Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (29 page)

It was Hurricane Babs, the tornado of the
sixième:
a meal of mashed houses. The Club kept their heads down, sank into their coat collars, dragged on their cigarettes with all their might. When Oliveira managed to say something, there was a great theatrical silence. Oliveira said that he thought the little piece by Nicolas de Staël was very charming and that Wong, now that he was fucking around so much with Escoffier’s work, ought to read it, give them a review of it at some other get-together of the Club. Babs called him inquisitor again, and Oliveira must have thought it was a bit funny because he smiled. Babs’s hand caught him full across the face. The Club took rapid measures, and
Babs went off wailing, lightly held by Wong, who got in between her and a furious Ronald. The Club closed in around Oliveira so that Babs would be on the outside and she accepted (
a
) the idea of sitting down in an easy chair and (
b
) Perico’s handkerchief. It must have been about that time that the facts about the Rue Monge had come up along with the story of La Maga the Good Samaritan, Ronald seemed to think—he was seeing great green phosphenes in a half-asleep remembrance of the party—that Oliveira had asked Wong if it was true that La Maga was living in a
meublé
on the Rue Monge. And maybe then Wong said that he didn’t know, or said that it was true, and somebody, probably Babs from where she was in the chair and with great sobs began to insult Oliveira again, throwing in his face the wonderful abnegation of La Maga the Good Samaritan at the bedside of sick Pola, and it was probably then that Oliveira began to laugh, looking especially at Gregorovius, and asked for more details concerning La Maga the nurse and her abnegation and if it was true that she was living on the Rue Monge, what number, those inevitable cadastral details. Now Ronald was stretching out his hand and putting it between Babs’s legs as she grumbled as if she were far away, Ronald liked to sleep with his fingers astray in that vague warm territory, Babs the
agent provocateur
who had brought about the breakup of the Club, he’d have to bawl her out in the morning: things-like-that-are-not-done. But the whole Club had encircled Oliveira in some way or another, as at a shameful trial, and Oliveira had noticed this even before the Club itself, in the center of the circle he broke out laughing with his cigarette in his mouth and his hands in the pockets of his lumberjacket, and then he had asked (of no one in particular, looking a bit above the heads of those who formed the circle) if the Club was waiting for an
amende honorable
or something like that, and the Club had not understood right off or preferred not to understand, except Babs who from her chair where Ronald was holding her down had started shouting the inquisitor business again, and it sounded almost tomblike at-that-hour-of-the-night. Then Oliveira had stopped laughing, and as if he had suddenly accepted the verdict (although nobody was judging him, because that’s not what the Club was for) had thrown his cigarette on the floor, crushed it out with his foot, and after a moment, moving his shoulder a little to avoid the hand of Étienne, who had come forward
uncertainly, had spoken in a very low voice, announcing irrevocably that he was withdrawing from the Club and that all the members of the Club, starting with himself and going on down the line, could go fuck the whore that bore them.

Dont acte.

(–
121
)

THE Rue Dauphine wasn’t far away, maybe it would be worth while going by to check up on what Babs had said. Of course, Gregorovius had known from the very start that La Maga, crazy as ever, would go to see Pola.
Caritas.
La Maga the Good Samaritan. Or better still,
The War Cry.
Did she ever let a day go by without doing her good deed? It was enough to make you laugh. Everything was enough to make you laugh. Or rather, there had been something like a great burst of laughter and that’s what they called History. Go to the Rue Dauphine, knock softly on the door of the top-floor apartment and La Maga would appear, Nurse Lucía, to be more exact, no, it was really too much. With a bedpan in her hand or an enema bag. You can’t see the patient, it’s quite late and she’s sleeping.
Vade retro, Asmodeus.
Or they would let him in and serve him coffee, no, worse still, and at some point they would all begin to cry, because it would certainly be contagious, all three of them would cry until they forgave each other, and then anything could happen, dehydrated women are terrible. Or they might put him to count out twenty drops of belladonna, one by one.

“I really ought to go,” Oliveira said to a black cat on the Rue Danton. “A certain aesthetic requirement, complete the pattern. Number three, the Clue. But let’s not forget about Orpheus. Maybe if I shave my head and cover it with ashes, go there with a tin cup, like a beggar. I am no longer he that ye once knew, oh women. Tragedian. Mime. Night of
empusae
and
lamiae
, evil shadows, the end of the great game. How tiring it gets being the same person all the time. Unpardonably. I will never see them again, it is written.
Qu’as tu fait, toi que violà, de ta jeunesse?
An inquisitor, that girl can really make them up … In any case, an autoinquisitor,
et encore
…An accurate epitaph:
Too bland.
But a bland inquisition is terrible, cornstarch tortures, tapioca bonfires, shifting sands, Medusa sucking sneakily. Medusa sneaking suckily. And too much pity underneath it all, me, who thought I was pitiless. It’s impossible to want what I want and in the shape I want it, and share life with others besides. I had to know how to be alone and how to let so much wanting do its work, save me or destroy me, but without the Rue Dauphine, without the dead child, without the Club and everything else. Don’t you think so, eh?”

The cat did not reply.

It wasn’t as cold along the Seine as in the streets, so Oliveira raised the collar of his lumberjacket and went over to look at the water. Since he was not the jumping-off type, he looked for a bridge to get under and do some thinking about that business of the kibbutz, for some time now the idea of the kibbutz had been working on him, a kibbutz of desire. “Strange that all of a sudden an expression should come up like that, one that has no meaning, a kibbutz of desire, until the third time around it begins to take on some meaning little by little and suddenly the expression doesn’t seem so absurd any more, like a sentence such as: ‘Hope, that lush Palmyra,’ a completely absurd phrase, a sonorous rumbling of the bowels, while the kibbutz of desire is not absurd at all, it’s a way of summing up closed in tight this wandering around from promenade to promenade. Kibbutz; colony, settlement, taking root, the chosen place in which to raise the final tent, where you can walk out into the night and have your face washed by time, and join up with the world, with the Great Madness, with the Grand Stupidity, lay yourself bare to the crystallization of desire, of the meeting. Whatch whout Whoracio,” Wholiveira whobserved, sitting down on the rim along the water’s edge, listening to the snoring of the
clochards
under their piles of newspapers and burlap bags.

For once in his life it wasn’t hard for him to give in to melancholy. Another cigarette that warmed him up, there among the snoring that was coming out of the depths of the earth, he was in a mood to deplore the impossible distance that was separating him from his kibbutz. As long as hope is nothing but a lush Palmyra there was no reason to invent illusions for himself. Quite the opposite, take advantage of the cold of night to get that lucid feeling, with the precision of that astral system
up above his head, that his vague search had been a failure and that perhaps victory was to be found in that very fact. First, because it was worthy of him (in his own moments Oliveira thought well of himself as a human specimen), because it was the search for a kibbutz so desperately far away, a citadel that could only be taken with the aid of arms contrived in fantasy, not with the soul of the West or with the spirit, those powers worn away by his own lies as they had so well pointed out in the Club, those alibis used by man the animal as he gets stuck on a road from which there is no turning back. Kibbutz of desire, not of the soul, not of the spirit. And even though desire might also be a rough definition of incomprehensible forces, he could feel it present and at work, present in every mistake and also in every forward leap, that was being a man, not just a body and a soul but that inseparable totality, that ceaseless meeting up with lacks, with everything they had stolen from the poet, the vehement nostalgia for a land where life could be babbled out according to other compasses and other names. Even though death might be waiting at the corner with his broom upraised, even though hope was nothing but a lush Palmyra. And a snore, and from time to time a fart.

It was no longer so important, then, to make a mistake as it would have been had the search for his kibbutz been carried out with maps from the Geographical Society, with tested compasses, North pointing north, West west; about all that was needed was to understand, get a quick glimpse that would tell him that in the last analysis his kibbutz was no more impossible at that hour and in that cold and after those last days than if he had been searching after it according to the tribal rites, meritoriously and without earning the showy epithet of inquisitor, without getting his face slapped, without people weeping and a guilty conscience and the urge to chuck everything and go back to his draft-card and the protection of a slot in some spiritual or temporal budget. He would die without ever reaching his kibbutz but his kibbutz was there, far away but it was there and he knew that it was there because he was the child of his desire, it was his desire in the same way that he was his own desire and the world or what passed for the world was desire, was his desire or desire itself, it didn’t make too much difference at that time of night. And then he was able to cover up his face with his hands, leaving just enough room for his cigarette, and stay
there by the river, among the tramps, thinking about his kibbutz.

The
clocharde
woke up out of a dream in which somebody had been telling her repeatedly:
“Ça suffit, conâsse,”
and she discovered that Célestin had gone off in the middle of the night taking with him the baby carriage full of some cans of sardines (in bad shape) that had been given to them that afternoon in the Marais ghetto. Toto and Lafleur were sleeping like moles underneath their burlap and the new guy was sitting on a mooring post, smoking. Dawn was breaking.

The
clocharde
daintily removed the successive editions of
France-Soir
covering her, and scratched her head a bit. At six o’clock you could get hot soup on the Rue du Jour. It was practically certain that Célestin would show up to get some soup, and she could get the cans of sardines back if he hadn’t already sold them to Pipon or La Vase.

“Merde,”
said the
clocharde
, beginning the complicated task of getting up. And as an encore,
“C’est cul.”

Wrapping up in a black overcoat that reached down to her ankles, she went over to the newcomer. The newcomer agreed that the cold was almost worse than the police. When she got a cigarette from him and lit it, the
clocharde
got the idea that she knew him from somewhere. The newcomer also said that he knew her from somewhere, and both of them were pleased that they recognized each other at that hour of the morning. Sitting down on the next post, the
clocharde
said that it was still too early to go for soup. They talked about soup for a while, but the newcomer really didn’t know too much about soup kitchens, she had to explain to him where the best ones were, he really was green, but he was interested in everything and maybe he would dare take the sardines away from Célestin. They talked about the sardines and the newcomer promised that as soon as he saw Célestin he would ask for them back.

“He’ll pull out his hook,” the
clocharde
warned. “You’ll have to move fast and hit him over the head with something. They had to take five stitches in Tonio, he hollered so much they could hear in Pontoise.
C’est cul, Pontoise
,” the
clocharde
added, succumbing to nostalgia.

The newcomer was watching dawn break over the point of Vert-Galant, a willow tree was extricating its spider-webs out of
the fog. When the
clocharde
asked him why he was shivering so much with such a good lumberjacket, he shrugged and offered her another cigarette. They smoked and smoked, talking and looking at each other sympathetically. The
clocharde
talked about Célestin’s habits and the newcomer remembered the afternoons he had seen her hugging Célestin all along the benches and railings of the Pont des Arts, on the corner by the Louvre underneath the tiger-skinned plane trees, in the doorways of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, and one night on the Rue Gîtle-Coeur, kissing and retching alternately, dead drunk, Célestin in a painter’s blouse and the
clocharde
wearing as usual four or five dresses and some topcoats and overcoats, carrying a bundle of red material with pieces of sleeves and a broken cornet sticking out, so much in love with Célestin that it was something to see, getting his face all covered with lipstick and greasy stuff, brazenly lost in their public idyl, finally turning down the Rue de Nevers, and then La Maga had said: “She’s the one who’s in love, he couldn’t care less,” and she had looked at him for an instant before squatting down to gather up a little piece of green string and wrap it around her finger.

“At this time of the morning it’s not so cold any more,” the
clocharde
said, as if to encourage him. “I’m going to see if Lafleur has any wine left. Wine settles down your night. Célestin took two quarts of mine away with him when he took the sardines. No, he hasn’t got any left. You’re well-dressed, maybe you can buy a quart at Habeb’s. And some bread, if you’ve got enough money.” She liked the newcomer very much, although deep down she knew that he wasn’t new, that he was just well-dressed and could stand at Habeb’s bar and drink one pernod after another without anybody else’s complaining about his bad smell and things like that. The newcomer kept on smoking, nodding vaguely, with his head over to one side. A familiar face. Célestin would have known at once because Célestin was good at faces…“The cold really starts at nine o’clock. It comes from down there out of the mud. But we can go get some soup, it’s pretty good.”