Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (32 page)

But since he doesn’t have this otherness, Traveler is a man of action. He calls it restricted action because it’s not a question of going about knocking yourself out. For the space of four decades he has gone through various phases: soccer (with the Colegiales, center forward, not too bad), pedestrianism, politics (a month in the Devoto jail in 1934), cuniculture and apiculture (a farm in Manzanares, bankruptcy within three months, smelly rabbits and ill-tempered bees), auto-racing (relief driver with Marimón, a crackup in Resistencia, three broken ribs), artistic carpentry (turning out pieces of furniture until they piled up to the ceiling, used only once, a complete failure), marriage and cycling on the Avenida General Paz on Saturdays on a rented bike. Out of all this action he has a mental archive, two languages, a facile hand with the pen, an ironical interest in soteriology and glass balls, the attempt at creating a mandrake by planting a sweet potato in a pot of earth and sperm, the sweet potato flourishing in the wild way sweet potatoes do, invading the furnished room, growing out the window, the surreptitious intervention of Talita, armed with a pair of scissors, Traveler inspecting the shape of the plant, suspecting something, the humiliating abandonment of the mandrake, gallows plant,
alraune
, leftovers from childhood. Sometimes Traveler talks about a double who is luckier than he, and Talita for some reason doesn’t like to hear about it, and she hugs him and kisses him restlessly, does all she can to get those ideas out of his head. Then she takes him out to see Marilyn Monroe, a great favorite of Traveler’s, and-slams-on-the-brakes of some purely artistic feelings of jealousy in the darkness of the Presidente Roca movie theater.

(–
98
)

TALITA wasn’t so sure that Traveler was very happy about the return of a childhood friend, because the first thing that Traveler did upon learning that a certain Horacio was coming home suddenly to Argentina on the
Andrea C
was to aim a kick at the counting cat of the circus and proclaim that life was a perfect fuckup. In any case, he did go down to the dock to meet him with Talita taking the counting cat along in a basket. Oliveira was coming out of customs carrying a single lightweight suitcase, and when he spotted Traveler he raised his eyebrows in a mixture of surprise and annoyance.

“What’s new?”

“Hi,” Traveler said, shaking his hand with more feeling than he had expected.

“Hey,” Oliveira said, “let’s go to a waterfront grill and get some sausages.”

“I’d like you to meet my wife,” Traveler said.

Oliveira said: “Pleased to meet you,” and put out his hand, barely looking at her. Then he asked immediately who the cat was and why they had brought him down to the pier in a basket. Talita, offended by the reception, found him absolutely disagreeable and announced that she was going back to the circus with the cat.

“O.K.,” Traveler said. “Put him by the window on the streetcar, you know he doesn’t like it in the aisle.”

In the grill Oliveira began to drink red wine and eat some sausages and
chinchulines.
Since he wasn’t being very communicative, Traveler told him all about the circus and how he had got married to Talita. He filled him in on politics and sports, pausing especially to talk about the rise and fall of Pascualito Pérez. Oliveira said that in Paris he had run into Fangio and that old bow-legs had seemed half-asleep. Traveler began to get
hungry and ordered some chitterlings. He was pleased that Oliveira accepted his first Argentine cigarette with a smile and smoked it with appreciation. They got into another quart of red wine, and Traveler talked about his work, how he hadn’t lost hope of finding something better, that is, something with less work and more dough, waiting all the time for Oliveira to tell him something, he didn’t know exactly what, just some direction that could bring them together again after so much time.

“Well, tell me something,” he proposed.

“The weather was very changeable,” Oliveira said, “but every once in a while there would be good days. Something else: As César Bruto said so well, if you want Paris in October to move ’er, don’t forget to see the Louvre. What else? Oh, yes, I went to Vienna once. They have fantastic cafés where fat women bring along their dogs and husbands to eat strudel.”

“O.K., O.K.,” Traveler said. “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

“One day I dropped a lump of sugar underneath the table in a restaurant. In Paris, not in Vienna.”

“If all you’re going to do is talk about cafés, you didn’t have to sail across the pond.”

“You understand well,” Oliveira said, carefully cutting into a string of
chinchulines.
“This is something you can’t get in the City of Lights. That’s what all the Argentinians used to tell me. They used to weep because they couldn’t get good beef, and I even knew a lady who used to think nostalgically about Argentinian wines. She used to say that French wine was no good to mix with soda.”

“Jesus,” Traveler said.

“And of course the tomatoes and the potatoes here are better than anywhere.”

“It’s obvious,” said Traveler, “that you were hanging out with the upper crust.”

“Once in a while. They usually didn’t like the way I used to hang, to keep on with your metaphor. Boy, it’s muggy.”

“That’s right,” Traveler said. “You’re going to have to get yourself acclimatized again.”

They kept on along those lines for some twenty-five minutes.

(–
39
)

OF course, Oliveira was not going to tell Traveler anything about his stopover in Montevideo when he had walked through the slums, asking and looking, having a couple of drinks of
caña
to get on the good side of some toughs. And nothing, except that there was a slew of new buildings and that on the waterfront, where he spent the hour before the
Andrea C
sailed, the water was full of dead fish floating belly up, and among the fish here and there a condom softly floating in the murky water. There was nothing else to do but go back on board, thinking that maybe Lucca, that maybe it really had been Lucca or Perugia. And all so much like the divine rocket.

Before disembarking in his mamma country, Oliveira had decided that everything that had passed had not been the past and that only a mental error like so many others would have allowed the easy expedient of imagining a future fertilized by games already played. He understood (only on the prow, at dawn, in the yellow fog of the harbor) that nothing would have changed if he had decided to take a stand, reject easy solutions. Maturity, supposing such a thing really did exist, was in the last analysis a kind of hypocrisy. Nothing was mature, nothing could have been more natural than for that woman with a cat in a basket, waiting for him beside Manolo Traveler, to look a little like that other woman who (but what had been the use of wandering through the slums of Montevideo, taking a taxi up to the edge of El Cerro, making use of directions assembled all over again by a restless memory). He had to keep going, either start over again or end it: there was still no bridge as yet. With a suitcase in his hand, he headed for a waterfront grill where one night somebody half-drunk had told him stories about the
payador
Betinoti, and how he used to sing that waltz:
Mi diagnóstico es sencillo: / Sé que no tengo remedio.
The idea that
a word like “diagnosis” should turn up in a waltz was irresistible to Oliveira, but now he was repeating the lines in a sententious sort of way while Traveler told him about the circus, about K. O. Lausse, and even about Juan Perón.

(–
86
)

HE was coming to the realization that his coming back had really been his going away in more than one sense. He was already vegetating with poor, humble Gekrepten in a hotel room across from the Pensión Sobrales where the Travelers were on the rolls. Everything was going well between them, Gekrepten was enchanted, she could prepare magnificent
mates
and even though she made love and
pasta asciutta
rather badly, she had other revealing domestic qualities and she could leave him alone for all the time he needed to ponder the business of coming back and going away, a problem that used to bother him in his free moments as he went from door to door selling bolts of gabardine. At first Traveler had criticized his mania for finding everything wrong with Buenos Aires, for treating the city like a tightly girdled whore, but Oliveira explained to him and Talita that in his criticism there was so much love that only a pair of mental defectives like them would misunderstand his attacks. In the end they realized that he was right, that Oliveira could not make any hypocritical compromise with Buenos Aires, and that at the moment he was much farther away from his own country than when he had been wandering about Europe. Only small things, a little passé, would make him smile:
mate
, De Caro records, sometimes the waterfront in the afternoon. The three of them used to wander around the city a lot, taking advantage of the fact that Gekrepten was working in a store, and Traveler could spot that Oliveira was making his peace with the city, fertilizing the soil with enormous quantities of beer. But Talita was more intransigent (a definite characteristic of indifference) and she demanded quick acceptances: Clorindo Testa’s painting, for example, or the films of Torre Nilsson. They got into hot arguments over Bioy Casares, David Viñas, Father Castellani, Manauta, and the policies of the YPF. Talita
finally came to understand that for Oliveira being in Buenos Aires was exactly the same as if he had been in Bucharest, and that in reality he had not come back but that he had been brought back. Underneath the things they would argue about there was always a layer of pataphysics, the triple coincidence of a histrionic search for lookout points that could excentrate the viewer or the thing being viewed. Because of their battles Talita and Oliveira began to have respect for each other. Traveler would remember when Oliveira was twenty years old and his heart would ache, but it was more likely gas from all the beers.

“The trouble with you is you’re not a poet,” Traveler would say. “You don’t have the same feeling we do for the city, a great big belly heaving slowly underneath the heavens, a huge spider with half his feet in San Vicente, in Burzaco, in Sarandí, in El Palomar, and the rest of them in the water, poor thing, you know how dirty the river is.”

“Horacio is a perfectionist,” Talita said with pity, for she was already becoming more sure of herself. “A gadfly on a thoroughbred horse. You ought to take a lesson from us, simple inhabitants of Buenos Aires, and still we do know who Pieyre de Mandiargues is.”

“And along the streets,” Traveler said, rolling his eyes, “girls pass with soft eyes and delicate faces showing the effects of rice and milk and Radio El Mundo in the pleasant foolishness of their face powder.”

“Not to mention the emancipated and intellectual women who work in circuses,” Talita added modestly.

“And specialists in urban folklore like myself. Remind me when we get back to the room to read you Ivonne Guitry’s story of her life, old man, it’s fantastic.”

“By the way, Señora Gutusso wanted me to tell you that if you don’t return her Gardel songbook she’ll crown you with a flowerpot,” Talita informed him.

“First I’ve got to read Horacio the life story. Let her wait, the old bitch.”

“Is Señora Gutusso that kind of catoblepas who spends her time talking to Gekrepten?” Oliveira asked.

“Yes, it’s their turn to be friends this week. You’ll see in a few days, that’s how things go in this neighborhood.”

“Silver-plated with moonlight,” Oliveira said.

“It’s a lot better than your Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Talita said.

“But of course,” said Oliveira, looking at her. Rolling his eyes a little, perhaps … And the way she pronounced the French words, the way she had, and if he just squinted a little. (Pharmacist, pity.)

How they loved to play with words, making up games to play those days in the cemetery of the language, turning to page 558 in the Julio Casares dictionary, for example, and playing with
hallulla, hámago, halieto, haloque, hamez, harambel, harbullista, harca
, and
harija.
Underneath it all they were a little sad as they thought about possibilities come to naught and the Argentinian character and time’s-inexorable-passage. As for the pharmacist business, Traveler insisted that it was all a matter of barbarian peoples and eminently Merovingian, and he and Oliveira dedicated an epic poem to Talita in which the Pharmaceutical hordes invaded Catalonia, spreading terror, piperine, and hellebore. The whole Pharmaceutical nation, on massive steeds. A meditation on the Pharmaceutical steppes. Oh Empress of the Pharmacists, have pity on the Mushies, the Yokies, the Lazies, and the Stuffies, all of the Runawaydies.

While Traveler was quietly working on the Manager so that Oliveira could get a job with the circus, the object of these maneuvers was drinking
mate
in his room and catching up on Argentine literature. While he was working at this task the weather suddenly got hot and the sale of gabardine dropped off considerably. They began to get together in Don Crespo’s patio. He was a friend of Traveler’s and rented rooms to Señora Gutusso and other ladies and gentlemen. With the help of Gekrepten’s tenderness (she spoiled him like a child), Oliveira was able to sleep as long as he could bear it and in his lucid intervals he would sometimes look at a book by Crevel that he had found in the bottom of his suitcase, and he was beginning to assume the airs of a hero in a Russian novel. No good could possibly come of this methodical laziness, and that was what he vaguely kept his faith in, in the idea that by half-closing his eyes he would be able to see things outlined more clearly, that by sleeping he would be able to clear up his meninges. Things were not going well with the circus and the Manager didn’t even want to think about taking on anybody new. In the early evening, before going to work, the Travelers would go down and have
some
mate
with Don Crespo, and Oliveira would come too and they would listen to records on an old phonograph that could still run, which is the way old records ought to be played. Sometimes Talita would sit across from Oliveira and they would play with the cemetery, or challenge each other by balancing questions, another game they had invented with Traveler and which they got a lot of fun out of. Don Crespo thought they were crazy and Señora Gutusso thought they were stupid.