“I’ve thought of it,” Oliveira said, tossing his lumberjacket in a corner and sitting down on a stool.
“You can hear everything the people downstairs are saying, all you have to do is put your head underwater and listen. The sounds come through the plumbing, I imagine. Once in Glasgow I discovered that the neighbors were Trotskyites.”
“When I think of Glasgow I think of bad weather, a port full of sad people,” La Maga said.
“Too many movies,” said Oliveira. “But this mate is like a pardon, something incredibly conciliatory. Good Lord, look how wet my shoes got. You see, a mate is like a period and a space. You take one and then you can start a new paragraph.”
“I’ll never know these delights of the pampas,” Gregorovius said. “But you also mentioned a drink, I believe.”
“Bring the caña,” Oliveira ordered. “I think there’s over a half-bottle left.”
“Did you two buy it here?” Gregorovius asked.
“Why the devil does he use the plural,” Oliveira thought. “They must have been rolling around here all night, it’s an unmistakable sign. But then.”
“No, my brother sends it to me. I have a wonderful brother in Rosario. Caña and reproaches, an abundance of both.”
He passed his empty gourd to La Maga, who had squatted by his feet. He began to feel good. He felt La Maga’s fingers on his ankle, on his shoelaces. He let her take off his shoe with a sigh. La Maga took off his wet sock and wrapped his foot in a page of the Figaro Littéraire. The mate was hot and very bitter.
Gregorovius liked the caña, it wasn’t just like barack but it was similar. He went through a catalogue of Hungarian and Czech drinks, some reminiscences. They could hear the rain falling softly and they felt comfortable, especially Rocamadour, who had been sleeping for more than an hour already without stirring. Gregorovius talked about Transylvania, about some adventures in Salonika. Oliveira remembered that there was a pack of Gauloises on the table and a pair of fleece-lined slippers. Feeling his way, he went over to the table. “In Paris, any mention of someplace beyond Vienna sounds like literature,” Gregorovius was saying, with a voice that seemed to be pleading. Horacio found the cigarettes and opened the drawer of the night-table to take out the slippers. In the darkness he could make out the figure of Rocamadour lying on his back. Without really knowing why, he stroked his forehead with a finger. “My mother didn’t like to talk about Transylvania, she was afraid that people would associate her with stories about vampires and all that … And Tokay, you know …” Horacio tried to get a better look, kneeling next to the bed. “You can imagine in Montevideo,” La Maga was saying. “You think that people are all alike, but when you live on the Cerro side of town … Is tokay a kind of bird?” “Well, in a certain sense.” The natural reaction in cases like this. Let’s see: first…(“What does in a certain sense mean? Is it a bird or isn’t it?”) But all he had to do was put a finger on the baby’s lips, the lack of a response. “I was taking the liberty of using a trite image, Lucía. There is a bird sleeping in all good wines.” Forced breathing, idiocy. Another form of idiocy that his hands should be trembling so much, barefoot and wet (his feet would have to be rubbed with alcohol, vigorously if possible). “Un soir, l’âme du vin chantait dans les bouteilles,” Ossip scanned. “Just like Anacreon, I think …” And one could almost touch La Maga’s resentful silence, her mental note: Anacreon, a Greek writer no one ever reads. Everybody knows about him except me. And where was that line from, un soir, l’âme du vin? Horacio slipped his hand under the sheets, it was a great effort to bring himself to feel Rocamadour’s tiny stomach, the cold thighs, there seemed to be a little warmth left farther up, but no, he was so cold. “Fall into the pattern,” Horacio thought. “Shout, turn on the light, start the obligatory hustle and bustle. Why?” But maybe, still…“Then it means that this instinct is of no use to me, this thing I’m starting to discover from deep down inside of me. If I call out it will be Berthe Trépat all over again, the same stupid attempts, pity. Put the glove on, do what must be done in cases like this. Oh no, that’s enough. Why turn on the light and shout if it won’t do any good? An actor, a perfect fucking actor. All that can be done is …” He heard Gregorovius’s glass tinkle against the bottle of caña. “Yes, it’s quite like barack.” With a Gauloise in his mouth he struck a match, taking a good look. “You’ll wake him up,” La Maga said as she put some fresh yerba mate in his gourd. Horacio blew the match out brutally. It’s a known fact that if the pupils, under a bright light, etc. Quod erat demonstrandum. “Like barack, but a little less aromatic,” Ossip was saying.
“The old man is knocking again,” La Maga said.
“It must be a shutter,” said Gregorovius.
“This building doesn’t have shutters. He must have gone crazy.”
Oliveira put on the slippers and went back to the chair. The mate was wonderful, hot and very bitter. There was pounding upstairs, twice, weakly.
“He’s killing cockroaches,” Gregorovius suggested.
“No, he’s got blood in his eye and he doesn’t want to let us sleep. Go up and say something to him, Horacio.”
“You go up,” Oliveira said. “I don’t know why, but he’s more afraid of you than of me. At least he doesn’t come out with xenophobia, apartheid, and other forms of segregation.”
“If I go up there I’ll tell him so many things that he’ll call the police.”
“It’s raining too hard. Work on his moral side, praise the decorations he has on his door. Talk about your feelings as a mother and things like that. Go ahead.”
“I don’t feel like it,” La Maga said.
“Go ahead, sweetheart,” Oliveira said in a low voice.
“But why do you want me to go?”
“To please me. You’ll see, he’ll stop.”
There were two thumps, then one. La Maga got up and went out of the apartment. Horacio followed her, and when he heard her going upstairs he turned on the light and looked at Gregorovius. He pointed to the bed. After a minute he turned out the light while Gregorovius went back to his chair.
“It’s incredible,” Ossip said as he grabbed the bottle of caña in the dark.
“Incredible, of course. Inevitable, all that. No obituaries, old man. All I had to do was leave this flat for one day and the damnedest things happened. Anyway, one thing can be the consolation for the other.”
“I don’t understand,” Gregorovius said.
“You understand beautifully. Ça va, ça va. You can’t imagine how little I care.”
Gregorovius noticed that Oliveira was using the familiar form and this meant that things would be different, if it were still possible … He said something about the Red Cross, all-night drugstores.
“Do what you want to do, it’s all the same to me,” Oliveira said. “What a day this has been, brother!”
If he could only flop on the bed and go to sleep for a couple of years. “Chicken,” he thought. Gregorovius had caught his contagious immobility and was laboriously lighting his pipe. They could hear talking from far off, La Maga’s voice coming through the rain, the old man answering her with his shrill voice. The door of some other apartment slammed, people going out to complain about the noise.
“Basically you’re right,” Gregorovius admitted. “But isn’t there some legal responsibility?”
“With everything that has happened we’re in it up to our necks,” Oliveira said. “Especially you two, I can always prove that I arrived too late. A mother lets her child die while she takes care of her lover on the floor.”
“If you’re trying to say …”
“It doesn’t really matter.”
“But it’s not true, Horacio.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to me, consummation is an after-effect. I don’t have anything to do with the whole business any more, I only came up because I was soaked and I wanted a mate. Hey, people are coming.”
“We ought to call an ambulance,” Gregorovius said.
“I’m not going to sit here,” Gregorovius said. “We’ve got to do something, I tell you, we’ve got to do something.”
“But I’m quite aware of that. Action, always action. Die Tätigkeit, old man. Bang, there weren’t many of us left and grandmother gave birth. Keep your voices down, you’ll wake the baby.”
“Hello,” said Ronald.
“Hi,” said Babs, struggling to close her umbrella.
“Keep your voices down,” said La Maga, who was coming in behind them. “Why didn’t you close the umbrella outside?”
“You’re right,” Babs said. “The same thing always happens to me everywhere I go. Don’t make any noise, Ronald. We only stopped by to tell you about Guy, it’s unbelievable. Did you blow a fuse?”
“No, it’s because of Rocamadour.”
“Keep your voice down,” Ronald said. “And put that fucking umbrella down someplace.”
“It’s so hard to close,” Babs said. “It opens so easily.”
“The old man threatened to call the police,” La Maga said, closing the door. “He was ready to hit me, shrieking like a madman. Ossip, you really should see what’s in his apartment, you can see a little from the stairway. A table full of empty bottles and in the middle a windmill that’s so big it looks life-size, just like the ones out in the country in Uruguay. And the windmill was turning from the draft, I couldn’t help peeping through the crack in the door, the old man was frothing at the mouth he was so mad.”
“I can’t close it,” Babs said. “I’ll stick it in this corner.”
“It looks like a bat,” La Maga said. “Give it to me, I’ll close it. See how easy?”
“She broke two ribs,” Babs said to Ronald.
“Quit belly-aching,” Ronald said. “Besides, we’ll be leaving right away, we only came to tell you that Guy swallowed a tube of gardenal.”
“Poor dear,” said Oliveira, who didn’t care very much for Guy.
“Étienne found him half-dead, Babs and I had gone to a vernissage (I have to tell you about that sometime, it was fabulous), and Guy had gone up to the apartment, got into bed, and poisoned himself.”
“He has no manners at all,” Oliveira said in English. “C’est regrettable.”
“Étienne had come by to look for us, luckily everybody has a key,” Babs said. “He heard someone vomiting, went in, and found Guy. He was dying. Étienne ran out to get help. They’ve taken him to the hospital now and he’s in critical condition. And with all this rain,” Babs added, flustered.
“Sit down,” La Maga said. “Not there, Ronald, there’s a leg missing. It’s so dark in here because of Rocamadour. Speak softly.”
“Fix them some coffee,” Oliveira said. “Great weather, eh?”
“I’ll have to be going,” Gregorovius said. “I wonder where I put my raincoat—no, not there, Lucía …”
“Stay and have some coffee,” La Maga said. “The subway has stopped running and it’s comfortable here. You can grind some fresh coffee, Horacio.”
“It smells shut in here,” Babs said.
“She always misses the pure outside ozone,” Ronald said furiously. “She’s like a horse, she only loves pure and unadulterated things. Primary colors, the seven-note scale. I don’t think she’s human.”
“Humanity is an ideal,” said Oliveira, feeling around for the coffee grinder. “Air has its story too. Coming from a wet street with lots of ozone, as you said, into an atmosphere whose temperature and make-up have been fifty centuries in the making … Babs is a kind of Rip van Winkle of respiration.”
“Oh, Rip van Winkle,” Babs said delighted. “My grandmother used to read me stories about him.”
“In Idaho, we all know,” Ronald said. “Well, what happened next was that Étienne called us at the bar on the corner a half-hour ago and told us that it would be best if we stayed away from our place for the night, at least until they know whether Guy is going to die or is going to vomit up the gardenal. It could be bad if the cops came by and found us there, they’re pretty good at putting two and two together, and lately all the business with the Club has got them in a bad mood.”
“What’s wrong with the Club?” La Maga asked, as she dried some cups with a towel.
“Nothing, but that’s precisely why we have no defense. The neighbors have complained so much about the noise, the record sessions, the coming and going at all hours … And besides, Babs has run-ins with the concierge and all the other women in the building, fifty or sixty of them.”
“They’re awful,” Babs said, chewing on a piece of candy she had taken out of her pocket. “They smell marijuana even if you’re only cooking a goulash.”
Oliveira was tired of grinding the coffee and passed the grinder to Ronald. Speaking softly, Babs and La Maga were discussing the motives behind Guy’s attempted suicide. After fussing so much about his raincoat, Gregorovius had flopped in the easy chair and was very quiet, keeping his unlit pipe in his mouth. The rain was beating on the window. “Schoenberg and Brahms,” Oliveira thought, taking out a Gauloise. “It’s O.K., usually under these circumstances one hears Chopin or the Todesmusik for Siegfried. Yesterday’s tornado killed between two and three thousand people in Japan. Statistically speaking …” But statistics didn’t stop his cigarette from tasting oily. He examined it as best he could, lighting another match. It was a perfect Gauloise, very white, with its delicate writing and shreds of its harsh caporal tobacco coming out of the wet end. “I always wet my cigarettes when I’m nervous,” he thought. “When I think about things like Rose Bob … Yes, it’s been a daddy of a day, and look what’s ahead of us.” The best thing would be to tell Ronald so that Ronald could pass it on to Babs in one of those almost telepathic messages that startled Perico Romero so. The theory of communication, one of those fascinating themes that literature had not gone into much until the Huxleys and the Borgeses of the new generation came along. Now Ronald was counting in time to the whispers passing between Babs and La Maga, spinning the grinder vigorously, the coffee wouldn’t be ready until doomsday. Oliveira slid off the horrible art nouveau chair and made himself comfortable on the floor, with his head resting on a pile of newspapers. There was a strange glow on the ceiling which must have been more subjective than anything else. When he closed his eyes the glow would last for a moment, then great purple spheres would begin to explode, one after another, voof, voof, voof, each sphere evidently corresponded to a systole or a diastole, who could tell. And somewhere in the building, probably on the third floor, a telephone was ringing. An extraordinary thing in Paris at that hour. “Another death,” Oliveira thought. “That’s the only reason anybody calls up in this city so considerate of sleep.” He remembered the time a recently arrived friend from Argentina had thought it quite natural to call him up at ten-thirty in the evening. God knows how, but he had managed to get the number of some telephone in the building from the Bottin guide and he gave a call then and there. The face of the gentleman from the fifth floor in his bathrobe, knocking at the door, an icy stare, quelqu’un vous demande au téléphone, Oliveira confused, putting on a wrap, going up to the fifth floor, finding a steadfastly annoyed woman, learning that old buddy Hermida was in Paris and when can we get together, man, I’ve got news from everybody, Traveler, and the boys in the Bidú bar, etc., and the woman hiding her irritation as she waited for Oliveira to start crying when he learned of the death of somebody very close, and Oliveira without knowing why, vraiment je suis tellement confus, madame, monsieur, c’était un ami qui vient d’arriver, vous comprenez, il n’est pas du tout au courant des habitudes…Oh, Argentina, generous schedules, open house, time to throw away, the whole future in front, all of it, voof, voof, voof, but in back of the eyes of that one six feet away there was nothing, there couldn’t ever be anything, the whole theory of communication ended, no mamma, no dada, no papa, no peepee no voof voof no nothing, just rigor mortis and people hanging around who
didn’t even come from Salta or Mexico and so could organize a wake for the angelito while they still could listen to music, who couldn’t find out like them a way out of the whole death business, people who had never been primitive enough to rise above the distress by means of acceptance or identification, nor yet developed enough to deny all distress and put this “one minor casualty” alongside the three thousand swept away by typhoon Veronica, for example. “But this is all dime-store anthropology,” Oliveira thought, conscious of a cold feeling in his stomach which was giving him cramps. It was always the solar plexus in the end. “These are the real messages, the warnings beneath the skin. And there is no dictionary for them.” Who had turned out the Rembrandt lamp? He couldn’t remember, a while back there had been a kind of old-gold dust on the floor, try as he could, he couldn’t reconstruct what had happened since Ronald and Babs had come, nothing to do, at some moment La Maga (because it must have been La Maga) or perhaps Gregorovius, someone had turned off the lamp.
“How are you going to make coffee in the dark?”
“I don’t know,” La Maga said, getting out some cups. “There was some light before.”
“Turn it on, Ronald,” Oliveira said. “It’s underneath your chair there. You have to turn the bulb, it’s the classic way.”
“This is all quite idiotic,” Ronald said, without anyone’s knowing whether he meant the way the lamp had to be turned on or not. The light made the purple spheres go away, and Oliveira began to like his cigarette better. Now everything was really comfortable, it was warm, there would be coffee.
“Come on over here,” Oliveira told Ronald. “You’ll be more comfortable than in that chair, it has a kind of point in the middle of it that pricks your ass. Wong would include it in his Peking collection if he knew about it, I’m sure.”
“I’m all right here,” Ronald said, “at the risk of being misunderstood.”
“You’re not all right. Come here. And how’s that coffee doing, ladies?”
“He’s being very masculine tonight,” said Babs. “Is he always like that with you?”
Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) Page 17
