Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (14 page)

“Tu t’accroches à des histoires,”
Crevel says.
“Tu étreins des mots
…”

“No, old man, that’s more like what they do across the ocean, which you know nothing about. It’s been a long time since I went to bed with words on. I still wear them, like you or anybody else, but I give them a good brushing before I put them on.”

Crevel is distrustful and I understand why. A whole canefield of words has grown up between La Maga and me, we have only been separated by a few hours and a few blocks and my sorrow is already
called
sorrow, and my love is
called
love … I shall keep on feeling less and less and remembering more and more, but what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously until one’s self itself becomes a vicar, the backward-looking face opens its eyes wide, the real face slowly becomes dim as in old pictures and Janus is suddenly any one of us. I’m saying all of this to Crevel but I’m speaking to La Maga, now that we’re so far apart. And I don’t talk to her with the words that only used to serve to make us misunderstand each other, now that it’s too late I begin to choose others, hers, the ones wrapped up in what she understands and which has no name, sparks and emanations which crackle in the air between two bodies or which can fill a room or a line of poetry with gold dust. But isn’t this the way we have been living, softly slashing at each other? No, that’s not the way; she might have wanted to,
but once again I imposed the false order that hides chaos, pretending that I was dedicated to a profound existence while all the time it was one that barely dipped its toe into the terrible waters. There are metaphysical rivers, she swims in them like that swallow swimming in the air, spinning madly around a belfry, letting herself drop so that she can rise up all the better with the swoop. I describe and define and desire those rivers, but she swims in them. I look for them, find them, observe them from the bridge, but she swims in them. And she doesn’t know it, any more than the swallow. It’s not necessary to know things as I do, one can live in disorder without being held back by any sense of order. That disorder is her mysterious order, that bohemia of body and soul which opens its true doors wide for her. Her life is not disorder except for me, buried among the prejudices I despise and respect at the same time. Me, inexorably condemned to be pardoned by La Maga who judges me without knowing it. Oh, let me come in, let me see some day the way your eyes see.

Useless. Condemned to be acquitted. Go home and read Spinoza. La Maga doesn’t know who Spinoza is. La Maga reads tedious Russian and German novels and Pérez Galdós and forgets immediately after what she has read. She will never suspect that she has condemned me to read Spinoza. A strange judge, a judge with her hands, with her racing down the street, a judge because she can just look at me and leave me naked, a judge by being silly and unhappy and upset and dull and less than anything. By everything I have known from my bitter knowledge, with my rusty slide rule of a college graduate and enlightened man, by all of that, a judge. Fall down, swallow, with those sharp scissors with which you cut the sky of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, pluck out these eyes that look without seeing, I have quickly been condemned without appeal to those blue gallows to which the hands of the woman caring for her son have raised me, let the execution be quick, quickly back to the false order of being alone and recovering one’s self-sufficiency, self-knowledge, self-awareness. And with so much knowledge a useless anxiety to pity something, to have it rain here inside, so that at long last it will start to rain and smell of earth and living things, yes, living things at long last.

(–
79
)

OPINION had it that the old man had slipped, that the car had run the red light, that the old man had tried to commit suicide, that things were getting worse than ever in Paris, that traffic was terrible, that it was not the old man’s fault, that it was the old man’s fault, that the brakes on the car were not working right, that the old man had been frightfully careless, that living was getting more expensive every day, that there were too many foreigners in Paris who didn’t understand the traffic laws and were taking work away from Frenchmen.

The old man didn’t seem to be hurt too badly. He was smiling weakly and stroking his moustache. An ambulance arrived, they put him on a stretcher, the driver of the car kept gesticulating and explaining the accident to the policeman and to the onlookers.

“He lives at 32 Rue Madame,” said a blond boy who had been speaking to Oliveira and others who had stopped. “He’s a writer, I know him. He writes books.”

“The bumper hit his legs, but the driver already had the brakes on.”

“It hit him in the chest,” the boy said. “The old man slipped on some shit in the street.”

“It hit him on the legs,” Oliveira said.

“It all depends on your point of view,” said an enormously short man.

“It hit him in the chest,” the boy said. “I saw it with my own two eyes.”

“In that case … Shouldn’t someone tell his family?”

“He doesn’t have any family, he’s a writer.”

“Oh,” said Oliveira.

“He has a cat and lots of books. Once I delivered a package to him for the concierge and he invited me in. There were books all
over the place. Something like this was bound to happen to him, writers are so absent-minded. That’ll be the day, when I get hit by a car …”

A few drops of rain began to fall and they immediately dissolved the circle of witnesses. Putting up the collar of his lumberjacket, Oliveira turned his nose into the cold wind and began to walk in no direction in particular. He was sure that the old man had not been seriously injured, but he kept on seeing his face, which could almost be described as placid, perplexed maybe, as they carried him in the stretcher and spoke friendly, comforting words to him,
“Allez, pépère, c’est rien, ça!”
from the stretcher-bearer, a redhead who must have said the same thing to everybody. “A complete lack of communication,” Oliveira thought. “It’s not so much that we’re alone, that’s a well-known fact that any fool can plainly see. Being alone is basically being alone on a certain level in which other lonelinesses could communicate with us if that were the case. But bring on any conflict, an accident in the street or a declaration of war, provoke the brutal crossing of different levels, and a man who is perhaps an outstanding Sanskrit scholar or a quantum physicist becomes a
pépère
in the eyes of the stretcher-bearer who arrives on the scene. Edgar Allan Poe on a stretcher, Verlaine in the hands of a sawbones, Nerval and Artaud facing psychiatrists. What could that Italian Galen have known about Keats as he bled him and helped him die of hunger? If men like them are silent, as is most likely, the others will triumph blindly, without evil intent, of course, without knowing that the consumptive over there, that injured man lying naked on that bed, are doubly alone, surrounded by beings who move about as if behind a glass, from a different place in time …”

Stopping in a doorway he lit a cigarette. It was towards the end of the afternoon and groups of girls were coming out of offices, with the need to laugh, to speak in shouts, to push each other, to sop up just this quarter-hour’s worth before falling back into the world of beef and weekly magazines. Oliveira kept on walking. Without having to dramatize, the smallest bit of objectivity would bring out into the open all the absurdity of Paris, the gregarious life. Since he had been thinking about poets, it was easy to remember all of those who had denounced the solitude of man among his fellows, the comedy of greetings, the “excuse me” when people met on the stairs, the seat that is
given to women on the subway, the brotherhood observed in politics and sports. Only a biological and sexual optimism is capable of covering up the isolation of some, no matter what John Donne might have felt about it. Contacts made in action in tribes in work in bed on the ballfield were contacts between branches and leaves which reached out and caressed each other from tree to tree while the trunks stood there disdainfully and irreconcilably parallel.
“Underneath it all
we could be what we are on the surface,” Oliveira thought, “but we would have to live in a different way. And what does it mean to live in a different way? Maybe to live absurdly in order to do away with the absurd, to dive into one’s self with such force that the leap will end up in the arms of someone else. Yes, maybe love, but that
otherness
lasts only as long as a woman lasts, and besides only as everything concerns that woman. Basically there is no such thing as otherness, maybe just that pleasant thing called
togetherness.
Of course, that is something …” Love, an ontologizing ceremony, a giver of being. And that is why he was thinking only now of what he should have thought about in the beginning: without the possession of self, there was no possession of otherness, and who could really possess himself? Who had come back from himself, from that absolute solitude which meant not even being in one’s own company, having to go to the movies or to a whorehouse or to friends’ houses or to get involved in a time-consuming profession or in marriage so that at least one could be alone-along-with-all-the-others? That’s how, paradoxically, solitude would lead to the heights of sociability, to the great illusion of the company of others, to the solitary man in a maze of mirrors and echoes. But people like him and so many others (or those who reject themselves but know themselves close up) got into the worst paradox, the one of reaching the border of otherness perhaps and not being able to cross over. That true otherness made up of delicate contacts, marvelous adjustments with the world, could not be attained from just one point; the outstretched hand had to find response in another hand stretched out from the beyond, from the other part.

(–
62
)

STANDING on a corner, fed up with the rarified atmosphere of his musing (and the fact that he kept on thinking, he didn’t know why, about the injured old man lying in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors and internes and nurses, amiably impersonal as they asked him his name, age, occupation, told him it wasn’t anything, that they would take care of him right away with shots and dressings), Oliveira had begun to look at what was going on around him and how any street corner in any city was the perfect illustration of what he had been thinking and almost took his work away from him. In the café, protected from the cold (a matter of going in and having a glass of wine), a group of bricklayers were talking with the man behind the bar. Two students were reading and writing at one table and Oliveira saw them look up and look at the bricklayers, go back to their books or notebooks, look up again. From one glass cage to another, look, withdraw, look: that’s all there was to it. Up above the sidewalk section of the café, which was closed, a young woman on the second floor seemed to be sewing or cutting out a dress by the window. Her upswept hair was moving in time to what she was doing and Oliveira tried to picture her thoughts, her shears, her children who would be coming back from school any moment now, her husband finishing work in an office or in a bank. The bricklayers, the students, the woman, and now a bum turned the corner of the street with a bottle of red wine sticking out of his pocket, pushing a baby carriage filled with old newspapers, tin cans, torn and dirty clothes, a headless doll, a package with a fishtail sticking out. The bricklayers, the students, the woman, the bum, and in a booth looking like someone condemned to the pillory,
LOTERIE NATIONALE
, an old woman with unrepatriated bits of straggly hair popping out from underneath a kind of gray bonnet, blue
mittens on her hands,
TIRAGE MERCREDI
, waiting but not in wait for customers, a charcoal brazier by her feet, encased in her vertical coffin, motionless, half-frozen, offering good fortune and thinking God knows what, clots of ideas, senile commonplaces, the teacher who used to give her candy when she was a girl, a husband killed on the Somme, a traveling-salesman son, at night her garret without running water, a three-day soup,
boeuf bourguignon
which is cheaper than a cut of meat,
TIRAGE MERCREDI
. The bricklayers, the students, the bum, the lottery woman, every group, everybody in his glass cage, but let an old man fall under a car and right away there is a general running to the scene of the accident, an animated exchange of opinion, of criticism, disparities and coincidences until it starts to rain again and the bricklayers go back to the bar, the students to their table, the X’s to X and the Z’s to Z.

“Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity,” Oliveira repeated. “But Jesus, I’m going to get soaked, I’ve got to get under someplace.” He spotted the posters of the Salle de Géographie and took refuge in the doorway. A lecture about Australia, the unknown continent. A meeting of the disciples of the Christ of Monfavet. A piano concert by Madame Berthe Trépat. Open registration for a course on meteors. Win a black belt in judo in five months. A lecture on the urbanization of Lyons. The piano concert was going to start very soon and it didn’t cost much. Oliveira looked at the sky, shrugged his shoulders, and went in. He thought vaguely about going to Ronald’s or to Étienne’s studio, but it was better to leave that for nighttime. He didn’t know why, but he thought it was funny for an artist to be named Berthe Trépat. He also thought it was amusing that he was taking refuge in a concert to get away from himself for a little while, an ironic illustration of what he had been thinking about while he was wandering about the streets. “We’re nothing,” he thought, as he passed along 120 francs at tooth-level to the old woman caged up in the ticket booth. He got a ticket in the tenth row out of the pure perversity of the old woman, since the concert was about to start and there was nobody else except a few old bald heads, a few old beards, and some others who partook of both qualities, who had an air of being from the neighborhood or from the family, two women between forty and forty-five with old coats and dripping umbrellas, a few young people, couples mostly and
arguing strenuously with shoves and the noise of candy being chewed and the squeaking of the old Vienna seats. Twenty people in all. It smelled like a rainy afternoon, the big theater was cold and damp, and one could hear talking backstage behind the backdrop. An old man had lit his pipe and Oliveira was quick to dig out a Gauloise. He didn’t feel too well, one of his shoes was full of water, and the musty smell and the smell of wet clothes bothered him a little. He took a deep drag, getting the cigarette hot and making it fall apart. A deaf-mute buzzer sounded outside, and one of the young people began to clap vigorously. The ancient usher, with her beret pulled to one side and make-up on that she surely must have slept in, closed a curtain in the back of the hall. At that point Oliveira remembered that they had given him a program. It was a sloppy mimeographed sheet on which he could make out with some effort that Madame Berthe Trépat, gold medalist, would play the
Three Discontinuous Movements
of Rose Bob (première), the
Pavan for General Leclerc
, by Alix Alix (first time for a civilian audience), and the
Délibes-Saint-Saëns Synthesis
, by Délibes, Saint-Saëns, and Berthe Trépat.