since nobody comes around to grind my meat no more.
Cold feet on the motor and cold feet on the stones,
and cold feet in my bed, ’cause I’m sleeping all alone.
(–13)
107
WRITTEN by Morelli in the hospital
The best trait my ancestors have is that of being dead; I am waiting modestly and proudly for the moment when I come into my inheritance from them. I have friends who would not fail to erect a statue of me in which they would represent me face down in the act of peeping into a puddleful of authentic little frogs. By putting a coin in the slot they will see me spit in the water and the frogs will get all stirred up and croak for a minute and a half, just enough time for people to lose all interest in the statue.
(–113)
108
“LA cloche, le clochard, la clocharde, clocharder. There’s even a thesis that was presented at the Sorbonne on the subject of the psychology of the clochard.”
“Could be,” Oliveira said. “But they don’t have any Juan Filloy to write Caterva for them. What ever happened to Filloy?”
Naturally, La Maga was in no position to know, in the first place because she never knew he had existed. He had to explain to her why Filloy, why Caterva. La Maga liked the plot of the book very much, the idea that South American linyeras were in a class with clochards. She remained firmly convinced that it was an insult to confuse a linyera with a beggar, and her liking for the clocharde of the Pont des Arts had its roots in reasons that now seemed scientific. Especially in those days when she had discovered, walking along the riverbank, that the clocharde was in love, sympathy and the desire for everything to turn out well were for La Maga something like the arch of the bridges, which always brought out her feelings, or like those pieces of tin or wire that Oliveira would pick up as they walked along.
“Filloy, shit,” Oliveira said looking at the towers of the City Hall and thinking about Cartouche. “My country’s so far away, damn it, it’s incredible there could be so much salt water in this mad world.”
“On the other hand there’s not so much air,” La Maga answered. “Thirty-two hours’ worth, no more, no less.”
“That’s right. But where do you get the dough for the flight?”
“And the wish to go back, because I really don’t.”
“Me either. But let’s just suppose. There’s no way back. Irrefutable.”
“You never talked about going back,” La Maga said.
“No one talks about it, wuthering heights, nobody talks about it. It’s only the feeling that everything is cool for the guy without bread.”
“Paris is free,” La Maga quoted. “You said so the day we met. Going to visit the clocharde is free, making love is free, telling you that you’re evil is free, not loving you … Why did you go to bed with Pola?”
“A matter of perfume,” Oliveira said, sitting down on the strip alongside the water’s edge. “I thought that she would smell like the Songs of Songs, cinnamon, myrrh, things like that. It was a sure thing, besides.”
“The clocharde won’t be along tonight. She would have been here already, she almost never misses.”
“Sometimes they arrest them,” Oliveira said. “To fumigate them, I suppose, or so the city can go to sleep peacefully alongside its impassive river. A clochard is a worse disgrace than a thief, that’s a well-known fact; basically, there’s nothing that can be done about them, they have to leave them in peace.”
“Tell me about Pola. We may see the clocharde in the meantime.”
“Night’s coming on, the American tourists are thinking about their hotels, their feet hurt, they bought a lot of crap, they’ve got their Sade, their Miller, their Onze mille verges, artistic pictures, pornographic snapshots, Sagans and Buffets. Look how they break up the sky on the bridge side. And leave Pola alone, that doesn’t matter. So, the painter folds up his stool, there’s no one to watch him any more. It’s incredible how clean everything gets, the air is washed like the skin of that girl running over there, look at her, dressed in red.”
“Tell me about Pola,” La Maga repeated, patting him on the shoulder with the back of her hand.
“Pure pornography,” Oliveira said. “You won’t like it.”
“But you must have told her something about us.”
“No. Just generally. What could I tell her? Pola doesn’t exist, you know. Where is she? Show her to me.”
“Pure sophistry,” La Maga said. She had learned the term in arguments with Ronald and Étienne. “She may not be here, but she’s on the Rue Dauphine, that’s for sure.”
“And where is the Rue Dauphine?” asked Oliveira. “Tiens, la clocharde qui s’amène. But look, hey, she’s wild.”
Coming down the steps, staggering under the weight of an enormous bundle, out of which were sticking pieces of unraveled overcoats, red scarves, pairs of pants picked up in trash cans, pieces of cloth, and even a blackened roll of wire, the clocharde reached dock-level below and let out an exclamation somewhere between a grunt and a sigh. On top of an indecipherable base where there probably had been accumulated skin-tight blouses and a brassière capable of holding up a pair of ominous breasts, were being added two, three, maybe four dresses, a complete wardrobe, and on top of it a man’s jacket with one sleeve almost torn off, a scarf held together with a tin brooch that had one green and one red stone, and on her incredibly dyed blond hair a kind of gauzy green clasp hanging to one side.
“She’s marvelous,” Oliveira said. “She’s just seduced the people on the bridge.”
“It’s obvious that she’s in love,” La Maga said. “And the way she’s made up, look at her lips. And the rouge, she’s put on every bit she’s got.”
“She looks like Grock in one of his worst moments. Or some of Ensor’s figures. She’s sublime. How can they make love, the pair of them? Because you’re not going to tell me they do it by remote control.”
“I know a corner near the Hotel Sens where the clochards get together for that. The police leave them alone. Madame Léonie told me there’s always some police informer among them, secrets come out at times like that. It seems that the clochards know a lot about gangsters.”
“Gangsters, what a word,” Oliveira said. “Yes, of course they’d know. They’re on the edge of society, on the rim of fraud. They must know a lot about property owners and priests too. A scrutinizing look into garbage pails …”
“Here comes the clochard. He’s drunker than ever. Poor thing, the way she waits for him, see how she left the package on the ground as a signal, she’s so sentimental.”
“You can say all you want about the Hotel Sens, but I still wonder how they make it,” Oliveira muttered. “Look at all those clothes. Because she probably only takes off one or two things when it’s not so cold, but underneath she probably has on five or six more, not counting her underwear. Can you imagine what it must be like, and in a vacant lot? It’s easier for the guy, pants are more manageable.”
“They don’t get undressed, maybe,” La Maga conjectured. “The police wouldn’t allow it. And the rain, give a thought to that. They hide in corners, in that vacant lot there are some ditches about a foot deep, with rubbish around the edges, where workmen throw trash and bottles. I have the feeling they make love standing up.”
“With all those clothes? But that’s inconceivable. You mean the guy has never seen her naked? That’s a hell of a drag.”
“Look how they love each other,” La Maga said. “The way they look at each other.”
“The guy’s got wine coming out of his eyes. Eleven percent tenderness with lots of tannin.”
“They love each other, Horacio, they love each other. Her name is Emmanuèle, she used to be a whore in the provinces. She arrived on a péniche and stayed on the docks. We talked one night when I was feeling sad. She smells to high heaven, I had to leave after a little while. You know what I asked her? I asked her when she changed her clothes. That’s a silly thing to ask. She’s very
good, she’s quite mad, that night she thought she saw wildflowers among the cobblestones, she was naming them for me.”
“Like Ophelia,” Horacio said. “Nature imitates art.”
“Ophelia?”
“I’m sorry, I’m being pedantic. And what did she say when you asked her about her clothes?”
“She started to laugh and drank a pint down in one swallow. She said that the last time she had taken something off she had pulled it over her legs, over her knees. It fell all apart. They get very cold in winter, they grab anything they can find.”
“I wouldn’t want to be a hospital orderly and have them brought in on a stretcher some night. A prejudice like any other. Pillars of society. I’m thirsty, Maga.”
“Go over to Pola’s,” said La Maga, looking at the clocharde, who was caressing her lover under the bridge. “Watch, they’re going to dance now, they always dance a little at this time.”
“He looks like a bear.”
“He’s so happy,” La Maga said, picking up a little white stone and looking it all over.
Horacio took the stone away from her and licked it. It tasted like salt and stone.
“It’s mine,” La Maga said, trying to get it back.
“Yes, but look at the color it has when it’s with me. It lights up when it’s with me.”
“It’s happier with me. Give it back. It’s mine.”
They looked at one another. Pola.
“So O.K.,” Horacio said. “It means the same now as any other time. You’re being silly, girl, if you only knew how peacefully you can sleep.”
“Sleeping alone, that’s swell. You see, don’t you, I’m not crying. You can keep on talking, I’m not going to cry. I’m like her, watch her dance, she’s like the moon, she weighs a ton and she’s dancing, she’s full of crud and she’s dancing. It’s an example. Give me my stone.”
“Take it. You know, it’s hard to say to you: I love you. It’s so hard right now.”
“Yes, you’d think you were giving me a carbon copy.”
“We’re talking like a pair of eagles,” Horacio said.
“It’s enough to make you laugh,” La Maga said. “I’ll lend it to you if you want, while the clocharde is dancing.”
“O.K.,” said Horacio, accepting the stone and licking it again. “Why talk about Pola? She’s sick and lonely, I’m going to see her, we still make love, but that’s all, I don’t want to turn her into words, not even with you.”
“Emmanuèle’s going to fall into the water,” said La Maga. “She’s drunker than the guy.”
“No, it’ll all end up with the usual sordidness,” Oliveira said, getting up from the edge. “Do you see the noble representative of authority coming this way? Let’s go, it’s too sad. Just because the poor girl wanted to dance …”
“Some old puritan dame must have raised hell up there. If we find her you can kick her in the tail.”
“O.K. And you can make excuses for me, saying that my leg got away from me, mortar shell, defending Stalingrad, you know.”
“Then you come to attention and snap a salute.”
“That I can do very well, you know, I learned it in Palermo. Come on, let’s get something to drink. I don’t want to look back any more, listen to the cop cussing her out. That’s where the whole problem lies. Shouldn’t I go back and give him a swift kick? Oh, Arjuna, counsel me. And beneath the uniform the smell of civilian ignominy. Ho detto. Come on, let’s cut out once and for all. I’m dirtier than Emmanuèle, it’s a crud that started collecting centuries ago, Persil lave plus blanc, it calls for a Detergent the Father, girl, a cosmic soap. You like pretty words? Salut, Gaston.”
“Salut messieurs dames,” Gaston said. “Alors, deux petits blancs secs comme d’habitude, hein?”
“Comme d’habitude, mon vieux, comme d’habitude. Avec du Persil dedans.”
Gaston looked at him and went off shaking his head. Oliveira took La Maga’s hand and counted her fingers attentively. Then he put the stone in her palm, closed the fingers over it, one by one, and to top it off gave her a kiss. La Maga saw that he had closed his eyes and seemed to be far off. “Actor,” she thought tenderly.
(–64)
109
IN some place Morelli tried to justify his narrative incoherencies, maintaining that the life of others, such as it comes to us in so-called reality, is not a movie but still photography, that is to say, that we cannot grasp the action, only a few of its eleatically recorded fragments. There are only the moments in which we are present with this other one whose life we think we understand, either when they talk about him, or when he tells us what has happened to him or projects in front of us what he intends to do. In the end there is a photograph album, with fixed instances; never the future coming about before us, the step from yesterday to today, the first prick of forgetfulness in the memory. For that reason there was nothing strange about his speaking of characters in the most spasmodic way possible; giving coherence to the series of pictures so they could become a movie (which would have been so very pleasing to the reader he called the female-reader) meant filling in with literature, presumptions, hypotheses, and inventions the gaps between one and another photograph. Sometimes the pictures showed a back, a hand resting on a door, the end of a stroll through the countryside, a mouth opening up to shout, some shoes in the closet, people walking along the Champs de Mars, a canceled stamp, the smell of Ma Griffe, things like that. Morelli thought that the existence of those pictures, which tried to present all that with the most acuity possible, must have placed the reader in conditions ripe for taking a chance, for participating, almost, in the destiny of the characters. What he would learn from them through his imagination would immediately become hardened into action, with no trick destined to integrate them into what had already been written or was to be written. The bridges between one and another instant in those lives which were so vague and so little characterized would have to be presumed or invented by the reader, all the way from the manner in which they combed their hair, even if Morelli did not mention it, to the reasons behind a behavior or a nonbehavior, if it seemed unusual and eccentric. The book would have to be something like those sketches proposed by Gestalt psychologists, and therefore certain lines would induce the observer to trace imaginatively the ones that would complete the figure. But sometimes the missing lines were the most important ones, the only ones that really counted. Morelli’s coquetry and petulance in this field had no limits.
Reading the book, one had the impression for a while that Morelli had hoped that the accumulation of fragments would quickly crystallize into a total reality. Without having to invent bridges, or sew up different pieces of the tapestry, behold suddenly a city, or a tapestry, or men and women in the absolute perspective of their future, and Morelli, the author, would be the first spectator to marvel at that world that was taking on coherence.
But there was no cause for confidence, because coherence meant basically assimilation in space and time, an ordering to the taste of the female-reader. Morelli would not have agreed to that; rather, it seems, he would have sought a crystallization which, without altering the disorder in which the bodies of his little planetary system circulated, would permit a ubiquitous and total comprehension of all of its reasons for being, whether they were disorder itself, inanity, or gratuity. A crystallization in which nothing would remain subsumed, but where a lucid eye might peep into the kaleidoscope and understand the great polychromatic rose, understand it as a figure, an imago mundi that outside the kaleidoscope would be dissolved into a provincial living room, or a concert of aunts having tea and Bagley biscuits.
(–27)
110
THE dream was composed like a tower of layers without end, rising upward and losing themselves in the infinite, or layers coiling downward, losing themselves in the bowels of the earth. When it swooped me in its undulations, the spiraling began, and this spiral was a labyrinth. There was no vault and no bottom, no walls and no return. But there
were themes repeating themselves with exactitude.
ANAÏS NIN, Winter of Artifice
(–48)
111
THIS narration was written by its protagonist, Ivonne Guitry, to Nicolás Díaz, a friend of Gardel’s in Bogotá.
My family belonged to the Hungarian intellectual class. My mother was headmistress of a girls’ seminary where the elite of a famous city, whose name I do not wish to mention, were educated. With the arrival of the stormy postwar period and the overthrow of thrones, social classes, and fortunes, I did not know which way to head in my life. My family lost its fortune, victim of the Trianon [sic] borders like thousands and thousands of others. My beauty, my youth, and my upbringing would not permit me to become a humble stenographer. Then the Prince Charming of my life arrived, an aristocrat of cosmopolitan upper circles, frequenters of European resorts. I married him with all of my youthful illusion, in spite of the opposition of my family, because I was young and he was a foreigner.
Honeymoon. Paris, Nice, Capri. Then the shattering of an illusion. I did not know where to turn and I did not dare tell my family of the failure of my marriage. A husband who would never be able to make me a mother. I am already sixteen years old and I am traveling like a pilgrim without a goal, trying to make my troubles disappear. Egypt, Java, Japan, the Celestial Empire, all of the Far East, in a carnival of champagne and false happiness, with my soul in pieces.
The years pass. In 1927 we are settled finally on the Côte d’Azur. I am a woman of high society, and cosmopolitan circles, casinos, balls, race tracks all render me homage.
One fine day in summer I took a definitive resolution: separation. Nature was all in flower: the sea, the fields were opening up in a song of love and enjoyment of youth.
The mimosa festival in Cannes, the carnival of flowers in Nice, springtime in Paris. So I abandoned home, comforts, and wealth, and alone I faced the world…
Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) Page 49
