Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series)

by Julio Cortázar

  “That Horacio knew about it before he left her.”

  “Please,” Gregorovius repeated. “I didn’t even …”

  “Don’t be dirty,” La Maga said monotonously. “Why should you want to put Horacio down? Don’t you know that we’ve split up, that he’s gone away out there in the rain?”

  “I’m not after anything,” Ossip said, as he seemed to huddle up into the easy chair. “I’m not like that, Lucía, you’re always going around misunderstanding me. Do I have to get down on my knees, like the captain of the Graffin that time, and beg you to believe me, and to—”

  “Leave me alone,” La Maga said. “First Pola, then you. All those spots on the wall and this night that never seems to have an end. I wouldn’t put it past you to think that I’m killing Pola.”

  “It never crossed my imagination.”

  “O.K., O.K. Horacio will never forgive me, even though he’s not in love with Pola any more. It’s laughable, a worthless little doll, made of wax from a Christmas candle, a delicate green wax, I remember.”

  “Lucía, it’s hard for me to believe that you were capable …”

  “He’ll never forgive me, even though we didn’t talk about it. He knows because he saw the doll and he saw the pins. He threw it on the floor, crushed it with his foot. He didn’t realize that that made it worse, that it increased the danger. Pola lives on the Rue Dauphine, he used to go to see her almost every afternoon. Do you think he told her about the little green doll, Ossip?”

  “Quite probably,” Ossip said, hostile and resentful. “All of you are crazy.”

  “Horacio used to speak about a new order of things, about the possibility of discovering a different life. He always spoke about death when he was talking about life, it was inevitable and we would laugh a lot about it. He told me that he was sleeping with Pola and then I understood that he didn’t think it was necessary for me to get upset or make a scene. I wasn’t really upset, Ossip, I could go to bed with you right now if I wanted to. It’s hard to explain, it’s not a matter of being unfaithful and things like that, Horacio used to get furious whenever he would hear the words ‘unfaithful’ or ‘cheating.’ I must recognize that from the first time we met he told me that he didn’t consider himself obligated in any way. I made the doll because Pola had got into my room, it was too much, I knew that she was capable of stealing my clothes, wearing my stockings, using my make-up, giving Rocamadour his milk.”

  “But you said you didn’t know her.”

  “She was in Horacio, stupid. Stupid, stupid Ossip. Poor Ossip, so stupid. In his lumberjacket, in the fur collar, you’ve seen the fur collar on Horacio’s lumberjacket. And Pola would be there when he came home, and in the way he would look, and when Horacio would get undressed, there in the corner, and take a bath in that tub—you see it, Ossip?—then Pola would start coming out of his skin, I saw her like ectoplasm and I held back the urge to cry because I knew that I would never get into Pola’s flat that way, that Pola would never sense me in Horacio’s hair or eyes or body-fuzz. I don’t know why; after all, we had been very much in love. I don’t know why. Because I don’t know how to think and he despises me. For things like that.”

  (–28)

  28

  THERE was walking on the stairway.

  “It’s probably Horacio,” Gregorovius said.

  “Probably,” said La Maga. “But I rather think it’s the watchmaker on the sixth floor, he always comes in late. Would you like to hear some music?”

  “At this time of night? We’ll wake the baby.”

  “No, we’ll put it on very low, it would be just right to listen to a quartet. We can turn it low enough so that we’ll be the only ones who can hear it, let’s see.”

  “It wasn’t Horacio,” Gregorovius observed.

  “I can’t say,” La Maga said, lighting a match and looking at some records piled in a corner. “He might have sat down outside, he does that sometimes. Sometimes he gets to the door and changes his mind. Turn on the phonograph, that white button next to the fireplace.”

  There was something that looked like a shoebox and La Maga knelt down to put the record on, feeling around in the dark, and the shoebox hummed a little, a distant chord filled the air around her hands. Gregorovius began to fill his pipe, a little scandalized. He didn’t like Schoenberg, but it was for a different reason, the time, the sick child, a kind of transgression. That was it, a transgression. An idiot idea. But sometimes he would get spells like that in which a vague sense of order would get back at him for having abandoned it. Stretched out on the floor with her head almost stuck inside the shoebox, La Maga seemed to be sleeping.

  Every so often there would be a soft snore from Rocamadour, but Gregorovius was getting lost in the music, he found that he could give in and let himself be carried off without protesting, turn himself over to a dead and buried Viennese. La Maga was smoking stretched out on the floor, her face would light up in the dark, with her eyes closed and her hair over her face, her cheeks shining as if she had been crying, it was stupid to think that she could have been crying, rather she was biting her lips with rage as she listened to the dry sound of a thump from up above, the second one, the third. Gregorovius was startled and was about to shout when he felt a hand holding him by the ankle.

  “Pay no attention, it’s the old man upstairs.”

  “But we can barely hear ourselves.”

  “It’s the pipes,” La Maga said mysteriously. “Everything gets in there, it’s already happened other times.”

  “The science of acoustics is amazing,” Gregorovius said.

  “He’ll get tired soon,” La Maga said. “The fool.”

  The knocking kept on upstairs. La Maga got up furiously and lowered the volume even more. Eight or nine chords, a pizzicato, and the knocking started again.

  “It can’t be,” Gregorovius said. “It’s absolutely impossible that he can hear a thing.”

  “He has better hearing than we do, that’s the worst of it.”

  “This building is like Dionysus’ ear.”

  “Whose ear? God damn him, right in the adagio. And he keeps on knocking. Rocamadour is going to wake up.”

  “Maybe it would be better …”

  “No, I don’t want to. Let him break the ceiling down. I’m going to put on a Mario del Monaco record and teach him a lesson, too bad I don’t have one. The fool, the dirty bastard.”

  “Lucía,” Gregorovius said softly. “It’s past midnight.”

  “Always the time,” La Maga snorted. “I’m going to get out of this place. I couldn’t put the volume any lower than it is, we couldn’t hear anything. Wait, I’m going to put the last movement on again. Don’t worry.”

  The knocking stopped, for a while the quartet was moving along towards the end without even the rhythmic snoring of Rocamadour. La Maga sighed, with her head practically in the speaker. The knocking started again.

  “What a fool,” La Maga said. “And that’s the way it is all the time.”

  “Don’t be stubborn, Lucía.”

  “Don’t you be a fool. I’m sick of them. I’d love to kick all of them out into the street. Just because I wanted to listen to Schoenberg, just for a while …”

  She had begun to cry, she reached over and knocked the pickup off as the last notes were over and since she was next to Gregorovius, leaning over the amplifier to shut it off, it was easy for him to put his arm around her waist and set her down on one of his knees. He began to stroke her hair, clearing it away from her face. La Maga was crying with short sobs, coughing and blowing her tobacco breath in his face.

  “Poor thing, poor thing,” Gregorovius repeated in rhythm to his caresses. “Nobody loves her, nobody. Everybody is nasty to poor Lucía.”

  “You stupid ass,” La Maga said as she hawked and swallowed in an unctuous sort of way. “I’m crying because I want to cry and especially to avoid anyone’s consoling me. My God, you’ve got sharp knees, they cut into me like scissors.”

 
“Sit here a while,” Gregorovius begged.

  “I don’t feel like it,” La Maga said. “And why in the world does that idiot keep on pounding like that?”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him, Lucía. You poor thing …”

  “He’s still knocking, I tell you it’s unbelievable.”

  “Let him knock,” Gregorovius advised incongruously.

  “You were the one who was worried before,” La Maga said, laughing in his face.

  “Please, if you knew …”

  “Oh, I know everything, but be still, Ossip,” La Maga said suddenly, catching on. “The guy wasn’t knocking because of the record. We can put another one on if we want to.”

  “Oh Lord, no.”

  “But can’t you still hear him pounding?”

  “I’m going up and punch him in the nose,” Gregorovius said.

  “Right now,” La Maga said in encouragement, getting up with a jump so that he could get by. “Tell him that he has no right to wake people up at one o’clock in the morning. Come on, get going, it’s the door on the left, there’s a shoe nailed to it.”

  “A shoe nailed to the door?”

  “Yes, the old man is completely mad. There’s a shoe and a green piece from an accordion. Aren’t you going up there?”

  “I don’t think it’s worth it,” Gregorovius said wearily. “That all makes it so different, so useless. Lucía, you didn’t understand that … Well, anyway, the fellow might stop knocking.”

  La Maga went over to the corner and took down something that in the shadows looked like a feather duster, and Gregorovius heard a tremendous blow on the ceiling. The noise stopped upstairs.

  “Now we can listen to what we please,” La Maga said.

  “I wonder,” thought Gregorovius, getting more and more tired.

  “For example,” La Maga said, “a Brahms sonata. How wonderful, he’s got tired of knocking. Wait, I’ll find the record, it’s around here somewhere. I can’t see a thing.”

  “Horacio is out there,” Gregorovius thought. “Sitting on the landing with his back against the door, listening to everything. Like a tarot figure, something that has to resolve itself, a polyhedron in which every edge and every facet keeps its immediate sense, the false one, until the mediating sense is integrated, revelation. And so Brahms, me, the thumps on the ceiling, Horacio: something is slowly heading towards an explanation. But it’s all so useless in any case.” He wondered what would happen if he tried to embrace La Maga in the dark again. “But he’s out there listening. He would be capable of enjoying what he heard, listening to us, he’s repulsive sometimes.” Besides, he was afraid of Oliveira and it was hard for him to admit it.

  “This must be it,” La Maga said. “Yes, a half-silver label with two birds on it. Who’s talking outside there?”

  “A polyhedron, somewhat crystallized, which takes shape little by little in the darkness,” Gregorovius thought. “She’s going to say this now and outside the other thing will happen and I … But I don’t know what this is or what the other is.”

  “It’s Horacio,” La Maga said.

  “Horacio and a woman.”

  “No, it must be the old man from upstairs.”

  “The one with the shoe on his door?”

  “Yes, he has an old woman’s voice, like a grackle. He always goes around wearing an astrakhan hat.”

  “Better not put the record on,” Gregorovius advised. “Let’s see what happens.”

  “So we can’t listen to the Brahms sonata after all,” La Maga said furiously.

  “What a ridiculous subversion of values,” Gregorovius thought. “There they are, about to kick each other around on the landing, in pitch dark or whatever you want to call it, and all she can think about is the fact that she won’t be able to hear her sonata.” But La Maga was right, as always she was the only one who was right. “I’m more prejudiced than I thought,” Gregorovius said to himself. “One thinks that just because he is living the life of an affranchi and accepts the material and spiritual parasitism of Lutetia, he’s managed to get over on the pre-Adamite side. Poor fool, what can you do.”

  “The rest is silence,” Gregorovius said in English as he sighed.

  “Silence my foot,” answered La Maga, who knew English quite well. “Now watch them start in all over again. The old man will speak first. There he is, ‘Mais qu’est-ce que vous foutez?’ ” La Maga mimicked with a nasal voice. “Let’s see what Horacio answers. I think he’s laughing under his breath, when he starts to laugh he can’t find the right words, it’s incredible. I’m going to see what’s going on.”

  “And we were so comfortable,” Gregorovius murmured, as if he had seen the angel of expulsion approaching. Gérard David, Van der Weiden, the Master of Flemalle, at that hour all the angels for some reason seemed to be accursedly Flemish, with chubby, stupid faces, but resplendent with lace and bourgeois admonitions (Daddy-ordered-it, so-you-better-beat-it-you-lousy-sinners). The whole room full of angels, “I looked over Jordan and what did I see / A band of angels comin’ after me,” always the same finale, police angels, dunning angels, angel angels. Putrefaction of putrefactions, like the blast of cold air that came up the legs of his pants, the angry voices on the landing, the silhouette of La Maga in the doorway.

  “C’est pas des façons, ça,” the old man was saying. “Empêcher les gens de dormir à cette heure c’est trop con. J’me plaindrai à la Police, moi, et puis qu’est-ce que vous foutez là, vous planqué par terre contre la porte? J’aurais pu me casser la gueule, merde alors.”

  “Go back to sleep, old man,” said Horacio, stretched out comfortably on the floor.

  “Dormir, moi, avec le bordel que fait votre bonne femme? Ça alors comme culot, mais je vous préviens, ça me passera pas comme ça, vous aurez de mes nouvelles.”

  “Mais de mon frère le Poète on a eu des nouvelles,” Horacio quoted with a yawn. “Have you been watching this guy?”

  “A fool,” La Maga said. “You put on a record turned down low and he pounds. You take the record off and he keeps on pounding. What does he want?”

  “Well, it’s the story of the guy who only drops one shoe.”

  “I don’t know that one,” La Maga said.

  “It was predictable,” said Oliveira. “Old people inspire respect in me, mixed up with other feelings, but as far as this one is concerned, I’d like to buy a bottle of formalin and stick him in it so he’d stop bugging us.”

  “Et en plus ça m’insulte dans son charabia de sales métèques,” the old man said. “On est en France, ici. Des salauds, quoi. On devrait vous mettre à la porte, c’est une honte. Qu’est-ce que fait le Gouvernement, je me demande. Des Arabes, tous des fripouilles, bande de tueurs.”

  “Come off it with the sales métèques, you ought to see that bunch of Frogs pile up the loot in Argentina,” Oliveira said. “What were you listening to? I just got here, I’m soaked.”

  “A Schoenberg quartet. Just now I wanted to listen to a Brahms sonata, turned down very low.”

  “The best thing would be to let it go till tomorrow,” said Oliveira, sizing up the situation and sitting up on one elbow as he lit a Gauloise. “Rentrez chez vous, monsieur, on vous emmerdera plus pour ce soir.”

  “Des fainéants,” the old man said. “Des tueurs, tous.”

  The astrakhan hat could be seen in the light of the match along with a dirty bathrobe and wrathful little eyes. The hat cast a gigantic shadow on the wall of the stairwell; La Maga was fascinated. Oliveira got up, blew out the match, and went into the apartment, closing the door softly.

  “Hello,” Oliveira said. “I can’t see anything.”

  “Hello,” said Gregorovius. “I’m glad you handled the man upstairs all right.”

  “Per modo di dire. The old man is really right, and besides, he’s old.”

  “Being old is no reason,” La Maga said.

  “It may not be a reason, but it is a safe-conduct pass.”

  “I remember your saying
once that the tragedy of Argentina is in the hands of old men.”

  “The curtain’s already been rung down on that play,” Oliveira said. “It’s been just the opposite since Perón, the young ones call the tune and it’s almost worse, but what can you do. The idea of age, generation, degrees, and class is a great joke. I suppose the reason that we’re so uncomfortable whispering like this is because Rocamadour is sleeping his sleep of the just.”

  “Yes, he fell asleep before we began to listen to some music. You’re soaked to the skin, Horacio.”

  “I went to a piano recital,” Oliveira explained.

  “Oh,” said La Maga. “Well, that’s fine. Take off your lumberjacket and I’ll fix you a nice hot mate.”

  “And a glass of caña, there still must be a half a bottle left around here.”

  “What’s caña?” Gregorovius asked. “Is it the same as what they call grappa?”

  “No, more like barack. Very good after concerts, especially in the case of first performances and indescribable consequences. Why don’t we light a dim and timid little light which won’t reach to Rocamadour’s eyes?”

  La Maga lit a lamp and placed it on the floor, creating a sort of Rembrandt that Oliveira found quite appropriate. The return of the prodigal, the picture of a return, even though it was fleeting and momentary, although he had not really known why he had climbed the stairs slowly to slump by the door and listen to the distant sounds of the end of the quartet and the whispered conversation of Ossip and La Maga. “They must have made love already, like a pair of cats,” he thought, looking at them. But no, they must have suspected that he would be back that night, and they had all their clothes on, and Rocamadour was in the bed. If Rocamadour had been lying on a pair of chairs placed together, if Gregorovius had had his shoes and coat off … Besides, what the hell difference did it make, since he was the intruder there, his dripping lumberjacket, shot to hell.

  “Acoustics,” Gregorovius observed. “It’s strange how sound gets into things and climbs from floor to floor, passing through a wall to the head of a bed, it’s unbelievable. Did you two ever duck underwater in a bathtub?”