Blow-Up and Other Stories

by Julio Cortázar

  “You have the loaf of bread there, on the tablecloth,” Johnny says looking down into the air. “It’s solid, no denying it, toasted a lovely color, smells beautiful. Something that’s not me, something apart, outside me. But if I touch it, if I move my fingers and grasp it, then something changes, don’t you think so? The bread is outside me, but I touch it with my fingers, I feel it, I feel that that’s the world, but if I can touch it and feel it, then you can’t really say it’s something else, or do you think you can say it’s something else?”

  “Oh baby, for thousands of years now, whole armies of greybeards have been beating their heads to solve that problem.”

  “There’s some day in the bread,” murmured Johnny, covering his face. “And I dared to touch it, to cut it in two, to put some in my mouth. Nothing happened, I know; that’s what’s terrible. Do you realize it’s terrible that nothing happened? You cut the bread, you stick the knife into it, and everything goes on as before. I don’t understand, Bruno.”

  Johnny’s face was beginning to upset me, his excitement. Every time, it was getting more difficult to get him to talk about jazz, about his memories, his plans, to drag him back to reality. (To reality: I barely get that written down and it disgusts me. Johnny’s right, reality can’t be this way, it’s impossible to be a jazz critic if there’s any reality, because then someone’s pulling your leg. But at the same time, as for Johnny, you can’t go on buying it out of his bag or we’ll all end up crazy.)

  Then he fell asleep, or at least he’s closed his eyes and is pretending to be asleep. Again I realize how difficult it is to tell where Johnny is from what he’s doing. If he’s asleep, if he’s pretending to sleep, if he thinks he’s asleep. One is much further away from Johnny than from any other friend. No one can be more vulgar, more common, more strung out by the circumstances of a miserable life; apparently accessible on all sides. Apparently, he’s no exception. Anyone can be like Johnny if he just resigns himself to being a poor devil, sick, hung up on drugs, and without will power—and full of poetry and talent. Apparently. I, who’ve gone through life admiring geniuses, the Picassos, the Einsteins, the whole blessed list anyone could make up in a minute (and Gandhi, and Chaplin, and Stravinsky), like everyone else, I tend to think that these exceptions walk in the clouds somewhere, and there’s no point in being surprised at anything they do. They’re different, there’s no other trip to take. On the other hand, the difference with Johnny is secret, irritating by its mystery, because there’s no explanation for it. Johnny’s no genius, he didn’t discover anything, he plays jazz like several thousand other black and white men, though he’s better than any of them, and you have to recognize that that depends somewhat on public taste, on the styles, in short, the times. Panassié, for example, has decided that Johnny is outright bad, and although we believe that if anyone’s outright bad it’s Panassié, in any case there’s an area open to controversy. All this goes to prove is that Johnny is not from some other world, but the moment I think that, then I wonder if precisely so there is not in Johnny something of another world (he’d be the first to deny it). Likely he’d laugh his ass off if you told him so. I know fairly well what he thinks, which of these things he lives. I say: which of these things he lives, because Johnny … But I’m not going that far, what I would like to explain to myself is the distance between Johnny and ourselves that has no easy answer, is not based in explainable differences. And it seems to me that he’s the first to pay for the consequences of that, that it affects him as much as it does us. I really feel like saying straight off that Johnny is some kind of angel come among men, until some elementary honesty forces me to swallow the sentence, turn it around nicely and realize that maybe what is really happening is that Johnny is a man among angels, one reality among the unrealities that are the rest of us. Maybe that’s why Johnny touches my face with his fingers and makes me feel so unhappy, so transparent, so damned small, in spite of my good health, my house, my wife, my prestige. My prestige above all. Above all, my prestige.

  But it turns out the same old way, I leave the hospital and hardly do I hit the street, check the time, remember what all I have to do, the omelet turns smoothly in the air and we’re right side up again. Poor Johnny, he’s so far out of it. (That’s the way it is, the way it is. It’s easier for me to believe that that’s the way it really is, now I’m in the café and the visit to the hospital was two hours ago, with everything that I wrote up there forcing me, like a condemned prisoner, to be at least a little decent with my own self.)

  Luckily, the business about the fire got fixed up okay, or it seemed reasonable to imagine that the marquesa did her best to see that the fire business would be fixed up okay. Dédée and Art Boucaya came looking for me at the paper, and the three of us went over to Vix to listen to the already famous—still secret—recording of Amorous. Dédée told me, not much caring to, in the taxi, how the marquesa had gotten Johnny out of the trouble over the fire, that anyway there was nothing worse than a scorched mattress and a terrible scare thrown into all the Algerians living in the hotel in the rue Lagrange. The fine (already paid), another hotel (already arranged for by Tica), and Johnny is convalescing in an enormous bed, very pretty, drinking milk out of a milkcan and reading Paris Match and The New Yorker, once in a while changing off to his famous (and scroungy) pocket notebook with Dylan Thomas poems and penciled notations all through it.

  After all this news and a cognac in the corner café, we settled down in the audition room to listen to Amorous and Streptomycin. Art had asked them to put out the lights, and lay down on the floor to hear better. And then Johnny came in and his music moved over our faces, he came in there even though he was back in the hotel propped up in bed, and scuttled us with his music for a quarter of an hour. I understand why the idea that they were going to release Amorous infuriated him, anyone could hear its deficiencies, the breathing perfectly audible at the ends of the phrase, and especially the final savage drop, that short dull note which sounded to me like a heart being broken, a knife biting into the bread (and he was speaking about bread a few days back). But on the other hand, and it would escape Johnny, there was what seemed to us a terrible beauty, the anxiety looking for an outlet in an improvisation full of flights in all directions, of interrogation, of desperate gestures. Johnny can’t understand (because what for him is a calamity, for us looks like a road, at least a road-sign, a direction) that Amorous is going to stand as one of jazz’s great moments. The artist inside him is going to blow his stack every time he hears this mockery of his desire, of everything that he’d wanted to say while he was fighting, the saliva running out of his mouth along with the music, more than ever alone up against that he was pursuing, against what was trying to escape him while he was chasing it. That hard. Curious, it had been indispensable to listen to this, even though already everything was converging into this, this solo in Amorous, so that I realized that Johnny was no victim, not persecuted as everyone thought, as I’d even insisted upon in my biography of him (the English edition has just appeared and is bound to sell like Coca-Cola). I know now that’s not the way it is, that Johnny pursues and is not pursued, that all the things happening in his life are the hunter’s disasters, not the accidents of the harassed animal. No one can know what Johnny’s after, but that’s how it is, it’s there, in Amorous, in the junk, in his absurd conversations on any subject, in his breakdowns, in the Dylan Thomas notebook, in the whole of the poor sonofabitch that Johnny is, which makes him larger than life, and changes him into a living weirdo, into a hunter with no arms and legs, into a rabbit running past a sleeping tiger’s nose. And I find it absolutely necessary to say that, at bottom, Amorous made me want to go vomit, as if that might free me of him, of everything in him that was going up against me and against everybody, that shapeless black mass without feet or hands, that crazy chimp that puts his fingers on my face and looks at me tenderly.

  Art and Dédée don’t see (I think they don’t want to see) more than the formal lovelines
s of Amorous. Dédée even liked Streptomycin better, where Johnny improvises with his usual ease and freedom, which the audience understands perfectly well and which to me sounds more like Johnny’s distracted, he just lets the music run itself out, that he’s on the other side. When we got into the street, I asked Dédée what their plans were, and she said that as soon as Johnny was out of the hotel (for the moment the police had him under surveillance), a new record company wanted to have him record anything he wanted to and it’d pay him very well. Art backed her up, said Johnny was full of terrific ideas, and that he and Marcel Gavoty were going to do this new bit with Johnny, though after the past few weeks you could see that Art wasn’t banking on it, and privately I knew that he’d been having conversations with his agent about going back to New York as soon as possible. Something I more than understood, poor guy.

  “Tica’s doing very well,” Dédée said bitterly. “Of course, it’s easy for her. She always arrives at the last minute and all she has to do is open her handbag and it’s all fixed up. On the other hand, I …”

  Art and I looked at one another. What in hell could we say? Women spend their whole lives circling around Johnny and people like Johnny. It’s not weird, it’s not necessary to be a woman to feel attracted to Johnny. What’s hard is to circle about him and not lose your distance, like a good satellite, like a good critic. Art wasn’t in Baltimore at that time, but I remember from the times I knew Johnny when he was living with Lan and the kids. To look at Lan really hurt. But after dealing with Johnny for a while, after accepting little by little his music’s influence, his dragged-out terrors, his inconceivable explanations of things that had never happened, his sudden fits of tenderness, then one understood why Lan wore that face and how it was impossible that she live with Johnny and have any other face at all. Tica’s something else, she gets out from under by being promiscuous, by living the dolce vita, and besides she’s got the dollar bill by the short hairs, and that’s a better scene than owning a machine gun, at least if you believe what Art Boucaya says when he gets pissed off at Tica or when he’s got a hangover.

  “Come as soon as you can,” Dédée said. “He’d like to talk with you.”

  I would have liked to lecture the hell out of him about the first (the cause of the fire, in which he was most certainly involved), but it would have been almost as hopeless to try to convince Johnny that he should become a useful citizen. For the moment everything’s going well (it makes me uneasy) and it’s strange that whenever everything goes well for Johnny, I feel immensely content. I’m not so innocent as to think this is merely a friendly reaction. It’s more like a truce, a breather. I don’t need to look for explanations when I can feel it as clearly as the nose on my face. It makes me sore to be the only person who feels this, who is hung with it the whole time. It makes me sore that Art Boucaya, Tica or Dédée don’t realize that every time Johnny gets hurt, goes to jail, wants to kill himself, sets a mattress on fire or runs naked down the corridors of a hotel, he’s paying off something for them, he’s killing himself for them. Without knowing it, and not like he was making great speeches from the gallows or writing books denouncing the evils of mankind or playing the piano with the air of someone washing away the sins of the world. Without knowing it, poor saxophonist, as ridiculous as that word is, however little a thing it is, just one among so many other poor saxophonists.

  What’s terrible is if I go on like that, I’m going to end up writing more about myself than about Johnny. I’m beginning to compare myself to a preacher and that doesn’t give me too big a laugh, I’m telling you. By the time I got home I was thinking cynically enough to restore my confidence, that in my book on Johnny I mention the pathological side of his personality only in passing and very discreetly. It didn’t seem necessary to explain to people that Johnny thinks he’s walking through fields full of urns, or that pictures move when he looks at them; junk-dreams, finally, which stop with the cure. But one could say that Johnny leaves these phantoms with me in pawn, lays them on me like putting a number of handkerchiefs in a pocket until the time comes to take them back. And I think I’m the only one who can stand them, who lives with them and is scared shitless of them; and nobody knows this, not even Johnny. One can’t admit things like that to Johnny, as one might confess them to a really great man, a master before whom we humiliate ourselves so as to obtain some advice in exchange. What is this world I have to cart around like a burden? What kind of preacher am I? There’s not the slightest bit of greatness in Johnny, I’ve known that since I’ve known him, since I began to admire him. And for a while now this hasn’t surprised me, although at the beginning the lack of greatness upset me, perhaps because it’s one quality one is not likely to apply to the first comer, and especially to jazzmen. I don’t know why (I don’t know why) I believed at one time that Johnny had a kind of greatness which he contradicts day after day (or which we contradict, it’s not the same thing really; because, let’s be honest, there is in Johnny the phantom of another who could be, and this other Johnny is very great indeed; one’s attention is drawn to the phantom by the lack of that quality which nevertheless he evokes and contains negatively).

  I say this because the tries Johnny has made to change his life, from his unsuccessful suicide to using junk, are ones you finally expect from someone with as little greatness as he. I think I admire him all the more for that, because he really is the chimpanzee who wants to learn to read, a poor guy who looks at all the walls around him, can’t convince himself, and starts all over again.

  Ah, but what if one day the chimp does begin to read, what a crack in the dam, what a commotion, every man for himself, head for the hills, and I first of all. It’s terrible to see a man lacking all greatness beat his head against the wall that way. He is the critic of us all with his bones cracking, he tears us to shreds with the opening notes of his music. (Martyrs, heroes, fine, right: one is certain with them. But Johnny!)

  Sequences. I don’t know how better to say it, it’s like an idea of what abruptly brings about terrible or idiotic sequences in a man’s life, without his knowing what law outside the categories labeled “law” decides that a certain telephone call is going to be followed immediately by the arrival of one’s sister who lives in the Auvergne, or that the milk is going to be upset into the fire, or that from a balcony we’re going to see a boy fall under an automobile. As on football teams or boards of directors, it appears that destiny always appoints a few substitutes when those named to the positions fall out as if by themselves. And so it’s this morning, when I’m still happy knowing that things are going better and more cheerfully with Johnny Carter, there’s an urgent telephone call for me at the paper, and it’s Tica calling, and the news is that Bee, Johnny and Lan’s youngest daughter, has just died in Chicago, and that naturally Johnny’s off his head and it would be good of me to drop by and give his friends a hand.

  I was back climbing the hotel stairs—and there have been a lot of them during my friendship with Johnny—to find Tica drinking tea, Dédée soaking a towel, and Art, Delaunay, and Pepe Ramírez talking in low voices about the latest news of Lester Young, Johnny very quiet on the bed, a towel on his forehead, and wearing a perfectly tranquil and almost disdainful air. I immediately put my sympathetic face back into my pocket, restricting myself to squeezing Johnny’s hand very hard, lighting a cigarette, and waiting.

  “Bruno, I hurt here,” Johnny said after a while, touching his chest in the conventional location. “Bruno, she was like a small white stone in my hand. I’m nothing but a pale horse with granulated eyelids whose eyes’ll run forever.”

  All of this said solemnly, almost recited off, and Tica looking at Art, and both of them making gestures of tender forbearance, taking advantage of the fact that Johnny has his face covered with the towel and can’t see them. Personally, I dislike cheap sentimentality and its whole vocabulary, but everything that Johnny had just said, aside from the impression that I’d read it somewhere, felt to me like a mask that he’d
put on to speak through, that empty, that useless. Dédée had come over with another towel to replace the one plastered on there, and in the interval I caught a glimpse of Johnny’s face uncovered and I saw an ashy greyness, the mouth twisted, and the eyes shut so tight they made wrinkles on his forehead. As always with Johnny, things had happened in a way other than what one had expected, and Pepe Ramírez who doesn’t know him very well is still flipped out and I think from the scandal, because after a time Johnny sat up in bed and started slowly, chewing every word, and then blew it out like a trumpet solo, insulting everyone connected with recording Amorous, without looking at anyone but nailing us all down like bugs in a box with just the incredible obscenity of his words, and so for two full minutes he continued cursing everyone on Amorous, starting with Art and Delaunay, passing over me (but I …) and ending with Dédée, Christ omnipotent and the whore who without exception gave birth to us all. And this was profoundly, this and the small white stone, the funeral oration for Bee, dead from pneumonia in Chicago.

  Two empty weeks will pass; piles of work, journalism, magazine articles, visits here and there—a good résumé of a critic’s life, a man who only lives on borrowed time, borrowed everything, on novelties for the news-hungry and decisions not of one’s making. I’m talking about what happened one night Tica, Baby Lennox and I were together in the Café de Flore humming Out of Nowhere very contentedly and talking about a piano solo of Bud Powell’s which sounded particularly good to all three of us, especially to Baby Lennox who, on top of being otherwise spectacular, had done herself up à la Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and you should have seen how great it looked on her. Baby will see Johnny show up with the rapturous admiration of her twenty years, and Johnny look at her without seeing her and continue wide of us and sit alone at another table, dead drunk or asleep. I’ll feel Tica’s hand on my knee.