Read Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) Online
Authors: Julio Cortazar
“Ophelia?”
“I’m sorry, I’m being pedantic. And what did she say when you asked her about her clothes?”
“She started to laugh and drank a pint down in one swallow. She said that the last time she had taken something off she had pulled it over her legs, over her knees. It fell all apart. They get very cold in winter, they grab anything they can find.”
“I wouldn’t want to be a hospital orderly and have them brought in on a stretcher some night. A prejudice like any other. Pillars of society. I’m thirsty, Maga.”
“Go over to Pola’s,” said La Maga, looking at the
clocharde
, who was caressing her lover under the bridge. “Watch, they’re going to dance now, they always dance a little at this time.”
“He looks like a bear.”
“He’s so happy,” La Maga said, picking up a little white stone and looking it all over.
Horacio took the stone away from her and licked it. It tasted like salt and stone.
“It’s mine,” La Maga said, trying to get it back.
“Yes, but look at the color it has when it’s with me. It lights up when it’s with me.”
“It’s happier with me. Give it back. It’s mine.”
They looked at one another. Pola.
“So O.K.,” Horacio said. “It means the same now as any other time. You’re being silly, girl, if you only knew how peacefully you can sleep.”
“Sleeping alone, that’s swell. You see, don’t you, I’m not crying. You can keep on talking, I’m not going to cry. I’m like her, watch her dance, she’s like the moon, she weighs a ton and she’s dancing, she’s full of crud and she’s dancing. It’s an example. Give me my stone.”
“Take it. You know, it’s hard to say to you: I love you. It’s so hard right now.”
“Yes, you’d think you were giving me a carbon copy.”
“We’re talking like a pair of eagles,” Horacio said.
“It’s enough to make you laugh,” La Maga said. “I’ll lend it to you if you want, while the
clocharde
is dancing.”
“O.K.,” said Horacio, accepting the stone and licking it again. “Why talk about Pola? She’s sick and lonely, I’m going to see her, we still make love, but that’s all, I don’t want to turn her into words, not even with you.”
“Emmanuèle’s going to fall into the water,” said La Maga. “She’s drunker than the guy.”
“No, it’ll all end up with the usual sordidness,” Oliveira said, getting up from the edge. “Do you see the noble representative of authority coming this way? Let’s go, it’s too sad. Just because the poor girl wanted to dance …”
“Some old puritan dame must have raised hell up there. If we find her you can kick her in the tail.”
“O.K. And you can make excuses for me, saying that my leg got away from me, mortar shell, defending Stalingrad, you know.”
“Then you come to attention and snap a salute.”
“That I can do very well, you know, I learned it in Palermo. Come on, let’s get something to drink. I don’t want to look back any more, listen to the cop cussing her out. That’s where the whole problem lies. Shouldn’t I go back and give him a swift kick? Oh, Arjuna, counsel me. And beneath the uniform the smell of civilian ignominy.
Ho detto.
Come on, let’s cut out once and for all. I’m dirtier than Emmanuèle, it’s a crud that started
collecting centuries ago,
Persil lave plus blanc
, it calls for a Detergent the Father, girl, a cosmic soap. You like pretty words?
Salut
, Gaston.”
“Salut messieurs dames,”
Gaston said.
“Alors, deux petits blancs secs comme d’habitude, hein?”
“Comme d’habitude, mon vieux, comme d’habitude. Avec du Persil dedans.”
Gaston looked at him and went off shaking his head. Oliveira took La Maga’s hand and counted her fingers attentively. Then he put the stone in her palm, closed the fingers over it, one by one, and to top it off gave her a kiss. La Maga saw that he had closed his eyes and seemed to be far off. “Actor,” she thought tenderly.
(–
64
)
IN some place Morelli tried to justify his narrative incoherencies, maintaining that the life of others, such as it comes to us in so-called reality, is not a movie but still photography, that is to say, that we cannot grasp the action, only a few of its eleatically recorded fragments. There are only the moments in which we are present with this other one whose life we think we understand, either when they talk about him, or when he tells us what has happened to him or projects in front of us what he intends to do. In the end there is a photograph album, with fixed instances; never the future coming about before us, the step from yesterday to today, the first prick of forgetfulness in the memory. For that reason there was nothing strange about his speaking of characters in the most spasmodic way possible; giving coherence to the series of pictures so they could become a movie (which would have been so very pleasing to the reader he called the female-reader) meant filling in with literature, presumptions, hypotheses, and inventions the gaps between one and another photograph. Sometimes the pictures showed a back, a hand resting on a door, the end of a stroll through the countryside, a mouth opening up to shout, some shoes in the closet, people walking along the Champs de Mars, a canceled stamp, the smell of Ma Griffe, things like that. Morelli thought that the existence of those pictures, which tried to present all that with the most acuity possible, must have placed the reader in conditions ripe for taking a chance, for participating, almost, in the destiny of the characters. What he would learn from them through his imagination would immediately become hardened into action, with no trick destined to integrate them into what had already been written or was to be written. The bridges between one and another instant in those lives which were so vague and so little characterized would have to be presumed or
invented by the reader, all the way from the manner in which they combed their hair, even if Morelli did not mention it, to the reasons behind a behavior or a nonbehavior, if it seemed unusual and eccentric. The book would have to be something like those sketches proposed by Gestalt psychologists, and therefore certain lines would induce the observer to trace imaginatively the ones that would complete the figure. But sometimes the missing lines were the most important ones, the only ones that really counted. Morelli’s coquetry and petulance in this field had no limits.
Reading the book, one had the impression for a while that Morelli had hoped that the accumulation of fragments would quickly crystallize into a total reality. Without having to invent bridges, or sew up different pieces of the tapestry, behold suddenly a city, or a tapestry, or men and women in the absolute perspective of their future, and Morelli, the author, would be the first spectator to marvel at that world that was taking on coherence.
But there was no cause for confidence, because coherence meant basically assimilation in space and time, an ordering to the taste of the female-reader. Morelli would not have agreed to that; rather, it seems, he would have sought a crystallization which, without altering the disorder in which the bodies of his little planetary system circulated, would permit a ubiquitous and total comprehension of all of its reasons for being, whether they were disorder itself, inanity, or gratuity. A crystallization in which nothing would remain subsumed, but where a lucid eye might peep into the kaleidoscope and understand the great polychromatic rose, understand it as a figure, an
imago mundi
that outside the kaleidoscope would be dissolved into a provincial living room, or a concert of aunts having tea and Bagley biscuits.
(–
27
)
THE dream was composed like a tower of layers without end, rising upward and losing themselves in the infinite, or layers coiling downward, losing themselves in the bowels of the earth. When it swooped me in its undulations, the spiraling began, and this spiral was a labyrinth. There was no vault and no bottom, no walls and no return. But there were themes repeating themselves with exactitude.
ANAÏS NIN
,
Winter of Artifice
(–
48
)
THIS narration was written by its protagonist, Ivonne Guitry, to Nicolás Díaz, a friend of Gardel’s in Bogotá.
My family belonged to the Hungarian intellectual class. My mother was headmistress of a girls’ seminary where the elite of a famous city, whose name I do not wish to mention, were educated. With the arrival of the stormy postwar period and the overthrow of thrones, social classes, and fortunes, I did not know which way to head in my life. My family lost its fortune, victim of the Trianon [
sic
] borders like thousands and thousands of others. My beauty, my youth, and my upbringing would not permit me to become a humble stenographer. Then the Prince Charming of my life arrived, an aristocrat of cosmopolitan upper circles, frequenters of European resorts. I married him with all of my youthful illusion, in spite of the opposition of my family, because I was young and he was a foreigner.
Honeymoon. Paris, Nice, Capri. Then the shattering of an illusion. I did not know where to turn and I did not dare tell my family of the failure of my marriage. A husband who would never be able to make me a mother. I am already sixteen years old and I am traveling like a pilgrim without a goal, trying to make my troubles disappear. Egypt, Java, Japan, the Celestial Empire, all of the Far East, in a carnival of champagne and false happiness, with my soul in pieces.
The years pass. In 1927 we are settled finally on the Côte d’Azur. I am a woman of high society, and cosmopolitan circles, casinos, balls, race tracks all render me homage.
One fine day in summer I took a definitive resolution: separation. Nature was all in flower: the sea, the fields were opening up in a song of love and enjoyment of youth.
The mimosa festival in Cannes, the carnival of flowers in Nice, springtime in Paris. So I abandoned home, comforts, and wealth, and alone I faced the world…
I was eighteen at the time and living alone in Paris, without any definite direction. Paris in 1928. The Paris of orgies and the outpouring
of champagne. The Paris of worthless francs. Paris, paradise of the foreigner. Full of Americans and South Americans, little kings of gold. Paris in 1928, where every day a new cabaret was born, a new sensation to make the foreigner loosen his purse.
Eighteen years old, blond, blue eyes. Alone in Paris.
In order to soften my misfortune I turned myself completely over to pleasure. I always attracted attention in the cabarets because I was alone, squandering champagne on the chorus and tips on the waiters. I had no idea of the value of money.
Sometimes, somebody out of that element that always lives off the cosmopolitan environment discovers my secret sorrow and recommends a remedy for forgetfulness to me … Cocaine, morphine, drugs. Then I began to look for exotic places, strange-looking dancers, dark-hued South Americans with their long hair.
In those days a recent arrival, a cabaret singer, was collecting success and applause. He opened in the Florida and sang strange songs in a strange language.
He sang in exotic garb never seen before in those places, Argentine tangos,
rancheras
, and
zambas.
He was a rather thin young man, a little dark, with white teeth that captured the attention of all the pretty women in Paris. It was Carlos Gardel. His weepy tangos that he sang with all his soul captivated the audience without anyone’s knowing why. His songs at that time—
Caminito, La chacarera, Aquel tapado de armiño, Queja indiana, Entre sueños
—were not modern tangos but songs of old Argentina, the pure soul of the gaucho of the pampas. Gardel was in vogue. No elegant dinner party or reception to which he was not invited. His dark face, his white teeth, his fresh and luminous smile, shone everywhere. Cabarets, theaters, music halls, race tracks. He was a permanent guest at Auteuil and Longchamps.
But Gardel preferred to have a good time in his own way, among his own friends, in the circle of his intimates.
At that time there was in Paris a cabaret called Palermo, on the Rue Clichy, frequented almost exclusively by South Americans … That’s where I met him. Gardel was interested in all women, but all I was interested in was cocaine … and champagne. Of course it pleased my feminine vanity to be seen in Paris with the man of the hour, with the idol of womanhood, but it did not tell my heart anything.
That friendship became established on other nights, other walks, other confidences, under the pale Parisian moon, through flowering fields. Many days of romantic interest went by. The man was getting into my soul. His words were silken, his phrases were digging at the rock of my indifference. I went crazy. My luxurious but sad little flat was now full of light. I did not go back to the cabarets. In my
beautiful gray living room, by the light of electric lamps, a blond little head became united to a firm, dark-featured face. My blue bedroom, which had known all the nostalgias of a soul without direction, was now a real love nest. It was my first love.
Time flew fast and fleeting. I can’t say how much time went by. The exotic blond who had dazzled Paris with her extravagances, with her
toiletts dernière cri
[
sic
], with her garden parties in which Russian caviar and champagne were the daily main course, had disappeared.
Months later the eternal habitués of the Palermo, the Florida, the Garon, learned in the press that a blond ballerina with blue eyes who was now twenty years old was driving the
señoritos
of the River Plate capital mad with her ethereal dances, with her startling brazenness, with all the voluptuousness of her youth in flower.
It was
IVONNE GUITRY.
(Etc.)
La escuela gardeleana
, Editorial Cisplatina, Montevideo
(–
49
)
MORELLIANA
I am revising a story that I wanted to be the least literary possible. A despairing job from the word go, in the revision intolerable phrases start to pop up right away. A character comes to some stairs: “Raymond commenced his descent …” I scratch it out and write: “Raymond began to go down …” I turn away from the revision to ask myself again the real reasons behind this rejection of “literary” language.
Commence his descent
has nothing bad about it unless maybe it is too easy; but
begin to go down
is exactly the same except cruder, more
prosaic
(that is, a mere vehicle of information), while the other form seems to combine what is useful with what is pleasant to hear. In short, what repels me in “commenced his descent” is the decorative use of a verb and a noun that we almost never use in everyday speech; in short, literary language repels me (in my work, let it be understood). Why?