Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (41 page)

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NEXT to El Cerro—although you never really do get next to El Cerro, you arrive all at once and never know actually whether you’re already there or not, near El Cerro would be better—in a section with low buildings and arguing children, his questions got him nowhere, they would all shatter against pleasant smiles, women who wanted to be helpful but didn’t really know anything, people move away, sir, there’ve been a lot of changes here, maybe if you go to the police they’ll be able to tell you. And he didn’t stay too long because the ship was going to sail, and though he kept it deep inside himself, everything had been hopeless from the start, his investigations had had their source in his doubts, like playing the numbers or working out a horoscope. Another streetcar back to the pier to flop down on his bunk until it was time to eat.

That same night, around two o’clock in the morning, was the first time he saw her again. It was hot, and in the steerage where a hundred-odd immigrants were snoring and sweating it was worse than sitting on the coils of a hawser underneath the dull river sky, as all the dampness of the harbor stuck to his skin. Oliveira sat down against a bulkhead to smoke, studying the few stars that were sneaking in and out of the clouds. La Maga came from behind a ventilator funnel, holding something in her hand that was dragging along the deck, and almost immediately she turned her back on him and went towards one of the hatchways. Oliveira made no attempt to follow her; he knew only too well that he was looking at something that would not let itself be followed. He thought that she was probably one of those snobs from first class who like to descend even to the filth of the forecastle, thirsting for something they would call experience or life, things like that. She did look a lot like La Maga, that was certain, but he had supplied the main part of the
resemblance, so that once his heart stopped heaving like a mad dog he lit another cigarette and called himself a hopeless idiot.

To have thought that he had seen La Maga was less bitter than the certainty that some uncontrollable desire had brought her up out of the depths of that place defined as the subconscious and had been able to project her onto the silhouette of any one of the women on board. Until that moment he had believed that he could allow himself the luxury of the melancholy memory of certain things, evoke determined stories in a proper time and atmosphere, then put an end to them with the same tranquillity with which he would crush a butt in an ashtray. When Traveler introduced him to Talita on the dock, so ridiculous with that cat in a basket and an air somewhere between pleasant and Alida Valli, he again felt certain remote likenesses condensing quickly into a total false resemblance, as if from out of his apparently so well compartmentalized memory a piece of ectoplasm had suddenly emerged, capable of inhabiting and complementing another body and another face, of looking at him from outside in a way that he had thought forever restricted to memories.

In the weeks following that were dragged along by Gekrepten’s irresistible abnegation and his apprenticeship in the difficult art of selling cashmere cuts from door to door, he had more than enough glasses of beer and time spent on park benches in which to dissect episodes. His explorations in El Cerro had seemed on the outside like a discharge of conscience: find, try to explain, say goodbye forever. That tendency of man to finish cleanly what he does, without leaving any threads hanging. Now he was beginning to realize (a shadow from behind a ventilator, a woman with a cat) that this was not why he had gone to El Cerro. Analytical psychology irritated him, but it was true: this was not why he had gone to El Cerro. Suddenly he was a pit falling infinitely into himself. He scolded himself ironically, right in the middle of the Plaza del Congreso: “And you called that a search? Did you think you were free? What was that business about Heraclitus? Let’s see, repeat the steps of liberation, so I can have a little laugh. But you’re at the bottom of the funnel, bud.” He would have liked to be sure that he had been irreparably debased by his discovery, but he was bothered by a vague satisfaction in the region of his stomach, that feline answer of contentment which the body gives when it laughs at
the restless schpells of the schpirit and hunches comfortably into its ribs, its belly, and the flat soles of its feet. The worst of it was that deep down inside he was rather content to feel that way, to feel that he hadn’t come back, that he was still going away even though he didn’t know where. On top of the contentment he was being burned by a kind of desperation for simple understanding, a cry for something that he would have liked to make into flesh and blood, and which this vegetative contentment was sluggishly rejecting, keeping it at a distance. There were moments when Oliveira would be present like a spectator at this discord, not caring to participate, cynically impartial. That’s what happened with the circus, the
mate
sessions in Don Crespo’s patio, Traveler’s tangos—Oliveira would look at himself out of the corner of his eye in all of those mirrors. He even wrote down some odd thoughts in a notebook that Gekrepten lovingly kept in the dresser drawer, not daring to read it. He was slowly realizing that his visit to El Cerro had been good, precisely because it had been based on other reasons than those he had imagined. To know that he was in love with La Maga was neither a defeat nor any sort of fixation in any outdated order of things; a love that could do without its object, that could find its nourishment in nothingness, that could be totaled up and come out as other strengths, defining them and bringing them together into an impulse that one day would destroy that visceral contentment of a body stuffed with beer and fried potatoes. All the words he used to fill the notebook along with great flourishes in the air and shrill whistles made him laugh like a madman. Traveler would finally come to the window and ask him to quiet down a little. But other times Oliveira would find a certain peace in manual chores, like straightening out nails or unweaving sisal threads, using the fibers to construct a delicate labyrinth which would cling to the lampshade and which Gekrepten would describe as elegant. Maybe love was the highest enrichment, a giver of being; but only by bungling it could one avoid its boomerang effect, let it run off into nothingness, and sustain one’s self alone again on this new step of open and porous reality. Killing the beloved object, that ancient fear of man, was the price paid for not stopping on the stairs, just as Faust’s plea to the passing moment would not have made sense if he had not abandoned it at the same time, just as one puts down an empty glass on the table. And things like that, and bitter
mate.

It would have been so easy to organize a coherent scheme, an order of thought and life, a harmony. All that was needed was the usual hypocrisy, elevate the past to the value of experience, derive profit from the wrinkles on one’s face, from the knowing look one sees in smiles and silences after forty years. Then one would put on a blue suit, comb one’s graying hair, and go to art galleries, to the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores and the Richmond bar, reconciled with the world. A discreet skepticism, an air of having returned, a measured entrance into maturity, into matrimony, into the paternal sermon at carving time or on receipt of an unsatisfactory report card. I am telling you this because I have lived longer than you. I’ve been around. When I was a boy. They’re all alike,
te lo digo yo.
I’m telling you this from my own experience, son. You don’t know what life is yet.

And all of it, so ridiculous and gregarious, could have been even worse on other levels, in meditations constantly menaced by
idola fori
, words that falsify institutions, turning things to stone in the name of simplification, moments of fatigue in which one slowly takes the flag of surrender from one’s vest pocket. The betrayal could have taken place in perfect solitude, without witnesses or accomplices: hand to hand, believing one’s self to be beyond personal compromises and dramas of the senses, beyond the ethical torture of knowing that one is tied to a race or to a people and a language at least. In what is apparently perfect freedom, not having to render accounts to anyone, leaving the game, leaving the crossroads and following any one of the roads put there by circumstance, proclaiming it to be the necessary one or the only one. La Maga was one of those roads, literature was another (burn the notebook at once, even if Gekrepten wu-rr-inggs her hands), laziness was something else, and meditation on the sovereign kicking of the bucket was something else. Stopping in front of a pizzeria at 1300 Corrientes, Oliveira asked himself the great question: “Must one stay in the center of the crossroads, then, like the hub of a wheel? What good is it to know or to think we know that every road is false if we don’t walk with an idea that is not the road itself? We’re not Buddha, and there are no trees here to sit under in the lotus position. A cop appears and asks for your identity card.”

Walking with an idea that is no longer the road itself. From all that chatter (what a combination, ch, mother of chigger,
cheese, and chili beans) the only thing left was that glimpse. Yes, it was a formula that deserved meditation. In that way his visit to El Cerro would have had to have a meaning after all, in that way La Maga would cease being a lost object and become the image of a possible reunion—no longer with her but on this side of her or on the other side of her; by her, but not her—. And Manú, and the circus, and that incredible idea of the nuthouse that they were talking about so much at that time, everything could have meaning just as long as it was extrapolated, the whinevitable whextrapolation at the metaphysical whour, that stately word was always on time. Oliveira took a bite of pizza, burning his gums in his usual gluttonous way, and he felt better. But how many times had he gone through the same cycle on dozens of corners and in cafés in so many cities, how many times had he reached similar conclusions, felt better, thought he could begin to live in a different way; one afternoon, for example, when he had gone in to listen to an idiotic concert, and afterwards … Afterwards it had rained so much, why think about it. That’s the way it was with Talita, the more he thought about it the worse it was. The woman was beginning to suffer because of him, not for any serious reason, just because he was there and everything seemed to be changing between Talita and Traveler, heaps of little things like that, taken for granted and dismissed, and suddenly they start to get sharp edges and what had started out as a Spanish stew ends up as a Kierkegaardian herring, without going any deeper into the matter. The afternoon with the boards had been a return to order, but Traveler had let the chance of saying what had to be said slip by, so that on that very day when Oliveira would have ordered himself to change neighborhoods and their lives, he not only had said nothing, but he had got him the job with the circus, proof that … In that case pity would have been just as idiotic as the other time: rain, rain. I wonder if Berthe Trépat still plays the piano?

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TALITA and Traveler talked at great length about famous madmen and others less well known now that Ferraguto had decided to buy the clinic and turn the circus, cat and all, over to somebody called Suárez Melián. It seemed to them, Talita especially, that the change from circus to clinic was like a step forward, but it was hard for Traveler to see very clearly the reasons for that optimism. In hopes of understanding better they went around in great excitement and were always going over to their windows or down to the street entrance to exchange impressions with Señora Gutusso, Don Bunche, Don Crespo, and even with Gekrepten if she was within range. The worst of it was that in those days there was a lot of talk of a revolt, that the armed forces in Campo de Mayo were about to rise up, and all that seemed much more important to people than the acquisition of a clinic on the Calle Trelles. Finally Talita and Traveler set out to try to find a little normality in a psychiatry text. As usual they got excited over anything, and the day of the duck, it was hard to tell why, their arguments became so violent that Cien Pesos was going crazy in his cage and Don Crespo waited for an acquaintance to go by so he could move his index finger in a circular pattern next to his forehead. On occasions like that thick clouds of duck feathers would come flying out the kitchen window and there would be a slamming of doors and a hand-to-hand dialectic without quarter which would barely give way to lunchtime, when the duck would disappear right down to the last tegument.

When it was time for coffee and some Mariposa
caña
, a tacit reconciliation brought them together over venerated texts, issues of esoteric reviews, long out of print, cosmological treasures that they felt they had to assimilate as a sort of prelude to their new life. They talked a lot about eccentricities, because
Traveler, with Oliveira’s approval, had condescended to bring out some old papers and exhibit part of his collection of phenomena, something they had begun together when they were both studying in the long-forgotten university and which they had kept up separately later on. The study of those documents was a fine dessert, and Talita had earned the right to participate thanks to her copies of
Renovigo
(
Periódiko Rebolusionario Bilingue
), a Mexican publication in the Ispamerikan tongue put out by Editorial Lumen, on which a number of madmen had collaborated with exciting results. They only heard from Ferraguto every so often, because the circus was practically in the hands of Suárez Melián already, but it seemed certain that the clinic would be turned over to them around the middle of March. Once or twice Ferraguto had shown up at the circus to watch the calculating cat, from whom he was obviously going to find it difficult to be parted, and both times he spoke about the imminence of the great transaction and the-weighty-responsibilities that would fall on their shoulders (sigh). It seemed practically assured that Talita would be entrusted with the pharmacy, and the poor girl was extremely nervous, reviewing some notes from the time of her anointment. Oliveira and Traveler amused themselves endlessly at her expense, but when they went back to the circus they would both walk around sadly and look at the people and the cat as if a circus were something unappreciably rare.