Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (51 page)

“Is that the appointment for the tests?”

“Yes, he wants me to have them done immediately. Feel here, it’s worse than last week.”

It was almost night and Pola looked like a figure out of Bonnard, stretched out on the bed which was being wrapped in a yellowish green by the last light from the window. “The street-sweeper at dawn,” Oliveira thought, leaning over to kiss her on the breast, exactly where she had just pointed with a hesitant finger. “But they don’t get up to the fifth floor, I’ve never heard of a street-sweeper or water-wagon getting up to a fifth floor. Apart from the fact that tomorrow the artist would come and do it over exactly the same way, this delicate curve where something …” He managed to stop thinking, for just an instant he managed to kiss her without its being anything but his own kiss.

(–
155
)

SAMPLE entry from Club files

Gregorovius, Ossip

Stateless.

Full moon (obverse side, invisible in those yet presputnik days): craters? seas? ashes?

Tends to dress in black, gray, brown. Has never been seen wearing full suit. There are those who affirm that he owns three but will invariably combine jacket of one with trousers of another. This could easily be verified.

Age: says he is forty-eight.

Profession: intellectual. Great-aunt sends modest allowance.

Carte de séjour
AC 3456923 (for six months, renewable. It has already been renewed nine times with increasing difficulty each time).

Country of origin: born in Borzok (birth certificate probably false according to declaration by Gregorovius to Paris police. Reasons for his assumption in his dossier).

Country of origin: in the year of his birth Borzok was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Obvious Magyar origin. Likes to imply that he is a Czech.

Country of origin: probably Great Britain. Gregorovius was probably born in Glasgow, the son of a sailor father and landlubber mother, the result of an emergency port of call, a shifting ballast, stout, and excessive xenophilic willingness on the part of Miss Marjorie Babington, 22 Stewart Street.

Gregorovius enjoys creating a picaresque prenatal state for himself and slanders his mothers (has three, depending on type of drunkenness) by attributing licentious habits to them. The Herzogin Magda Razenswill, who appears with whiskey or cognac, was the lesbian author of a pseudo-scientific treatise on
carezza
(translated into four languages). Miss Babington,
whose ectoplasm materializes with gin, ended up as whore on Malta. Third mother is constant problem for Étienne, Ronald, and Oliveira, witnesses to her hazy apparition via Beaujolais, Côtes-du-Rhône, or Bourgogne Aligoté. Depending on circumstances her name is Galle, Adgalle, or Minti, she lives freely in Herzegovina or Naples, travels to the United States with a vaudeville company, is first woman to smoke in Spain, sells violets outside the Vienna Opera, invents contraceptive devices, dies of typhus, is alive but blind in Huerta, disappears along with the Tsar’s chauffeur in Tsarskoie Selo, blackmails her son every leap year, practices hydrotherapy, has suspicious relations with priest from Pontoise, died at the birth of Gregorovius, who is also the son of Santos-Dumont. In some inexplicable way witnesses have noted that these successive (or simultaneous) versions of third mother are always accompanied by references to Gurdjieff, whom Gregorovius admires and despises according to the pendulum.

(–
11
)

FACETS of Morelli, his Bouvard et Pécuchet side, his side as the compiler of a literary almanac (sometimes he will give the name of “Almanac” to the body of his work).

He would like to
sketch
certain ideas, but he is incapable of doing so. The designs which appear in the margins of his notes are terrible. The obsessive repetition of a tremulous spiral, with a rhythm similar to the ones adorning Sanchi’s stupa.

He plans one of the many endings to his unfinished book, and he leaves a mockup. The page contains a single sentence: “Underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn’t any.” The sentence is repeated over and over for the whole length of the page, giving the impression of a wall, of an impediment. There are no periods or commas or margins. A wall, in fact, of words that illustrate the meaning of the sentence, the collision with a wall behind which there is nothing. But towards the bottom and on the right, in one of the sentences the word
any
is missing. A sensitive eye can discover the hole among the bricks, the light that shows through.

(–
149
)

I’M tying my shoes, happy, whistling, and suddenly unhappiness. But this time I caught you, anguish. I sensed you
ahead
of any mental organization, with the first negative judgment. Like a gray color that might be a pain and might be my stomach. And
almost
at the same time (but afterwards, you won’t fool me this time) the way was opened for the intelligible repertory, with an explicatory idea first off: “And now to live another day, etc.” From which there follows: “I’m anxious
because
…etc.”

Ideas under sail, propelled by the primordial wind blowing from underneath (but underneath is only a physical location). All that’s needed is a change in the breeze (
but what is it that changes its quadrant?
) and right off, here are the happy little boats, with their colored sails. “After all, there’s no reason to complain, man,” like that.

I woke up and I saw the light of dawn through the cracks in the Venetian blinds. It came from so deep in the night that I had a feeling like that of vomiting up myself, the terror of coming into a new day with its same presentation, its mechanical indifference of everytime: consciousness, a sensation of light, opening my eyes, blinds, dawn.

In that second, with that omniscience of half-sleep, I measured the horror of what astounds and enchants religions so much: the eternal perfection of the cosmos, the unending rotation of the globe on its axis. Nausea, the unbearable feeling of coaction.
I am obliged to bear the daily rising of the sun.
It’s monstrous.
It’s inhuman.

Before going back to sleep I imagined (I saw) a plastic universe, changeable, full of wondrous chance, an elastic sky, a sun that suddenly is missing or remains fixed or changes its shape.

I was anxious for the dispersal of the fixed constellations, that dirty luminous propaganda put out by the Divine Watchmakers’ Trust.

(–
83
)

AS soon as he began to amalate the noeme, the clemise began to smother her and they fell into hydromuries, into savage ambonies, into exasperating sustales. Each time that he tried to relamate the hairincops, he became entangled in a whining grimate and had to face up to envulsioning the novalisk, feeling how little by little the arnees would spejune, were becoming peltronated, redoblated, until they were stretched out like the ergomanine trimalciate which drops a few filures of cariaconce. And it was still only the beginning, because right away she tordled her hurgales, allowing him gently to bring up his orfelunes. No sooner had they cofeathered than something like a ulucord encrestored them, extrajuxted them, and paramoved them, suddenly it was the clinon, the sterfurous convulcant of matericks, the slobberdigging raimouth of the orgumion, the sproemes of the merpasm in one superhumitic agopause. Evohé! Evohé! Volposited on the crest of a murelium, they felt themselves being balparammed, perline and marulous. The trock was trembling, the mariplumes were overcome, and everything became resolvirated into a profound pinex, into niolames of argutentic gauzes, into almost cruel cariniers which ordopained them to the limit of their gumphies.

(–
9
)

(
Renovigo
, No. 5: translated from the Ispamerikan)

ANUTHER SUISIDE

It waz a sad surprize to rede in the “Orthografik” the newz ov the demize in San Luis Potosí on march furst last of lootenant kernel (promoted to kernel on leving the surviss) Adolfo Abila Sanhes. It waz a surprize bekuz we had no newz of hiz having bin il. Furthermor, for sum time now we hav kept a katalog ov owr frends hoo wur suisides, and on won okayzhun “Renovigo” made referens too serten simtums in thoze obzervd. It iz just that Abila Sanhes did not chuze a reevolvr like the anteyklerikl riter Giyermo Delora, nor the nooss like the French esperantist Eujene Lanti.

Abila Sanhes waz a man wurthi of atenshun and apreshiayshun. An onorabl soljer, he brawt onor too hiz profeshun in theeoree and in praktiss. He had a hie ideea ov loyaltee and eevn went onto the feeld ov batl. A man ov kulchur, he tawt seyens to yung peepl and adults. A thinkr, he rote meni thingz for magazeenz and he left a fue unpublishd werks, amung them “Baraks Maxims.” A poet, he versifeyed with grate fasilitee in difrent forms. An artist with pen and pensil, he ofen entertaned us with hiz kreayshuns. A lingwist, he likd too tranzlate his own produkshuns intoo Inglish, Esperanto, and uther tungs.

Basikly, Abila Sanhes waz a man ov thawt and akshun, ov moralitee and ov kulchur. This is wat made up hiz being.

In the uther colum ther ar sevral entrees, and it iz nachural to hezitate befor lifting the vale on hiz prievt life. But sinse a publik man haz nun and Abila Sanhes waz just that, we wood not be tru too owrselvz if we did not sho the uther side ov the medl. In owr role as biografrz and historiunz we must abandn skruplz.

We met Abila Sanhes pursonalee arownd 1936 in Linares, N.L., and then in Monteray we vizitd him in hiz home, wich seemd prosperus and happee. Yers later wen we vizitd him in Samora the impreshun was compleetlee difrent, we realizd that hiz home waz braking up, and then wekes later, wel, it waz hiz wife hoo dezertd him and hiz childrn skatrd. Finely, in San Luis Potosí, he met a kined yung gerl hoo liked him and she agrede too maree him: that iz how he had a sekund famlee, wich waz mor tolerunt than the ferst won and nevr kame to abandn him.

Wat hapnd ferst with Abila Sanhes, hiz mentl ilness or alkoholism? We doo not no, but both thingz toogethr were the ruinayshun ov hiz life and the kauz ov hiz deth. A sik man in hiz last yers, we had expeld him noing that he waz a suiside hedding toards hiz inevitabl end. Won becumz fatalistik wen he obzervz peepl so clerelee hedding toards a ner and trajik deth.

The desseessed beleved in a fiucher life. If he fownd that, let him fynd happines ther, even tho with difrent karakteristiks awl ov us, awl hiumans seke it.

(–
52
)

“WHEN I was in my first cause, I did not have God…; I wanted myself and I did not want anything else; I was what I wanted, and I wanted what I was, and I was free of God and of everything … That is why we beseech God to free us from God, and to let us conceive the truth and to let us enjoy it eternally, there where the supreme angels, the fly, and the soul are all alike, there where I was and where I wanted that which I was and it was that which I wanted …”

MEISTER ECKARDT
, sermon:
Beati pauperes spiritu

(–
147
)

MORELLIANA

Basically, what is this story about finding a millenary kingdom, an Eden, another world? Everything written these days and worth reading is oriented towards nostalgia. An Arcadia complex, the return to the great uterus, back to Adam,
le bon sauvage
(and so it goes…),
Paradise lost, lost because I searched for you in my eternal darkness
…And so much for islands (
cf.
Musil) or gurus (if you have the cash for the Paris—Bombay flight) or simply picking up a coffee cup and looking at it all over, not like a coffee cup any more but like evidence of the immense asininity in which we all find ourselves, believing that this object is nothing but a coffee cup while even the most idiot among journalists is assigned to give us a précis of the quanta, Planck and Heisenberg, knocks himself out in three columns explaining that everything vibrates and trembles and is like a cat about to take an enormous hydrogen or cobalt leap which will leave us all with our feet sticking up in the air. An uncouth way of expressing one’s self, really.

The coffee cup is white, the noble savage is brown, Planck was a formidable German. Behind all that (it’s always behind, convince yourself that this is the key idea of modern thought) Paradise, the other world, trampled innocence which weeping darkly seeks the land of Hurqalyā. In one way or another everyone is looking for it, everyone wants to open the door that leads out to the playground. And not just for Eden, not so much for Eden as such, but just to leave jet planes behind, Nikita’s face or Dwight’s or Charles’s or Francisco’s, the waking up to bells, the adjustment to thermometer and weather vane, the retirement from kicks in the ass (forty years of rubbing one’s behind so that it won’t hurt so much, but it hurts just the same, the tip of the shoe digs in a little deeper every time just the same, and
each kick dredges up for just one moment more the poor ass of the cashier or the second lieutenant or the professor of literature or the nurse), and we were saying that Homo sapiens is not seeking the door in order to enter the millenary kingdom (even though it would not be so bad, not really bad at all) but only so he can close it behind his back and wiggle his ass like a contented dog, knowing that the old whore’s shoe was left behind, breaking itself against the closed door, and that one can go ahead and unbutton his poor asshole with a sigh, straighten up, and start walking among the posies in the garden and sit down to look at a cloud for five thousand years, no less, or twenty thousand if that is possible and if nobody gets upset and if he is lucky enough to stay in the garden looking at the posies.

From time to time among the legions of people going about with their asses exposed there is one who not only might want to shut the door for protection against the kicks of the three traditional dimensions, plus the ones supplied by the categories of understanding, by that more than rotten principle of sufficient reason and other infinite drivel, but furthermore, these types believe along with other madmen that we are not in the world, that our venerable parents have set us on a course in the wrong direction and we have to get off it if we do not want to end up as an equestrian statue or transformed into an exemplary grandparent, and that nothing is lost if one maintains as his end the value of proclaiming that everything is lost and that we have to start all over again, like the famous sandhogs in 1907 who realized one August morning that the tunnel under Monte Brasco was off course and that they would end up by coming out more than twenty yards away from the tunnel being dug by Yugoslav sandhogs coming from Dublivna. What did the famous sandhogs do? The famous sandhogs left their tunnel the way it was, came out on the surface, and after several days and nights of deliberation in various Piedmont bars, began to dig on their own and at their own risk in a different part of Monte Brasco, and they kept on going without worrying about the Yugoslav sandhogs, and after four months and five days they came out in the southern part of Dublivna, with no small surprise for a retired schoolteacher who saw them appear in his house at bathroom level. A praiseworthy example which the Dublivna sandhogs should have followed (although one must recognize that the famous sandhogs had not communicated
their intentions) instead of obstinately connecting with a nonexistent tunnel, as is the case with so many poets leaning halfway out the living-room window late at night.