Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series)

by Julio Cortázar

  “We used to stroll around there.”

  “But she would only talk to me when she was alone. A nice girl, a little crazy.”

  “You said it,” Oliveira thought. He was listening to Emmanuèle who was remembering more and more, a bundle of odds and ends, a white sweater that still had some wear, a fine girl who didn’t work and wasn’t wasting her time studying for a degree, a little crazy sometimes, wasting her francs to feed the pigeons on the Ile Saint-Louis, sometimes quite sad, other times breaking up with laughter. Sometimes bad.

  “We would argue,” Emmanuèle said, “because she told me not to bother Célestin. She never came back, but I liked her a lot.”

  “Did she talk to you so much?”

  “You didn’t like it, did you?”

  “That’s not it,” Oliveira said, looking over at the other bank. But that’s just what it was, because La Maga hadn’t told him more about her dealings with the clocharde, and a basic generalization carried him off, etc. Retrospective jealousy, cf. Proust, subtle torture and so on. It was most likely going to rain, the willow began to look as if it was hanging there in the damp air. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be so cold, not quite so cold. Perhaps he said something like: “She never spoke about you much to me,” because Emmanuèle let out a satisfied and wicked laugh, and kept putting on pink powder with her blackened fingers; from time to time she would lift up her hand and give herself a pat on her matted hair which was wrapped up in a wool scarf with red and green stripes, actually a man’s muffler picked up in some trash can. Finally he had to go, go up into the city, so close by there, twenty feet above, where it began exactly on the other side of the Seine embankment, in back of the lead RIP boxes where the pigeons were talking among themselves and fluffing up as they waited for the first rays of the bland, unforceful sun, the pale eight o’clock pablum that floats down from a mushy sky because it certainly was going to drizzle the way it always did.

  When he was already on his way Emmanuèle shouted something at him. He stopped and waited for her, they went up the stairs together. At Habeb’s they bought two quarts of red wine, they took cover in the arcade along the Rue de l’Hirondelle. Emmanuèle was so kind as to take out a bundle of newspapers from under her coats, and this made a fine cushion to put down in a corner that Oliveira had explored with the help of some timid matches. From the other side of the archway there came some snoring that smelled of garlic and cauliflower and cheap forgetfulness; biting his lip, Oliveira stumbled into the corner and settled himself as comfortably as possible against the wall, close to Emmanuèle who was already sucking on the bottle and snorting with satisfaction after every gulp. Untrain the senses, open your mouth and nose wide and take in the worst of smells, human funkiness. One minute, two, three, easier and easier, like any apprenticeship. Keeping his nausea under control, Oliveira grabbed the bottle, even though he couldn’t see he knew the neck was anointed with spit and lipstick, the darkness sharpened his sense of smell. Closing his eyes to protect himself against something, he wasn’t sure what it was, he downed half a pint of wine in one gulp. Then they started to smoke, shoulder to shoulder, satisfied. The nausea went away, not conquered but humiliated, waiting there with its crooked head, and he was able to think about other things. Emmanuèle was talking right along, delivering herself of solemn discourses in between hiccups, giving a maternal scolding to a ghostly Célestin, taking inventory of the sardines, her face lighting up at every puff of the cigarette and Oliveira saw the spots of dirt on her forehead, her thick lips stained with wine, the triumphal scarf of the Syrian goddess that had been trampled on by some enemy army, a chryselephantine head rolling around in the dust, with spots of blood and gore but keeping all the while the diadem of red and green stripes, the Great Mother stretched out in the dust and trampled on by drunken soldiers who amused themselves by pissing on her mutilated breasts, until the greatest clown among them knelt down to the accolade of all the others, his penis standing out erect above the fallen goddess, masturbating onto the marble and letting the sperm trickle into the eye-holes from which officers’ hands had already plucked the precious stones, into the half-open mouth which accepted the humiliation as a final offering before rolling off into oblivion. And it was so natural that in the darkness the hand of Emmanuèle should feel along Oliveira’s arm and alight there confidently while the other hand sought out the bottle and one could hear the glug-glug and a satisfied snort, so natural that everything ought to be like this with reverse and obverse, the opposite sign as a kind of survival. And even though Wholiveira might mistrust whinebriation, whastute whaccomplice of the Grand Whentrapment, something told him that there was a kibbutz there, that in back of it all, always in back, there was hope for a kibbutz. Not a methodical certainty, oh no, dear fellow, never that, much as you might want it that way, nor an in vino veritas nor a Fichte-like dialectic or other Spinozan precious stones, only an acceptance in nausea, Heraclitus had got himself buried in a pile of manure to cure himself of dropsy, somebody had told him about that that very night, somebody who already seemed like someone out of another life, someone like Pola or Wong, people he had annoyed only because he had wanted to make contact with the good side, reinvent love as the only way ever to enter his kibbutz. In shit up to his neck, Heraclitus the Obscure, just like the two of them except without wine, and besides, he wanted to cure himself of dropsy. Maybe that’s what it was, then, keeping yourself covered with shit up to the neck and also hoping, because Heraclitus certainly must have had to stay under the shit for days on end, and Oliveira was beginning to remember too that Heraclitus had said that if one did not expect he would never find the unexpected, wring the neck of the swan, Heraclitus had said, but no, of course he’d said no such thing, and while he was swallowing another long swig and Emmanuèle was laughing in the shadow as she heard the glug-glug and stroked his arm as if to show him that she was enjoying his company and his promise to take the sardines away from Célestin, there suddenly came up to Oliveira like a winy belch the double Mexican surname of the swan with the twistable neck, and he wanted to laugh so much and tell Emmanuèle, but instead he gave her back the almost empty bottle, and Eramanuèle began to sing in a scrapy sort of way Les Amants du Havre, a song that La Maga used to sing when she was sad, but Emmanuèle sang it with a tragic crawl, out of tune and forgetting the words as she petted Oliveira who kept on thinking that only one who expected would be able to find the unexpected, and half-closing his eyes to reject the dim light that was coming in through the entranceway, he thought that far off (across the sea, or was it an access of patriotism?) there was that pure landscape of his kibbutz. It was obvious that he had to twist the swan’s neck, even if it hadn’t been Heraclitus who had demanded it. He was getting sentimental, puisque la terre est ronde, mon amour t’en fais pas, mon amour, t’en fais pas along with the wine and the thick voice that was singing as he was getting sentimental, it would all end up in tears and self-commiseration, like Babs, poor little Horacio anclado en París, set down in Paris, as the tango says, cómo habrá cambiado tu calle Corrientes, Suipacha, Esmeralda, y el viejo arrabal. But even though he put all his anger into the lighting of another Gauloise, very far away in the depth of his eyes he kept on seeing his kibbutz, not across the sea or even most likely across the sea, or there outside in the Rue Galande or in Puteaux or in the Rue de la Tombe Issoire, in any case his kibbutz was always there and it wasn’t a mirage.

  “It’s not a mirage, Emmanuèle.”

  “Ta guele, mon pote,” said Emmanuèle, feeling down among her innumerable skirts looking for the other bottle.

  Then they got off onto other things, Emmanuèle told him about a drowned girl that Célestin had seen from up on Grenelle, and Oliveira wanted to know what color her hair had been, but Célestin had only seen her legs sticking up a little bit out of the water, and he had got out of there before the police would start up with their damn bit of asking everybody questions. And when they had drunk up almost all of the second bottle and were happier t
han ever, Emmanuèle recited a passage from La Mort du loup, and Oliveira gave her a quick introduction to the sestinas of the Martín Fierro. Now and then a truck began to cross the square, they began to hear the sounds that Delius once … But it wouldn’t do any good to talk to Emmanuèle about Delius in spite of the fact that she was a sensitive woman, that she didn’t go along with poetry and expressed herself manually, rubbing up against Oliveira in order to get rid of the cold, stroking his arm, mumbling parts of operas and obscene comments about Célestin. Biting the cigarette with his lips until it seemed to be almost a part of his mouth, Oliveira listened to her, let her rub up against him, kept repeating coldly that he was no better than she was and that if worst came to worst he could always cure himself like Heraclitus, it might have been that the Obscure’s most penetrating message was the one he had not written down, leaving it up to anecdotes, the voice of his disciples to transmit it so that perhaps some attuned ear might come to understand it one day. He was amused by the friendly and matter-of-fact way in which the hand of Emmanuèle was going to work unbuttoning him, and at the same time he was able to imagine that perhaps the Obscure one had sunk himself up to the neck in shit without even having been sick, without having dropsy at all, simply to sketch out a pattern that his milieu would never have condoned in the shape of a message or lesson, and which he had surreptitiously carried across the border of time until it had arrived, all mixed up with theory, noting nothing but a disagreeable and painful detail, to rest alongside the earth-shaking diamond of panta rhei, a barbarian therapy that Hippocrates had already condemned, just as for hygienic reasons he would have condemned the fact that Emmanuèle was little by little leaning more heavily on her drunken friend and with a tongue stained with tannin was humbly licking his deal, helping to maintain its understandable abandon with her fingers and murmuring things in the language one uses when holding cats or nursing babies, completely oblivious of the meditation that was going on up above, bent on a duty that would afford her little profit, following the line of some obscure feeling of pity, so that the newcomer would feel happy on his first night as a clochard and maybe he would fall a little in love with her to punish Célestin, would forget about the strange things he had been muttering in his barbarian American language as he slid down a little more against the wall and let himself slide with a sigh, putting his hand on Emmanuèle’s hair and imagining for a second (but that must have been hell) that it was Pola’s hair, that still once more Pola had thrown herself on top of him among Mexican ponchos and Klee postcards and Durrell’s Quartet, making him enjoy and enjoy from without, as she was attent, analytical, and alien, before she demanded her share and stretched out against him trembling, demanding that he take her and injure her, with her painted mouth of a Syrian goddess, like Emmanuèle who was getting up, dragged to her feet by the policeman, sitting down suddenly and saying: On faisait rien, quoi, and all of a sudden underneath the gray that in some way was filling up the doorways Oliveira opened his eyes and saw the cop’s legs next to where he lay ridiculously unbuttoned, and with an empty bottle rolling away from the gendarme’s kick, the second kick on his thigh, the fierce whack right on the top of Emmanuèle’s head as she hunched over and moaned, and on his knees for some reason, the only logical position in which he could put the corpus delicti back into his pants as quickly as possible while it shrank prodigiously in a great spirit of co-operation and allowed itself to be closed in and buttoned up, and really now there was nothing wrong but how could you explain that to the policeman who was leading them off to the patrol wagon parked in the square, how could you explain to Babs that an inquisition was something else, and to Ossip, to Ossip most of all, how could you explain to him that everything still remained to be done and that the only decent thing to do was to take a step back in order to get a better start, let yourself fall down so that maybe you could get up again later on, Emmanuèle so that maybe later on…

  “Let her go,” Oliveira asked the gendarme. “The poor old girl’s drunker than I am.”

  He ducked just in time to miss the swing. Another gendarme grabbed him around the waist, and with one shove pitched him into the patrol wagon. They tossed Emmanuèle in on top of him and she was singing something that sounded like Le Temps des cerises. They left them alone inside the truck, and Oliveira rubbed his thigh which was hurting terribly, and he joined in the singing of Le Temps des cerises, if that’s what it was. The wagon started up as if it had been sprung from a catapult.

  “Et tous nos amours,” Emmanuèle shouted.

  “Et tous nos amours,” Oliveira said, throwing himself onto the bench and looking for a cigarette. “This bit, old girl, not even Heraclitus.”

  “Tu me fais chier,” Emmanuèle said as she began a weeping that sounded more like howling. “Et tous nos amours,” she sang between sobs. Oliveira could hear the cops laughing, looking at them through the grill. “Well, if you wanted tranquillity you’re going to get lots of it. Better take advantage of it, forget what you’re thinking about,” he said to himself. It was O.K. to call up and tell them all what a funny dream you had had, but that’s enough, don’t push it. Everybody on his own side, dropsy is cured with patience, with shit, and with solitude. Besides, the Club was all over with, happily fini, and all that was left to get rid of would just be a matter of time. The wagon slammed on its brakes at a corner and when Emmanuèle started to shout Quand il reviendra, le temps des cerises, one of the cops opened the window and warned that if they didn’t shut up he was going to kick their teeth in. Emmanuèle lay down on the floor of the truck, face down and wailing, and Oliveira put his feet on her behind and settled himself comfortably on the bench. Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors. On top is Heaven, on the bottom is Earth, it’s very hard to get the pebble up to Heaven, you almost always miscalculate and the stone goes off the drawing. But little by little you start to get the knack of how to jump over the different squares (spiral hopscotch, rectangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often) and then one day you learn how to leave Earth and make the pebble climb up into Heaven (Et tous nos amours, Emmanuèle was sobbing face down), the worst part of it is that precisely at that moment, when practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb up into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you’re into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too. And since you have come out of childhood (Je n’oublierai pas le temps des cerises, Emmanuèle was kicking about on the floor) you forget that in order to get to Heaven you have to have a pebble and a toe. Which is what Heraclitus knew, up to his neck in shit, and probably Emmanuèle too, wiping off the snot with the back of her hand in the midst of the cherry season, or the two fairies who somehow were sitting in the patrol wagon (but of course, the door had been opened and shut in the midst of shrieks and laughter and the toot of a whistle) and were laughing like mad as they looked at Emmanuèle on the floor and at Oliveira, who wanted a smoke but who didn’t have any cigarettes and matches even though he had not remembered the police going through his pockets, et tous nos amours, et tous nos amours. A pebble and a toe, what La Maga had known so well and he much less well, and the Club more or less well, and who from a childhood in Burzaco or in the suburbs of Montevideo would show the straight and narrow path to Heaven without need of Vedanta or Zen or collected eschatologies, yes, reach Heaven with kicks, get there with the pebble (carry your cross? Not a very portable object) and with one last kick send the stone up against l’azur l’azur l’azur l’azur, crash, a broken pane, the final bed, naughty child, and what difference did it make if behind the broken pane there was the kibbutz, since Heaven was nothing but a childish name for his kibbutz.

  “Let’s sing and smoke for all of that,” Horacio said. “Emmanuèle, get up, you weepy old woman.”

  “Et tous nos amours,” Em
manuèle bellowed.

  “Il est beau,” one of the fairies said, looking tenderly at Horacio. “Il a l’air farouche.”

  The other fairy had taken a brass tube out of his pocket and was looking through a hole in the end, smiling and making faces. The younger fairy snatched away the tube and took a look. “You can’t see anything, Jo,” he said. “Yes you can, doll,” said Jo. “No, no, no, no.” “Yes you can, yes you can. LOOK THROUGH THE PEEPHOLE AND YOU’LL SEE PATTERNS PRETTY AS CAN BE.” “It’s nighttime, Jo.” Jo took out a box of matches and lit one in front of the kaleidoscope. Squeals of enthusiasm, patterns pretty as can be. Et tous nos amours, Emmanuèle declaimed, sitting up on the floor of the truck. Everything was so perfect, everything happening right on time, hopscotch and the kaleidoscope, the smaller fairy looking and looking, oh Jo, I can’t see anything, more light, more light, Jo. Collapsed on the bench, Horacio greeted the Obscure one, his head of darkness sticking up through the pyramid of manure with two eyes that looked like green stars, patterns pretty as can be, the Obscure one was right, a road to the kibbutz, perhaps the only road to the kibbutz, not the world, people grabbing at the kaleidoscope from the wrong end, then you had to turn it around with the help of Emmanuèle and Pola and Paris and La Maga and Rocamadour, stretch out on the floor like Emmanuèle and from there begin to look out from the mountain of manure, look at the world through the eye of your asshole and you’ll see patterns pretty as can be, the pebble had to pass through the eye of your asshole, kicked along by the tip of your toe, and from Earth to Heaven the squares would be open, the labyrinth would unfold like the spring of a broken clock as it made workmen’s time fly off in a thousand pieces, and through the snot and semen and stink of Emmanuèle and the shit of the Obscure one you would come onto the road leading to the kibbutz of desire, no longer rising up to Heaven (rise up, a hypocrite word, Heaven, flatus vocis), but walk along with the pace of a man through a land of men towards the kibbutz far off there but on the same level, just as Heaven was on the same level as Earth on the dirty sidewalk where you played the game, and one day perhaps you would enter that world where speaking of Heaven did not mean a greasy kitchen rag, and one day someone would see the true outline of the world, patterns pretty as can be, and, perhaps, pushing the stone along, you would end up entering the kibbutz.