Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (19 page)

“Your childhood sounds like something out of
The Prisoner of Zenda
,” La Maga said as she thought about it.

“It was a world of wigs,” said Gregorovius. “I wonder what Horacio would have done in my place. We were really going to talk about Horacio, you wanted to tell me something.”

“That hiccup is strange,” La Maga said, looking at Rocamadour’s bed. “It’s the first time he’s had it.”

“Probably his digestion.”

“Why do they insist I take him to the hospital? This afternoon again, that ant-faced doctor. I don’t want to take him, he wouldn’t like it. I can do everything that has to be done. Babs was here this morning and said it wasn’t so serious. Horacio didn’t think it was serious either.”

“Horacio isn’t coming back?”

“No. Horacio’s gone off out there, looking for things.”

“Don’t cry, Lucía.”

“I’m just blowing my nose. The hiccups have gone.”

“Tell me about it, Lucía, if it would help.”

“I can’t remember anything, it’s not worth it. Yes, I remember. Why? Adgalle is a strange name.”

“Yes, who knows whether it was her real one. I was told …” “Like the blond wig and the black wig,” La Maga said.

“Like everything,” said Gregorovius. “You’re right, the hiccups have gone away. Now he’ll sleep till morning. When did you and Horacio first meet?”

(–
134
)

SHE would have preferred for Gregorovius to be quiet or to talk only about Adgalle, letting her smoke peacefully in the darkness, far removed from the shapes in the room, from the books and records that would have to be packed up so Horacio could take them away when he found a place. But it was no use, he would be still for a moment waiting for her to say something, and then he would ask a question, they all had something to ask her all the time, as if it bothered them that she would rather sing
Mon p’tit voyou
or make sketches with burnt matches or pet the mangiest cats she could find on the Rue du Sommerard, or give Rocamadour his bottle.

“Alors, mon p’tit voyou,”
La Maga sang softly,
“la vie, qu’estce qu’on s’en fout
…”

“I used to adore fishbowls too,” said Gregorovius, thinking back. “I lost all interest in them when I was initiated into the duties proper to my sex. In Dubrovnik, a whorehouse where I was taken by a Danish sailor who at the time was my Odessa mother’s lover. There was a marvelous aquarium at the foot of the bed, and the bed too had something of an aquarium about it with its pale-blue rippling spread which the fat redhead carefully turned down before she grabbed me by the ears like a rabbit. You can’t imagine the fright, Lucía, the terror of all that. We were lying on our backs, next to each other, and she caressed me mechanically, I was cold and she was talking about something or other, about the fight that had just taken place in the bar, of the stormy weather in March … The fish went back and forth like her hand on my legs, rising, sinking … That’s what love-making was, then, a black fish going doggedly back and forth. An image like any other, but quite exact. The infinite repetition of an anxious desire to flee, to go through the glass and go into some other thing.”

“Who can tell,” La Maga said. “I don’t think that fish ever want to get out of their bowls, they almost never touch the glass with their noses.”

Gregorovius thought that somewhere Chestov had written about aquariums with a removable glass partition which could be taken out any time and that the fish, who was accustomed to his compartment, would never try to go over to the other side. He would come to a point in the water, turn around and swim back, without discovering that the obstacle was gone, that all he had to do was to keep on going forward…

“But that could be love too,” Gregorovius said. “How wonderful to be admiring fish in a tank and suddenly to see them pass into the open air, fly away like doves. An idiotic hope, of course. We all draw back for fear of rubbing our noses against something unpleasant. The nose as the limit of the world, a topic for a dissertation. Do you know how they teach cats not to dirty indoors? The technique of an opportune rub. Do you know how they teach pigs not to eat the truffles? A whack on the nose, it’s horrible. I think that Pascal was more of an expert on noses than one would gather from his famous Egyptian observation.”

“Pascal?” La Maga asked. “What Egyptian observation?”

Gregorovius sighed. They all used to sigh when she asked a question. Horacio and especially Étienne, because Étienne not only used to sigh but would sniff, snort, and call her stupid. “It’s so purple to be ignorant,” La Maga thought, hurt. Every time that somebody would be scandalized by one of her questions a purple feeling, a purple mass would envelop her for a moment. She had to take a deep breath so that the purple mass would dissolve, would float about there like the fish, dividing up into a lot of purple rhombuses, kites in vacant lots in the Pocitos quarter, summer at the beach, purple blotches on the sun and the sun was called Ra and was also Egyptian like Pascal. Gregorovius’s sigh didn’t bother her much now, after Horacio she wouldn’t be bothered by anybody’s sighs when she asked a question, but in any case, the purple spot always came for a moment, a desire to cry, something which lasted just the time necessary to grind out her cigarette in that irresistible carpet-ruining gesture, supposing that there had been a carpet there.

(–
141
)

“WHEN you come right down to it,” Gregorovius said, “Paris is one big metaphor.”

He knocked his pipe, tamped the tobacco a bit. La Maga had lit another Gauloise and was singing softly. She was so tired that she didn’t even get angry at not understanding what he had said. Since she didn’t hasten to ask a question as she would have normally, Gregorovius decided to explain. La Maga was listening from far off, aided by the darkness of the room and the cigarette. She heard bits and pieces, the continual mention of Horacio, Horacio’s disorder, the aimless wanderings of almost all of those in the Club, the reasons behind the belief that all of this was leading toward some sense. Sometimes something Gregorovius said would become outlined on the shadows, green or white, sometimes it was an Atlan, at others an Estève, then some sound would whirl around and take shape, grow like a Manessier, like a Wifredo Lam, like a Piaubert, like an Étienne, like a Max Ernst. It was fun, Gregorovius was saying, “… and they’re all looking out for magical Babylonian pathways, to put it that way, and then…,” La Maga saw a resplendent Deyrolles take shape out of the words, a Bissière, but now Gregorovius was talking about the uselessness of an empirical ontology and suddenly it was a Friedländer, a delicate Villon which made a crisscross on the half-light and made it quiver,
empirical ontology
, smoke-blues, pinks,
empirical
, a pale yellow, a hollow where whitish sparks were fluttering.

“Rocamadour has fallen asleep,” La Maga said, putting out her cigarette. “I have to sleep for a while too.”

“Horacio won’t be back tonight, I don’t imagine.”

“How should I know. Horacio is like a cat, and he might even be sitting on the floor outside the door, and he might have taken a train to Marseilles.”

“I can stay,” Gregorovius said. “You go to sleep and I’ll watch Rocamadour.”

“But I’m not sleepy. I keep seeing things in the air while you’re talking. You said ‘Paris is one big metaphor,’ and it was like one of those designs by Sugai, lots of red and black.”

“I was thinking of Horacio,” Gregorovius said. “It’s funny how Horacio has been changing in these months since I first met him. You wouldn’t have noticed, I don’t imagine, too close to him and too responsible for the changes.”

“Why one big metaphor?”

“He walks around here the way other people look for flight in voodoo or marijuana, Pierre Boulez or Tinguely’s painting-machines. He guesses that in some part of Paris, some day or some death or some meeting will show him a key; he’s searching for it like a madman. Note that I said like a madman. I mean that he really doesn’t know that he’s looking for the key, or that the key exists. He has an inkling of its shapes, its disguises; that’s why I was talking about a metaphor.”

“Why do you say that Horacio has changed?”

“A question to the point, Lucía. When I met Horacio I typed him as an amateur intellectual, I mean an intellectual without rigor. You’re a little like that down there, aren’t you? In Mato Grosso, places like that.”

“Mato Grosso is in Brazil.”

“Along the Paraná, then. Very intelligent and alert, up to date on everything. Much more than us. Italian literature, for example, or English. And the whole Spanish Golden Age, and naturally French literature on the tip of your tongues. Horacio was pretty much like that. It was only too clear. I think it’s admirable that he has changed like this in so little time. Now he’s turned into a real animal, all you have to do is look at him. Well, he hasn’t turned into an animal quite yet, but he’s trying his best.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” La Maga snorted.

“Understand me, what I’m trying to say is that he is looking for the black light, the key, and he’s beginning to realize that you don’t find those things in libraries. You’re the one who really taught him that, and if he’s left it’s because he’s never going to forgive you for it.”

“That’s not why Horacio left.”

“There’s a design to that too. He doesn’t know why he left and
you, the reason for his leaving, are incapable of knowing unless you decide to believe what I’m telling you.”

“I don’t believe it,” La Maga said, sliding off the chair and lying down on the floor. “And besides, I don’t understand any of it. And don’t bring up Pola. I don’t want to talk about Pola.”

“Keep on looking at what’s being drawn in the darkness,” Gregorovius said pleasantly. “We can talk about other things, of course. Did you know that the Chirkin Indians, by always asking missionaries for shears, now have such a collection of them that the number of shears per capita among them far outstrips the figure for any other group of people in the world? I read about that in an article by Alfred Métraux. The world is full of strange things.”

“But why is Paris one big metaphor?”

“When I was a boy,” Gregorovius said, “the nursemaids used to make love to the Uhlans who were stationed in the Bozsok sector. Since I would get in their way for the performance of those duties, they used to let me play in a huge room full of rugs and tapestries which would have delighted Malte Laurids Brigge. One of the rugs showed the layout of the city of Ophir, according to the legends that have reached the West through storybooks. I used to get on my knees and with my nose or my hands push a yellow ball along, following the course of the Shan-Ten river, crossing walls guarded by black warriors armed with spears, and then after numerous dangers and after bumping my head on the legs of the mahogany table which was in the center of the rug, I would come to the quarters of the Queen of Sheba and I would curl up like a caterpillar and fall asleep on top of the picture of a triclinium. Yes, Paris is a metaphor. Now that I think about it, you’re stretched out on a rug too. What’s the picture on it? Ah, lost childhood, closeness, closeness! I’ve been in this room twenty times and I can’t remember the picture on that rug …”

“It’s so dirty that there isn’t much picture left,” La Maga said. “I think it shows two peacocks kissing with their bills. It’s all rather greenish.”

They were silent, listening to the footsteps of someone coming up the stairs.

(–
109
)

“OH, Pola,” La Maga said. “I know more about her than Horacio does.”

“Without ever having seen her, Lucía?”

“But I’ve seen so much of her,” La Maga said impatiently. “Horacio carried her around in his hair, in his overcoat, he shook from her, he washed from her.”

“Étienne and Wong told me about the woman,” Gregorovius said. “They saw them one day at a sidewalk café in Saint-Cloud. Only the stars could tell us what all those people could possibly have been doing in Saint-Cloud, but there they were. Horacio was looking at her the way you would look at an anthill, it seems. Wong used all this later on to work out a complicated theory on sexual saturation; according to him it would be possible to advance in knowledge provided that at a given moment one would reach a certain coefficient in love (they’re his words, please excuse the Chinese jargon) which would cause the spirit to crystallize suddenly on another level, become established in a surreality. Do you think that’s so, Lucía?”

“I suppose that we’re looking for something like that, but we almost always get swindled or do some swindling ourselves. Paris is a great blind love, we are all hopelessly in love, but there is something green, a kind of mist, I don’t know. It was the same way in Montevideo, you couldn’t really love anybody, strange things would turn up right away, stories of sheets or hairs, and for a woman lots of other things, Ossip, abortions, for example. So.”

“Love, sexuality. Are we talking about the same thing?”

“Yes,” La Maga said. “If we’re talking about love we’re talking about sexuality. Not so much the other way around. But sexuality is different from sex, I think.”

“No theories,” Ossip said unexpectedly. “Dichotomies, like
syncretisms … Horacio was probably looking for something in Pola that you couldn’t give him, I imagine. Getting down to practical matters, that is.”

“Horacio is always looking for any number of things,” La Maga said. “He was getting tired of me because I don’t know how to think, that’s all. I have the feeling that Pola thinks all the time.”

“Poor love that feeds on thought,” Ossip quoted.

“We’ve got to be fair,” La Maga said. “Pola is very beautiful, I know that from the way Horacio’s eyes would look at me when he would come back after being with her, he would come back like a match being struck and suddenly its hair would all grow up, it would only last a second, but it was marvelous, a sort of scratch, a very strong smell of phosphorus and that huge flame that would die down quickly. That’s the way he would come home and it was because Pola had filled him with beauty. I used to tell him that, Ossip, and it was only right that I did. We were already a little distant although we were still in love with one another. These things don’t happen all of a sudden, Pola was coming up like the sun at the window, I always have to think about things like that to know that I’m telling the truth. She was coming in slowly, breaking up the shadows around me, and Horacio was getting warmed, the same as on shipboard, he was getting tanned, he was happy.”