Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series)

by Julio Cortázar

  “Come right in,” he repeated aloud, but the door didn’t open. The soft scratching continued, probably it was a pure coincidence that down below there was someone beside the fountain, a woman with her back turned, with long hair and arms hanging by her sides, absorbed in the contemplation of the trickle of water. At that hour and in that darkness it could have just as easily been La Maga as Talita or any one of the madwomen, even Pola if one really thought about it. Nothing stopped him from staring at the woman with her back towards him, since if Traveler decided to come in the defenses would function automatically and there would be more than enough time to stop looking at the courtyard and face him. At any rate, it was rather strange that Traveler should keep on scratching at the door as if to ascertain whether he was sleeping (it couldn’t be Pola, because Pola’s neck was shorter and her hips were more well-defined), unless he too for his part had devised a special system of attack (it could be La Maga or Talita, they looked so much alike and much more so at night and from the third story) designed to make him lose his mind, pull him off his position on the square (at least from one to eight, because he hadn’t been able to get beyond eight, he would never reach Heaven, he would never enter his kibbutz). “What are you waiting for, Manú?” Oliveira thought. “What good is all this doing us?” It was Talita of course, who was now looking up and stood motionless again when he stuck his bare arm out the window and moved it tiredly from side to side.

  “Come over here, Maga,” Oliveira said. “You look so much alike from here that your name can be changed.”

  “Close that window,” Talita said.

  “Impossible, the heat is terrible and your husband is out there scratching on the door in a fearsome way. It’s what they call a conjunction of annoying circumstances. But don’t you worry, pick up a pebble and try again, who can tell but that with one …”

  The drawer, the ashtray, and the chair all fell onto the floor at the same time. Crouching down a little, Oliveira looked blinded at the purple rectangle that replaced the door, the black shape moving around, he heard Traveler’s curse. The noise must have waked everybody up.

  “You simple bastard,” Traveler said in the doorway. “Do you want the Boss to throw us all out?”

  “He’s preaching to me,” Oliveira informed Talita. “He always was like a father to me.”

  “Close the window, please,” Talita said.

  “There’s nothing needed so much as an open window,” Oliveira said. “Listen to your husband, one can observe that he’s put one foot in the water. He must have a face full of threads, he doesn’t know what to do.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Traveler was saying, lashing out in the darkness and pulling threads off himself on all sides. “Turn on the light, God damn it.”

  “He hasn’t fallen on the floor yet,” Oliveira informed. “The rulemans are letting me down.”

  “Don’t lean out like that!” Talita shouted, raising her arms. With his back to the window, with his head turned around to see her and talk to her, Oliveira was leaning farther and farther back. Cuca Ferraguto came running out into the courtyard, and only at that moment did Oliveira realize that it was no longer nighttime, Cuca’s bathrobe was the same color as the stones of the courtyard and the walls of the pharmacy. Allowing himself a reconnaissance of the battlefield, he looked into the darkness and observed that in spite of his offensive difficulties, Traveler had decided to close the door. Between two curses he heard the sound of the latch.

  “That’s the way I like it, hey,” Oliveira said. “Alone in the center of the ring like two men.”

  “Shit on your soul,” Traveler said furiously. “One of my slippers is soaked through, and that’s the thing that can upset me worse than anything in the world. Turn on the light at least, you can’t see a thing.”

  “The ambush at Cancha Rayada was something like this,” Oliveira said. “You must understand that I’m not going to sacrifice the advantages of my position. Be thankful that I’m answering you, because I don’t really have to do that. I had my lessons on the rifle range too, brother.”

  He heard Traveler breathe heavily. Outside there was a slamming of doors, Ferraguto’s voice mixed in with other questions and answers. Traveler’s silhouette was becoming more and more visible; everything was drawing a number and fitting into its place, five basins, three spittoons, dozens of rulemans. They could almost see each other now in that light which was like the dove in the hands of the madman.

  “Well,” Traveler said, picking up the fallen chair and sitting down on it without much desire. “If you could explain a little of this clambake to me.”

  “It’ll be a little hard like. Talking, you know …”

  “When you want to talk you always find the most unbelievable moments,” Traveler said in a rage. “When we’re not riding horseback on two planks at ninety degrees in the shade, you catch me with one foot in the water and these damnable threads.”

  “But always in symmetrical positions,” Oliveira said. “Like two twins playing on a seesaw, or more simply like anybody in front of a mirror. Don’t you notice it, Doppelgänger?”

  Without answering Traveler took a cigarette out of his pajama pocket and lit it while Oliveira took out another and lit it almost at the same time. They looked at each other and began to laugh.

  “You’re completely off your rocker,” Traveler said. “This time there’s no way to tell you to turn. To imagine that I …”

  “Leave the word imagination in peace,” Oliveira said. “Limit yourself to the observation that I took my precautions, but that you came. Not someone else. You. At four o’clock in the morning.”

  “Talita told me, and I thought … But do you really believe …?”

  “Underneath it all it’s probably necessary, Manú. You thought that you got up to come and calm me down, give me assurances. If I had been sleeping you would have come in without any trouble at all, like anybody who goes up to the mirror without any difficulties, of course, one goes quietly up to the mirror with the brush in his hand, and suppose that instead of the brush it was that thing you have there in your pajamas …”

  “I always carry it,” Traveler said indignantly. “Or do you think we’re in some kind of kindergarten here? If you go around unarmed it’s because you don’t know what’s up.”

  “So finally,” Oliveira said, sitting on the edge of the window again and waving his hand at Talita and Cuca, “what I think of all this doesn’t matter very much next to what has to be, whether we like it or not. It’s been so long that we’ve been the same dog chasing his tail. It’s not that we hate each other; on the contrary. There are other things that use us as playthings, the white pawn and the black pawn, something like that. Let’s call it two ways, the necessity that one must be abolished in the other and vice versa.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Traveler said. “It’s just that you’ve got me boxed into a place where I don’t know what to do any more.”

  “Mutatis mutandi, you met me at the dock with something that looked like an armistice, a white flag, a sad incitement to forget. I don’t hate you either, brother, but I denounce you, and that’s what you call being boxed in.”

  “I’m alive,” Traveler said looking into his eyes. “Being alive always seems to be the price of something. And you don’t want to pay anything. You never wanted to. A kind of existential puritan, a purist. Caesar or nothing, that kind of radical demand. Do you think I’m not surprised at you in my own sort of way? Do you think I’m not surprised that you haven’t committed suicide? You’re the real Doppelgänger, because you’re like something disembodied, you’re a will in the form of a weather vane, up there. I want this, I want that, I want north and south and everything all at the same time, I want La Maga, I want Talita, and then the gentleman visits the morgue and plants a kiss on his best friend’s wife. Everything because realities and memories are mixed up in him to such a non-Euclidean extent.”

  Oliveira shrugged his shoulders, but he looked at Traveler to mak
e him feel that it was not a gesture of disdain. How could he transmit to him something of that thing that in the territory facing him they called a kiss, a kiss on Talita, a kiss he gave La Maga or Pola, that other game of mirrors like the game of turning his head towards the window and looking at La Maga standing there next to the hopscotch while Cuca and Remorino and Ferraguto, crowding around the door, seemed to be waiting for Traveler to come to the window and announce to them that all was well, and that a capsule of Nembutal or at best a strait-jacket for a little while, until the boy got over his fit. The knocks on the door didn’t contribute much to understanding either. If at least Manú were capable of feeling that nothing he was thinking made any sense from the window side, that it was only worth something on the basin and ruleman side, and if the person beating on the door with both his fists would be quiet for just a minute, perhaps then … But all he could do was look at La Maga so beautiful beside the hopscotch, and wish that she would move the piece from one square to the other, from earth to Heaven.

  “… so non-Euclidean.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you all this time,” Oliveira said tiredly. “You’re probably aware that I wasn’t going to let myself be disemboweled just like that. Everybody knows what he has to do, Manú. If you want an explanation of what happened down there … just that it won’t have anything to do with this, and you know that. You know that, Doppelgänger, you know that. What difference does the kiss make to you, and what difference does it make to her either? That’s between the two of you, after all.”

  “Open up! Open up immediately!”

  “They’re taking it rather badly,” Traveler said, getting up. “Shall we open up for them? It must be Ovejero.”

  “As far as I’m concerned …”

  “He’ll want to give you an injection. Talita must have roused up the whole loony-bin.”

  “Women are too much,” Oliveira said. “Look at her there, so well-behaved next to the hopscotch … Better not open up, Manú, we’re doing fine just the way we are.”

  Traveler went to the door and put his mouth to the keyhole. God-damned fools, why don’t they stop fucking around with those shouts they pick up in horror movies. He and Oliveira were doing fine and they would open up when it was time. They would be better off making coffee for everybody, there was no living in that clinic.

  It was audible enough so that Ferraguto was not convinced, but the voice of Ovejero imposed itself over his like a wise persistent rumble, and finally they left the door alone. For the moment the only sign of upset was the people in the courtyard and the lights on the fourth floor that went on and off continuously, Number 43’s happy habit. Shortly after, Ovejero and Ferraguto reappeared in the courtyard, and from there they looked at Oliveira seated on the window and he greeted them, excusing himself for being in his undershirt. Number 18 had gone over to Ovejero and was telling him something about the Heftpistole, and Ovejero seemed very interested and looked at Oliveira with professional attention, as if he no longer was his best opponent at poker, something which rather amused Oliveira. They had opened almost all the windows on the second floor, and several patients were participating with great vivacity in everything that was going on, which was not very much. La Maga had raised her right arm to attract Oliveira’s attention, as if that were necessary, and she was asking him to call Traveler to the window. Oliveira explained to her in the cleverest way he could that it was impossible because the window zone belonged exclusively to the defense, but that perhaps they could arrange a truce. He added that the gesture of calling him by raising her arm made him think of actresses of the past and especially opera singers like Emmy Destinn, Melba, Marjorie Lawrence, Muzio, Bori, and why not Theda Bara and Nita Naldi, he kept spouting names with enormous pleasure and Talita lowered her arm and then raised it again in supplication, Eleonora Duse, naturally, Vilma Banky, Garbo exactly, but of course, and a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt that as a boy he had pasted in a scrapbook, and Karsavina, Baronova, women, those eternal gestures, that perpetuation of destiny although in that case it might not be possible to accede to the pleasant request.

  Ferraguto and Cuca were shouting rather contradictory manifestations when Ovejero, who with his sleepy face listened to everything, motioned them to be quiet so that Talita could get through to Oliveira. An operation which was of no avail because Oliveira, after listening for the seventh time to La Maga’s plea, turned his back on them and they saw him (although they could not hear him) talking to the invisible Traveler.

  “They want you to come over here, you know.”

  “Look, in any case, just give me a minute. I can go under the strings.”

  “Nuts,” said Oliveira. “It’s the last line of defense, if you break it we’ll be into hard infighting.”

  “O.K.,” Traveler said, sitting down on the chair. “Keep on piling up useless words.”

  “They’re not useless,” Oliveira said. “If you want to come over here you don’t have to ask my permission. I think that’s clear.”

  “You swear you won’t jump?”

  Oliveira kept looking at him as if Traveler were a giant panda.

  “At last,” he said. “The fat’s in the fire. There down below, La Maga is thinking the same thing. And I thought that in spite of everything they might know me a little.”

  “It’s not La Maga,” Traveler said. “You know perfectly well it’s not La Maga.”

  “It’s not La Maga,” Oliveira said. “I know perfectly well it’s not La Maga. And you’re the standard-bearer, the herald of surrender, of the return to home and order. You’re beginning to make me feel sorry, old man.”

  “Forget about me,” Traveler said bitterly. “What I want is for you to give me your word you won’t do anything idiotic.”

  “Take notice that if I jump,” Oliveira said, “I’m going to land right on Heaven.”

  “Come on over here, Horacio, and let me talk to Ovejero. I can fix things up, tomorrow everybody will have forgotten about all this.”

  “He learned it all in the psychiatry manual,” Oliveira said, almost startled. “He’s a student who has great retentive powers.”

  “Listen,” Traveler said. “If you don’t let me come to the window I’m going to have to open the door and that’ll be worse.”

  “It’s all the same to me, their coming in is one thing and their getting over here is another.”

  “You mean that if they try to grab you you’ll jump.”

  “It might mean that from over on your side.”

  “Please,” Traveler said, taking a step forward. “Can’t you see it’s a bad dream? They’re going to think you’re really crazy, they’re going to think I really did want to kill you.”

  Oliveira leaned out a little more, and Traveler stopped at the second line of watery basins. Although he had sent the rulemans flying with a kick, he stopped advancing. Amid the shrieks from Cuca and Talita, Oliveira straightened up and made a quieting sign to them. As if defeated, Traveler brought the chair up a little and sat down. They were pounding on the door again, less vigorously than before.

  “Don’t rack your brains any more,” Oliveira said. “Why are you looking for explanations of it, old man? The only real difference between you and me at this moment is that I’m alone. That’s why the best thing is for you to go downstairs and rejoin your people, and we’ll keep on talking out the window like good friends. Around eight o’clock I intend cutting out; Gekrepten agreed to wait for me with pancakes and mate.”

  “You’re not alone, Horacio. Maybe you wanted to be alone out of pure vanity, play the Buenos Aires Maldoror. You spoke about a Doppelgänger, didn’t you? Now you can see that someone is following you, that someone is like you even though he’s on the other side of your damnable threads.”

  “It’s too bad,” Oliveira said, “that you have such a prissy idea of vanity. That’s where it lies, making yourself an idea of something, no matter what the cost. Aren’t you capable of sensing even for a single second that this might
not be like that?”

  “Let’s say that’s what I think. Just the same, there you are leaning next to an open window.”

  “If you really suspected that this can’t be this way, if you really got to the heart of the artichoke … Nobody asks you to deny what you’re seeing, but if you were only capable of pushing a little, understand, with the tip of your toe …”

  “If it were only so easy,” Traveler said, “if it were only a question of hanging up some idiotic threads … I don’t say that you haven’t given your push, but look at the results.”

  “What’s wrong with them? At least we have the window open and we’re breathing in this fabulous dawn, feel the freshness that comes up at this hour. And down below everybody is strolling about in the courtyard, it’s extraordinary, they’re getting exercise without knowing it. Cuca, take a peek, and the Boss, that type of gentle marmot. And your wife, who is laziness personified. For your part you can’t deny that you were never as awake as right now. And when I say awake you understand, right?”