Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) (70 page)

1. “Yes, we can’t really explain any of that at all,” Ronald said.

(–
34
)

IN the morning, still persisting in the dozing that the hair-raising shriek of the alarm could not change into sharp wakefulness, they would dutifully tell each other about the dreams they had had that night. Head to head, caressing each other, mingling hands and feet, they tried to put into words the world they had been living in during darkness. Traveler, a friend from Oliveira’s youth, was fascinated by Talita’s dreams, her mouth, tight or smiling according to the telling, the gestures and exclamations with which she would accentuate it, her ingenuous conjectures about the reason and meaning of her dreams. Then it would be his turn to tell about his, and sometimes in the middle of a telling his hands would begin to caress and they would go from dreams to love, fall asleep again, be late everywhere they were going.

Listening to Talita, her voice a little sticky from sleep, looking at her hair spread out on the pillow, Traveler was startled that everything could be like that. He stuck out a finger, touched Talita on the temple, the forehead. (“And then my sister became my Aunt Irene, but I’m not sure”), he would test the barrier so few inches away from his own head (“And I was a boy naked in a pile of straw and I was looking at the raging river as it rose, a gigantic wave …”). They had fallen asleep with their heads touching and there, in that physical immediacy, in that almost total coincidence of attitudes, positions, breathing, the same tick-tock, the same stimuli of street and city, the same magnetic radiations, the same brand of coffee, the same stellar conjunction, the same night for both of them, tightly embraced there, they had dreamed different dreams, they had lived unlike adventures, one had smiled while the other had fled frightened by herself, one had taken an exam in algebra again while the other was coming to a city built of white stone.

Talita would put pleasure or doubt into the morning retelling, but Traveler would secretly insist on looking for correspondences. How was it possible that his daytime companion would inevitably turn off into that divorce, that inadmissible solitude of the dreamer? Sometimes his image would become part of Talita’s dreams, or the image of Talita would share the horror of one of Traveler’s nightmares. But
they
did not know it, it was necessary for one to tell the other on awakening: “Then you grabbed me by the hand and told me …” And Traveler discovered that while in Talita’s dream he had grabbed her hand and talked to her, in his own dream he had been in bed with Talita’s best friend or had been talking with the manager of the Las Estrellas circus, or swimming in Mar del Plata. The presence of his ghost in an alien dream had reduced him to the status of a tool, with no precedence whatsoever over manikins, unknown cities, railroad stations, stairways, all the paraphernalia of nighttime reproductions. Next to Talita, wrapping up her face and head with his lips and fingers, Traveler could feel the impassable barrier, the dizzy distance that not even love could leap. For a long time he waited for a miracle, that the dream Talita was about to tell him in the morning would also be the one he had dreamed. He waited for it, incited it, provoked it, calling upon all possible analogies, looking for similarities that suddenly would bring him to a recognition. Only once, without Talita’s assigning it the least importance, did they dream analogous dreams. Talita spoke about a hotel that she and her mother had gone to where everybody had to bring his own chair. Then Traveler remembered his dream: a hotel without bathrooms, which obliged everyone to take a towel and go through a railroad station to take a bath in some imprecise place. He told her: “We almost dreamed the same dream, we were in hotels without chairs and without bathrooms.” Talita was amused and laughed, it was already time to get up, they were shamefully lazy.

Traveler kept on hoping and waiting less and less. The dreams came back, each one on its own side. Their heads would fall asleep touching each other and in each one the curtain would rise on a different stage. Traveler thought ironically that they were like those two movie theaters side by side on the Calle Lavalle, and he lost his hopes completely. He lost his faith that what he wanted could happen, and he knew that without faith it
would not happen. He knew that without faith nothing that should happen would happen, and with faith almost never either.

(–
100
)

PERFUMES, Orphic hymns, civets in the first and second meanings … Here you smell of sardonyx. Here of chrysoprase. Here, wait a minute, here it’s like parsley but just a hint, a small piece lost in a chamois skin. Here your own smell starts. How strange, really, that a woman cannot smell herself the way a man can smell her. Here exactly. Don’t move, let me. You smell of royal jelly, of honey in a tobacco pouch, of seaweed even though the place might make it topical. There are so many kinds of seaweed, La Maga smelled of fresh seaweed, pulled up by the sea’s last surf. Of the wave itself. On some days the smell of seaweed would become mixed up with a thicker cadence, then I would have to have recourse to perversion—but it was a Palatine perversion, you understand, a Bulgaroctonous luxury, that of a seneschal surrounded by nocturnal obedience—, to bring my lips up to hers, touch with my tongue that light pink flame that fluttered surrounded by shadow, and then, as now I do with you, I would slowly separate her thighs, hold her a little to one side and breathe into her interminably, feeling how her hand, without my asking, would begin to break me up the way a flame begins to pluck its topazes out of a wrinkled newspaper. Then the perfumes would stop miraculously and everything was taste, biting, essential juices running about the mouth, the fall into that shadow, the primeval darkness, the hub of the wheel of origins. Yes, in that instant of the most crouching animality, closest to excretion and its unspeakable apparatus, there the initial and final figures are sketched, there in the viscous cavern of your daily relaxation stands the trembling Aldebaran, genes and constellations jump, everything becomes alpha and omega,
coquille
, cunt,
concha, con, coño
, millennium, Armageddon,
terramycin
, oh shut up, don’t come on with your despicable
show
, your easy mirrors. The silence of your skin, its abysses
with
the roll of emerald dice, gadflies and phoenixes and
craters…

(–
92
)

MORELLIANA

GOMBROWICZ
,
Ferdydurke
, Chapter IV. Preface to the Honer lined with child

(–
122
)

PITCHCOMBE, GLOS.

(–
29
)

WHY so far from the gods? Perhaps simply by asking.

And so what? Man is the animal who asks. The day when we will really learn how to ask there will be a dialogue. Right now questions sweep us away from the answers. What
epiphany
can we expect if we are drowning in the falsest of freedoms, the Judeo-Christian dialectic? We need a real
Novum Organum
, we have to open our windows up wide and throw everything out into the street, but above all we also have to throw out the window and ourselves along with it. It is either a case of death or a continuing flight. We have to do it, in some way or another we have to do it. To have the strength to plunge into the midst of parties and crown the head of the dazzling lady of the house with a beautiful green frog, a gift of night, and suffer without horror the vengeance of her lackeys.

(–
31
)

CONCERNING the etymology offered by Gabio Basso for the word
person.

A wise and ingenious explanation, by my lights, that of Gabio Basso, in his treatise
On the Origin of Words
, of the word
person
, mask. He thinks that this word has its origin in the verb
personare
, to retain. This is how he explains his opinion: “Since the mask covers the face completely except for an opening where the mouth is, the voice, instead of scattering in all directions, narrows down to escape through one single opening and therefore acquires a stronger and more penetrating sound. Thus, since the mask makes the human voice more sonorous and firm, it has been given the name
person
, and as a consequence of the formation of this word, the letter
o
as it appears in it is long.”

AULIO GELIO
,
Attic Nights

(–
42
)

OCTAVIO PAZ

(–
54
)

HOSPITAL Items

The York County Hospital informs us that the Dowager Duchess of Grafton, who Sunday last fractured a leg, had a restful day yesterday.

The Sunday Times
, London

(–
95
)

MORELLIANA

It is enough to take a momentary look with everyday eyes at the behavior of a cat or a fly to feel that the new vision towards which science seems to be heading, that disanthropomorphization urgently proposed by biologists and physicists as the only possible conjoinment with phenomena such as instinct or vegetative life, is nothing but the remote, isolated, insistent voice by which certain lines of Buddhism, Vedanta, Sufism, Western mysticism urge us to renounce mortality once and for all.

(–
152
)

THE ABUSE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

THIS house I am living in resembles my own in every way: the disposition of the rooms, the smell of the hallway, the furniture, the light that slants in the morning, becomes attenuated at noontime, overlaps in the afternoon; everything is the same, even the paths and the trees in the garden, and that old tumbledown gate and the paving stones in the courtyard.

The hours and minutes of the time that passes also resemble the hours and minutes of my own life. In the moment in which they spin me around, I tell myself: “They seem real. How much they resemble the real hours I am living at this moment!”

For my part, if indeed I have done away with every reflective surface in my house, in spite of it all, the inevitable window-pane insists on returning my reflection, I see someone there who looks like me. Yes, he looks very much like me, I recognize him!

But no one must think that it is I! After all! Everything is false here. When they give me back
my
house and
my
life, then I shall find my own true face.

JEAN TARDIEU

(–
143
)

“EVEN though you’re from Buenos Aires and all that, they’ll stick you with a blossom horse if you don’t watch out.”

“I’ll try to watch out.”

“That would be wise.”

CAMBACERES
,
Música sentimental

(–
19
)

IN any case, their shoes were walking on linoleum-like material, their noses smelled a bittersweet aseptic powder, the old man was installed in his bed up against two pillows, his nose like a hook caught in the air holding him upright. Livid, with mortuary rings underneath his eyes. The extraordinary zigzag of his temperature chart. And why had they gone to all that trouble?

They said it was nothing, the Argentine friend had happened to be a witness to the accident, the French friend was a dauber, all hospitals, the same infinite filth. Morelli, yes, the writer.

“It’s impossible,” Étienne said.

Why not, stone-in-the-water-editions: plop, nothing more is known about him. Morelli took the trouble to tell them that some four hundred copies had been sold (and given away). And then this fact, two in New Zealand, a tender statistic.

Oliveira took out a cigarette with a trembling hand, and he looked at the nurse who gave him an affirmative signal and went away, leaving them hedged in between the two yellowish screens. They sat down on the foot of the bed after pushing aside some notebooks and piles of paper.