Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (24 page)

“I’m sitting on the floor,” Ronald said, “and to tell the truth, it’s not comfortable at all. Listen, Horacio: it makes no sense to deny this reality. It’s here, we’re part of it. The night is here for both of us, it’s raining outside for both of us. How should I know what night is, the weather, the rain, but there they are and they’re outside of me, they’re things that happen to me, there’s nothing I have to do about it.”

“But of course,” Oliveira said. “No one denies that. What we don’t understand is why this has to happen this way, why we are here and it’s raining outside. The absurd thing is not things themselves; what is absurd is that the things are there and that we think they are absurd. The relationship between me and what is happening to me escapes me at this moment, but I don’t deny that it is happening to me. Of course it’s happening to me. And that’s what’s so absurd.”

“It’s not very clear,” Étienne said.

“It can’t be clear, if it were it wouldn’t be true; it might be scientifically true, perhaps, but as an absolute it would be false. Clarity is an intellectual requirement, nothing more. If only we could know more clearly, think clearly along the border of science and reason. And when I say ‘if only,’ just try to see that I’m saying something idiotic. Probably the only anchor of salvation is science, uranium 235, things like that. But we have to live, after all.”

“Yes,” said La Maga, serving coffee. “We have to live, after all.”

“Understand, Ronald,” Oliveira said, squeezing his knees. “You are much more than your intelligence, it’s obvious. Tonight, for example, what’s happening to us now, here, it’s like one of those paintings by Rembrandt where just a bit of light is shining in a corner, and it’s not a physical light, it’s not what you calmly call a lamp, with its watts and wicks. The absurd thing is to believe that we can grasp the totality of what constitutes us in this moment or in any moment, and sense it as something coherent, something acceptable, if you want. Every time we enter a crisis the absurdity is total; understand that dialectics can only set our closet in order in moments of calm. You know very well that at the high point of a crisis we always work by impulse, just the opposite of foresight, doing the most unexpected and wildest sort of thing. And at that moment precisely it could be said that there was a sort of saturation of reality, don’t you think? Reality comes on fast, it shows itself with all its strength, and precisely at that moment the only way of facing it is to renounce dialectics, it’s the moment for shooting somebody, jumping overboard, swallowing a bottle of gardenal like Guy, unleashing the dog, a free hand to do anything. Reason is only good to mummify reality in moments of calm or analyze its future storms, never to resolve a crisis of
the moment. But these crises are like metaphysical outbursts, like a state that perhaps, if we hadn’t chosen the path of reason, would be the natural and current state of
Pithecanthropus erectus
.”

“It’s very hot, watch out,” La Maga said.

“And these crises that most people think of as terrible, as absurd, I personally think they serve to show us the real absurdity, the absurdity of an ordered and calm world, with a room where different people are drinking coffee at two o’clock in the morning, without any of this having the slightest meaning unless it’s hedonistic, how nice it is to be near this stove which does its job so well. Miracles have never seemed absurd to me; the absurdity about them is what comes before and after them.”

“And still,” said Gregorovius, stretching,
“il faut tenter de vivre.”

“Voilà,”
Oliveira thought. “Another proof that I won’t mention. Of all the millions of possible lines he chooses the one I was thinking about ten minutes ago. What people call chance.”

“Well,” Étienne said dreamily, “it’s not a question of trying to live, since life is something that we have been inevitably presented with. It’s been some time now since people have suspected that life and living things are two completely different things. Life lives for itself, whether we like it or not. Guy tried to deny this theory today, but statistically speaking it’s incontrovertible. Which torture and concentration camps vouch for. Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn’t belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it’s life itself defending itself. Etcetera. And with all this I’m going off to bed, because Guy’s shenanigans have reduced me to ashes. Ronald, you must come by the studio tomorrow morning, I’ve just finished a still life that will knock you out.”

“Horacio hasn’t convinced me,” Ronald said. “I agree that a lot of what is around me is absurd, but we probably call it that because that’s what we call anything we don’t understand yet. Someday we’ll know.”

“Charming optimist,” Oliveira said. “We could also put optimism on the tab of pure life. What gives you strength is that for you there is no future, as is logical in the case of most agnostics. You’re always alive, you’re always present, everything is in perfect order for you as in a picture by Van Eyck. But if that horrible thing that is not to have faith and at the same time to
be heading towards death were to happen to you, to be heading towards the scandal of all scandals, your mirror would fog up pretty fast.”

“Come on, Ronald,” Babs said. “It’s very late, I’m getting sleepy.”

“Wait, wait a minute. I was thinking about the death of my father, yes, there’s some truth in what you say. I could never fit that piece into the puzzle, it was something that had no explanation. A happy young man, in Alabama. He was walking along the street and a tree fell on him. I was fifteen at the time and they came to get me in school. But there are so many other absurd things, Horacio, so many deaths and mistakes … I suppose it’s not a question of numbers. It’s not a total absurdity as you think.”

“The absurdity is that it doesn’t look like an absurdity,” said Oliveira in an obscure way. “The absurdity is that you go out in the morning and find a bottle of milk on the doorstep and you are at peace because the same thing happened to you yesterday and will happen again tomorrow. It’s this stagnation, this so be it, this suspicious lack of exceptions. I don’t know, you see, we ought to try some other road.”

“By renouncing intelligence?” asked Gregorovius, suspiciously.

“I don’t know, maybe. Using it in some other way. Can it be proved beyond doubt that logical principles are part and parcel of our intelligence? There are peoples who are capable of survival within a magical order of things … Of course, the unfortunates eat raw worms, but that too is just a question of values.”

“Worms, how awful,” Babs said. “Ronald, dear, it’s getting so late.”

“Underneath it all,” Ronald said, “what bothers you is legality in all its forms. As soon as a thing begins to function well, you feel trapped. But all of us are a little like that, a band of what they call failures because we don’t have professions, degrees, and all that. That’s why we’re in Paris, man, and your famous absurdity is reduced once and for all to a kind of vague, anarchic ideal that you’ll never be able to define in concrete terms.”

“You’re so very right,” Oliveira said. “How nice it would be to go out on the street and put up posters in favor of free Algeria.
And along with everything there is to do in the social struggle.”

“Action can give meaning to your life,” Ronald said. “You must have read that in Malraux, I suppose.”

“Éditions N.R.F.,”
Oliveira said.

“But still you keep on masturbating like a monkey, turning false problems round and round, waiting for God knows what. If all of this is absurd you ought to do something to change it.”

“Your words sound familiar,” Oliveira said. “As soon as you think the discussion is heading towards something you consider more concrete, like your famous bit on action, you get all eloquent. You refuse to see that action, just like inaction, has to be earned. How can one act unless there is a previous central attitude, a sort of acceptance of what we call the good and the true? Your notions about truth and goodness are purely historical, based on an ethic you inherited. But history and ethics are highly dubious as far as I’m concerned.”

“Sometime,” Étienne said as he stood up, “I’d like to hear more details on what you call the central attitude. Right in the middle of the center itself there’s probably a perfect emptiness.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of that,” Oliveira said. “But even for aesthetic reasons, which are easy for you to appreciate, you have to admit that between being in a center and fluttering around its edges there is a qualitative difference that makes you stop and think.”

“Horacio,” said Gregorovius, “is making great use of those very words he was so emphatically advising us against a while back. He’s a man one must not ask for speeches but for other things, foggy and unexplainable things like dreams, coincidences, revelations, and above all, black humor.”

“The guy upstairs knocked again,” Babs said.

“No, it’s the rain,” said La Maga. “It’s time to give Rocamadour his medicine.”

“There’s still some time,” said Babs, crouching over hurriedly as she held her wristwatch next to the lamp. “Ten to three. Let’s go Ronald, it’s quite late.”

“We’ll leave at five after three,” Ronald said.

“Why five after three?” La Maga asked.

“Because the first quarter of an hour is always lucky,” Gregorovius explained.

“Give me another shot of
caña
,” Étienne asked.
“Merde
, it’s all gone.”

Oliveira put out his cigarette. “The knight’s vigil,” he thought thankfully. “They’re real friends, even Ossip, poor devil. Now we shall have fifteen minutes of chain reactions which no one will be able to avoid, no one, not even by thinking that next year, at this very same hour, the most exact and detailed memory will not be capable of changing the output of adrenalin or saliva, the sweat on the palms of the hands … These are the truths that Ronald will always refuse to understand. What have I done tonight? Slightly monstrous, a priori. Perhaps we should have tried an oxygen balloon, something like that. Fool, really; we would only have been prolonging life the way it was in the case of Monsieur Valdemar.”

“We ought to prepare her,” Ronald whispered in his ear.

“Don’t be foolish, please. Can’t you sense that she’s prepared already, that the smell is floating in the air?”

“Now you begin to speak low,” La Maga said, “just when there’s no reason to any more.”

“Tu parles,”
Oliveira thought.

“Smell?” Ronald murmured. “I don’t smell anything.”

“Well, it’ll be three o’clock pretty soon,” Étienne said, shivering as if he were cold. “Make an attempt, Ronald; Horacio may not be a genius, but it’s easy to sense what he’s trying to tell you. All we can do is stay a while longer and go along with whatever happens. And you, Horacio, now that I think of it, what you said about the Rembrandt painting was rather good. There’s metapainting just as there is metamusic, and the old boy was sticking his arms in up to the elbows in what he was doing. Only someone blinded by logic or good manners can stop in front of a Rembrandt and not feel that there is a window there that opens onto something else, a sign. Very dangerous for painting, but on the other hand …”

“Painting is an art form like so many others,” Oliveira said. “It doesn’t need too much protection as far as being a form is concerned. Besides, for every Rembrandt there are a hundred others who are nothing but painters, so painting is quite safe from harm.”

“Luckily,” Étienne said.

“Luckily,” accepted Oliveira. “Luckily everything is going very well in the best of all possible worlds. Turn on the big light, Babs, it’s the switch behind your chair.”

“I wonder where there’s a clean spoon,” said La Maga, getting up.

With an effort that seemed repugnant to him, Oliveira avoided looking towards the corner of the room. La Maga was dazzled by the light and was rubbing her eyes, and Babs, Ossip, and the others looked away, looked back, and looked away again. Babs had started to take La Maga by the arm, but something on Ronald’s face held her back. Étienne got up slowly, pulling his pants up since they were still wet. Ossip unfolded himself from the easy chair and was saying something about finding his raincoat. “Now is the time for them to pound on the ceiling,” Oliveira thought, closing his eyes. “Several thumps in a row, and then three more, solemnly. But everything is backwards, instead of turning off the lights we turn them on, we’re on the stage side, there’s nothing we can do about it.” He got up in turn, and he felt it in his bones, walking all day, the things that had been going on all day long. La Maga had found the spoon on the mantel, behind a pile of records and books. She began to wipe it with the hem of her skirt, she examined it under the light. “Now she’ll put the medicine in the spoon, and then she’ll spill half of it before she reaches the bed,” Oliveira said to himself, leaning against the wall. They were all so still that La Maga looked at them in wonder, but she was having trouble getting the bottle opened, Babs wanted to help her, hold the spoon for her, and all the while her face was all tightened up as if what La Maga was doing was some indescribable horror, until La Maga poured the liquid into the spoon and put the bottle down carelessly on the table where there was barely room for it between the notebooks and the paper, and holding the spoon like Blondin with a balancing pole, as an angel holds a saint who is about to slide off the edge of a cliff, she began to walk, shuffling her slippers, and started over to the bed with Babs at her side, whose face was twitching and who tried to look and not to look and then to look at Ronald and the others who came up behind her, Oliveira bringing up the rear with his cigarette extinguished in his mouth.

“It always spills on me when …” La Maga said, stopping at the edge of the bed.

“Lucía,” Babs said, bringing her hands close to her shoulders but not touching them.

The liquid fell on the bedcovers and the spoon fell into it. La
Maga shrieked and rolled onto the bed, face down then on her back then on her side as her hands clutched an indifferent ashen little doll who trembled and shook without conviction, uselessly mistreated and cuddled.