Authors: Julio Cortazar
Dédée comes in with a package and looks at Johnny.
“Your fever’s higher. I telephoned the doctor already, he’s going to come at ten. He says you should stay quiet.”
“Okay, okay, but first I’m going to tell Bruno about the subway. The other day I noticed what was happening. I started to think about my old lady, then about Lan and the guys, an’ whup, it was me walking through my old neighborhood again, and I saw the kids’ faces, the ones from then. It wasn’t thinking, it seems to me I told you a lot of times, I never think; I’m like standing on a corner watching what I think go by, but I’m not thinking what I see. You dig? Jim says that we’re all the same, that in general (as they say) one doesn’t think on his own. Let’s say that’s so, the thing is I’d took the metro at Saint-Michel, and right away I began to think about Lan and the guys, and to see the old neighborhood. I’d hardly sat down and I began to think about them. But at the same time I realized that I was in the metro, and I saw that in a minute or two we had got to Odéon, and that people were getting on and off. Then I went on thinking about Lan, and I saw my old lady when she was coming back from doing the shopping, and I began to see them all around, to be with them in a very beautiful way, I hadn’t felt that way in a long time. Memories are always a drag, but this time I liked thinking about the guys and seeing them. If I start telling you everything I saw you’re not going to believe it because I would take a long time doing it. And that would be if I economized on details. For example, just to tell you one thing, I saw Lan
in a green suit that she wore when she came to Club 33 where I was playing with Hamp. I was seeing the suit with some ribbons, a loop, a sort of trim down the side and a collar … Not at the same time, though, really, I was walking around Lan’s suit and looking at it pretty slow. Then I looked at Lan’s face and at the boys’ faces, and then I remembered Mike who lived in the next room, and how Mike had told me a story about some wild horses in Colorado, once he worked on a ranch, and talked about the balls it took for cowboys to break wild horses …”
“Johnny,” Dédée said from her far corner.
“Now figure I’ve told you only a little piece of everything that I was thinking and seeing. How much’ll that take, what I’m telling you, this little piece?”
“I don’t know, let’s say about two minutes.”
“Let’s say about two minutes,” Johnny mimicked. “Two minutes and I’ve told you just a little bitty piece, no more. If I were to tell you everything I saw the boys doing, and how Hamp played
Save it, pretty mama
, and listened to every note, you dig, every note, and Hamp’s not one of them who gets tired, if I told you I heard an endless harangue of my old lady’s, she was saying something about cabbages, if I remember, she was asking pardon for my old man and for me, and was saying something about some heads of cabbage … Okay, if I told you all that in detail, that’d take more than two minutes, huh, Bruno?”
“If you really heard and saw all that, it’d take a good quarter-hour,” I said, laughing to myself.
“It’d take a good quarter-hour, huh, Bruno. Then tell me how it can be that I feel suddenly the metro stop and I come away from my old lady and Lan and all that, and I see that we’re at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which is just a minute and a half from Odéon.”
I never pay too much attention to the things Johnny says, but now, with his way of staring at me, I felt cold.
“Hardly a minute and a half in your time, in her time,” Johnny said nastily. “And also the metro’s time and my watch’s, damn them both. Then how could I have been thinking a quarter of an hour, huh, Bruno? How can you think a quarter of an hour in a minute and a half? That day I swear I hadn’t smoked even a roach, not a crumb,” he finished like a boy excusing himself. “And then it happened to me again, now it’s beginning to happen to me everyplace. But,” he added astutely, “I can only notice in the metro, because to ride the metro is like being put in a clock. The stations are minutes, dig, it’s that time of yours, now’s time; but I know there’s another, and I’ve been thinking, thinking …”
He covers his face with his hands and shakes. I wish I’d gone already, and I don’t know how to get out now without Johnny resenting it, he’s terribly touchy with his friends. If he goes on this way he’s going to make a mess of himself, at least with Dédée he’s not going to talk about things like that.
“Bruno, if I could only live all the time like in those moments, or like when I’m playing and the time changes then too … Now you know what can happen in a minute and a half … Then a man, not just me but her and you and all the boys, they could live hundreds of years, if we could find the way we could live a thousand times faster than we’re living because of the damned clocks, that mania for minutes and for the day after tomorrow …”
I smile the best I can, understanding fuzzily that he’s right, but what he suspects and the hunch I have about what he suspects is going to be deleted as soon as I’m in the street and’ve gotten back into my everyday life. At that moment I’m sure that what Johnny’s saying doesn’t just come from his being half-crazy, that he’s escaping from reality; I’m sure that, in the exchange, what he thinks
leaves him with a kind of parody which he changes into a hope. Everything Johnny says to me at such moments (and it’s been five years now Johnny’s been saying things like this to me and to people) you can’t just listen and promise yourself to think about it later. You hardly get down into the street, the memory of it barely exists and no Johnny repeating the words, everything turns into a pot-dream, a monotonous gesticulating (because there’re others who say things like that, every minute you hear similar testimony) and after the wonder of it’s gone you get an irritation, and for me at least it feels as though Johnny’s been pulling my leg. But this always happens the next day, not when Johnny’s talking to me about it, because then I feel that there’s something that I’d like to admit at some point, a light that’s looking to be lit, or better yet, as though it were necessary to break something, split it from top to bottom like a log, setting a wedge in and hammering it until the job’s done. And Johnny hasn’t got the strength to hammer anything in, and me, I don’t know where the hammer is to tap in the wedge, which I can’t imagine either.
So finally I left the place, but before I left one of those things that have to happen happened—if not that, then something else—and it was when I was saying goodbye to Dédée and had my back turned to Johnny that I felt something was happening, I saw it in Dédée’s eyes and swung around quickly (because maybe I’m a little afraid of Johnny, this angel who’s like my brother, this brother who’s like my angel) and I saw Johnny had thrown off the blanket around him in one motion, and I saw him sitting in the easy-chair completely nude, his legs pulled up and the knees underneath his chin, shivering but laughing to himself, naked from top to bottom in that grimy chair.
“It’s beginning to get warm,” Johnny said. “Bruno, look what a pretty scar I got between my ribs.”
“Cover yourself,” Dédée ordered him, embarrassed and not knowing what to say. We know one another well enough and a naked man is a naked man, that’s all, but anyway Dédée was scandalized and I didn’t know how to not give the impression that what Johnny was doing had shocked me. And he knew it and laughed uproariously, mouth wide open, obscenely keeping his legs up so that his prick hung down over the edge of the chair like a monkey in the zoo, and the skin of his thighs had some weird blemishes which disgusted me completely. Then Dédée grabbed the blanket and wrapped it tightly around him, while Johnny was laughing and seemed very cheerful. I said goodbye hesitatingly, promised to come back the next day, and Dédée accompanied me to the landing, closing the door so Johnny couldn’t hear what she was going to say to me.
“He’s been like this since we got back from the Belgian tour. He’d played very well everyplace, and I was so happy.”
“I wonder where he got the heroin from,” I said, looking her right in the eye.
“Don’t know. He’d been drinking wine and cognac almost constantly. He’s been shooting up too, but less than there …”
There was Baltimore and New York, three months in Bellevue psychiatric, and a long stretch in Camarillo.
“Did Johnny play really well in Belgium, Dédée?”
“Yes, Bruno, better than ever, seems to me. The people went off their heads, and the guys in the band told me so, too, a number of times. Then all at once some weird things were happening, like always with Johnny, but luckily never in front of an audience. I thought … but you see now, he’s worse than ever.”
“Worse than in New York? You didn’t know him those years.”
Dédée’s not stupid, but no woman likes you to talk about her man before she knew him, aside from the fact that now she has to put up with him and whatever “before” was is just words. I don’t know how to say it to her, I don’t even trust her fully, but finally I decide.
“I guess you’re short of cash.”
“We’ve got that contract beginning day after tomorrow,” said Dédée.
“You think he’s going to be able to record and do the gig with an audience too?”
“Oh, sure.” Dédée seemed a bit surprised. “Johnny can play better than ever if Dr. Bernard can get rid of that flu. The problem is the horn.”
“I’ll take care of that. Here, take this, Dédée. Only … Maybe better Johnny doesn’t know about it.”
“Bruno …”
I made a motion with my hand and began to go down the stairway, I’d cut off the predictable words, the hopeless gratitude. Separated from her by four or five steps, made it easier for me to say it to her.
“He can’t shoot up before the first concert, not for anything in the world. You can let him smoke a little, but no money for the other thing.”
Dédée didn’t answer at all, though I saw how her hands were twisting and twisting the bills as though she were trying to make them disappear. At least I was sure that Dédée wasn’t on drugs. If she went along with it, it was only out of love or fear. If Johnny gets down on his knees, like I saw once in Chicago, and begs her with tears … But that’s a chance, like everything else with Johnny, and for the moment they’d have enough money to eat, and for medicines. In the street I turned up the collar on my raincoat because it was beginning to drizzle, and took a breath so deep that my lungs hurt; Paris smelled clean, like fresh bread. Only then I noticed how Johnny’s place had
smelled, of Johnny’s body sweating under the blanket. I went into a café for a shot of cognac and to wash my mouth out, maybe also the memory that insisted and insisted in Johnny’s words, his stories, his way of seeing what I didn’t see and, at bottom, didn’t want to see. I began to think of the day after tomorrow and it was like tranquillity descending, like a bridge stretching beautifully from the zinc counter into the future.
When one is not too sure of anything, the best thing to do is to make obligations for oneself that’ll act as pontoons. Two or three days later I thought that I had an obligation to find out if the marquesa was helping Johnny Carter score for heroin, and I went to her studio down in Montparnasse. The marquesa is really a marquesa, she’s got mountains of money from the marquis, though it’s been some time they’ve been divorced because of dope and other, similar, reasons. Her friendship with Johnny dates from New York, probably from the year when Johnny got famous overnight simply because someone had given him the chance to get four or five guys together who dug his style, and Johnny could work comfortably for the first time, and what he blew left everyone in a state of shock. This is not the place to be a jazz critic, and anyone who’s interested can read my book on Johnny and the new post-war style, but I can say that forty-eight—let’s say until fifty—was like an explosion in music, but a cold, silent explosion, an explosion where everything remained in its place and there were no screams or debris flying, but the crust of habit splintered into a million pieces until its defenders (in the bands and among the public) made hipness a question of self-esteem over something which didn’t feel to them as it had before. Because after Johnny’s step with the alto sax you couldn’t keep on listening to earlier musicians and think that they were the end; one
must submit and apply that sort of disguised resignation which is called the historical sense, and say that any one of those musicians had been stupendous, and kept on being so, in his moment. Johnny had passed over jazz like a hand turning a page, that was it.
The marquesa had the ears of a greyhound for everything that might be music, she’d always admired Johnny and his friends in the group enormously. I imagine she must have “loaned” them no small amount of dollars in the Club 33 days, when the majority of critics were screaming bloody murder at Johnny’s recordings, and were criticizing his jazz by worse-than-rotten criteria. Probably also, in that period, the marquesa began sleeping with Johnny from time to time, and shooting up with him. I saw them together often before recording sessions or during intermissions at concerts, and Johnny seemed enormously happy at the marquesa’s side, even though Lan and the kids were waiting for him on another floor or at his house. But Johnny never had the vaguest idea of what it is to wait for anything, he couldn’t even imagine that anyone was somewhere waiting for him. Even to his way of dropping Lan, which tells it like it really is with him. I saw the postcard that he sent from Rome after being gone for four months (after climbing onto a plane with two other musicians, Lan knowing nothing about it). The postcard showed Romulus and Remus, which had always been a big joke with Johnny (one of his numbers has that title), said: “Waking alone in a multitude of loves,” which is part of a first line of a Dylan Thomas poem, Johnny was reading Dylan all the time then; Johnny’s agents in the States agreed to deduct a part of their percentages and give it to Lan, who, for her part, understood quickly enough that it hadn’t been such a bad piece of business to have gotten loose from Johnny. Somebody
told me that the marquesa had given Lan money too, without Lan knowing where it had come from. Which didn’t surprise me at all, because the marquesa was absurdly generous and understood the world, a little like those omelets she makes at her studio when the boys begin to arrive in droves, and which begins to take on the aspect of a kind of permanent omelet that you throw different things into and you go on cutting out hunks and offering them in place of what’s really missing.