Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (10 page)

She got up blinking, glanced at Gregorovius who looked like something spoiled and dirty. Someone passed her a cup.

(–
137
)

“I DON’T like to talk about him just for the sake of talking,” La Maga said.

“That’s all right,” said Gregorovius. “I was just asking.”

“If you just want to hear talking, I can talk about something else.”

“Don’t be cute.”

“Horacio is like guava jelly,” La Maga said.

“What’s guava jelly?”

“Horacio is like a glass of water in a storm.”

“Ah,” said Gregorovius.

“He must have been born during that period Madame Léonie talks about when she’s a little tipsy. A time when nobody was upset, when streetcars were pulled by horses and wars took place in open country. There were no such things as sleeping pills, Madame Léonie says.”

“The beautiful golden age,” said Gregorovius. “They told me about times like that too, in Odessa. My mother, so romantic, with her hair down … They kept pineapple plants on the balconies and at night there was no need for chamber pots, it was extraordinary. But I can’t picture Horacio in those royal-jelly days.”

“I can’t either, but he wouldn’t have been so sad. In these times everything hurts him, even aspirin hurts him. Really, last night I made him take an aspirin because he had a toothache. He grabbed it and started to look at it, it was terribly hard for him to decide to swallow it. He said funny things, that it was unhealthy to use things one really knew nothing about, things invented by other people to calm other things that we also know nothing about … You know how he is when he goes off on a tangent.”

“You repeated the word ‘thing’ several times,” Gregorovius
said. “It’s rather vulgar, but it does show, on the other hand, what’s wrong with Horacio. Obviously a victim of thingness.”

“What is thingness?” La Maga asked.

“Thingness is that unpleasant feeling that where our presumption ends our punishment begins. I’m sorry I have to use abstract and almost allegorical language, but I mean that Oliveira is pathologically sensitive to the pressure of what is around him, the world he lives in, his fate, to speak kindly. In a word, he can’t stand his surroundings. More briefly, he has a world-ache. You had an inkling of it, Lucía, and with delightful innocence you felt that Oliveira would be happier in any of the pocket-size Arcadias manufactured by the Madame Léonies of this world, not to mention my mother, the one in Odessa. Because you probably didn’t believe that business about the pineapples, I suppose.”

“Or the chamber pots either,” said La Maga. “It’s hard to believe.”

Guy Monod decided to wake up when Ronald and Étienne agreed to listen to Jelly Roll Morton; opening one eye he decided that the back outlined in the light of the green candles must belong to Gregorovius. He shuddered, the green candles seen from a bed made a bad impression on him, the rain on the skylight was strangely mixed with the remnants of his dream-images, he had been dreaming about an absurdly sunny place, where Gaby was walking around nude and feeding crumbs to a group of stupid pigeons the size of ducks. “I have a headache,” Guy said to himself. He was not in the least interested in Jelly Roll Morton although it was amusing to hear the rain on the skylight as Jelly Roll sang: “Stood on a corner, an’ she was soakin’ wet …” Wong would certainly have come up with a theory about real and poetic time, but was it true that Wong had mentioned making coffee? Gaby feeding the pigeons crumbs and Wong, the voice of Wong going in between Gaby’s nude legs in a garden with brightly colored flowers, saying: “A secret I learned in the casino at Menton.” Quite possible, after all, that Wong would appear with a pot full of coffee.

Jelly Roll was at the piano beating the time softly with his foot for lack of a better rhythm section. Jelly Roll could sing
Mamie’s Blues
rocking a little, staring up at some decoration on the ceiling, or it was a fly that came and went or a spot that
came and went in Jelly Roll’s eyes. “Eleven twenty-four took my baby away-ay …” That’s what life had been, trains bringing people and taking them away while you stood on the corner with wet feet, listening to a nickelodeon and laughing and cussing out the yellow windows of the saloon where you didn’t always have enough money to go in. “Eleven twenty-four took my baby away-ay …” Babs had taken so many trains in her life, she liked to go by train if in the end there was some friend waiting for her, if Ronald softly put his hand on her hip the way he was doing now, sketching out the music on her skin, “Eleven-thirteen’ll carry her back one day,” obviously some train would bring her back again, but who knows if Jelly Roll was going to be on that platform, at that piano, that time he sang the blues about Mamie Desdume, the rain on a Paris skylight at one o’clock in the morning, wet feet, and a whore who muttered “If you can’t hand me a dollar then hand me a rotten dime,” Babs had said things like that in Cincinnati, every woman had said things like that somewhere, even in the bed of a king, Babs had a very special idea of what the bed of a king was like but in any case some woman must have said something like, “If you can’t give me a million, gimme a lousy grand,” a matter of proportions, and why was Jelly Roll’s piano so sad, so much that rain that woke Guy up, that was making La Maga cry, and Wong who wasn’t coming with the coffee.

“It’s too much,” Étienne said, sighing. “I don’t know why I stand for that garbage. It’s moving, but it’s garbage.”

“It’s no Pisanello medal, of course,” Oliveira said.

“Or opus whatever-you-want by Schoenberg,” said Ronald. “Why did you want to hear it? Besides intelligence you also lack charity. Have you ever stood with your feet in a puddle at midnight? Jelly Roll has, you can tell when he sings, it’s something you learn, man.”

“I can paint better if my feet are dry,” Étienne said. “And don’t come around with any Salvation Army arguments. Why don’t you put on something more intelligent, like those Sonny Rollins solos. At least those modern guys make you think of Jackson Pollock or Tobey, it’s easy to see that they’ve left the age of the pianola and the box of watercolors.”

“He’s capable of believing in progress in art,” Oliveira said yawning. “Don’t pay any attention to him, Ronald, and with that hand you have free dig out that little record of the
Stack O’Lee
Blues,
when all’s said and done I think it has a fine piano solo on it.”

“That business about progress in art is ancient nonsense,” Étienne said, “but in jazz as in any art there’s always a flock of fakers. Music that can be translated into emotion is one thing, but emotion which pretends to pass as music is another. Paternal grief in F sharp, sarcastic laughter in yellow, violet, and black. No, my boy, it’s hard to say where art begins, but it’s never that stuff.”

No one seemed disposed to contradict him because Wong had quietly appeared with the coffee and Ronald, shrugging his shoulders, had turned loose Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians and after a terrible scratching they reached the theme that fascinated Oliveira, an anonymous trumpet followed by the piano, all wrapped up in the smoke of an old phonograph and a bad recording, of a corny prejazz band, all in all like those old records, showboats, Storyville nights, where the old only really universal music of the century had come from, something that brought people closer together and in a better way than Esperanto, UNESCO, or airlines, a music which was primitive enough to have gained such universality and good enough to make its own history, with schisms, abdications, and heresies, its Charleston, its Black Bottom, its Shimmy, its Fox Trot, its Stomp, its Blues, to label its forms, this style and the other one, swing, bebop, cool, a counterpoint of romanticism and classicism, hot and intellectual jazz, human music, music with a history in contrast to stupid animal dance music, the polka, the waltz, the
zamba,
a music that could be known and liked in Copenhagen as well as in Mendoza or Capetown, a music that brings adolescents together, with records under their arms, that gives them names and melodies to use as passwords so they can know each other and become intimate and feel less lonely surrounded by bosses, families, and bitter love affairs, a music that accepts all imaginations and tastes, a collection of instrumental 78’s with Freddie Keppard or Bunk Johnson, the reactionary cult of Dixieland, an academic specialization in Bix Beiderbecke, or in the adventures of Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, or Thad Jones, the vulgarities of Erroll Garner or Art Tatum, repentance and rejection, a preference for small groups, mysterious recordings with false names and strange titles and labels made up on the spur of the moment, and that whole
freemasonry of Saturday nights in a student’s room or in some basement café with girls who would rather dance to
Stardust
or
When Your Man Is Going to Put You Down,
and have a sweet slow smell of perfume and skin and heat, and let themselves be kissed when the hour is late and somebody has put on
The Blues with a Feeling
and hardly anybody is really dancing, just standing up together, swaying back and forth, and everything is hazy and dirty and lowdown and every man is in a mood to tear off those warm girdles as his hands go stroking shoulders and the girls have their mouths half-opened and turn themselves over to delightful fear and the night, while a trumpet comes on to possess them in the name of all men, taking them with a single hot phrase that drops them like a cut flower into the arms of their partners, and there comes a motionless race, a jump up into the night air, over the city, until a miniature piano brings them to again, exhausted, reconciled, and still virgins until next Saturday, all of this from a kind of music that horrifies solid citizens who think that nothing is true unless there are programs and ushers, and that’s the way things are and jazz is like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in and tonight in Vienna Ella Fitzgerald is singing while in Paris Kenny Clarke is helping open a new
cave
and in Perpignan Oscar Peterson’s fingers are dancing around and Satchmo, everywhere, with that gift of omnipresence given him by the Lord, in Birmingham, in Warsaw, in Milan, in Buenos Aires, in Geneva, in the whole world, is inevitable, is rain and bread and salt, something completely beyond national ritual, sacred traditions, language and folklore: a cloud without frontiers, a spy of air and water, an archetypal form, something from before, from below, that brings Mexicans together with Norwegians and Russians and Spaniards, brings them back into that obscure and forgotten central flame, clumsily and badly and precariously he delivers them back to a betrayed origin, he shows them that perhaps there have been other paths and that the one they took was maybe not the only one or the best one, or that perhaps there have been other paths and that the one they took was the best, but that perhaps there were other paths that made for softer walking and that they had not taken those, or that they only took them in a halfway sort of way, and that a man is always more than a man and always less than a man,
more than a man because he has in himself all that jazz suggests and lies in wait for and even anticipates, and less than a man because he has made an aesthetic and sterile game out of this liberty, a chessboard where one must be bishop or knight, a definition of liberty which is taught in school, in the very schools where the pupils are never taught ragtime rhythm or the first notes of the blues, and so forth and so on.

(–
97
)

THERE was no use asking himself what he was doing there at that time and with that group, those dear friends strangers still yesterday and tomorrow, people who were but a fleeting episode in place and time. Babs, Ronald, Ossip, Jelly Roll, Akhnaton: what difference did it make? The same shadows from the same green candles. A binge at its highest moment. Doubtful vodka, terribly strong.

If he could have conceived of an extrapolation of all this, understanding the Club, understanding the
Cold Wagon Blues,
understanding La Maga’s love, understanding every thread that would become unraveled from the cuff of things and reach down to his fingers, every puppet and every puppeteer, like an epiphany; understanding them, not as symbols of some other unattainable reality perhaps, but as agents of potency (such language, such lack of decorum), just like lines of flight along a track that he ought to follow at this very moment, disentangling himself from the Eskimo pelt which was so delightfully warm and so scented and so Eskimo that it was frightening, getting down to the level of things, down, down in a solo flight, down to the corner, the corner all by itself, Max’s café, Max all by himself, the streetlight on the Rue de Bellechase where … where alone. And maybe from that moment on.

But all on a level that could be called me-ta-phy-si-cal. Because Horacio, words … That is to say that words, for Horacio…(a question mulled over many times in moments of insomnia). Taking La Maga’s hand, taking it in the rain as if it were cigarette smoke, something that is part of one, in the rain. To make love with her again but a little bit on her side, less easy indifference, a denial that at best is swamped by the uselessness of the effort, the ninny teaching algorisms in some hazy university to grubby grinds or colonels’ daughters. If all this, the
predawn tapioca starting to stick to the skylight, La Maga’s so sad face as she looked at Gregorovius looking at La Maga looking at Gregorovius,
Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,
Babs who was crying again, hidden from Ronald who was not crying but who hid his face in the sticky smoke, the vodka transformed into a truly saintly halo, Perico the Spanish ghost up on a stool of disdain and Pavlovian stylistics, if everything were able to be extrapolated, if everything just
did not exist,
if he were there just so somebody (anybody, but he at the moment, because he was the one who was doing the thinking, in any case he was the one who knew that he was really thinking, eh, Cartesius, you old fuck), so that somebody could extract from all that was going on by striving and biting and especially by delving, it was hard to say how but by delving down to the very dregs, that out of all this there might pop up some grasshopper of peace, some cricket of contentment, that a person might be able to enter any gate and come into any garden, an allegorical garden as far as the others were concerned, just as mandalas are allegorical for everyone else, and in that garden he would find a flower and that flower would be La Maga, or Babs, or Wong, but described and describing itself, reconstituted outside their appearances among the Club, back to what they were, emerged, dawning, at best this all might be just a nostalgic view of the earthly paradise, an ideal of purity, except that purity had come to be inevitably the product of simplification, the bishop moves, rooks move, the knight jumps, pawns fall away, and in the center of the board, big as anthracite lions the kings remain flanked by the cleanest and last and purest of their armies, at dawn the deciding lances will be crossed, fate will be served, peace will reign. A pureness as of coitus between crocodiles, not the pureness of oh Mary my mother with dirty feet; a pureness of a slate roof with doves who naturally shit on the heads of ladies wild with rage and radishes, a pureness of … Horacio, Horacio, please.