Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (27 page)

“You’re beginning to understand,” said Oliveira, taking his hand away. “Underneath it all you’ve got the feeling that I can’t say anything to anybody, to you, or to anybody.”

The footsteps stopped when they got to the second floor. “He’s coming back,” Oliveira thought. “He’s afraid I’ll burn up the bed or cut up the sheets. Poor Ossip.” But after a moment the shoes went on their way downstairs.

Seated on the bed, he looked at the papers in the drawer of the night-table. A novel by Pérez Galdós, a bill from the drugstore. It was drugstore night. Some pieces of paper with scribbling in pencil. La Maga had taken everything, there was a smell left over from before, the paper on the walls, the bed with the striped spread. A novel by Galdós, what an idea. If it wasn’t Vicki Baum it was Roger Martin du Gard, and that brought on the strange jump to Tristan L’Hermite, hours on end repeating for any reason at all
“les rêves de l’eau qui songe,”
or an artistic edition of
pantungs
, or stories by Schwitters, a kind of ransom, penitence of the most exquisite and sneaky sort, until suddenly one would fall back into John Dos Passos and spend five days swallowing enormous doses of the printed word.

The scribbling was some kind of letter.

(–
32
)

BABY Rocamadour, baby, baby. Rocamadour.

By now I know you’re like a mirror, Rocamadour, sleeping or looking at your feet. Here I am holding a mirror and thinking that it’s you. But don’t you believe it, I’m writing to you because you don’t know how to read. If you did know I wouldn’t be writing to you or I’d be writing about important things. Someday I’ll have to write to you and tell you to behave and keep warm. Someday seems incredible, Rocamadour. Now I can only write to you in the mirror, sometimes I have to dry my finger because it gets wet with tears. Why, Rocamadour? I’m not sad, your mother is a slob, I dropped the borscht I had prepared for Horacio into the fire; you know who Horacio is, Rocamadour, the man who brought you the velvet bunny last Sunday and who got so bored because you and I had so much to say to one another and he wanted to go back to Paris; then you started to cry and he showed you how the rabbit moved its ears; you looked good then, Horacio I mean, someday you’ll understand, Rocamadour.

Rocamadour, it’s silly to cry like this because I spilled the borscht. The room is full of beet-smell, Rocamadour, you’d laugh if you could see the pieces of beet and the cream, all over the floor. It’s not too bad because I’ll have it all cleaned up by the time Horacio comes, but first I have to write to you, it’s so foolish to cry like this, the pots have taken on a soft shape, there are things like halos on the windowpanes, and you can’t hear the girl upstairs singing, the one who sings
Les Amants du Havre
all day long. When we’re together I’ll sing it for you, you’ll see.
Puisque la terre est ronde, mon amour t’en fais pas, mon amour, t’en fais pas
…Horacio whistles it at night when he’s writing or sketching. You’d like it, Rocamadour. You’d like it, Horacio gets furious because I like to use the same familiar
form Perico does, but it’s different in Uruguay. Perico is the man who didn’t bring you anything the other day but talked so much about children and their diet. He knows a lot, you’ll respect him someday, Rocamadour, and you’ll be a fool if you respect him. But there I go with his familiar again.

Rocamadour, Madame Irène is upset because you’re so handsome, so happy, so weepy and shouty and pissy. She says that everything is all right and that you’re a charming child, but all the time she keeps her hands in the pockets of her apron the way some sneaky animals do, Rocamadour, and that frightens me. When I said so to Horacio he laughed a lot, but he didn’t realize what I really meant, I can’t explain it. Rocamadour, if only there was some way to read in your eyes what has happened to you in these two weeks, moment by moment. I think I’ll try to get a different
nourrice
even though Horacio will get very angry and say, but you’re not interested in what he thinks about me. Another
nourrice
who doesn’t talk so much, I don’t care whether she says you’re naughty or cry at night or don’t want to eat, I don’t care if when she says all that I can feel that she isn’t evil, that she’s telling me something that won’t do you any harm. It’s all so strange, Rocamadour, for example, the way I like to say your name and write it down, every time I get the feeling that I’m touching the tip of your nose and that you’re laughing, but Madame Irène never uses your name, she says
l’enfant
, just imagine, she doesn’t even say
le gosse
, she says
l’enfant
, it’s as if she put on rubber gloves every time she spoke, maybe she already has them on and that’s why she puts her hands in her pockets and says that you’re so good and so handsome.

There’s something called time, Rocamadour, it’s like a bug that just keeps on walking. I can’t explain it to you because you’re so small, but what I mean is that Horacio will be back any minute now. Shall I let him read my letter so that he can add something too? No, I wouldn’t want anyone to read a letter that was just for me either. A big secret between the two of us, Rocamadour. I’m not crying any more, I’m happy, but it’s so hard to understand things, I need so much time to understand just a little of what Horacio and the others understand right away, but they understand everything so well and they can’t understand you and me, they don’t understand why I can’t have you with me, feed you, change your diapers, make you go to
sleep or play with me, they don’t understand and they really don’t care, and I who care so much only know that I can’t have you with me, that it would be bad for both of us, that I have to be alone with Horacio, live with Horacio, I don’t know for how long, helping him look for what he’s looking for and what you’ll be looking for too, Rocamadour, because you will be a man and you too will be searching like a big fool.

That’s how it is, Rocamadour: In Paris we’re like fungus, we grow on the railings of staircases, in dark rooms with greasy smells, where people make love all the time and then fry some eggs and put on Vivaldi records, light cigarettes, and talk like Horacio and Gregorovius and Wong and me, Rocamadour, and like Perico and Ronald and Babs, we all make love and fry eggs and smoke, oh, you can’t imagine how we smoke, how we make love, standing up, lying down, on our knees, with our hands, with our mouths, crying or singing, and outside there are all sorts of things, the windows open onto the air and it all begins with a sparrow or a gutter, it rains a lot here, Rocamadour, much more than in the country, and things get rusty, the leaders, the pigeons’ feet, the wires Horacio uses to make figures with. We don’t have many clothes, we get along with so few, a good overcoat, some shoes to keep the rain out, we’re very dirty, everybody is dirty and good-looking in Paris, Rocamadour, the beds smell of night and deep sleep, dust and books underneath, Horacio falls asleep and the book ends up under the bed, we get into terrible fights because we can’t find the books and Horacio thinks that Ossip has stolen them, until they show up one day and we laugh, and there just about isn’t room for anything, not even another pair of shoes, Rocamadour, to set down a washbasin on the floor we have to move the phonograph, but where can we put it because the table is full of books. I couldn’t have you here, as small as you are there wouldn’t be room for you, you’d bump against the walls. When I think about it I start to cry, Horacio doesn’t understand, he thinks I’m wicked, that it’s bad of me not bringing you here, even though I know he wouldn’t be able to stand you for very long. No one can stand it here for very long, not even you and I, you have to live by fighting each other, it’s the law, the only way that things are worth while but it hurts, Rocamadour, and it’s dirty and bitter, you wouldn’t like it, you see lambs in the fields, or hear the birds perched on the weather vane of the house. Horacio calls me
sentimental, he calls me materialist, he calls me everything because I don’t bring you or because I want to bring you, because I deny it, because I want to go see you, because suddenly I understand that I cannot go, because I’m capable of walking for an hour in the rain if in some part of town I don’t know they’re showing
Potemkin
and I’ve got to see it even if the world comes to an end, Rocamadour, because the world doesn’t matter any more if you don’t have the strength to go ahead and choose something that’s really true, if you keep yourself neat like a dresser drawer, putting you on one side, Sunday on the other, mother-love, a new toy, the Montparnasse station, the train, the visit you have to make. I don’t feel like going, Rocamadour, and you know it’s all right and you don’t feel bad. Horacio is right, sometimes I don’t care about you at all, and I think you’ll thank me for that some day when you’ll be able to understand, when you’ll be able to see that the best thing was that I’m the way I am. But just the same I cry, Rocamadour, and I write this letter to you because I don’t know, because maybe I’m wrong, because maybe I am wicked or sick or a little stupid, not much, just a little, but that’s terrible, it makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about it, I’ve got my toes curled all the way under and I’m going to split open my shoes if I don’t take them off, and I love you so much, Rocamadour, baby Rocamadour, little garlic-clove, I love you so much, sugar-nose, sapling, toy pony…

(–
132
)

“THERE’S a reason behind his leaving me alone,” Oliveira thought as he opened and shut the drawer of the night-table. “A gracious act or a dirty trick, it’s all in the way you look at it. He’s probably on the stairway now, listening like a half-baked sadist. He’s waiting for the great Karamazov crisis, the Céline attack. Or he’s tiptoed off on his Herzegovina toes and after a second glass of kirsch at Bébert’s he’ll raise mental hell and plan out the ceremonies for the arrival of Adgalle. Torture through waiting: Montevideo, the Seine, or Lucca. Variants: the Marne, Perugia. But then you, really …”

Lighting a Gauloise from the butt of the first, he looked into the drawer again, took out the novel, thinking vaguely about pity, a subject for a thesis. Pity for himself: that was more like it. “I never asked for happiness,” he thought, thumbing slowly through the novel. “It’s not an excuse, it’s not a justification.
Nous ne sommes pas au monde. Donc, ergo, dunque
…Why should I pity her? Because I found a letter to her son which is really meant for me? Me, author of the complete letters to Rocamadour. No reason for pity. Out there wherever she is her hair is burning like a tower and it singes me from far away, breaks me up into pieces by nothing more than just her absence. And
patati patata.
She’s going to get along fine without me and without Rocamadour. A bluebottle fly, delightful, flying towards the sun, runs into a window, bump, a bloody nose, tragedy. Two minutes later so happy, buying a paper doll in a stationery store and running out to put it in an envelope and send it to one of her strange girlfriends with Nordic names scattered about in the weirdest countries. How can you feel pity for a cat, for a lioness? Living-machines, perfect bolts of lightning. My only fault is that I wasn’t combustible enough so that she could
warm her hands and feet on me at her pleasure. She thought she was getting a burning bush and all she got was a pot of cold water. Poor little darling, shit.”

(–
67
)

IN September of 1880, a few months after the demise of my AND the things she reads, a clumsy novel, in a cheap edition father, I decided to give up my business activities, transferring besides, but you wonder how she can get interested in things them to another house in Jerez whose standing was as solvent like this. To think that she’s spent hours on end reading tasteless as that of my own; I liquidated all the credits I could, rented out stuff like this and plenty of other incredible things,
Elle
and the properties, transferred my holdings and inventories, and
France Soir
, those sad magazines Babs lends her.
And moved to
moved to Madrid to take up residence there. My uncle (in truth
Madrid to take up residence there
, I can see how after you swalmy father’s first cousin), Don Rafael Bueno de Guzmán y Ataide, low four or five pages you get in the groove and can’t stop read-wanted to put me up in his home; but I demurred for fear of ing, a little like the way you can’t help sleeping or pissing, losing my independence. I was finally able to effect a comproslavery or whipping or drooling.
I was finally able to effect a
mise between my comfortable freedom and my uncle’s gracious
compromise
, a style that uses prefabricated words to transmit offer; and renting a flat in his building, I arranged matters so superannuated ideas, coins that go from hand to hand, from that I could be alone when I wished or I could enjoy family generation to generation,
te voilà en pleine écholalie. Enjoy
warmth when that became essential. The good gentleman lived,
family warmth
, that’s good, shit if that isn’t good. Oh, Maga, I should say we lived, in a section that had been built up on a how could you swallow this stuff, and what the hell is the charity site where the charity warehouse had once been. My uncle’s flat warehouse, for God’s sake. I wonder how much time she spent
was the main one, 18,000
reales
he paid, handsome and happy, reading this stuff, probably convinced that this was life, and even though it was not adequate for such a large family. I took you were right, it is life, that’s why we’ve got to get rid of it, the ground-floor apartment, a little less spacious than the main (The main one, what’s that.) And on some afternoons when one, but marvelously extensive for me alone, and I decorated I’d got the bug to cover the whole Egyptian section of the Louvre, it luxuriously and put in all the comforts to which I had become case by case, and I would come home with a taste for
mate
and accustomed. My income, thank God, allowed me to do all of this bread and jam, I’d find you stuck by the window with one of and more.