Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series)

by Julio Cortázar

  (Final suite)

  Imagination has been praised to excess. The poor thing cannot move an inch away from the limits of its pseudopods. In this direction, great variety and vivacity. But in the other space, where the cosmic wind that Rilke felt pass over his head blows, Dame Imagination does not go. Ho detto.

  (–4)

  85

  LIVES which end like literary articles in newspapers and magazines, so pompous on page one and ending up in a skinny tail, back there on page thirty-two, among advertisements for secondhand sales and tubes of toothpaste.

  (–150)

  86

  THE people in the Club, with two exceptions, maintained that it was easier to understand Morelli from the quotes he used than from his personal meanderings. Wong insisted until his departure from France (the police refused to renew his carte de séjour) that it wasn’t worth the trouble champollionizing the old man’s rosettas, once you found the two following quotations, both from Pauwels and Bergier:

  Perhaps there is a place in man from where the whole of reality can be perceived. This hypothesis seems delirious. Auguste Comte declared that the chemical composition of a star would never be known. The following year Bunsen invented the spectroscope.

  Language, just like thought, proceeds from the binary arithmetical functioning of our brain. We classify by yes and no, by positive and negative. (…) The only thing that my language proves is the slowness of a world vision limited to the binary. This insufficiency of language is obvious, and is strongly deplored. But what about the insufficiency of binary intelligence itself? Internal existence, the essence of things, escapes it. It can discover that light is continuous and discontinuous at the same time, that a molecule of benzine establishes between its six atoms dual relationships which are nevertheless mutually exclusive; it accepts it, but it cannot understand it, it cannot incorporate into its own structure the reality of the profound structures it examines. In order to do that, it would have to change its state, machines other than the usual ones would have to start functioning in the brain, so that binary reasoning might be replaced with an analogical consciousness which would assume the shapes and assimilate the inconceivable rhythms of those profound structures…

  Le Matin des magiciens

  (–78)

  87

  IN 1932, Ellington recorded Baby When You Ain’t There, one of his least praised numbers and one to which the faithful Barry Ulanov does not give any special mention. With a curiously dry voice Cootie Williams sings the lyrics.

  Why is it so necessary at certain times to say: “I loved that”? I loved some blues, an image in the street, a poor dry river in the north. Giving testimony, fighting against the nothingness that will sweep us all away. That’s how in the air of the soul little things like that will linger, a sparrow that belonged to Lesbia, some blues that in the memory will fill the small space saved for perfumes, stamps, and paperweights.

  (–105)

  88

  “HEY, if you move your leg like that I’m going to stick this needle in your ribs,” Traveler said.

  “Keep on telling me about that business of colored in yellow,” Oliveira said. “With my eyes bandaged it’s like a kaleidoscope.”

  “Colored in yellow,” Traveler said, rubbing the thigh with a piece of cotton, “is under the jurisdiction of the national corporation of commission agents for the corresponding species.”

  “Animals with yellow fur, vegetables with yellow flowers, and minerals with a yellow look,” Oliveira recited obediently. “Why not? After all, Thursday is the fashionable day here, one doesn’t work on Sunday, the metamorphoses between Saturday morning and afternoon are extraordinary, people so easy-going. You’re hurting something awful. Is that some metal with a yellow look, or what?”

  “Distilled water,” Traveler said. “So you’ll think it’s morphine. You’re quite right, Ceferino’s world only appears strange to guys who believe in their own institutions to the exclusion of those outside. If you thought about everything that changes as soon as you leave the edge of the sidewalk and take three steps into the street …”

  “Like going from colored in yellow to colored in pampa,” Oliveira said. “This thing is making me a little sleepy.”

  “Water is a soporific. If I had my way I’d shoot you up with nebiole and you’d be more wide awake.”

  “Explain me something before I fall asleep.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to fall asleep, but go ahead.”

  (–72)

  89

  THERE were two letters from Juan Cuevas, attorney, but the order in which they should be read was material for a polemic. The first was the poetical exposition of what he called “world sovereignty”; the second one, also dictated to a stenographer at the Santo Domingo gate, took its vengeance on the required modesty of the first:

  Make as many copies of this letter as you wish, especially for members of the UN and world officials, who are the lowest kind of swine and international jackals. If on the one hand the Santo Domingo gate is a tragedy of noise, I like it on the other because I can come here and toss the largest stones in history.

  The following figured among the stones:

  The Pope in Rome is the greatest swine in history, and not by the slightest chance the vicar of God; Roman clericalism is the pure shit of Satan; every Roman clerical church should be completely razed, so that Christ’s light may shine, not only in the depths of human hearts, but also shining on through God’s universal light, and I say all of this because I dictated the previous letter to a most charming young lady, who looked at me with such a very languid face that I could not state certain strong items.

  Oh chivalrous lawyer! The fierce enemy of Kant, he insisted on “humanizing the current philosophy of the world,” to which purpose he decreed:

  And let the novel be more psychopsychiatric, by that I mean let the truly spiritual elements of the soul be set forth as scientific elements of the true universal psychiatry…

  Abandoning for a few minutes a considerable dialectical arsenal, he peeped into the kingdom of world religion:

  But just so long as humanity follows the path of both universal commandments; and until the hard stones of the world become silken wax under the illuminating light…

  A poet, and a good one.

  The voices of all the stones in the world will resound from out of all the cataracts and canyons in the world, with little silver threads of voices, an occasion for the endless love of women and of God…

  Suddenly the archetypal vision invades and spreads out:

  The Cosmos of the Earth, interior just like the universal mental image of God, which would later become condensed matter, is symbolized in the Old Testament by the archangel who turns his head and sees a faint world of lights, of course, I cannot remember passages from the Old Testament word for word, but that is more or less the direction which it takes: it is as if the face of the Universe became the very light of Earth, and remained as an orbit of universal energy around the sun … In a like way all Humanity and its peoples must turn their bodies, their souls, and their heads … It is the universe and the whole Earth turning towards Christ, laying all the laws of the Earth at his feet…

  And then,

  …all that remains is a sort of universal light that comes from equal lamps, lighting up the innermost heart of peoples…

  The worst was that suddenly,

  Ladies and gentlemen: I am writing this letter in the midst of frightful noise. And, nevertheless, we shall keep right on offering what we have here to you; the fact is that you still do not realize that in order to write (?) WORLD SOVEREIGNTY in a more perfect way and for it really to arrive at universal understanding, I should at least deserve from you some broad help so that each line and each letter will find its proper place, and not this disorder of the sons of the sons of the son of the chingada mother of all mothers; fuck the mother of all noises.

  But did it make any difference? Ecstasy again in the following line: />
  What an excellence of universes! May they flourish like the spiritual light of delightful roses in the hearts of all peoples…

  And the letter went on to its close in a flowery way, although with some curious last-minute grafts:

  …It seems that the whole universe is being brightened with the light of the universal Christ in every human flower, with infinite petals to illuminate eternally all earthly paths; and so it will remain brightened in the light of WORLD SOVEREIGNTY, they say that you no longer love me because you have other lovers.—Very truly yours. Mexico City, September 20, 1956—. 32 Avenida 5 de Mayo, Room III. —Paris Bldg. JUAN CUEVAS, ATTORNEY.

  (–53)

  90

  HE went around thinking in those days, and the bad habit of ruminating about everything at length inevitably made things hard for him. He had been revolving about the great affair, and the inconvenience in which he was living because of La Maga and Rocamadour made him analyze with increasing violence the intersection where he felt he was stuck. In cases like that Oliveira would grab a sheet of paper and write down the grand words over which he went slipping along in his ruminations. He wrote, for example: “The great whaffair,” or “the whintersection.” It was enough to make him laugh and feel more up to preparing another mate. “Whunity,” whrote Wholiveira. “The whego and the whother.” He used this wh the way other people used penicillin. Then he would get back to the matter more slowly and feel better. “The whimportant thing is not to become whinflated,” Wholiveira would say to whimself. After moments like this he would feel able to think without having the words play dirty tricks on him. Little more than methodological progress, because the great affair was still invulnerable. “Who would have told you, kid, that you’d end up as a metaphysician?” Oliveira would ask himself. “You have to resist the clothes-closet with three bodies, conform to the night-table of every day’s insomnia.” Ronald had come by to suggest to him that he accompany him in some vaguely political activities, and all night long (La Maga had not yet brought Rocamadour from the country) they had argued like Arjuna and the Charioteer, about action and passivity, the reasons for risking the present for the sake of the future, the blackmail side of every action that has a social end, the degree to which the risk taken serves at least to palliate an individual guilty conscience, the swinish personal behavior of everyday life. Ronald had ended up leaving with his head bowed down, not having been able to convince Oliveira that action was needed in support of the Algerian rebels. Oliveira had had a bad taste in his mouth all day because it had been easier to say no to Ronald than to himself. He was fairly certain of only one thing, and it was that he could not give in without betraying the passive hope by which he had lived since coming to Paris. Ceding to facile generosity and going out to paste up clandestine posters on the street seemed like a mundane explanation to him, a settling of accounts with friends who would appreciate his boldness, more than a real reply to great questions. Measuring the thing from the temporal and the absolute, he felt that he was wrong in the first case and right in the second. He was wrong in not fighting for Algerian independence, or against anti-Semitism or racism. He was right in rejecting the simple stupefaction of collective action and remaining alone once more next to his bitter mate, thinking about the great affair, turning it around like a ball of yarn in which you cannot see the end or where there are four or five ends.

  It was all right, yes, but one also had to recognize that his character was like a foot that trampled all dialectics of action in the manner of the Bhagavad-Gita. Between preparing mate and having La Maga prepare it there was no possible doubt. But everything was fissionable and would immediately allow an opposite interpretation: to passive character there corresponded a maximum of freedom and availability, the lazy absence of principles and convictions made him more sensitive to the axial condition of life (what one calls a weather-vane type), capable of rejecting through laziness but at the same time of filling the hollow left by the rejection with a content freely chosen by conscience or by an instinct that is more open, more ecumenical, as it were.

  “More whecumenical,” Oliveira wisely jotted down.

  Besides, what was the true morality of action? A social action like that of the syndicalists was more than justified in the field of history. Happy were those who lived and slept in history. An abnegation was almost always justified as an attitude of religious origin. Happy were those who loved their neighbor as themselves. In every case Oliveira rejected that sally of the ego, that magnanimous invasion of somebody else’s corral, an ontological boomerang destined to enrich in the last instance the one who threw it, to give him more humanity, more sainthood. One is always a saint at the expense of somebody else, etc. There was no objection to that action as such, but he pushed it aside with doubts about his personal conduct. He would suspect a betrayal the moment he gave in to posters on the street or activities of a social nature; a betrayal disguised as satisfactory work, daily happiness, satisfied conscience, fulfilled duty. He was too well acquainted with certain communists in Buenos Aires and in Paris, capable of the worst villainy but redeemable in their own minds by “the struggle,” by having to leave in the middle of dinner to run to a meeting or finish a job. Social action in those people seemed too much like an alibi, the way children are usually the alibi for mothers’ not having to do anything worth while in this life, the way learning with its blinders is useful in not learning that in the jail down the street they are still guillotining guys who should not be guillotined. False action is almost always the most spectacular, the kind that tears down respect, prestige, and whequestrian wheffigies. It’s as easy as putting on a pair of slippers, it can even become meritorious (“After all, it would be so nice if the Algerians got independence and we all ought to help a little,” Oliveira said to himself); the betrayal was something else, as always it was a denial of the center, one’s installation on the periphery, the marvelous joy of brotherhood with other men who were embarked on the same action. There where a certain human type could reach fulfillment as a hero, Oliveira knew that he was condemned to the worst of comedies. So it was better to sin through omission than through commission. Being an actor meant renouncing the orchestra seats, and he seemed born to be a spectator in the first row. “The worst of it,” Oliveira said to himself, “is that I always want to be an active onlooker and that’s where the trouble starts.”

  Whactive whonlooker. He had to whanalyze the whaffair carefully. At that moment certain pictures, certain women, certain poems gave him hopes of someday reaching a position from which he could accept himself with less loathing and less doubt than at that moment. It was no mean advantage for him that his worst defects tended to be useful in that matter which was not a path but rather the search for a halt that comes at the beginning of every path. “My strength is in my weakness,” Oliveira thought. “The great decisions I have always made were masks for flight.” Most of his undertakings (of his whundertakings) ended not with a bang but a whimper; the great breaks, the bangs without return were the nips of a cornered rat and nothing else. Otherness was rotating ceremoniously, dissolving into time or into space or into behavior, without violence, from fatigue—like the ending of his sentimental adventures—or from a slow retreat as when one begins to visit a friend less and less, read a poet less and less, go to a café less and less, taking mild doses of nothingness so as not to hurt one’s self.

  “Nothing ever really happens to me,” Oliveira thought. “A flowerpot is never going to fall on my noggin.” Why the unrest, then, if it was not the stale attraction of the opposites, the nostalgia for vocation and action? An analysis of this unrest, as far as is possible, would always allude to a dislocation, to an excentration in regard to a kind of order that Oliveira was incapable of defining. He knew that he was a spectator on the edge of the spectacle, like being blindfolded in a theater: sometimes the secondary meaning of some word would come to him, or of some piece of music, filling him with anxiety because he was capable of sensing that it was t
he primary meaning. In moments like that he knew he was closer to the center than many people who lived convinced that they were the axle of the wheel, but his was a useless nearness, a tantalizing instant which did not even take on the quality of torture. Once he had believed in love as an enrichment, an exaltation of interceding forces. One day he realized that his loves were impure because they presupposed that expectation, while the true lover loved without expecting anything but love, blindly accepting that the day would become bluer and the night softer and the streetcar less uncomfortable. “I can make a dialectical operation even out of soup,” Oliveira thought. He ended up by making friends out of the women he had loved, accomplices in a special contemplation of the world around. The women started out by adoring him (they really whadored him), admiring him (a whunlimited whadmiration), then something would make them suspect the void, they would jump back, and he would make their flight easy for them, he would open the door so that they could go play on the other side. On two occasions he had been at the point of feeling pity and letting them keep the illusion that they understood him, but something told him that his pity was not genuine, it was more a cheap trick of his selfishness and his laziness and his habits. “Pity is being auctioned off,” Oliveira would say to himself and let them go; he quickly forgot about them.

  (–20)

  91

  PAPERS scattered on the table. A hand (Wong’s). A voice reads slowly, making mistakes, the l’s like hooks, the e’s indefinable. Notes, cards with words on them, a line of poetry in some language, the writer’s kitchen. Another hand (Ronald’s). A resonant voice that knows how to read. Greetings in a low voice to Ossip and to Oliveira who arrive contritely (Babs has gone to let them in, has received them with a knife in each hand). Cognac, golden light, the legend of the profanation of the Eucharist, a small De Staël. The topcoats can be left in the bedroom. A piece of sculpture by (perhaps) Brancusi. In the back of the bedroom, lost between a dressmaker’s dummy rigged out as a hussar and a pile of boxes with pieces of wire and cardboard in them. There are not enough chairs, but Oliveira brings over two stools. One of those silences is produced which is comparable, according to Genet, to those observed by refined people when they suddenly perceive in a living room the smell of a silent fart. Soon thereafter Étienne opens up the briefcase and takes out the papers.