Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (18 page)

“If I knock on the door it will startle them. I don’t think Valentin wants to have any scene.”

“Nothing bothers him when he’s like this, nothing bothers him at all. It wouldn’t be beyond him to get dressed up in my clothes and walk into the police station on the corner singing the
Marseillaise.
He almost did it once. Robert from the warehouse caught him in time and brought him home. Robert was a good boy, he had his quirks too and he understood.”

“Let me go up,” Oliveira insisted. “You go to the café on the corner and wait for me. I’ll fix things up, you can’t spend the whole night like this.”

The hall light went on just as Berthe Trépat was about to give him a stronger answer. She jumped and ran out into the street, making a show of getting away from Oliveira, who stood there not knowing what to do. A couple was coming down the stairs, they passed without looking and went along towards the Rue Thouin. With a nervous glance behind, Berthe Trépat huddled back into the doorway. It was raining hard.

Not feeling like it at all, but asking himself what else he could do, Oliveira went inside looking for the stairway. He could not have taken more than three steps when Berthe Trépat grabbed him by the arm and hauled him back towards the door. She was mumbling all sorts of orders, prayers, everything got mixed up in a kind of cackling counterpoint that alternated between words and interjections and Oliveira let himself be led along, giving up to whatever might come. The light went out but it went on again in a few moments and they heard voices saying goodbye on the second or third floor. Berthe Trépat let go of Oliveira and leaned against the side of the door, pretending that she was buttoning up her raincoat as if she was getting ready to go out. She didn’t move until the two men who were coming down went by her, looking at Oliveira in an incurious way and mumbling the
pardon
that goes with all hallway encounters. For a minute Oliveira considered going upstairs without any further ado, but he wasn’t sure which floor she lived on. He took a heavy drag on his cigarette, back in the darkness, waiting for something to happen or for nothing to happen. In spite of the rain Berthe Trépat’s sobs began to get clearer and clearer. He went over and put his hand on her shoulder.

“Please, Madame Trépat, don’t carry on like that. Tell me what we can do, there must be some way out of this.”

“Leave me alone, leave me alone,” the pianist muttered.

“You’re worn out, you’ve got to get to bed. Anyway, let’s go to a hotel, I don’t have any money either, but I can make a deal with the manager, I’ll pay him tomorrow. I know a hotel on the Rue Valette, it’s not far.”

“A hotel,” Berthe Trépat said, turning around and looking at him.

“It’s not good, but it is a way for you to get a good night’s sleep.”

“Do you really mean to take me to a hotel?”

“Madame, I will take you to the hotel, I will speak to the clerk and have him give you a room.”

“A hotel, you want to take me to a hotel?”

“I don’t want anything,” Oliveira said, losing his patience. “I can’t offer you my own place for the simple reason that I don’t have any. You won’t let me go up and make Valentin open the door. Would you rather I left? In that case, I’ll say good night to you.”

But who can tell whether he really did say all that or whether he was only thinking it. He had never been so far away from those words that in some other moment might have been the ones that came to his mind right off. This wasn’t the way to do things. He didn’t know exactly what to do, but this certainly wasn’t the way. And Berthe Trépat was looking at him as she huddled against the doorway. No, he hadn’t said anything, he had been standing quietly alongside her, and strange as it seemed, he still wanted to help, do something for Berthe Trépat who was looking straight at him and raising her hand little by little, and suddenly she let it go full force across Oliveira’s face and he drew back confused, getting out from under the worst of the slap but feeling the lash of her slender fingers, the instantaneous scratch of her nails.

“A hotel,” Berthe Trépat repeated. “Just listen, all of you, just listen to what he said.”

She was looking down the darkened hallway, moving her eyes about, her fervent painted lips were twisting around like something independent, given a life of their own, and in his upset Oliveira thought he saw once more the hands of La Maga trying to shove the suppository into Rocamadour, and Rocamadour was
clutching the cheeks of his behind together as he bellowed horribly and Berthe Trépat twisted her mouth from one side to the other, her eyes fixed on an invisible audience in the shadows of the hallway, her absurd hairdo shaking along more and more intensely with the movements of her head.

“Please,” Oliveira murmured, stroking the place where she had scratched him and which was bleeding slightly, “how could you think such a thing?”

But she could think it, because (and she shouted it out and the light in the hall went on again) she knew very well what sort of degenerate followed her down the street the way they did with all decent women, but she would not permit it (and the door of the concierge’s apartment began to open up and Oliveira saw the face of a monstrous rat peep out, with eyes that looked about avidly) and no monster, no drooling satyr was going to attack her in the doorway of her own home, that’s what police are for and the courts—and someone came running down the stairs full speed, a boy with ruffled hair and a gypsy look was leaning on the banister to look and listen at his pleasure—and if her neighbors would not look out for her she was able to look after herself alone, because this wasn’t the first time that a degenerate, a dirty exhibitionist had…

On the corner of the Rue Tournefort Oliveira realized that he still had the cigarette butt between his fingers, extinguished by the rain and half melted away. Leaning against a lamppost, he lifted up his face and let the rain wet it all over. That was so nobody could tell, with his face all wet in the rain nobody could tell. Then he started to walk slowly, hunched over, with the collar of his lumberjacket buttoned up against his chin; as always, the pelt on the collar stank like something terribly rotten, like a tannery. He wasn’t thinking about anything, just letting himself walk along as if he had been looking around, a big, fat-footed dog with his fur hanging down walking in the rain. Once in a while he would lift up his hand and wipe his face, but finally he let it rain, sometimes he would thrust out his lip and drink up some of the salty water running down his cheeks. When much later and near the Jardin des Plantes he picked up again on the day’s memories, an applied and careful retelling of every minute of that day, he said to himself that he had really not been such an idiot to have felt so happy seeing the old woman home. But that as always he had paid dearly for
that foolish happiness. Now he would begin to reproach himself, put himself down little by little until the same old thing was left there, a hole where time was blowing, an imprecise continuum that had no set bounds. “Let’s not get literary,” he thought while he dug out a cigarette after he had dried his hands a bit with the heat of his pants pockets. “Let’s forget about bringing up those bitchy words, those made-up pimps. That’s how it was and too bad. Berthe Trépat … It’s all been too nutty, but it would have been nice to have gone upstairs and had a drink with her and with Valentin, taken off my shoes next to the fire. Actually, that’s all I ever wanted to do, the idea of taking off my shoes and drying my socks. I crumped out on you, baby, what you going to do about it. Let’s let things lie the way they are, I’ve got to get to bed. There was no other reason, there couldn’t have been any other reason. If I don’t let myself go along I might go back to the apartment and spend the night being wet-nurse.” From the Rue du Sommerard it would be twenty minutes in the rain; it would be better to pop into the first hotel and go to bed. One after another his matches began to go out. It was enough to make you laugh.

(–
124
)

“I DON’T know how to explain it,” La Maga said as she dried the spoon with a towel that was not too clean. “Other people could probably do a better job of it, but I’ve always been that way, it’s easier to talk about sad things than happy ones.”

“It’s a law,” Gregorovius said. “Perfectly put forth, a profound truth. Raised to the level of literary skill it means that bad writing comes from good feelings, and other things along the same line. Happiness cannot be explained, Lucía, probably because it is the ultimate moment of the veil of Maya.”

La Maga looked at him perplexed and Gregorovius sighed.

“The veil of Maya,” he repeated. “But let’s not get things confused. You have seen very well that misfortune is, let’s say, tangible, perhaps because out of it comes the separation into subject and object. That’s why memory is so important, that’s why it’s so easy to describe catastrophes.”

“What happens,” said La Maga as she stirred the milk on the hot-plate, “is that happiness belongs to only one person while misfortune seems to belong to everybody.”

“A worthy corollary,” said Gregorovius. “What’s more, I want you to know that I’m not nosy. The other night, at the meeting of the Club … Well, Ronald had some vodka that was too much of a tongue-loosener. I don’t want you to think that I’m any kind of prier, I just like to know my friends better. You and Horacio … What I mean is that there’s something about you I can’t explain, some kind of mystery in your core. Ronald and Babs say that you’re the perfect couple, that you complement each other. I don’t see that you complement each other so much.”

“What difference does it make?”

“It doesn’t make any difference, but you were telling me that Horacio has gone off.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” La Maga said. “I can’t talk about happiness, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been happy. If you want I can go on telling why Horacio left, why it could have been me who left if it hadn’t been for Rocamadour.” She waved her hand in the direction of the suitcases, the great mess of paper and boxes and records that filled the room. “I’ve got to take care of all this, I’ve got to find some place to go … I don’t want to stay here, it’s too sad.”

“Étienne could find you a place with good light. When Rocamadour goes back to the country. Something around seven thousand francs a month. In that case, if it’s all right with you, I’ll take this place. I like it, it has an aura. One can think here, it’s comfortable.”

“Don’t you believe it,” La Maga said. “Around seven o’clock the girl upstairs begins to sing
Les Amants du Havre.
It’s a nice song, but on and on …”

“That’s pretty,” Gregorovius said indifferently.

“Yes, it has a great philosophy, that’s what Ledesma would have said. No, you didn’t know him. It was before Horacio, in Uruguay.”

“The Negro?”

“No, the Negro’s name was Ireneo.”

“Then the story about the Negro was true?”

La Maga looked at him surprised. Gregorovius really was stupid. Except for Horacio (and sometimes…) everybody who had ever wanted her always acted like such an idiot. Stirring the milk, she went over to the bed and tried to get Rocamadour to take a few spoonfuls. Rocamadour shrieked and refused, the milk ran down his neck. “Topitopitopi,” La Maga kept saying with the voice of a hypnotist giving out prizes. “Topitopitopi,” trying to get a spoonful in Rocamadour’s mouth as he got red and refused to drink, but suddenly he relented for some reason and slid down towards the foot of the bed as he took one spoonful after another to the immense satisfaction of Gregorovius, who was filling his pipe and beginning to feel a little like a father.

“Chin chin,” La Maga said, leaving the pot by the side of the bed and tucking in Rocamadour who was rapidly getting drowsy. “He still has a high fever, it must be a hundred and three at least.”

“Didn’t you use the thermometer?”

“It’s hard to get it in, then he’ll cry for twenty minutes afterwards, Horacio can’t stand it. I can tell by how warm his forehead is. It must be over a hundred and three, I can’t understand why it doesn’t go down.”

“Too much empiricism, I’m afraid,” Gregorovius said. “And isn’t that milk bad for him when his fever is so high?”

“It’s not so high for a child,” La Maga said, lighting up a Gauloise. “The best thing would be to turn off the light so he’ll fall asleep right away. Over there, next to the door.”

A glow was coming from the stove and it seemed to get brighter as they sat opposite each other and smoked for a while without talking. Gregorovius watched La Maga’s cigarette go up and down, for a second her strangely placid face would light up like a hot coal, her eyes would glisten as she looked at him, everything was wrapped up in a half-light in which Rocamadour’s whimpering and clucking got softer and softer until it stopped altogether, followed by a light hiccup that came periodically. A clock struck eleven.

“He’s not coming back,” La Maga said. “Of course, he’ll have to come for his things, but that’s not the same. It’s over,
kaput.
”

“I wonder,” Gregorovius said cautiously. “Horacio is so sensitive, it’s difficult for him to get around in Paris. He thinks that he’s doing what he wants to do, that he has a lot of liberty here, but he goes around running into barriers. All you have to do is see him on the street, once I followed him a while, from a distance.”

“Spy,” La Maga said in a tone that was almost friendly.

“Let’s say ‘observer.’ ”

“You were really following me, even though I wasn’t with him.”

“Maybe I was, I didn’t stop to think about it at the time. I like to see how people I know act, it’s always more exciting than a game of chess. I have discovered that Wong masturbates and that Babs practices a kind of Jansenist charity, her face turned to the wall while she drops a piece of bread with something
inside it. There was a time when I used to study my mother. It was in Herzegovina, a long time ago. Adgalle used to fascinate me, she insisted on wearing a blond wig when I knew very well that her hair was black. Nobody in the castle knew this; we had moved in there after Count Rossler died. When I asked her about it (I was barely ten then, it was such a happy time) my mother would laugh and make me swear never to reveal the truth. That truth I had to hide used to make me nervous, it was simpler and more beautiful than the blond wig. The wig was a work of art, my mother could comb her hair quite naturally while the maid was there and no one would suspect anything. But when she was alone, I really don’t know why, but I wanted to hide under a sofa or behind the purple curtains. I decided to bore a hole in the wall between the library and my mother’s boudoir—I used to work at night when they thought I was asleep. That’s how I was able to watch Adgalle take off her blond wig, shake out her black hair which gave her such a different look, so beautiful, and then she took off the other wig and there was the perfect cue-ball, something so disgusting that I vomited most of my goulash on my pillow that night.”