(–37)
FROM THIS SIDE
Il faut voyager loin en aimant sa maison,
APOLLINAIRE, Les mamelles de Tirésias
37
HE hated the name Traveler because he had never been outside Argentina except for trips over to Montevideo and once up to Asunción in Paraguay, centers that he remembered with sovereign indifference. At the age of forty he was still stuck on the Calle Cachimayo, and the fact that he was a sort of agent and jack-of-all-trades for a circus called Las Estrellas gave him no hope whatever of traveling around the world Barnum-style; the zone of operations of his circus extended from Santa Fe to Carmen de Patagones, with long runs in the capital, La Plata, and Rosario. When Talita, who was a reader of encyclopedias, would get interested in wandering peoples and cultures, Traveler would grumble and speak with insincere praise about a courtyard with geraniums, an army cot, and that no place like home bit. As he sucked on one mate after another he would dazzle his wife with his wisdom, but it was obvious that he was trying too hard. When he was asleep he would sometimes come out with words that had to do with uprooting, trips abroad, troubles in customs, and inaccurate alidades. If Talita started to tease him when he woke up, he would start to whack her on the butt, and then they would laugh like crazy and it even seemed that Traveler’s betrayal of himself did them both some good. One thing had to be recognized and it was that unlike almost all her other friends, Traveler didn’t blame life or fate for the fact that he had been unable to travel everywhere he had wanted to. He would just take a stiff drink of gin and call himself a boob.
“Of course, I have been his best trip,” Talita used to say when the opportunity would present itself, “but he’s so silly that he doesn’t realize it. I, my dear, have carried him off on the wings of fantasy to the very edge of the horizon.”
The lady thus addressed would think that Talita was speaking seriously and would answer along the following lines:
“Ah, my dear, men are so incomprehensible” (sic for uncomprehending).
Or:
“Believe me, that’s just what happens with me and my Juan Antonio. I’ve always said the same thing to him, but I could just as well be speaking to the wall.”
Or:
“How well I can sympathize with you, my dear. Life is such a struggle.”
Or:
“Don’t worry yourself about it, miss. As long as you have your health and your work.”
Then Talita would tell Traveler everything that people had said and the pair of them would laugh and roll around on the kitchen floor until they had dirtied up their clothes. Traveler used to have the most fun hiding in the toilet, with a handkerchief or undershirt crammed into his mouth, and listening while Talita got the ladies from the Pensión Sobrales and some others who lived in the hotel across the street to talk. In moments of optimism, which were never for long, he would work up a soap opera which would make fun of these fat ladies without their realizing it, make them weep copiously and tune in every day. But in any case, he never had traveled, and it was like a black stone in his soul.
“A regular brick,” Traveler would explain, feeling his stomach.
“I never saw a black brick,” the Manager of the circus, the eventual intimate of so much nostalgia, used to say.
“It got that way from being so sedentary. And to think there have been poets who complained about being heimatlos, Ferraguto!”
“Talk so I can understand,” the Manager said, always a little upset when he was called by name in such a dramatic sort of way.
“I can’t, Boss,” Traveler muttered, excusing himself tacitly for having called him by name. “Beautiful foreign words are like an oasis, stopovers. Will we ever go to Costa Rica? To Panama, where long ago royal galleons …? Gardel died in Colombia, Chief, in Colombia!”
“We haven’t got the cash,” the Manager said, taking out his watch. “I’ve got to get back to the hotel. Cuca must be ready to start hollering.”
Traveler was alone in the office and he was wondering what sunsets in Connecticut were like. As consolation he went back over the good things that had happened to him. For example, one of the good things that had happened to him was that one morning in 1940 he had gone into his superior’s office in Internal Revenue carrying a glass of water. He had come back out without a job as his boss used a piece of tissue to dry off his face. That had been one of the good things that had happened to him, because that very month they had been planning to promote him, just as marrying Talita had been another good thing that had happened to him (even though they both might think otherwise), since Talita had been condemned by her pharmacy degree to grow old dispensing court plasters and Traveler had shown up looking for some suppositories to cure his bronchitis, and out of the explanation he had got from Talita love had foamed up like shampoo in a showerbath. Traveler would even insist that he had fallen in love with Talita at the precise moment when she lowered her eyes and explained how the suppository would be more effective if used after rather than before a good bowel movement.
“You devil,” Talita used to say when they would reminisce. “You understood the directions perfectly well, but you played the fool so I would have to explain them to you.”
“A pharmacist must serve truth, even when it turns up in the most intimate places. If you only knew my emotions when I inserted the first suppository that afternoon, right after I left you. It was a huge green thing.”
“Eucalyptus,” Talita said. “You were lucky I didn’t sell you one of those that has a garlicky odor and can be smelled fifty feet away.”
But sometimes they would turn sad and vaguely understand that once again they had been having fun as a last resort against the melancholy of Buenos Aires and a life that didn’t have too much (What else could you say except “too much”? A vague uneasiness at the top of the stomach, the black brick, as always).
Talita explaining Traveler’s melancholy moments to Señora Gutusso:
“It gets hold of him around siesta-time, it’s like something that comes up out of his pleura.”
“He must have something wrong inside,” Señora Gutusso says. “It’s internal pain, or whatever it is they say.”
“It comes out of his soul, señora. My husband is a poet, believe me.”
Shut up in the toilet with a towel around his face, Traveler is laughing so hard that his eyes are watering.
“Don’t you think it might be some allergy or whatever they call it? My little boy Vítor, you can see him playing in the geraniums out there and he’s really a delight, believe me, but when he gets an attack of his celery allergy it’s monstrous, his dark little eyes start to close, his mouth puffs up like a toad’s, and during it all he can’t even bend his toes.”
“Bending the toes isn’t always too important,” Talita says.
Traveler’s muffled roars can be heard from the toilet and Talita quickly changes the subject to get Señora Gutusso off the track of what’s been going on. Usually Traveler will leave his hiding place feeling very sad, and Talita understands. Some mention should be made of Talita’s understanding. It’s an ironic, tender understanding, like something distant. Her love for Traveler is made up of dirty casseroles, long vigils, a gentle acceptance of his nostalgic fantasies and his love for the tango and a game of truco. When Traveler gets sad and thinks about the fact that he has never traveled (and Talita knows it’s not that that bothers him, that his worries are much deeper), she has to go along with him and not say very much, prepare his mate, make sure that he never runs out of tobacco, do her duty as a wife alongside her husband but never casting her shadow on him, and that’s what’s difficult. Talita is very happy with Traveler, with the circus, grooming the counting cat before it goes on stage, keeping books for the Manager. Sometimes in her modest way she thinks that she is really closer than Traveler to those elemental depths that worry him, but metaphysical contexts upset her somewhat and she ends up convincing herself that he is the only one capable of making a puncture that will rele
ase the black and oily flow. It all floats around a little, dresses up in words or patterns, calls itself otherness, calls itself laughing or loving, and it’s also the circus and life to call it by its most external and fateful names and who the hell is your aunt anyway.
But since he doesn’t have this otherness, Traveler is a man of action. He calls it restricted action because it’s not a question of going about knocking yourself out. For the space of four decades he has gone through various phases: soccer (with the Colegiales, center forward, not too bad), pedestrianism, politics (a month in the Devoto jail in 1934), cuniculture and apiculture (a farm in Manzanares, bankruptcy within three months, smelly rabbits and ill-tempered bees), auto-racing (relief driver with Marimón, a crackup in Resistencia, three broken ribs), artistic carpentry (turning out pieces of furniture until they piled up to the ceiling, used only once, a complete failure), marriage and cycling on the Avenida General Paz on Saturdays on a rented bike. Out of all this action he has a mental archive, two languages, a facile hand with the pen, an ironical interest in soteriology and glass balls, the attempt at creating a mandrake by planting a sweet potato in a pot of earth and sperm, the sweet potato flourishing in the wild way sweet potatoes do, invading the furnished room, growing out the window, the surreptitious intervention of Talita, armed with a pair of scissors, Traveler inspecting the shape of the plant, suspecting something, the humiliating abandonment of the mandrake, gallows plant, alraune, leftovers from childhood. Sometimes Traveler talks about a double who is luckier than he, and Talita for some reason doesn’t like to hear about it, and she hugs him and kisses him restlessly, does all she can to get those ideas out of his head. Then she takes him out to see Marilyn Monroe, a great favorite of Traveler’s, and-slams-on-the-brakes of some purely artistic feelings of jealousy in the darkness of the Presidente Roca movie theater.
(–98)
38
TALITA wasn’t so sure that Traveler was very happy about the return of a childhood friend, because the first thing that Traveler did upon learning that a certain Horacio was coming home suddenly to Argentina on the Andrea C was to aim a kick at the counting cat of the circus and proclaim that life was a perfect fuckup. In any case, he did go down to the dock to meet him with Talita taking the counting cat along in a basket. Oliveira was coming out of customs carrying a single lightweight suitcase, and when he spotted Traveler he raised his eyebrows in a mixture of surprise and annoyance.
“What’s new?”
“Hi,” Traveler said, shaking his hand with more feeling than he had expected.
“Hey,” Oliveira said, “let’s go to a waterfront grill and get some sausages.”
“I’d like you to meet my wife,” Traveler said.
Oliveira said: “Pleased to meet you,” and put out his hand, barely looking at her. Then he asked immediately who the cat was and why they had brought him down to the pier in a basket. Talita, offended by the reception, found him absolutely disagreeable and announced that she was going back to the circus with the cat.
“O.K.,” Traveler said. “Put him by the window on the streetcar, you know he doesn’t like it in the aisle.”
In the grill Oliveira began to drink red wine and eat some sausages and chinchulines. Since he wasn’t being very communicative, Traveler told him all about the circus and how he had got married to Talita. He filled him in on politics and sports, pausing especially to talk about the rise and fall of Pascualito Pérez. Oliveira said that in Paris he had run into Fangio and that old bow-legs had seemed half-asleep. Traveler began to get hungry and ordered some chitterlings. He was pleased that Oliveira accepted his first Argentine cigarette with a smile and smoked it with appreciation. They got into another quart of red wine, and Traveler talked about his work, how he hadn’t lost hope of finding something better, that is, something with less work and more dough, waiting all the time for Oliveira to tell him something, he didn’t know exactly what, just some direction that could bring them together again after so much time.
“Well, tell me something,” he proposed.
“The weather was very changeable,” Oliveira said, “but every once in a while there would be good days. Something else: As César Bruto said so well, if you want Paris in October to move ’er, don’t forget to see the Louvre. What else? Oh, yes, I went to Vienna once. They have fantastic cafés where fat women bring along their dogs and husbands to eat strudel.”
“O.K., O.K.,” Traveler said. “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
“One day I dropped a lump of sugar underneath the table in a restaurant. In Paris, not in Vienna.”
“If all you’re going to do is talk about cafés, you didn’t have to sail across the pond.”
“You understand well,” Oliveira said, carefully cutting into a string of chinchulines. “This is something you can’t get in the City of Lights. That’s what all the Argentinians used to tell me. They used to weep because they couldn’t get good beef, and I even knew a lady who used to think nostalgically about Argentinian wines. She used to say that French wine was no good to mix with soda.”
“Jesus,” Traveler said.
“And of course the tomatoes and the potatoes here are better than anywhere.”
“It’s obvious,” said Traveler, “that you were hanging out with the upper crust.”
“Once in a while. They usually didn’t like the way I used to hang, to keep on with your metaphor. Boy, it’s muggy.”
“That’s right,” Traveler said. “You’re going to have to get yourself acclimatized again.”
They kept on along those lines for some twenty-five minutes.
(–39)
39
OF course, Oliveira was not going to tell Traveler anything about his stopover in Montevideo when he had walked through the slums, asking and looking, having a couple of drinks of caña to get on the good side of some toughs. And nothing, except that there was a slew of new buildings and that on the waterfront, where he spent the hour before the Andrea C sailed, the water was full of dead fish floating belly up, and among the fish here and there a condom softly floating in the murky water. There was nothing else to do but go back on board, thinking that maybe Lucca, that maybe it really had been Lucca or Perugia. And all so much like the divine rocket.
Before disembarking in his mamma country, Oliveira had decided that everything that had passed had not been the past and that only a mental error like so many others would have allowed the easy expedient of imagining a future fertilized by games already played. He understood (only on the prow, at dawn, in the yellow fog of the harbor) that nothing would have changed if he had decided to take a stand, reject easy solutions. Maturity, supposing such a thing really did exist, was in the last analysis a kind of hypocrisy. Nothing was mature, nothing could have been more natural than for that woman with a cat in a basket, waiting for him beside Manolo Traveler, to look a little like that other woman who (but what had been the use of wandering through the slums of Montevideo, taking a taxi up to the edge of El Cerro, making use of directions assembled all over again by a restless memory). He had to keep going, either start over again or end it: there was still no bridge as yet. With a suitcase in his hand, he headed for a waterfront grill where one night somebody half-drunk had told him stories about the payador Betinoti, and how he used to sing that waltz: Mi diagnóstico es sencillo: / Sé que no tengo remedio. The idea that a word like “diagnosis” should turn up in a waltz was irresistible to Oliveira, but now he was repeating the lines in a sententious sort of way while Traveler told him about the circus, about K. O. Lausse, and even about Juan Perón.
(–86)
40
HE was coming to the realization that his coming back had really been his going away in more than one sense. He was already vegetating with poor, humble Gekrepten in a hotel room across from the Pensión Sobrales where the Travelers were on the rolls. Everything was going well between them, Gekrepten was enchanted, she could prepare magnificent mates and even though she made love
and pasta asciutta rather badly, she had other revealing domestic qualities and she could leave him alone for all the time he needed to ponder the business of coming back and going away, a problem that used to bother him in his free moments as he went from door to door selling bolts of gabardine. At first Traveler had criticized his mania for finding everything wrong with Buenos Aires, for treating the city like a tightly girdled whore, but Oliveira explained to him and Talita that in his criticism there was so much love that only a pair of mental defectives like them would misunderstand his attacks. In the end they realized that he was right, that Oliveira could not make any hypocritical compromise with Buenos Aires, and that at the moment he was much farther away from his own country than when he had been wandering about Europe. Only small things, a little passé, would make him smile: mate, De Caro records, sometimes the waterfront in the afternoon. The three of them used to wander around the city a lot, taking advantage of the fact that Gekrepten was working in a store, and Traveler could spot that Oliveira was making his peace with the city, fertilizing the soil with enormous quantities of beer. But Talita was more intransigent (a definite characteristic of indifference) and she demanded quick acceptances: Clorindo Testa’s painting, for example, or the films of Torre Nilsson. They got into hot arguments over Bioy Casares, David Viñas, Father Castellani, Manauta, and the policies of the YPF. Talita finally came to understand that for Oliveira being in Buenos Aires was exactly the same as if he had been in Bucharest, and that in reality he had not come back but that he had been brought back. Underneath the things they would argue about there was always a layer of pataphysics, the triple coincidence of a histrionic search for lookout points that could excentrate the viewer or the thing being viewed. Because of their battles Talita and Oliveira began to have respect for each other. Traveler would remember when Oliveira was twenty years old and his heart would ache, but it was more likely gas from all the beers.
Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) Page 25
