Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (9 page)

“Take it easy,” Babs said in English. “Have a drink, sonny, and don’t be such a murder to me.”

“And what it really comes down to is a case of eyes that can’t see … Why, tell me why we must beat old ladies about the head with our puritan adolescence of shitty little cretins? Oh, brother, I’m stewed. I’m going home.”

But it was hard for him to give up the warm Eskimo pelt, the distant and almost indifferent contemplation of Gregorovius as he plied La Maga with his sentimental interview. Breaking away from everything as if he were plucking a cadaverous old rooster who had resisted to the last in the name of the cock he once had been, he let out a sigh of relief on hearing the theme of
Blue Interlude,
a record he had once owned in Buenos Aires. He couldn’t remember all of them, but he did know that Benny Carter was on it and maybe Chu Berry, and hearing the difficult simplicity of Teddy Wilson in his solo, he decided to wait for the end of the record. Wong had said it was raining, it had been raining all day. That must be Chu Berry, unless it was Coleman Hawkins in person, but no, it wasn’t Hawk. “It’s incredible how we’re cheating ourselves,” thought Oliveira looking at La Maga who was looking at Gregorovius who was looking at the air.
“We’ll end up going to the Bibliothèque Mazarine to take notes on mandrakes, Bantu necklaces, or the comparative history of nail clippers.” Think of a repertory of insignificant things, the enormous work which goes into studying them and gaining a basic knowledge of them. A history of nail clippers, two thousand volumes to acquire the certain knowledge that until 1675 these small things had never received any mention. Suddenly in Mainz someone does a picture of a woman cutting a nail. It is not exactly a pair of nail clippers, but it looks like it. In the eighteenth century a certain Philip McKinney of Baltimore patents the first nail clippers with a spring attached: the problem is solved, the fingers can squeeze with all their strength to cut toenails, incredibly tough, and the clippers will snap back automatically. Five hundred notes, a year of work. If we were to turn now to the invention of the screw or to the use of the verb
gond
in eighteenth-century Pali literature. Anything would be more interesting than to guess the conversation between La Maga and Gregorovius. To find a barricade, anything, Benny Carter, nail clippers, the verb
gond,
another drink, a ceremonial impalement conducted carefully by an executioner attent to the smallest details, or Champion Jack Dupree lost in the blues, a better barricade than he because (and the needle was making a horrible noise)

So that in all certainty Ronald would come back to Big Bill Broonzy, led by associations Oliveira knew about and respected, and Big Bill would tell them about another barricade with the same voice that La Maga was using to tell Gregorovius about her childhood in Montevideo, Big Bill without bitterness, “matter of fact,”

“I know already that nothing can come of it,” said Gregorovius. “Memories only change the least interesting part of the past.”

“Yes, nothing can come of it,” La Maga said.

“That’s why if I asked you to tell me about Montevideo it was because you’re like a queen of hearts to me, all front, no substance. I put it that way so that you’ll understand me.”

“And Montevideo is the substance … Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. What do you call the past? As far as I’m concerned everything that has happened to me happened yesterday, last night, no earlier.”

“So much the better,” said Gregorovius. “Now you’re a queen, only not of hearts.”

“It wasn’t so long ago for me. It’s far away, very far away, but not so long ago. The arcades of the Plaza Independencia, you know them too, Horacio, that sad square with all those restaurants, knowing there had been a killing that afternoon, the newsboys selling their papers in and out of the arcade.”

“The lottery and all its prizes,” Horacio said.

“The woman carved up in El Salto, politics, soccer …”

“The boat to the racetrack, a drink of Ancap brandy. Local color, eh.”

“It must have been quite exotic,” said Gregorovius, putting himself in a position so that he would block off Oliveira’s view and be more alone with La Maga, who was looking at the candles and keeping time with her foot.

“There was no such thing as time in Montevideo in those days,” La Maga said. “We used to live near the river, in a large house with a courtyard. I was always thirteen years old, I remember it so well. A blue sky, thirteen years old, my fifth-grade teacher was cross-eyed. One day I fell in love with a blond boy who sold newspapers in the square. He had a way of saying ‘paypuh’ that made me feel empty somewhere here … He wore long pants but he couldn’t have been more than twelve. My father was not working then and spent the afternoons drinking
mate
in the courtyard. I lost my mother when I was five years old, some aunts brought me up but they went to the country later on. When I was thirteen there were only my father and I at home. It was a kind of tenement, not a home. There was an Italian, two old women, and a Negro and his wife who fought at night but later on would play the guitar and sing. The Negro
had red eyes, like a wet mouth. I didn’t like them very much and preferred to play in the street. If my father found me playing in the street he made me come in and would spank me. One day while he was spanking me I saw the Negro peeking through his half-opened door. At first I didn’t really catch on, I thought he was scratching his leg, something he was doing with his hand … Father was too busy hitting me with a belt. It’s funny how you can lose your innocence all at once, without even knowing that you’ve passed into another existence. That night in the kitchen the Negro couple sang until quite late. I was in my room and I had cried so much that I was terribly thirsty, but I didn’t want to leave my room. My father was drinking
mate
in the doorway. You can’t imagine how hot it was because you’re all from cold countries. It was the humidity that was bad there near the river, I think it’s worse in Buenos Aires, Horacio has told me it’s worse, I don’t know. That night my clothes stuck to me, everybody was drinking
mate
that night, two or three times I went out and got a drink from the spigot in the courtyard among the geraniums. I had the idea that water from that spigot was cooler. There wasn’t a star in the sky, the geraniums had a harsh smell about them, they’re vulgar plants, very beautiful, you have to stroke a geranium leaf. The lights were out in the other rooms already and father had gone out to the bar run by one-eyed Ramos, and I went into the courtyard and there was the empty
mate
gourd he always left by the door so that the tramps from the lot next door would not steal it. I remember that when I crossed the courtyard the moon came out a little and I stopped to look at it, the moon always made me feel coldish, and I made a face that could be seen from the stars, I believed in such things, I was only thirteen. Then I drank some more from the spigot and went back to my room upstairs, climbing up an iron staircase where once I had sprained my ankle when I was nine years old. When I was about to light the candle on my night-table a hot hand grabbed my shoulder, I heard the door close, another hand covered my mouth, and I began to notice Negro smell, the Negro was pawing me all over and whispering things in my ear, slobbering on my face, pulling off my clothes, and there was nothing I could do, not even scream because I knew he would kill me if I screamed and I didn’t want him to kill me, anything would have been better than that, to die would have been the worst offense, the most complete stupidity.
Why are you looking at me like that, Horacio? I’m telling how the Negro in the tenement raped me, Gregorovius did so want to know how I lived in Uruguay.”

“Don’t spare us any details,” said Oliveira.

“Oh, a general idea is enough,” said Gregorovius.

“There’s no such thing as a general idea,” Oliveira said.

(–
120
)

“WHEN he left my room it was almost dawn and I didn’t even know how to cry any more.”

“The dirty bastard,” Babs said.

“Oh, La Maga richly deserved that homage,” said Étienne. “The only funny thing, as always, is the diabolical separation of form and content. Everything you’ve said is exactly the same as what happens between lovers, except for the slight resistance and the probably stronger aggression.”

“Chapter 8, Section 4, Paragraph A,” Oliveira said.
“Presses Universitaires Françaises.”

“Ta gueule,”
said Étienne.

“Let’s cap it off,” Ronald said. “It’s about time we heard something like
Hot and Bothered.
”

“A proper title for the reminiscences we’ve just heard,” said Oliveira, lifting up his glass. “That Negro was quite a guy.”

“It’s not a subject for jokes,” Gregorovius said.

“You were the one who dragged it out, friend.”

“And you’re drunk, Horacio.”

“Of course. It’s the great moment, the lucid moment. You, child, should have got a job in some gerontological clinic. Just look at Ossip, your pleasant recollections have taken twenty years off his age.”

“He dragged it out,” said La Maga resentfully. “Now he’ll start saying how he didn’t enjoy it. Give me a vodka, Horacio.”

But Oliveira didn’t seem disposed to get mixed up with La Maga and Gregorovius, who was muttering explanations that she was barely listening to. Wong got more of his attention as he offered to make some coffee. Very hot and very strong, a secret he had learned at the casino in Menton. The Club applauded unanimously. Ronald lovingly kissed the label on one record, started the turntable, put the needle on in a ritualistic
sort of way. For a moment the Ellington machine obliterated them with that fabulous sparring between trumpet and Baby Cox, the subtle and easygoing entrance of Johnny Hodges, the crescendo (but the rhythm was already getting to be a little stiff after thirty years, an old tiger who could still ripple) with riffs which were both tense and loose at the same time, a difficult minor miracle: “I swing, therefore I am.” Leaning against the Eskimo pelt, looking at the green candles through his glass of vodka (we used to go to look at the fish on the Quai de la Mégisserie) it was almost easy to come to the conclusion that what was called reality deserved that disparaging phrase of the Duke’s, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing,” but why had the hand of Gregorovius stopped caressing La Maga’s hair, there was poor Ossip, sleeker than a seal, all broken up by that distant deflowering, it was pitiful to look at him, so tense in that atmosphere where the music was breaking down resistance and was weaving everything into a kind of common breathing, the peace of an enormous heart beating for all, drawing them all into itself. And now a cracked voice, making its way out of a worn-out record, suggesting unknowingly that old Renaissance invitation, that old Anacreontic sadness, a
carpe diem
from Chicago, 1922.

Every so often the words of the dead fit the thoughts of the living (if the one group is living and the other is dead). You so beautiful.
Je ne veux pas mourir sans avoir compris pourquoi j’avais vécu.
A blues song, René Daumal, Horacio Oliveira, but you gotta die some day, you so beautiful but— And that’s why Gregorovius insisted on knowing about La Maga’s past, so that she would die a little less from that other backward-moving death composed entirely of things dragged along by time, so as to put her in her own time, you so beautiful but you gotta, so as not to love a ghost who lets her hair be stroked under a green light, poor Ossip, and how terrible the night was turning out, everything so incredibly so, Guy Monod’s shoes, but you gotta die some day, Ireneo the Negro (later on, when she got more courage, La Maga would tell him about Ledesma, about the men at carnival-time, the saga of Montevideo). And suddenly with cool perfection, Earl Hines was giving his first variation of
I Ain’t Got Nobody,
and even Perico, lost in some remote reading,
lifted up his head and listened, La Maga had rested her head on Gregorovius’s thigh and was looking at the floor, at the piece of Oriental rug, a red strand that disappeared into the socle, an empty glass next to a table-leg. She wanted to smoke but she wasn’t going to ask Gregorovius for a cigarette, without knowing why she wasn’t going to ask him, and she wasn’t going to ask Horacio either, but she knew why she wasn’t going to ask him, she didn’t want to see his eyes as he laughed and again took revenge for her lying close to Gregorovius and for not having approached him all evening. Helpless, she thought sublime thoughts, quotations from poems which made her feel that she was in the very heart of the artichoke, on one side “I ain’t got nobody, and nobody cares for me,” which was not entirely true, because at least two people were present who were in a bad mood over her, and at the same time a line from Perse, something like
“Tu es là, mon amour, et je n’ai lieu qu’en toi,”
where La Maga took refuge snuggling up to the sound of
lieu,
of
Tu es là, mon amour,
the bland acceptance of a fate which made her shut her eyes and made her body feel like an offering, something that anybody could have and dirty and exalt like Ireneo, while Hines’s music matched the red and blue spots which danced around behind her eyelids, which for some reason were called Volaná and Valené, Volaná on the left (“and nobody cares for me”) spinning madly, Valené on top, hanging like a star in a pierodellafrancesca blue,
et je n’ai lieu qu’en toi,
Volaná and Valené, Ronald would never be able to play the piano like Earl Hines, Horacio and she should really own that record to listen to at night in the dark, to learn how to make love to the phrasing, those long, nervous caresses, “I ain’t got nobody” on the back, on the shoulders, fingers behind the neck, nails working in and out of the hair, one last whirlwind and Valené merges with Volaná,
tu est là, mon amour
and nobody cares for me, Horacio was there but nobody bothered with her, nobody was petting her head, Valené and Volaná had disappeared and her eyelids hurt from having squeezed them together so tightly, she could hear Ronald talking and then the smell of coffee, ah, a wonderful smell of coffee, dear Wong, Wong Wong Wong.