentaries
round about.
You see, you had to reach a level where it would be possible to join both things together. I think I’m already there, but I’m one of the few.”

7. “You’re probably king of the few,” Ronald said. “Anything at all is enough to make you take off.”

6. “I know that’s how it is,” Étienne said. “I know that. But it’s taken me a lifetime to get my two hands to work together, the left one to its heart, the right one to its brush and canvas. At first I was someone who would look at Raphael and think about Perugino, pounce like a lobster on Leo Battista Alberti, connect, link, Pico here, Lorenzo Valla there, but look, Burckhardt says, Berenson denies, Argan thinks, those blues are Sienese, those blurs are from Masaccio. I don’t remember when, it was in Rome, in the Barberini gallery, I was analyzing an Andrea del Sarto, what they call analyzing, and all of a sudden I saw. Don’t ask me to explain anything. I saw it (and not the whole painting, just a detail in the background, a small figure on a road). Tears came to my eyes, I mean it.”

5. “That doesn’t prove anything,” Ronald said. “One cries for many reasons.”

4. “It’s no good answering you. She probably would have understood much better. We’re all really on the same road, except that some people start on the lefthand side and some on the right. Sometimes, right in the middle, somebody sees the piece of tablecloth with the glass on it, the fork, the olives.”

3. “You’re talking figures,” Ronald said. “It’s always the same thing.”

2. “There’s no other way to get back what’s been lost, what’s strayed away. She was closer to it and she sensed it. Her only
mistake was in wanting a proof that the closeness was worth all our rhetoric. Nobody could give her that proof, first because we’re incapable of conceiving of it, and second because in one way or another we’re comfortably installed and satisfied in our collective science. It’s common knowledge that Webster lets us sleep peacefully, there he is within reach, with all the answers. And it’s true, but only because we’re no longer capable of asking the questions that would liquidate him. When La Maga would ask why trees covered themselves in summer … but it’s useless, man, it’s better to shut up.”