Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series)

by Julio Cortázar

  His jowls were shaking and the old man, seized by a fit of coughing and emotion, withdrew behind the curtains. Forty hands gave out with a dry applause and several matches lost their heads. Oliveira slouched in his seat as far as possible and felt better. The old man in the accident must have been feeling better too in his hospital bed, sunk in the sleepiness which follows shock, that happy interregnum in which one abdicates self-government and the bed becomes a ship, with paid vacations, any break at all with daily routine. “I’m almost capable of going to visit him one of these days,” Oliveira said to himself. “But at best I would just spoil his desert island and become the footprint in the sand. God, but you’re getting sentimental.”

  The applause made him open his eyes and observe the hard work Madame Berthe Trépat was putting into her bow of thanks. Before he even had taken a good look at her face, her shoes had stopped him in his tracks, men’s shoes, incapable of disguise by any skirt. Square and heelless, with useless feminine ribbons. What followed up from them was both stiff and broad, a fat-lady stuck into a merciless corset. But Berthe Trépat was not really fat; the best you could say was that she was robust. She must have had sciatica or lumbago, something which made her move all at once, frontally now, waving with effort, and then from the side, outlined between the stool and the piano and folding herself geometrically until seated. From that position the artist turned her head around brusquely and bowed again, although the applause had stopped. “Somebody up above must be pulling strings,” Oliveira thought. He liked marionettes and puppets, and he was expecting miracles of prophetic syncretism. Berthe Trépat looked at the audience once more, all the sins of the moon suddenly seemed concentrated in her face that appeared to be covered with flour, and her cherry-red mouth opened up to assume the shape of an Egyptian barge. Profile once again, her little parrot-beak nose pointed for a moment at the keyboard while her hands perched on the keys from C to B like two dried-up chamois bags. The thirty-two chords of the first discontinuous movement began to sound. There were five seconds between the first and the second, fifteen between the second and third. On arriving at the fifteenth chord, Rose Bob had decided on a pause of twenty-five seconds. Oliveira, who at first had appreciated the good Weberian use of silence that Rose Bob was utilizing in her pauses, noticed that overuse was rapidly dissipating the effect. Between chords 7 and 8 there was coughing, between 12 and 13 somebody struck a match noisily, between 14 and 15 he clearly heard the expression “Ah, merde alors!” contributed by a young blond girl. Around the twentieth chord one of the more ancient ladies, a real virginal pickle, gripped her umbrella and opened her mouth to say something that was mercifully swallowed up by the twenty-first chord. Amused, Oliveira looked at Berthe Trépat, suspecting that the pianist was studying them all with what is called the corner of her eye. Out of that corner of the hooknosed profile of Berthe Trépat a celestial gray glance seemed to come, and it occurred to Oliveira that probably the poor woman was counting the house. At chord 23 a man with a neat, round bald spot got up indignantly and after snorting and huffing left the hall, digging in his heels during the eight-second silence ordained by Rose Bob. After chord 24 the pauses began to get smaller, and between 28 and 32 there was a rhythm like that of a dirge which could not help but have some effect. Berthe Trépat took her shoes off the pedals, put her left hand in her lap, and started on the second movement. This movement lasted for only four measures, each of three notes of equal value. The third movement consisted mainly in coming from the extreme registers of the keyboard and in approaching the middle chromatically, repeating the operation back out again, all in the midst of triplets and other adornments. At a given moment, which no one could foresee, the pianist stopped playing and stood up quickly, bowing with an air which seemed to bespeak a challenge, but in which Oliveira seemed to discern a note of insecurity or even fear. One couple applauded madly; Oliveira found himself applauding in turn and not knowing why (and when he found out why he got angry and stopped applauding). Berthe Trépat went back to her profile almost at once and ran her finger over the keyboard while she waited for them to quiet down. She began to play the Pavan for General Leclerc.

  In the two or three minutes that followed, Oliveira had some trouble in dividing his attention between the extraordinary stew that Berthe Trépat was boiling up at full steam and the furtive or forthright way in which young and old were leaving the concert. A mixture of Liszt and Rachmaninoff, the Pavan was the tiresome repetition of two or three themes which then got lost in innumerable variations, bits of bravura (rather poorly played, with holes and stitching everywhere) and the solemnities of a catafalque upon a caisson, broken by sudden fireworks which seemed to delight the mysterious Alix Alix. Once or twice Oliveira was worried that the towering Salammbô hairdo of Berthe Trépat would suddenly collapse, but who knows how many hairpins were reinforcing it, amidst the rumble and tumble of the Pavan. The orgiastic arpeggios which announced the end came on, and three themes were successively repeated (one of which had been lifted bodily from Strauss’s Don Juan), and Berthe Trépat let the chords rain down with growing intensity, modified by the hysterical repetition of the first theme and two chords composed of the gravest notes, the last of which came out markedly false for the right hand, but it was something that could happen to anyone and Oliveira applauded warmly; he had really enjoyed it.

  The artist turned around to face the audience with one of her rare springlike motions and bowed. Since she seemed to be counting the house with her eyes, she could not have failed to calculate that there were no more than eight or nine people left. With dignity Berthe Trépat went off stage left, and the usher drew the curtain and sold candy to the audience.

  On the one hand he wanted to leave, but all during the concert there had been an atmosphere which had fascinated Oliveira. After all, poor Madame Trépat had been trying to present works in première, which in itself was a great thing in this world of the polonaise, the clair de lune, and the ritual fire dance. There was something moving about that face of a burlap-stuffed doll, of a plush turtle, of an immense nitwit stuck in a rancid world of chipped teapots, old women who had heard Risler play, art and poetry lectures in halls covered with old wallpaper, of budgets of forty thousand francs a month and furtive touches on friends to get through the month, the cult of au-then-tic Akademia Raymond Duncan art, and it was easy to imagine what Alix Alix and Rose Bob looked like, the base calculations before renting the hall, the mimeographed program done by some well-meaning pupil, the fruitless lists of people to invite, the empty feeling backstage when they saw the empty hall and still had to go on, gold medal and all, she still has to go on. It was almost a chapter out of Céline and Oliveira felt himself incapable of thinking beyond the general atmosphere, beyond the useless and defeatist survival of such artistic activities among groups of people equally defeated and useless. “Of course it had to be my fate, getting stuck inside this moth-eaten fan,” Oliveira raged to himself. “An old man underneath a car, and now Madame Trépat. And let’s not think about the lousy weather outside or about myself. Above all, let’s not talk about myself.”

  Four people were left in the hall, and he thought it best to go sit in the first row to accompany the pianist a little better. He was amused by this bit of solidarity, but as soon as he was seated down front he lit a cigarette. For some reason a woman decided to leave at the exact moment in which Berthe Trépat had come back on stage, and she took a strong look at her before she drew herself up to make a bow to the empty hall. Oliveira thought that the woman who had left deserved a hard kick in the ass. He suddenly realized that all of his reactions came from a certain sympathy for Berthe Trépat, in spite of the Pavan and Rose Bob. “It’s been a long time since something like this has happened to me,” he thought. “I wonder if I’m getting soft with age.” So many metaphysical rivers and suddenly he wants to go visit the old man in the hospital, or he is surprised to find himself applauding this madwoman in a corset. Strange. It must be the cold, his wet shoes.

/>   The Délibes-Saint-Saëns Synthesis must have been going on for three minutes or so when the couple who had been the mainstay of the audience that remained got up and ostentatiously left. Again Oliveira thought he could make out a side-glance from Berthe Trépat, but now it was as if her hands had gone stiff, she bent over the piano and with tremendous effort, taking advantage of every pause to glance out of the corner of her eye at the seats where Oliveira and a peaceful-looking man were listening with what seemed to be the signs of rapt attention. The prophetic syncretism was not long in revealing its secret, even for a layman like Oliveira: three measures of Le Rouet d’Omphale were followed by four more from Les Filles de Cadix, then her left hand offered “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix,” while the right one spasmodically interspersed the theme of the bells from Lakmé, together they passed successively into the Danse Macabre and Coppélia, until other themes which the program attributed to the Hymne à Victor Hugo, Jean de Nivelle, and Sur les bords du Nil alternated showily with the better-known ones, and as far as prophetic was concerned, nothing could have been more successful, as was shown by the soft laughter of the peaceful-looking man while as a person of good breeding he covered his mouth with his glove, and Oliveira had to admit the guy was right, that he shouldn’t be asked to be quiet, and Berthe Trépat must have felt the same because she kept making more and more mistakes, it seemed as if her hands had become paralyzed, she kept leaning forward shaking her forearms and raising her elbows like a hen settling into her nest. “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix,” “Où va la jeune hindoue?” again, two syncretic chords, a stray arpeggio, Les Filles de Cadix, tra-la-la-la, like a hiccup, several notes together (surprisingly) in the manner of Pierre Boulez, and the peaceful-looking man let out a sort of bellow and ran out holding his gloves up to his mouth, just as Berthe Trépat lowered her hands and looked fixedly at the keyboard, and a long second passed, an interminable second, something desperately empty between Oliveira and Berthe Trépat alone in the hall.

  “Bravo,” Oliveira said, understanding that applause would have been out of place. “Bravo, madame.”

  Without standing up Berthe Trépat turned a little on the stool and put her elbow on middle C. They looked at each other. Oliveira got up and went to the edge of the stage.

  “Very interesting,” he said. “Really, madame, I listened to your concert with real interest.”

  What a bastard.

  Berthe Trépat looked at the empty hall. One of her eyelids was trembling a little. She seemed to be asking herself something, waiting for something. Oliveira sensed that he should keep on talking.

  “An artist like you must be aware of the lack of understanding and the snobbism of the public. Deep down I know that you were playing for yourself.”

  “For myself,” Berthe Trépat repeated in a macaw voice strikingly similar to that of the gentleman who had introduced her.

  “For whom, then?” Oliveira asked, climbing onto the stage with the ease of a dreamer. “An artist can only count on the stars, as Nietzsche said.”

  “Who are you?” Berthe Trépat was startled.

  “Oh, someone who is interested in manifestations …” He could have run words together the way he always did. All he could say was that he was here, looking for a little companionship without really knowing why.

  Berthe Trépat was listening, still a little absent. She got up with difficulty and looked at the hall, the curtains.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s getting late. I’ve got to go home.” She had said it to herself as if it were a punishment or something.

  “Could I have the pleasure of accompanying you for a while?” said Oliveira as he leaned forward. “I mean if no one is waiting for you in your dressing room or at the stage door.”

  “There’s no one. Valentin left after he introduced me. What did you think of the introduction?”

  “Interesting,” Oliveira said, more and more certain that he was dreaming and that he wanted to keep on dreaming.

  “Valentin can do better,” Berthe Trépat said. “And I thought it was nasty of him … yes, nasty … to leave the way he did, as if I were some old rag.”

  “He spoke of you and your work with great admiration.”

  “For five hundred francs he would speak about a dead fish with great admiration. Five hundred francs!” Berthe Trépat was lost in her thoughts.

  “I’m playing the fool,” Oliveira told himself. He bowed and got down off the stage; maybe she had forgotten about his offer. But she was looking at him and Oliveira saw that she was crying.

  “Valentin is a swine. All of them … there were more than two hundred people, you saw them, more than two hundred. That’s remarkable for a première, don’t you think? And they all paid, don’t think we sent out any complimentary tickets. Over two hundred, and now you’re the only one left. Valentin left, I …”

  “Some absences can mean a real success,” Oliveira said in some incredible way.

  “But why did they leave? Did you see them go? Over two hundred, I tell you, and prominent people, I’m sure I spotted Madame de Roche, Doctor Lacour, Montellier, the teacher whose pupil got the latest grand prize in violin … I don’t think they liked the Pavan too much and that’s why they left, don’t you think? Because they left before my Synthesis, that’s for certain, I saw them myself.”

  “Of course,” Oliveira said. “You have to admit, the Pavan…”

  “It isn’t really a pavan at all,” Berthe Trépat said. “It’s a piece of shit. It’s Valentin’s fault, they warned me that Valentin was sleeping with Alix Alix. Why do I have to keep a faggot, young man? Me, gold medalist, I’ll show you my notices, hits, in Grenoble, in Puy …”

  The tears were running down to her throat and getting lost among the withered pores of her ashen skin. She took Oliveira’s hand and shook it. At any moment she was going to become hysterical.

  “Why don’t you get your coat and we’ll get out of here,” Oliveira said hurriedly. “The outside air will do you good, we can have something to drink, for me it would be a great …”

  “Something to drink,” Berthe Trépat repeated. “Gold medal.”

  “Whatever you want,” Oliveira said incongruously. He made a motion to free himself, but the pianist gripped his arm and came closer. Oliveira could smell the sweat of the concert mixed with naphthaline and benzoin (as well as piss and cheap perfume). First Rocamadour and now Berthe Trépat, it was unbelievable. “Gold medal,” she kept saying, crying and snuffling. Suddenly a great sob shook her as if a chord had burst into the air. “And it’s the same old thing …” Oliveira finally understood as he fought in vain to get away from personal feelings, to take refuge in some metaphysical river, naturally. Offering no resistance, Berthe Trépat let herself be led back towards the curtains where the usher was looking at them, holding a flashlight and a feathered hat.