Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (31 page)

“Let her go,” Oliveira asked the gendarme. “The poor old girl’s drunker than I am.”

He ducked just in time to miss the swing. Another gendarme grabbed him around the waist, and with one shove pitched him into the patrol wagon. They tossed Emmanuèle in on top of him and she was singing something that sounded like
Le Temps des cerises.
They left them alone inside the truck, and Oliveira rubbed his thigh which was hurting terribly, and he joined in the singing of
Le Temps des cerises
, if that’s what it was. The wagon started up as if it had been sprung from a catapult.

“Et tous nos amours,”
Emmanuèle shouted.

“Et tous nos amours,”
Oliveira said, throwing himself onto the bench and looking for a cigarette. “This bit, old girl, not even Heraclitus.”

“Tu me fais chier,”
Emmanuèle said as she began a weeping that sounded more like howling.
“Et tous nos amours,”
she sang between sobs. Oliveira could hear the cops laughing, looking at them through the grill. “Well, if you wanted tranquillity you’re
going to get lots of it. Better take advantage of it, forget what you’re thinking about,” he said to himself. It was O.K. to call up and tell them all what a funny dream you had had, but that’s enough, don’t push it. Everybody on his own side, dropsy is cured with patience, with shit, and with solitude. Besides, the Club was all over with, happily
fini
, and all that was left to get rid of would just be a matter of time. The wagon slammed on its brakes at a corner and when Emmanuèle started to shout
Quand il reviendra, le temps des cerises
, one of the cops opened the window and warned that if they didn’t shut up he was going to kick their teeth in. Emmanuèle lay down on the floor of the truck, face down and wailing, and Oliveira put his feet on her behind and settled himself comfortably on the bench. Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors. On top is Heaven, on the bottom is Earth, it’s very hard to get the pebble up to Heaven, you almost always miscalculate and the stone goes off the drawing. But little by little you start to get the knack of how to jump over the different squares (spiral hopscotch, rectangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often) and then one day you learn how to leave Earth and make the pebble climb up into Heaven (
Et tous nos amours
, Emmanuèle was sobbing face down), the worst part of it is that precisely at that moment, when practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb up into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you’re into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too. And since you have come out of childhood (
Je n’oublierai pas le temps des cerises
, Emmanuèle was kicking about on the floor) you forget that in order to get to Heaven you have to have a pebble and a toe. Which is what Heraclitus knew, up to his neck in shit, and probably Emmanuèle too, wiping off the snot with the back of her hand in the midst of the cherry season, or the two fairies who somehow were sitting in the patrol wagon (but of course, the door had been opened and shut in the midst of shrieks and laughter and the toot of a whistle) and were laughing like mad as they looked at Emmanuèle on the floor and at Oliveira, who wanted a smoke but who didn’t have any cigarettes and matches even though he had not remembered the police going through his pockets,
et
tous nos amours, et tous nos amours.
A pebble and a toe, what La Maga had known so well and he much less well, and the Club more or less well, and who from a childhood in Burzaco or in the suburbs of Montevideo would show the straight and narrow path to Heaven without need of Vedanta or Zen or collected eschatologies, yes, reach Heaven with kicks, get there with the pebble (carry your cross? Not a very portable object) and with one last kick send the stone up against
l’azur l’azur l’azur l’azur
, crash, a broken pane, the final bed, naughty child, and what difference did it make if behind the broken pane there was the kibbutz, since Heaven was nothing but a childish name for his kibbutz.

“Let’s sing and smoke for all of that,” Horacio said. “Emmanuèle, get up, you weepy old woman.”

“Et tous nos amours,”
Emmanuèle bellowed.

“Il est beau,”
one of the fairies said, looking tenderly at Horacio.
“Il a l’air farouche.”

The other fairy had taken a brass tube out of his pocket and was looking through a hole in the end, smiling and making faces. The younger fairy snatched away the tube and took a look. “You can’t see anything, Jo,” he said. “Yes you can, doll,” said Jo. “No, no, no, no.” “Yes you can, yes you can. L
OOK THROUGH THE PEEPHOLE AND YOU
’
LL SEE PATTERNS PRETTY AS CAN BE
.” “It’s nighttime, Jo.” Jo took out a box of matches and lit one in front of the kaleidoscope. Squeals of enthusiasm, patterns pretty as can be.
Et tous nos amours
, Emmanuèle declaimed, sitting up on the floor of the truck. Everything was so perfect, everything happening right on time, hopscotch and the kaleidoscope, the smaller fairy looking and looking, oh Jo, I can’t see anything, more light, more light, Jo. Collapsed on the bench, Horacio greeted the Obscure one, his head of darkness sticking up through the pyramid of manure with two eyes that looked like green stars, patterns pretty as can be, the Obscure one was right, a road to the kibbutz, perhaps the only road to the kibbutz, not the world, people grabbing at the kaleidoscope from the wrong end, then you had to turn it around with the help of Emmanuèle and Pola and Paris and La Maga and Rocamadour, stretch out on the floor like Emmanuèle and from there begin to look out from the mountain of manure, look at the world through the eye of your asshole and you’ll see patterns pretty as can be, the pebble had to pass through the eye of your asshole,
kicked along by the tip of your toe, and from Earth to Heaven the squares would be open, the labyrinth would unfold like the spring of a broken clock as it made workmen’s time fly off in a thousand pieces, and through the snot and semen and stink of Emmanuèle and the shit of the Obscure one you would come onto the road leading to the kibbutz of desire, no longer rising up to Heaven (rise up, a hypocrite word, Heaven,
flatus vocis
), but walk along with the pace of a man through a land of men towards the kibbutz far off there but on the same level, just as Heaven was on the same level as Earth on the dirty sidewalk where you played the game, and one day perhaps you would enter that world where speaking of Heaven did not mean a greasy kitchen rag, and one day someone would see the true outline of the world, patterns pretty as can be, and, perhaps, pushing the stone along, you would end up entering the kibbutz.

(–
37
)

HE hated the name Traveler because he had never been outside Argentina except for trips over to Montevideo and once up to Asunción in Paraguay, centers that he remembered with sovereign indifference. At the age of forty he was still stuck on the Calle Cachimayo, and the fact that he was a sort of agent and jack-of-all-trades for a circus called Las Estrellas gave him no hope whatever of traveling around the world Barnum-style; the zone of operations of his circus extended from Santa Fe to Carmen de Patagones, with long runs in the capital, La Plata, and Rosario. When Talita, who was a reader of encyclopedias, would get interested in wandering peoples and cultures, Traveler would grumble and speak with insincere praise about a courtyard with geraniums, an army cot, and that no place like home bit. As he sucked on one
mate
after another he would dazzle his wife with his wisdom, but it was obvious that he was trying too hard. When he was asleep he would sometimes come out with words that had to do with uprooting, trips abroad, troubles in customs, and inaccurate alidades. If Talita started to tease him when he woke up, he would start to whack her on the butt, and then they would laugh like crazy and it even seemed that Traveler’s betrayal of himself did them both some good. One thing had to be recognized and it was that unlike almost all her other friends, Traveler didn’t blame life or fate for the fact that he had been unable to travel everywhere he had wanted to. He would just take a stiff drink of gin and call himself a boob.

“Of course, I have been his best trip,” Talita used to say when the opportunity would present itself, “but he’s so silly that he doesn’t realize it. I, my dear, have carried him off on the wings of fantasy to the very edge of the horizon.”

The lady thus addressed would think that Talita was speaking seriously and would answer along the following lines:

“Ah, my dear, men are so incomprehensible” (
sic
for uncomprehending).

Or:

“Believe me, that’s just what happens with me and my Juan Antonio. I’ve always said the same thing to him, but I could just as well be speaking to the wall.”

Or:

“How well I can sympathize with you, my dear. Life is such a struggle.”

Or:

“Don’t worry yourself about it, miss. As long as you have your health and your work.”

Then Talita would tell Traveler everything that people had said and the pair of them would laugh and roll around on the kitchen floor until they had dirtied up their clothes. Traveler used to have the most fun hiding in the toilet, with a handkerchief or undershirt crammed into his mouth, and listening while Talita got the ladies from the Pensión Sobrales and some others who lived in the hotel across the street to talk. In moments of optimism, which were never for long, he would work up a soap opera which would make fun of these fat ladies without their realizing it, make them weep copiously and tune in every day. But in any case, he never had traveled, and it was like a black stone in his soul.

“A regular brick,” Traveler would explain, feeling his stomach.

“I never saw a black brick,” the Manager of the circus, the eventual intimate of so much nostalgia, used to say.

“It got that way from being so sedentary. And to think there have been poets who complained about being
heimatlos
, Ferraguto!”

“Talk so I can understand,” the Manager said, always a little upset when he was called by name in such a dramatic sort of way.

“I can’t, Boss,” Traveler muttered, excusing himself tacitly for having called him by name. “Beautiful foreign words are like an oasis, stopovers. Will we ever go to Costa Rica? To Panama, where long ago royal galleons …? Gardel died in Colombia, Chief, in Colombia!”

“We haven’t got the cash,” the Manager said, taking out his
watch. “I’ve got to get back to the hotel. Cuca must be ready to start hollering.”

Traveler was alone in the office and he was wondering what sunsets in Connecticut were like. As consolation he went back over the good things that had happened to him. For example, one of the good things that had happened to him was that one morning in 1940 he had gone into his superior’s office in Internal Revenue carrying a glass of water. He had come back out without a job as his boss used a piece of tissue to dry off his face. That had been one of the good things that had happened to him, because that very month they had been planning to promote him, just as marrying Talita had been another good thing that had happened to him (even though they both might think otherwise), since Talita had been condemned by her pharmacy degree to grow old dispensing court plasters and Traveler had shown up looking for some suppositories to cure his bronchitis, and out of the explanation he had got from Talita love had foamed up like shampoo in a showerbath. Traveler would even insist that he had fallen in love with Talita at the precise moment when she lowered her eyes and explained how the suppository would be more effective if used after rather than before a good bowel movement.

“You devil,” Talita used to say when they would reminisce. “You understood the directions perfectly well, but you played the fool so I would have to explain them to you.”

“A pharmacist must serve truth, even when it turns up in the most intimate places. If you only knew my emotions when I inserted the first suppository that afternoon, right after I left you. It was a huge green thing.”

“Eucalyptus,” Talita said. “You were lucky I didn’t sell you one of those that has a garlicky odor and can be smelled fifty feet away.”

But sometimes they would turn sad and vaguely understand that once again they had been having fun as a last resort against the melancholy of Buenos Aires and a life that didn’t have too much (What else could you say except “too much”? A vague uneasiness at the top of the stomach, the black brick, as always).

Talita explaining Traveler’s melancholy moments to Señora Gutusso:

“It gets hold of him around siesta-time, it’s like something that comes up out of his pleura.”

“He must have something wrong inside,” Señora Gutusso says. “It’s internal pain, or whatever it is they say.”

“It comes out of his soul, señora. My husband is a poet, believe me.”

Shut up in the toilet with a towel around his face, Traveler is laughing so hard that his eyes are watering.

“Don’t you think it might be some allergy or whatever they call it? My little boy Vítor, you can see him playing in the geraniums out there and he’s really a delight, believe me, but when he gets an attack of his celery allergy it’s monstrous, his dark little eyes start to close, his mouth puffs up like a toad’s, and during it all he can’t even bend his toes.”

“Bending the toes isn’t always too important,” Talita says.

Traveler’s muffled roars can be heard from the toilet and Talita quickly changes the subject to get Señora Gutusso off the track of what’s been going on. Usually Traveler will leave his hiding place feeling very sad, and Talita understands. Some mention should be made of Talita’s understanding. It’s an ironic, tender understanding, like something distant. Her love for Traveler is made up of dirty casseroles, long vigils, a gentle acceptance of his nostalgic fantasies and his love for the tango and a game of
truco.
When Traveler gets sad and thinks about the fact that he has never traveled (and Talita knows it’s not that that bothers him, that his worries are much deeper), she has to go along with him and not say very much, prepare his
mate
, make sure that he never runs out of tobacco, do her duty as a wife alongside her husband but never casting her shadow on him, and that’s what’s difficult. Talita is very happy with Traveler, with the circus, grooming the counting cat before it goes on stage, keeping books for the Manager. Sometimes in her modest way she thinks that she is really closer than Traveler to those elemental depths that worry him, but metaphysical contexts upset her somewhat and she ends up convincing herself that he is the only one capable of making a puncture that will release the black and oily flow. It all floats around a little, dresses up in words or patterns, calls itself otherness, calls itself laughing or loving, and it’s also the circus and life to call it by its most external and fateful names and who the hell is your aunt anyway.