Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (39 page)

“And if he were here,” Traveler said in a low voice, looking at his cigarette, “he wouldn’t understand anything either. But he’d know very well that it’s something else. It’s incredible, when he’s with us it’s as if walls collapsed, piles of things all going to hell, and suddenly the sky becomes fantastically beautiful, the stars come out on that baking dish, you can skin them and eat them, that duck is really Lohengrin’s swan, and behind, behind …”

“Am I disturbing you?” asked Señora Gutusso as she appeared in the hallway door. “You’re probably talking about personal matters, I don’t want to intrude where I haven’t been invited.”

“Not at all,” Talita said. “Come right in, señora, and look at this beautiful creature.”

“Marvelous,” Señora Gutusso said. “I always say that duck may be tough, but it has its own special taste.”

“Manú stepped on top of it,” Talita said. “I bet it turns out like a ball of fat.”

“You said it,” Traveler said.

(–
102
)

IT was natural to think that he was waiting for him to appear at the window. It was enough waking up at two o’clock on a hot sticky night, with the acrid smell of the flypaper, with two enormous stars planted on the casement of the window, with the window opposite also open.

It was natural because the plank still seemed to be in the casement, and what was a negative in the bright sunlight might be something else perhaps in the middle of the night, turn into a sudden acquiescence, and then he would be there in his window, smoking to drive away the mosquitoes and waiting for sleepwalking Talita to uncouple herself softly from Traveler’s body and appear and look at him from darkness to darkness. Perhaps with slow movements of his hand he would sketch signs with the lighted end of his cigarette. Triangles, circumferences, instantaneous coats of arms, symbols of the fatal love potion or of diphenilpropilamine, pharmaceutical abbreviations that she could interpret, or just a luminous back and forth from his mouth to the arm of the chair, from the arm of the chair to his mouth, from his mouth to the arm of the chair, all through the night.

There was nobody in the window. Traveler went over to the hot well, he looked into the street where a defenseless open newspaper let itself be read by a starry sky that seemed almost touchable. The window of the hotel opposite seemed even closer at night, a gymnast could have reached it in one leap. No, he couldn’t have. Maybe with death at his heels, but not any other way. There was no sign of the boards any more, there was no way across.

Sighing, Traveler went back to bed. He answered a sleepy question of Talita’s by stroking her hair and murmuring something.
Talita kissed the air, moved her hand around a little, settled down.

If he had been in some part of the black well, stuck back in the depths of the room and from there looking out the window, he must have seen Traveler, the ectoplasm of his white undershirt. If he had been in some part of the black well waiting for Talita to appear, the indifferent appearance of a white undershirt must have mortified him minutely. Now he would be scratching his forearm, his usual gesture of discomfort and resentment, he would squeeze his cigarette between his lips, he would mutter some fitting obscenity, he would probably throw himself onto the bed without the least consideration for Gekrepten, who was in a deep sleep.

But if he had not been in any part of the black well, the act of getting up and going to the window at that time of night was an admission of fear, almost an assent. It was practically the same as taking for granted that neither Horacio nor he had withdrawn the boards. In one way or another there was a way across, it was possible to come and go. Any one of the three, sleepwalking, could go from window to window, walking on the thick air without fear of falling into the street. The bridge would only disappear with the light of day, with the reappearance of the
café con leche
that would bring them back to solid constructions and tear away the cobwebs of the predawn hours with the heavy hand of news bulletins on the radio and a cold shower.

Talita’s dreams: She was being taken to an art show in an immense ruined palace, and the pictures were hung at giddy heights, as if someone had turned the prisons of Piranesi into a museum. And so to get to the paintings one had to climb up some archways where one could get footing only on the carvings, go through galleries that went to the edge of a stormy sea with leadlike waves, climb up spiral staircases to see finally, always poorly, always from below or from one side, the paintings in which the same whitish splotch, the same coagulation of tapioca or milk was repeated to infinity.

Talita’s awakening: Sitting up suddenly in bed at nine o’clock in the morning, shaking Traveler who was sleeping face down, slapping him on the behind to wake him up. Traveler stretching out an arm and pinching her on the leg. Talita throwing herself on top of him and pulling his hair. Traveler abusing his
strength, twisting her hand until Talita apologized. Kisses, terrible heat.

“I dreamt about a frightful museum. You were taking me there.”

“I detest oneiromancy. Make some
mate
, you creature.”

“Why did you get up last night? It wasn’t because you had to pee, when you get up to pee you explain to me first as if I were stupid, you tell me: ‘I’m going to get up, I can’t hold it any more,’ and I feel sorry for you because I can hold it perfectly well all night long, I don’t even have to hold it, it’s a different metabolism.”

“A what?”

“Tell me why you got up. You went over to the window and you sighed.”

“Don’t bug me.”

“Idiot.”

“It was hot.”

“Tell me why you got up.”

“No reason, to see if Horacio wasn’t able to sleep either, so we could talk for a while.”

“At that hour? The pair of you barely talk during the day.”

“It probably would have been different. You never know.”

“I dreamt about a horrible museum,” Talita says, starting to put on her slip.

“You already told me,” Traveler says, looking at the ceiling.

“We don’t talk much any more either,” Talita says.

“Of course not, it’s the humidity.”

“But it’s as if something is talking, something is using us to talk. Don’t you get that feeling? Don’t you think we’re inhabited in some sort of way? I mean … It’s hard to explain, really.”

“Transhabited would be better. Look, this won’t go on forever.
No te aflijas, Catalina
”—Traveler sings softly—
“ya vendrán tiempos mejores / y te pondré un comedor.”

“Stupid,” Talita says, kissing him on the ear. “This won’t go on forever, this won’t go on forever … This shouldn’t go on for even one minute more.”

“Violent amputations are bad, afterwards the stump hurts for the rest of your life.”

“If you want me to tell you the truth,” Talita says, “I have the impression that we’re raising spiders or centipedes. We take care of them, we attend to them, and they keep on growing, at
first they were insignificant little bugs, almost cute, with so many legs, and suddenly they’ve grown, they jump at your face. I think I dreamt about spiders too, I remember vaguely.”

“Listen to Horacio,” Traveler says, pulling on his pants. “At this hour he whistles like a madman to celebrate Gekrepten’s leaving. What a guy.”

(–
80
)

“MUSIC, moody food of us that trade in love,” Traveler had quoted for the fourth time, tuning up his guitar before offering the tango called
Cotorrita de la suerte.

Don Crespo was interested in the quotation and Talita went upstairs to get all five acts in Astrana Marin’s translation. The Calle Cachimayo was noisy at nightfall, but in Don Crespo’s patio, except for the canary Cien Pesos, all that could be heard was Traveler’s voice as he came to the part about
la obrerita juguetona y pizpireta / la que diera a su casita la alegría.
Playing the card game
escoba de quince
doesn’t call for talking, and Gekrepten kept beating Oliveira time after time as he alternated with Señora Gutusso in the chore of getting rid of twenty-cent pieces. Luck’s little parrot (
que augura la vida o muerte
) in the meantime had picked out a pink slip of paper: a boyfriend, long life. Which did not prevent Traveler’s voice from assuming a hollow tone as he described the rapid illness of the heroine,
y la tarde en que moría tristemente / preguntando a su mamita: “¿No llegó
?” Trrang.

“Such feeling,” Señora Gutusso said. “They say bad things about the tango, but as far as I’m concerned there’s no comparison between it and the calypso songs and other trash they play on the radio. Can you pass me some beans, Don Horacio? I need more chips.”

Traveler leaned the guitar against a flowerpot, took a deep drag on his
mate
, and got the feeling that the night was going to be a big bore for him. He almost would have preferred having to work or being sick, anything for distraction. He poured himself a shot of
caña
and drank it in one gulp, looking at Don Crespo, who with his glasses on the tip of his nose was moving suspiciously into the preface of the tragedy. Beaten, out eighty cents, Oliveira went over to sit by them and also took a shot.

“It’s a fabulous world,” Traveler said in a low voice. “The Battle of Actium is going to take place in a little while in there, if the old boy can last that long. And next to him those two madwomen haggling over beans on the strength of their seven-cards.”

“They’re occupations like any others,” Oliveira said. “Do you get the sense of the word? To be occupied, have an occupation. It sends chills up my spine. But look, so we won’t get metaphysical I’m going to tell you that my occupation in the circus is pure fraud. I’m earning that money without doing anything.”

“Wait’ll we open in San Isidro, it’ll be harder. In Villa del Parque we had all the problems solved already, especially that bribe that had the Boss worried. Now we’ve got to start all over again with new people and you’ll be plenty occupied, since you like the expression.”

“You don’t say. Groovy, hey, I really had it made. So I’m really going to have to work?”

“For the first few days, then everything will fall into place. Tell me something, didn’t you ever work when you were wandering around Europe?”

“As little as I could manage,” Oliveira said. “I was a clandestine bookkeeper. Old man Trouille, a character out of Céline. I’ll have to tell you all about it someday if it’s worth the trouble, and it isn’t.”

“I’d like to hear,” Traveler said.

“You know, everything’s so much up in the air. Anything I told you would be like a piece of the pattern in a rug. It needs a coagulant, to give it some kind of name: plunk, everything falls into its proper place and there taking shape you have a beautiful crystal with all its facets. The bad part,” Oliveira said, looking at his fingernails, “is that it’s probably coagulated already and I didn’t notice, I stayed behind with the old men who listen to people talking about cybernetics and slowly shake their heads thinking that soon it will be time for soup with vermicelli in it.”

The canary Cien Pesos gave out with a trill that was more of a squeal than anything else.

“All in all,” Traveler said, “it occurs to me sometimes that you shouldn’t have come back.”

“You think about it,” Oliveira said. “I live it. Underneath it all it’s probably the same thing, but let’s not fall into any quick
swoon over it. What’s killing you and is killing me is modesty, you know. We walk around the house naked, to the great horror of some ladies, but when it comes to talking … You understand, sometimes it occurs to me that I might be able to tell you … I don’t know, perhaps right now words could be good for something, could be useful to us. But since they’re not words from everyday life and
mate
in the courtyard, well-oiled conversation, one draws back, from his best friend, no less, who is the one we have most trouble telling such things to. Doesn’t it happen to you, that sometimes you confide much more in just anybody?”

“It could be,” Traveler said, tuning the guitar. “The worst is that with these ideas one wonders what friends are good for.”

“They’re good just to be there, and they might just come in handy sometime.”

“Whatever you say. So it’s going to be hard for us to understand each other the way we used to in the past.”

“In the name of the past we carry out the greatest deceits in the present,” Oliveira said. “Look, Manolo, you talk about understanding each other, but basically you realize that I also want to come to some sort of understanding with you, and
you
means much more than you yourself. The burden is the fact that real understanding is something else. We’re satisfied with too little. When friends understand each other well, when lovers understand each other well, when families understand each other well, then we think that everything is harmonious. Pure illusion, a mirror for larks. Sometimes I feel that there’s more understanding between two people punching each other in the face than among those who are there looking on from outside. That’s why … Hell, I really ought to write for the Sunday supplement of
La Nación
.”

“You were doing fine,” Traveler said, tuning the first string, “but you finally had one of those attacks of modesty that you were talking about before. You reminded me of Señora Gutusso when she feels obliged to mention her husband’s piles.”

“This Octavius Caesar says the oddest things,” grumbled Don Crespo, looking at them over his glasses. “Here he’s talking about Mark Antony’s having eaten strange flesh on the Alps. What is he trying to tell me with that expression? Kid, I suppose.”

“A featherless biped, more likely,” Traveler said.

“It’s hard to find anybody in this play who’s not crazy,” Don Crespo said respectfully. “You should see some of the things Cleopatra does.”

“Queens are so complicated,” Señora Gutusso said. “That Cleopatra was mixed up in all sorts of things, it was in a movie. Of course times were different then and they didn’t have any religion.”

“A trick,” Talita said, picking up six cards from the deck.