Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (8 page)

“Don’t cry,” Oliveira whispered to Babs. “Don’t cry, Babs, none of this is true.”

“Oh yes, oh yes it is true,” Babs said, blowing her nose. “It is true.”

“It could be true,” said Oliveira, kissing her on the cheek, “but it isn’t.”

“Like those shadows,” Babs said, snuffing and swallowing the mucus and moving her hand from side to side. “And it makes you sad, Horacio, because everything is so beautiful.”

But all this, Bessie’s singing, Coleman Hawkins’s cooing, weren’t they illusions, or something even worse, the illusion of other illusions, a dizzy chain going backwards, back to a monkey looking at himself in the water on that first day? But Babs was crying, Babs had said, “Oh yes, oh yes it is true,” and Oliveira, a little drunk too, felt that the truth now lay in that Bessie and Hawkins were illusions, because only illusions were capable of moving their adherents, illusions and not truths. And there was more than this, there was intercession, the arrival through illusions to a plane, a zone impossible to imagine, useless to attempt conception of because all thought destroyed it as soon as it attempted to isolate it. A hand of smoke took his hand, started him downward, if it was downward, showed him a center, if it was a center, put it in his stomach, where the vodka was softly making crystal bubbles, some sort of infinitely beautiful and desperate illusion which some time back he had called immortality. Closing his eyes he managed to tell himself that if a simple ritual was able to excentrate him like this the better to
show him a center, to excentrate him towards a center which was nonetheless inconceivable, perhaps everything was not lost and some day, in different circumstances, after other proofs, arrival would be possible. But arrival where, for what? He was too drunk even to set up a working hypothesis, to form an idea of a possible route. He was not drunk enough to stop thinking consecutively, and this poor power of thought was sufficient for him to feel that it was carrying him away farther and farther from something too distant, too precious to be seen through this stupidly propitious mist, vodka mist, Maga mist, Bessie Smith mist. He began to see green rings spinning wildly about, he opened his eyes. Usually after seeing the rings he would feel like vomiting.

(–
106
)

WRAPPED up in smoke Ronald was pulling out record after record, scarcely bothering to find out what the others wanted, and once in a while Babs would get up from the floor and start digging through the piles of old 78’s, she would pick out four or five and put them on the table within reach of Ronald, who would lean forward and pet Babs who would twist away laughing and sit on his lap but just for a moment because Ronald wanted to be quiet while he listened to
Don’t Play Me Cheap.

Satchmo was singing:

and Babs wiggled on Ronald’s knees, excited by Satchmo’s style of singing, the theme was vulgar enough to let her take liberties which Ronald would never condone when Satchmo sang the
Yellow Dog Blues,
and because in the breath that Ronald was blowing on the back of her neck there was a mixture of vodka and sauerkraut that aroused Babs fantastically. From her high outlook, a sort of delicate pyramid of smoke and music and vodka and sauerkraut and Ronald’s hands marching up and down, Babs could condescend to look downward through her half-closed eyes and she saw Oliveira on the floor, his back against the Eskimo pelt on the wall, smoking and dead drunk now, with a resentful and bitter South American face whose mouth would smile from time to time between drags, Oliveira’s hps which Babs had once desired (not now) were curved a little while the rest of his face looked washed-out and absent. As much as he liked jazz, Oliveira could never get into the spirit of it like Ronald, whether it was good or bad, hot or cool, white or black, old or modern, Chicago or New Orleans, never jazz, never what was now Satchmo, Ronald, and Babs, “So what’s the use if you’re gonna cut off my juice,” and then the trumpet’s
flaming up, the yellow phallus breaking the air and having fun, coming forward and drawing back and towards the end three ascending notes, pure hypnotic gold, a perfect pause where all the swing of the world was beating in an intolerable instant, and then the supersharp ejaculation slipping and falling like a rocket in the sexual night, Ronald’s hand caressing Babs’s neck and the scratching of the needle while the record kept on turning and the silence there was in all true music slowly unstuck itself from the walls, slithered out from underneath the couch, and opened up like lips or like cocoons.

“Ça alors,”
said Étienne.

“Yes, Armstrong’s great period,” said Ronald, examining the pile of records Babs had picked out. “Like Picasso’s giant period, if you like. Nowadays they’re both a pair of pigs. To think that doctors have invented ways to be rejuvenated … They’ll go on screwing us for another twenty years, wait and see.”

“Not us,” Étienne said. “We’ve already shot them down and just at the right moment, and all I ask is for someone to do the same for me when my time is up.”

“Just at the right moment? You’re not asking for much, kiddo,” said Oliveira, yawning. “But you’re right, we have given them the
coup de grâce
already. With a rose instead of a bullet, if you want to think of it that way. What’s left is habit and carbon paper. To think that Armstrong has just now gone to Buenos Aires for the first time and you can imagine the thousands of boobs who will think they’re listening to something great while Satchmo, with more tricks than an old fighter, bobbing and weaving, tired and amortized and without giving a damn what he does, strictly routine, while some of my friends whom I respect and who twenty years ago would cover their ears if you put on
Mahogany Hall Stomp
now pay God knows how much for an orchestra seat to listen to that warmed-over stuff. Of course, my country itself is warmed-over too, with all my patriotic love I’m forced to admit it.”

“Starting with you,” said Perico from behind a dictionary. “You’ve come here in the same mold as all of your countrymen who take off for Paris to get their ‘sentimental education.’ At least in Spain we learn all about that in brothels and at bullfights,
coño.
”

“And from the Countess Pardo Bazán,” said Oliveira, yawning
again. “Everything else you say is true, old boy. What I should really be doing is playing
truco
with Traveler. You didn’t know him, did you. You don’t know anything about all that. So what’s the use of talking about it?”

(–
115
)

HE came out of the corner he had been stuck in, he put one foot on a piece of floor after having examined it as if it had been vital to pick out the exact spot on which to place his foot, then he brought out the other one with the same caution, and six feet away from Ronald and Babs he began to shrivel down until he was impeccably installed on the floor.

“It’s raining,” said Wong, pointing at the skylight.

Wafting the smoke away with his hand, Oliveira looked at Wong with friendly contentment.

“It’s best to be at sea-level where all one can see are shoes and knees all around. Where’s your glass?”

“Over there,” said Wong.

It turned out that it was full and within reach. They began to drink, appreciatively, and Ronald put on a John Coltrane record which made Perico snort. Then a Sidney Bechet from his Paris
merengue
period, something that seemed to be making a little fun of Spanish prejudices.

“Is it true that you’re writing a book about tortures?”

“Not exactly,” said Wong.

“What is it, then?”

“In China one has a different conception of art.”

“I know, we’ve all read Mirbeau the Chinese. Is it true that you have photographs of tortures taken in Peking in 1920 or around that time?”

“Oh, no,” said Wong smiling. “They’re all faded, they’re not worth looking at.”

“Do you really carry the worst one around in your wallet?”

“Oh, no,” Wong said.

“And did you show it to some women in a café?”

“They were so insistent,” said Wong. “The worst of it was they didn’t understand at all.”

“Let me see it,” said Oliveira, putting out his hand.

Wong began to look at the hand, smiling. Oliveira was too drunk to insist. He drank some more vodka and shifted his position. A piece of paper folded four times was placed in his hand. Instead of Wong he saw a kind of Cheshire cat smiling, sort of bowing in all the smoke. The post must have been six feet high, but there were eight posts, except that it was the same post repeated eight times in four series of two photos each, which went from left to right and from top to bottom, the post was the same in spite of slight differences in focus, all that was different was the prisoner tied to the post, the faces of the people around (there was a woman on the left) and the position of the executioner, standing to the left out of deference to the photographer, some American or Danish ethnologist who had a firm hand but a bad camera, an ancient Kodak that took bad pictures, so that except for the second picture, where the choice of knives had indicated work on the right ear, and the rest of the naked body could be seen clearly, the other pictures, because of the blood which was beginning to cover the body and the poor quality of the film or the development, were rather disappointing, especially from the fourth one on, in which the prisoner appeared as a blackish mass on which one could make out an open mouth and a very white arm, and the three last pictures were practically the same except for the position of the executioner, in the sixth picture crouching next to his bag of knives, taking out one at random (but he must have been cheating, because if he was going to begin with the deepest cuts…), and looking more closely one could see that the victim was alive because one foot was sticking out in spite of the pressure of his bonds, and his head was thrown back, his mouth still open, on the ground Chinese gentility must have spread an abundant amount of sawdust because the pool was no bigger, it made an almost perfect oval around the post. “The seventh is the critical one,” Wong’s voice came out from behind the vodka and the smoke, and one had to look closely because blood was pouring out around the paps which had been deeply excised (between the second and third pictures), but one could see in the seventh that a decisive cut had been made because the shape of the thighs which had been turned outward a bit had changed, and if one brought the picture up close he could see that the change was not in the thighs but in the groin, instead of the hazy
splotch in the first picture it looked like something pouring out of a hole, something like a little girl who has been raped, with blood flowing down her thighs. And if Wong did not think highly of the eighth picture he must have been right because the victim could not have been alive any more, no one lets his head fall to the side that way. “According to what I have been told, the whole operation took an hour and a half,” Wong observed with ceremony. The piece of paper was folded in four, a black leather wallet opened its mouth like a crocodile and gobbled it up from amidst the smoke. “Of course, Peking is not what it used to be. I’m sorry I showed you something so primitive, but one cannot carry certain other documents in his billfold, there have to be explanations, an initiation …” His voice came from so far away it seemed to be a prolongation of the images, the gloss of a ceremonious scholar. Above or below, Big Bill Broonzy had begun to chant
See, See, Rider,
and as always everything came together from the unreconcilable forms, a grotesque collage which made its adjustments with vodka and Kantian categories, those tranquilizers against any too sharp coagulation of reality. Or as almost always happened, closing one’s eyes and going back, to the cottony world of any other night chosen carefully among the cards of the open deck. “See, see, rider,” Big Bill was singing, another corpse, “see what you have done.”

(–
114
)

IT was so natural for him to remember then that night on the Saint-Martin canal, the proposition they had made him (1,000 francs) to see a film at the home of a Swiss doctor. During the war an Axis surgeon had arranged to film a hanging in all of its details. Two rolls in all, but silent. However, the photography was excellent, they swore. You could pay on the way out.

In the moment necessary to resolve it all and say no and leave the café with the Haitian girl who knew the friend of the Swiss doctor, he had had time to imagine the scene and put himself as always on the side of the victim. There was no reason to waste words on the hanging of whoever-he-was, but if that somebody had known (and the refinement could have been precisely in telling him so) that a camera was going to record every moment of his grimaces and twistings for the pleasure of future dilettantes…“No matter how it hurts me, I shall never be indifferent like Étienne,” Oliveira thought. “What it amounts to is that I insist on the unheard-of idea that man was meant for something else. Then, of course … What poor tools we have to find a way out of this dungeon.” The worst was that he had looked at Wong’s picture with coldness because the one they were torturing had not been his father, not thinking about the forty years that had passed since it all took place in Peking.

“Look,” Oliveira told Babs, who had come back to him after having quarreled with Ronald, who had insisted on listening to Ma Rainey and had put Fats Waller down, “it’s incredible how bastardly we can get. What did Christ think about before he fell asleep? Suddenly in the midst of a smile your mouth can turn into a big hairy spider.”

“Oh, no,” said Babs. “Not delirium tremens at this time of night.”

“It’s all superficial, baby, everything is epi-der-mic. Look, when I was a kid I used to drag them out for all the old ladies in the family, sisters and all that, the whole genealogical mess, you know why? Well, all kinds of silly reasons, but among them because for those ladies when anyone passed on, as they would say, any kicking-off which took place in their circle was much more important than a war, an earthquake which kills ten thousand people, things like that. We’re cretins, but such cretins it’s hard to imagine, Babs, because to come to this we’ve had to read Plato, the Church Fathers, the classics, without overlooking a single one, and beyond that to know everything that can be known about the knowable, and that’s the precise moment that one arrives at a cretinism so incredible that he’s capable of grabbing his poor illiterate mother by her shawl and blowing his top over the fact that she is upset by the death of the Jew on the corner or the girl on the third floor. And you talk to her about the earthquake in Bab-el-Mandeb or the offensive at Vardar Ingh, and you think the poor devil feels any abstract pity for the liquidation of three divisions of the Iranian army …?”