Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (7 page)

“I like it here. It’s warm, it’s dark.”

“That Bix is a crazy son of a bitch. Put on
Jazz Me Blues.
”

“The influence of technique on art,” said Ronald, digging his
hands into a pile of records, looking casually at the labels. “Before LP’s came out those guys had less than three minutes to play in. Nowadays a wild man like Stan Getz can come along in front of a mike and turn himself loose, blow anything he wants to. Poor Bix had to be satisfied with one chorus and as soon as he got warmed up, snap, it was all over. They must have got sore as hell when they cut records.”

“I don’t know,” said Perico. “It’s like writing a sonnet instead of an ode, and I don’t know a damned thing about this crap. I only came because I was sick of staying in my room reading an endless essay by Julián Marías.”

(–
65
)

GREGOROVIUS let his glass be filled with vodka and began to drink with dainty sips. Two candles were burning on the mantelpiece where Babs kept bottles of beer and her dirty stockings. Gregorovius admired the listless burning of the candles through the hyaline glass, it was so foreign to all of them and so out of their time, like Bix’s cornet, coming and going from a different time. He was annoyed by the feet of Guy Monod, who was on the couch either sleeping or listening with his eyes closed. La Maga came over and sat on the floor with a cigarette in her mouth. The green candles burned in her eyes. Gregorovius looked at her in ecstasy and remembered a street in Morlaix at dusk, a high aqueduct, clouds.

“This light is so much like you, something that comes and goes, always moving.”

“Like Horacio’s shadow,” La Maga said. “His nose grows and shrinks. It’s amazing.”

“Babs is a shepherdess of shadows,” Gregorovius said, “she works in clay, concrete shadows … Here everything breathes, a lost contact is established again; music helps, vodka, friendship … Those shadows in the cornice; the room has lungs, it palpitates. Yes, electricity is eleatic, it has turned our shadows to stone. Now they are part of the furniture and the faces. But here, on the other hand … Look at that molding, how its shadow is breathing, that volute that rises and falls. In those days man lived in a soft and porous night, in a continuous dialogue. The terrors, what a luxury for the imagination …”

He put his palms together, keeping only his thumbs apart: a dog began to open his mouth and move his ears on the wall. La Maga laughed. Then Gregorovius asked her what it was like in Montevideo, the dog suddenly dissolved, because he wasn’t sure
that she was Uruguayan; Lester Young and the Kansas City Six. Shh…(Ronald, finger to his lips).

“Uruguay always sounded so strange to me. I picture Montevideo with lots of steeples all with bells cast after a battle. And you can’t tell me that Montevideo doesn’t have giant lizards along the river bank.”

“Certainly,” said La Maga. “All you have to do is take the bus to Pocitos.”

“And do people in Montevideo really know Lautréamont?”

“Lautréamont?” asked La Maga.

Gregorovius sighed and drank more vodka. Lester Young, tenor; Dickie Wells, trombone; Joe Bushkin, piano; Bill Coleman, trumpet; John Simmons, bass; Jo Jones, drums.
Four O’Clock Drag.
Yes, tremendous lizards, trombones on the river bank, blues crawling along,
drag
probably meant a lizard in time, an endless crawling at four o’clock in the morning. Or maybe something completely different. “Oh, Lautréamont,” La Maga said, suddenly remembering. “Yes, I think they know him quite well.”

“He was from Uruguay, although you wouldn’t think so.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” said La Maga, coming to.

“Actually, Lautréamont … But Ronald’s getting annoyed, he’s put on one of his idols. I guess we’ll have to shut up. But let’s talk very low while you tell me about Montevideo.”

“Ah, merde alors,”
said Étienne, looking at them furiously. The vibes were testing the air, taking wrong steps upstairs, skipping a step, jumping five at once and coming down again on the top one. Lionel Hampton was balancing
Save It Pretty Mama,
letting it go as it fell down and spun around on the tip of his toe among pieces of glass, instant constellations, five stars, three stars, ten stars, he was putting them out with the tip of his slipper, he was rocking in a hammock twirling a Japanese parasol wildly in his hand and the whole band came in on the final fall, a hoarse trumpet, earth, down again, floating to a landing,
finibus,
all over. Gregorovius was listening to the whisper of Montevideo according to La Maga, and perhaps he would finally learn more about her, about her childhood, whether her name really was Lucía like Mimi in
La Bohème;
he was at that vodka level where the night began to become magnanimous and everything promised him fidelity and hope.
Guy Monod had doubled up his legs and his hard soles no longer dug into Gregorovius’s spine. La Maga was leaning on him a bit and he felt the soft warmth of her body, every movement she made to follow the music or the rhythm of her speech. With his wits ajar Gregorovius managed to make out the corner where Ronald and Wong were selecting and passing records, Oliveira and Babs were on the floor, leaning against an Eskimo pelt on the wall, Horacio keeping cadence with the smoke, Babs lost to vodka, unpaid rent, and dyes that faded at three hundred degrees, a blue which melded into orangey rhombuses, something intolerable. Oliveira’s lips were moving in the silence of the smoke, he was talking to himself, backwards, to some other thing that imperceptibly twisted Gregorovius’s innards, he didn’t know why, probably because that apparent absence of Horacio’s was a fraud, which left him for La Maga to play with while he was there moving his lips in silence, speaking to La Maga through himself in the midst of the smoke and the jazz, laughing to himself inwardly at so much Lautréamont, at so much Montevideo.

(–
136
)

GREGOROVIUS had always enjoyed meetings of the Club because it was really not a club at all in the strictest sense. He liked Ronald because of his anarchy, because of Babs, because of the way they were carefully killing themselves without worrying about anything, given over to the reading of Carson McCullers, Miller, Raymond Queneau, to jazz as a quiet exercise in freedom, to the unrestricted knowledge that they both were failures in the arts. He liked, if that’s the word for it, Horacio Oliveira, with whom he had a sort of persecutive relationship in that Oliveira’s presence always exasperated Gregorovius from the moment they came together, even after he had been out looking for Horacio, although he would not admit it, and Horacio would be amused by the cheap mysteries Gregorovius used to cover up his origins and way of life, by the fact that Gregorovius was in love with La Maga and did not think that Horacio knew, and the two of them would accept and reject each other at the same time in a sort of tight bullfight which in the last analysis was one of the reasons for the Club’s get-togethers. They worked hard at being the knowing ones, at arranging a set of allusions to frustrate La Maga and infuriate Babs; all they had to do was mention something in passing, as now when Gregorovius was thinking that there really was a disillusioned persecution between him and Horacio, and right off one of them would quote the hound of heaven, “I fled him,” and so forth, and all the while La Maga would look at them with a kind of humble despair as one of them was in a state of I-flew-so-high-so-high-I-caught-my-prey and they would end up laughing at themselves. But it was too late because Horacio would be appalled at this exhibitionism of associative memory, and Gregorovius would feel himself touched with the annoyance that he had helped bring about, and between them both a certain resentment of
accomplices would build up and two minutes later they would be at it again, and that, among other things, is what went on at meetings of the Club.

“This is one of the few times I’ve had such lousy vodka here,” said Gregorovius as he filled his glass. “Lucía, you were about to tell me about your childhood. It’s not hard for me to picture you on the river bank, with pigtails and rosy cheeks, like the girls I used to know in Transylvania, before they turned pale under the influence of this damned Lutetian climate.”

“Lutetian?” asked La Maga.

Gregorovius sighed. He began to explain and La Maga was listening humbly and in a studious sort of way, just as she always did and with great intensity until rescued by some distraction. Ronald had just put on an old Coleman Hawkins record and La Maga seemed resentful that the explanation was ruining the music, and besides, it wasn’t what she usually expected from an explanation, a tingling of the skin, a need to breathe deeply as Hawkins must have breathed just before taking another turn at the melody and as she would breathe when Horacio would deign to explain some really deep line of poetry for her, adding to it that other fabulous depth which could have been now if he instead of Gregorovius had been explaining this business about Lutetians, and how he would have made it blend into Hawkins’s music, along with the green candles, a tickle, a deep breath which would be the only thing she could be sure of, something comparable only to Rocamadour or Horacio’s lips or sometimes an adagio from Mozart that could barely be heard because the record was in such bad shape.

“Don’t be like that,” Gregorovius said humbly. “All I wanted was to understand your life a little better, what you are, how you happen to have so many facets.”

“My life,” said La Maga. “Even if I were drunk I wouldn’t tell you about it. And you won’t understand me any better after hearing about my childhood. Besides, I didn’t have any childhood.”

“I didn’t either. In Herzegovina.”

“Mine in Montevideo. I’ll tell you one thing. Sometimes I dream about grammar school, it’s so horrible I wake up screaming. And age fifteen, I don’t know whether you were ever fifteen years old.”

“I think so,” Gregorovius said uncertainly.

“I was; in a house with a courtyard and flowerpots where my father used to drink
mate
and read dirty magazines. Does your father ever come back to you? His ghost I mean?”

“No, actually my mother is more apt to,” Gregorovius said. “Especially the Glasgow one. My Glasgow mother comes back sometimes, but she’s not a ghost, just a memory that’s a little too wet, that’s all. She goes away with an Alka-Seltzer, it’s easy. But you …?”

“How should I know,” La Maga said impatiently. “It’s that music, those green candles, Horacio over there in the corner, like an Indian. Why must I tell how he comes back? But a few nights ago I was at home waiting for Horacio, I was sitting near the bed and outside it was raining a little, the way it does on that record. Yes, it was something like that, I was looking at the bed and waiting for Horacio, I don’t remember how the bed was made, and suddenly I saw my father lying with his back towards me and covering his face as he always did when he was drunk and beginning to fall asleep, I saw his legs and could make out his hand on his chest. I felt my hair stand on end, I wanted to scream, everything you feel at times like that, you must have been afraid sometime … I wanted to run away, the door was so far off, at the other end of the hallway and more hallways, the door was farther and farther away and I could see the pink bedspread going up and down, I could hear my father snoring, in a moment I would see a hand, then eyes, then his hooked nose, no, I shouldn’t be telling you all this, finally I screamed so loud that the woman upstairs came down and made me some tea, and later on Horacio said I was hysterical.”

Gregorovius stroked her hair and La Maga lowered her head. “Here it comes,” Oliveira was thinking, and he stopped following Dizzy Gillespie’s tricks as he swung on the high trapeze without benefit of net, “here it comes, it was bound to. He’s crazy about the girl and that’s his way of showing it, with his ten fingers. The same game over and over. We keep falling into worn-out molds, learning every trite role there is like idiots. But just as if I were stroking her hair while she told me sagas of the Río de la Plata, we feel sorry for her and we have to take her home, all of us a little tight, and put her to bed, petting her gently as we take off her clothes, slowly, button by button, every zipper, and she does want to, wants to, doesn’t want to, straightens up, covers her face, cries, hugs us as if suggesting
something sublime, wiggles out of her slip, kicks off a shoe with a gesture that connotes protest and gets us as excited as we ever can get, how base, how base. I’m going to have to bust you in the face, Ossip Gregorovius my poor friend. No desire, no pity, exactly what Dizzy is blowing, without pity, without desire, just as absolutely without pity as what Dizzy is blowing.”

“What a damned drag,” Oliveira said. “Take that crap off the machine. I’m not coming to the Club any more if I have to listen to that clown.”

“The gentleman doesn’t like bop,” Ronald said sarcastically. “Wait a minute, I’ll put on something by Paul Whiteman for you.”

“Let’s compromise,” Étienne said. “Common consent, sweet Ronald: let’s hear Bessie Smith, the dove in a cage of bronze.”

Ronald and Babs began to laugh for some obscure reason and Ronald looked through the pile of old records. The needle made a terrible scratch, something began to move down deeper as if there were layers and layers of cotton between voice and ears, Bessie singing with a bandaged face, stuck in a hamper of soiled clothes, and her voice got more and more muffled, it came out stuck to rags and proclaimed with neither anger nor plea, “I wanna be somebody’s baby doll,” it fell back to wait, a street-corner voice, one from a houseful of grannies, “to be somebody’s baby doll,” hotter and more yearning, panting now “I wanna be somebody’s baby doll …”

Oliveira burned his mouth with a long drink of vodka, put his arm around Babs’s shoulders, and rested against her comfortable body. “The intercessors,” he thought, sinking softly into the tobacco smoke. Bessie’s voice thinned out towards the end of the side, and now Ronald was flipping the Bakelite disk (if it was Bakelite) and from this piece of worn-out material the
Empty Bed Blues
would be born again, a night in the twenties in some corner of the United States. Ronald had closed his eyes, his hands on his knees, faintly keeping time. Wong and Étienne also had their eyes shut, the room was almost dark and the needle scratched on the old record; it was hard for Oliveira to believe that all of this was taking place. Why there, why the Club, those stupid rites, why did those blues come out like that when Bessie sang them? “The intercessors,” he thought once more, snuggling up to Babs who was completely drunk and was crying quietly as she listened to Bessie, trembling in time to the rhythm or
counterpoint, weeping inside so as not to get far away from the blues about an empty bed, tomorrow morning, shoes in puddles, unpaid rent, fear of old age, the ashen image of dawn in the mirror at the foot of the bed, the blues, life’s infinite
cafard.
“The intercessors, one unreality showing us another, like painted saints pointing towards Heaven. This cannot exist, we cannot really be here, I cannot be someone whose name is Horacio. That ghost there, that voice of a Negro woman killed in an automobile accident twenty years ago: links in a nonexistent chain, how do we support ourselves here, how can we be meeting tonight if it is not a mere play of illusions, of rules that are accepted and agreed upon, a deck of cards in the hands of an inconceivable dealer …”