Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (49 page)

“Stop fucking around,” Traveler shouted at the people pounding on the door again. “Can’t anybody talk peacefully in this madhouse?”

“You’re wonderful, brother,” Oliveira said, moved.

“In any case,” Traveler said, moving his chair up a little, “you’re not going to deny that you’ve gone too far this time. Transubstantiations and other plants are all O.K. but this trick of yours is going to cost us all our jobs, and I’m sorry about it especially for Talita’s sake. You can talk all you want about La Maga, but I’m the one who has to feed my wife.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Oliveira said. “One forgets he has a
job and things like that. Do you want me to talk to Ferraguto? There he is over by the fountain. I’m sorry, Manú, I didn’t want La Maga and you …”

“Do you think it’s right now to call her La Maga? Don’t lie, Horacio.”

“I know she’s Talita, but a while ago she was La Maga. She’s two people, just like us.”

“They call that being crazy,” Traveler said.

“Everything is called something, you choose and let it go. If you’ll excuse me I must attend to the people down below, because they can’t take any more of this.”

“I’m leaving,” Traveler said, getting up.

“That’s more like it,” said Oliveira. “It’s much better for you to leave and not bend your knees the way you are, because I’m going to explain what will happen, you adore explanations just like all the other sons of the five thousand years. As soon as you jump on me, carried away by friendship and your diagnosis, I’ll move to one side, because I don’t know if you remember the time I used to practice judo with the boys on the Calle Anchorena, and what will happen is that you’ll continue your trip through this window and end up as a piece of mucus on square four, and then only if you’re lucky because it’s more likely that you won’t even get beyond two.”

Traveler looked at him, and Oliveira saw that his eyes were filling with tears. He made a gesture as if to stroke his hair from a distance.

Traveler waited another second, and then he went to the door and opened it. As soon as Remorino (two other attendants could be seen in back of him) tried to enter he grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him back.

“Leave him alone,” he ordered. “He’ll be all right in a while. We have to leave him alone, oh fuck it all.”

Disregarding the dialogue that had rapidly ascended to tetralogue, hexalogue, and dodecalogue, Oliveira closed his eyes and thought that everything was so good like that, that Traveler really was his brother. He heard the noise of the door as it closed, the voices going away. The door opened again, coinciding with his eyelids which he lifted with great effort.

“Throw the bolt,” Traveler said. “I don’t trust them.”

“Thanks,” said Oliveira. “Go on down to the courtyard. Talita’s very upset.”

He went under the few surviving threads and threw the bolt. Before returning to the window he put his face in the water in the sink and drank like an animal, swallowing and licking and snorting. Down below one could hear Remorino’s commands as he ordered the patients to their rooms. When he went back, fresh and peaceful, he saw that Traveler was next to Talita and that he had put his arm around her waist. After what Traveler had just done, everything had something like a marvelous feeling of conciliation and that senseless but vivid and present harmony could not be violated, could no longer be falsified, basically Traveler was what he might well have been with a little less cursed imagination, he was the man of the territory, the incurable mistake of the species gone astray, but how much beauty in the mistake and in the five thousand years of false and precarious territory, how much beauty in those eyes that had filled with tears and in that voice that had advised him: “Throw the bolt, I don’t trust them,” how much love in that arm that held the waist of a woman. “Probably,” Oliveira thought while he answered the friendly gestures of Dr. Ovejero and Ferraguto (a little less friendly), “the only possible way to escape from the territory is to plunge into it over one’s head.” He was aware that as soon as he got that feeling he would glimpse the image of a man taking an old woman along by the arm through rainy and freezing streets. “Who can tell,” he said to himself. “Who can tell if maybe I haven’t been staying on the edge, and that there probably was a passage. Manú would have found it, certainly, but the idiot thing is that Manú will never look for it and I, on the other hand …”

“Hey, Oliveira, why don’t you come on down and have some coffee?” Ferraguto proposed to the visible displeasure of Ovejero. “You’ve already won the bet, don’t you think? Look at Cuca, how upset she is.”

“Don’t get upset, señora,” Oliveira said. “With your experience in the circus you’re not going to go soft on me over some nonsense.”

“Oh, Oliveira, you and Traveler are awful,” Cuca said. “Why don’t you do what my husband says? I was just thinking that we all ought to sit down together for some coffee.”

“Yes, hey, come on down,” Ovejero said, trying to appear casual. “I need your advice on a couple of matters that have to do with some French books.”

“I can hear quite well from up here,” Oliveira said.

“O.K., old man,” Ovejero said. “You come on down when you want to, we’re going to have some breakfast.”

“With nice hot croissants,” Cuca said. “Shall we go make some coffee, Talita?”

“Don’t be an ass,” Talita said, and in the extraordinary silence that followed her admonition, the meeting of the looks of Traveler and Oliveira was as if two birds had collided in flight and all mixed up together had fallen into square nine, or at least that was how it was enjoyed by those involved. Cuca and Ferraguto were breathing heavily during all this, and finally Cuca opened her mouth to shriek: “Why, what’s the meaning of such insolence?” while Ferraguto stuck out his chest and looked Traveler up and down while the latter at the same time was looking at his wife with a mixture of admiration and censure until Ovejero found the appropriate scientific escape and said dryly:
“Hysteria matinensis yugulata
, let’s go inside, I have to hand out some pills,” at the same time that Number 18, violating Remorino’s orders, came out into the courtyard to announce that Number 31 was upset and that there was a telephone call from Mar del Plata. His violent expulsion at the hands of Remorino helped the administrators and Ovejero to evacuate the courtyard without excessive loss of prestige.

“My, my, my,” said Oliveira, teetering on the window, “and I thought that pharmacists had such good manners.”

“Did you notice?” Traveler said. “She was glorious.”

“She sacrificed herself for me,” Oliveira said. “The other one is never going to forgive her, not even on her deathbed.”

“That really worries me,” Talita said. “ ‘With nice hot croissants,’ get a load of that.”

“And what about Ovejero?” Traveler asked. “French books! The only thing missing was for them to tempt you with a banana. I’m surprised you didn’t tell them all to go to hell.”

That’s the way it was, the harmony lasted incredibly long, there were no words that could answer the goodness of those two down there below, looking at him and talking to him from the hopscotch, because Talita had stopped in square three without realizing it, and Traveler had one foot in six, so that the only thing left to do was to move his right hand a little in a timid salute and stay there looking at La Maga, at Manú, telling
himself that there was some meeting after all, even though it might only last just for that terribly sweet instant in which the best thing without any doubt at all would be to lean over just a little bit farther out and let himself go, paff the end.

*     *     *

(–
135
)

“I’M warming up some ideas for when Adgalle arrives. What do you think about my taking her to the Club some night? Étienne and Ronald would be charmed, she’s so mad.”

“Take her.”

“You would have liked her too.”

“Why do you talk as if I were dead?”

“I don’t know,” Ossip said. “I really don’t know. You have a look about you.”

“This morning I was telling Étienne about some very pretty dreams. Right now I’m getting them all mixed up inside of me with some other memories while you go on about the burial with such tender words. It really must have been a moving ceremony, eh. It’s so very strange to be able to be in three places at once, but that’s just what’s happening to me this afternoon, it must be the influence of Morelli. Yes, yes, now I’m going to tell you about it. In four places at once, now that I think about it. I’m getting close to ubiquity, and going crazy is just one step away … You’re right, I probably won’t be able to meet Adgalle, I’ll be gone to hell long before.”

“Zen has a precise explanation for the possibilities of preubiquity, something similar to the feeling you’ve just described, if in fact you did have such a feeling.”

“That’s what it is. I’ve returned from four simultaneous points: The dream this morning, still alive and wriggling. Some interludes with Pola which I’ll spare you, your gaudy description of the kid’s burial, and now I realize that all at the same time I’ve been answering Traveler, a friend in Buenos Aires who never in his fucking life understood a few lines of poetry of mine which began like this, listen to them: ‘Between sleep and wakefulness, diving into washbasins.’ And it’s so easy, if you think about it a little, you ought to understand it. When you
wake up, with the remains of a paradise half-seen in dreams hanging down over you like the hair on someone who’s been drowned: terrible nausea, anxiety, a feeling of the precarious, the false, especially the useless. You fall inward, while you brush your teeth you really are a diver into washbasins, it’s as if the white sink were absorbing you, as if you were slipping down through that hole that carries off tartar, mucus, rheum, dandruff, saliva, and you let yourself go in the hope that maybe you’ll return to the other thing, to what you were before you woke up, and it’s still floating around, is still inside you, is you yourself, but then it starts to go away … Yes, you fall inward for a moment, until the defenses of wakefulness, oh pretty words, oh language, take charge and stop you.”

“A typical existential experience,” Gregorovius said petulantly.

“Naturally, but everything depends on the dosage. In my case the washbasin really sucks me in.”

(–
70
)

“YOU were very wise to come,” Gekrepten said as she changed the
yerba.
“You’re better off here at home, especially because of the environment over there, what did you expect. You should have taken two or three days off.”

“I think you’re right,” Oliveira said. “And more important than all that, old girl. These fried cakes are sublime.”

“How lucky that you like them. Don’t eat too many or you’ll get indigestion.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Ovejero said, lighting a cigarette. “Have a good nap now and tonight you’ll be in prime condition for drawing a royal flush and lots of aces.”

“Don’t move,” Talita said. “It’s incredible how you can’t be still.”

“My wife is so upset,” Ferraguto said.

“Have another fried cake,” said Gekrepten.

“Don’t give him anything except fruit juice,” Ovejero ordered.

“National Corporation of the Learned in Suitable Sciences and their Houses of Science,” Oliveira mocked.

“Seriously now, don’t eat anything until tomorrow,” Ovejero said.

“Here’s one with lots of sugar on it,” said Gekrepten.

“Try to get some sleep,” Traveler said.

“Hey, Remorino, stick around the door and don’t let Number 18 bother him,” Ovejero said. “He’s developed a terrible fixation and all he talks about is some kind of pistol.”

“If you want to sleep I’ll close the blinds,” Gekrepten said, “then you won’t hear Don Crespo’s radio.”

“No, leave them,” Oliveira said. “They’re playing something by Falú.”

“It’s already five o’clock,” Talita said. “Don’t you feel like sleeping?”

“Give him a fresh compress,” Traveler said, “that seems to relieve him.”

“The
mate
will be ready soon,” Gekrepten said. “Do you want me to go out and pick up the
Noticias Gráficas
?”

“Fine,” Oliveira said. “And a pack of cigarettes.”

“It’s hard for him to go to sleep,” Traveler said, “but he’ll be able to get through the whole night now, Ovejero gave him a double dose.”

“Behave yourself, love,” Gekrepten said, “I’ll be right back. We’re going to have strip steak tonight, how does that suit you?”

“With a tossed salad,” Oliveira said.

“He’s breathing better,” Talita said.

“And I’ll make you some rice and milk,” Gekrepten said. “I didn’t like the look on your face when you arrived.”

“The streetcar was jammed,” Oliveira said. “You know what the platform is like at eight in the morning and with all this heat.”

“Do you really think he’ll stay asleep, Manú?”

“As far as I want to believe in something, yes.”

“Then let’s go up and see the Boss, he’s waiting to fire us.”

“My wife is so upset,” Ferraguto said.

“Why, what’s the meaning of such insolence?!” Cuca shouted.

“They were great people,” Ovejero said.

“You don’t find many like them,” said Remorino.

“He refused to believe me when I told him he needed a Heftpistole,” said Number 18.

“Beat it back to your room or I’ll give you an enema,” Ovejero said.

“Death to the dog!” Number 18 said.

(–
131
)

THEN, to pass the time, they catch fish they cannot eat; to avoid the rotting of the fishes in the air, notices have been posted all along the beach telling the fishermen to bury them in the sand just as soon as they have been caught.

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
,
Tristes Tropiques

(–
41
)

MORELLI had been thinking about a list of acknowledgments which he never got around to including in his published works. It had several names: Jelly Roll Morton, Robert Musil, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Raymond Roussel, Kurt Schwitters, Vieira da Silva, Akutagawa, Anton Webern, Greta Garbo, José Lezama Lima, Buñuel, Louis Armstrong, Borges, Michaux, Dino Buzzati, Max Ernst, Pevsner, Gilgamesh (?), Garcilaso, Arcimboldo, René Clair, Piero di Cosimo, Wallace Stevens, Isak Dinesen. The names of Rimbaud, Picasso, Chaplin, Alban Berg, and others had a very fine line drawn through them, as though they were too obvious to be mentioned. But in the end he should have done the same to all of them, because Morelli had decided not to include the list in any of his volumes.