Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series)

by Julio Cortázar

  “Whenever you want,” Étienne said, holding on to the sketchbook. “Whenever you feel like it, there’s no rush. I still plan to live another forty years, so …”

  “ ‘Time present and time past,’ ” Oliveira recited, “ ‘are both perhaps present in time future.’ It has been written that today everything is going to end up in lines by T. S. Eliot thinking about a dream, sorry, hey. Let’s go right now.”

  “Yes, because it’s all right about the dream. You can take that, take it, but after all …”

  “It’s really about a different dream.”

  “Misère!” said Étienne.

  “I didn’t tell you about it on the phone because I’d forgot.”

  “And the bit about the six minutes,” Étienne said. “Basically, the authorities are very wise. We always shit on them, but we’ve got to admit they know what they’re doing. Six minutes …”

  “If I’d thought of it, all I had to do was get out of that booth and go to the next one.”

  “It’s all right,” Étienne said. “You tell me about the dream, and then we’ll go down those stairs and have a little wine on Montparno. I’ll swap your famous old man for a dream. Both things are too much together.”

  “You hit the nail on the head,” Oliveira said, looking at him with interest. “The problem is knowing if those two things can be swapped. What you were telling me just today: butterfly or Chiang Kai-shek? Probably when you swap the old man with me for a dream, what you’ll be swapping will be a dream for the old man.”

  “To tell the truth, I don’t give a damn.”

  “Painter,” said Oliveira.

  “Metaphysician,” said Étienne. “And now that we’re here, there’s a nurse over there who’s beginning to wonder whether we’re a dream or a couple of bums. What’s going to happen? If she comes over to throw us out, is it a nurse who is throwing us out or a dream that throws out two philosophers who are dreaming about a hospital where among other things there is an old man and an enraged butterfly?”

  “It was much more simple,” Oliveira said, slipping down on the bench a little and closing his eyes. “Look, it was just my childhood house and La Maga’s flat, both things together in the same dream. I don’t remember when I dreamed it, I’d forgotten it completely and this morning while I was thinking about that business with the loaf of bread …”

  “You already told me about the loaf of bread.”

  “Suddenly it’s the other thing again and the bread can go to the devil, because they can’t be compared. Maybe that’s what inspired my dream about the bread … Inspired, that’s a fine word.”

  “Don’t be ashamed to use it, if it means what I think it does.”

  “You were thinking about the kid, of course. A required association. But I don’t have any feelings of guilt. I didn’t kill him.”

  “Things are not so easy,” Étienne said uncomfortably. “Let’s go see the old man, we’ve had enough of idiot dreams for a while.”

  “It’s really impossible for me to tell you about it,” Oliveira said with resignation. “Imagine that when you get to Mars a guy asks you to describe ashes to him. Something like that, more or less.”

  “Shall we go see the old man or not?”

  “It doesn’t make the slightest difference to me. Since we’re already here … Bed number ten, I think. We should have brought him something, it’s stupid coming here like this. In any case, give him a drawing.”

  “My drawings are for sale,” Étienne said.

  (–112)

  123

  THE real dream was located in an imprecise zone, next to waking but without his really being awake; he would have had to make use of other references to speak about it, eliminate rotund terms like dreaming and awake that didn’t mean a thing, locate himself rather in that zone where once more his childhood house would be suggested, the living room and the garden in a clear present time, with the colors as they were seen at the age of ten, reds so red, blues of tinted glass shades, green of leaves, green of fragrance, smell, and color, a single presence at the level of nose and eyes and mouth. But in the dream, the room with its two windows that opened on the garden was at the same time La Maga’s room; the forgotten province of Buenos Aires town and the Rue du Sommerard were brought together without any clash, not juxtaposed or overlapped but merged, and in the effortless removal of contradiction there was the sensation of being where one should be, in the essential place, as when one is a child and has no doubts that the living room will be there for a whole lifetime: an inalienable belonging. So that the house in Burzaco and the flat on the Rue du Sommerard were the place, and in the dream it was necessary to choose the most peaceful spot in the place, the reason behind the dream seemed to be just that, choosing a peaceful place. There was another person in the place, his sister, who was silently helping him choose the peaceful spot, the way a person participates in some dreams without even being there, and we take it for granted that the person or thing is there and participates; a force with no visible manifestations, something that is or does through a presence that can do without appearances. So he and his sister chose the living room as the most peaceful spot in the place, and it was a good choice because in La Maga’s flat one could not play the piano or listen to the radio after ten o’clock at night, the old man upstairs would immediately start pounding on the floor or the people on the fifth floor would delegate a cross-eyed midget girl to go up and complain. Without a single word, since they didn’t even seem to be there, he and his sister chose the living room that opened on the garden, rejecting La Maga’s flat. In that moment of the dream Oliveira had awakened, perhaps because La Maga had put a leg between his. In the darkness the only thing he felt was that until that instant he had been in his childhood living room with his sister and also a terrible urge to urinate. Pushing La Maga’s leg away unceremoniously, he got up and went out to the landing, feeling around for the dim light in the toilet, and without bothering to close the door began to piss, leaning against the wall with one hand, struggling against going to sleep and falling down in that lousy toilet, completely absorbed in the aura of the dream, watching without seeing the stream that was coming out from between his fingers and disappearing down the hole or drifting vaguely around the edges of the dirty porcelain. Maybe the real dream appeared to him at that moment when he felt he was awake and pissing at four o’clock in the morning on a sixth floor on the Rue du Sommerard and knew that the living room that opened on the garden in Burzaco was reality, knew it as only a few undeniable things are known, as one knows that he is himself, that no one but one’s self is thinking that, he knew without any surprise or shock that his life as a man awake was a fantasy next to the solidity and permanence of the living room, although after going back to bed there might not be any living room and only the flat on the Rue du Sommerard, he knew that the place was the living room in Burzaco with the smell of Cape jasmine coming through the windows, the room with the old Bluthner piano, with its pink carpet and its covered little chairs, and his sister also with a cover on. He made a violent effort to get out of the aura, reject the place that was tricking him, wide awake enough to let the notion of trickery enter the notion of dream and wakefulness, but while he shook off the last drops and turned out the light, and rubbing his eyes crossed the landing to go back into the flat, everything was less, it was less signal, less landing, less door, less light, less bed, less Maga. Breathing with effort he murmured, “Maga,” he murmured, “Paris,” perhaps he murmured, “Today.” It still sounded far away, hollow, not really alive. He went back to sleep like a person who is looking for his place and his house after a long road in the rain and the cold.

  (–145)

  124

  IT was necessary to propose, according to Morelli, a movement on the margin of all grace. In what he had done so far about that movement, it was easy to note the almost swift impoverishment of his novelistic world, not only evident in the almost simian poverty of his characters but also in the simple course
of their actions and especially their inactions. He ended by not having anything happen to them, they whirled about in a sarcastic commentary on their inanity, they pretended to adore ridiculous idols which they thought they had discovered. This must have seemed important to Morelli because he had piled up notes on a supposed exigency, a final and desperate recourse to drag himself out of the rut of the immanent and transcendental ethic in search of a nakedness that he called axial and sometimes called the threshold. Threshold of what, to what? One could deduce the incitement to something like turning one’s self inside out like a glove, as a way of receiving a brazen contact with some reality without the interposition of myths, religions, systems, and reticula. It was curious that Morelli enthusiastically embraced the most recent working hypotheses of the physical and biological sciences, he presented himself as convinced that the old dualism had become cracked in the face of the evidence of a common reduction of matter and spirit to notions of energy. As a consequence, his wise monkeys seemed more and more to desire a retreat into themselves, nullifying on one hand the chimeras of a controlled reality, betrayed by the supposed instruments of cognition, and nullifying in turn their own mythopoetic force, their “soul,” ending up in a kind of meeting ab ovo with a maximum shrinking into that point in which the last spark of (false) humanity will be lost. He seemed to propose—although he never got around to formulating it—a path that would begin with that external and internal liquidation. But he had ended up without words, without people, without things, and potentially, of course, without readers. The Club would sigh, somewhere between depression and exasperation, and it was always the same thing or almost.

  (–128)

  125

  THE notion of being like a dog among men: material for an indifferent reflection that went on through two drinks of caña and a walk through the suburbs, the growing suspicion that only the alpha can yield the omega, that all insistence upon an intermediate period—epsilon, lambda—is the same thing as spinning around with one foot fastened to the ground. The arrow goes from the hand to the target: there’s no midway in the journey, there’s no century numbered XX between X and XXX. A man should be able to isolate himself from the species within the species itself, and choose the dog or the original fish as a starting point for the march towards himself. There’s no passage for the Doctor of Philosophy, there’s no opening for the eminent allergist. Inlaid in the species, they will be what they should be and if not they will be nothing. Very worthy men, no doubt about it, but always epsilon, lambda, or pi, never alpha and never omega. The man in question doesn’t accept those pseudo-fulfillments, the great decaying mask of the Western world. The guy who has wandered as far as the bridge on the Avenida San Martin and stands smoking on a corner watching a woman adjust her stocking, has a completely brainless idea of what he calls fulfillment, and he’s not sorry about it because something tells him that the seed lies in brainlessness, that the bark of a dog is closer to the omega than a thesis on the gerund in Tirso de Molina. Such stupid metaphors. But he goes on doggedly, his way of putting words together. What is he searching for? Is he searching for himself? He would not be searching for himself if he had not already found himself. It means that he has found himself (but that’s not brainless any more, ergo it cannot be trusted. As soon as you turn it loose, Reason supplies you with a special bulletin, arms you with the first syllogism in a chain that leads you nowhere except to a diploma or a ranch-style bungalow and kids playing on the carpet to the enormous delight of mom). Let’s see, let’s take it slowly: What is that guy searching for? Is he searching for himself? Is he searching for himself as an individual? As a supposedly timeless individual, or as a historical entity? If it’s the latter, a waste of time. If, on the other hand, he’s searching for himself along the margin of all contingencies, the business of the dog is probably not so bad. But let’s take it slowly (he loves to talk to himself that way, like a father to his son, so that later on he can give himself the great pleasure of all children and kick the old man in the balls), let’s take it piano piano, let’s see what this business of the search is all about. Well, search is just what it is not. Subtle, eh. It’s not a search because he’s already found himself. Just that the finding has not taken any shape. The meat, potatoes, and scallions are there, but there isn’t any pot. Or let’s say that we’re no longer with the others, that we’ve already stopped being a citizen (there’s some reason for their weeding me out of everywhere, let Lutetia tell about it), but we still haven’t learned how to get out of the dog to reach the thing that doesn’t have a name, that conciliation, let’s say that reconciliation.

  It’s a terrible job, splashing around in a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, to use the language of scholasticism. What is being searched for? What is being searched for? Repeat it fifteen thousand times, like hammer-blows on the wall. What is being searched for? What is that conciliation without which life doesn’t go beyond being an obscure joke? Not the conciliation of a saint, because if in the notion of going back to the dog, of starting over again from the dog or from the fish or from the ooze and the ugliness and the misery and any other disvaluation, there’s always something like a nostalgia for sainthood, it would seem that one yearns for a nonreligious sainthood (and here comes brainlessness), a state without differentiation, without saints (because a saint is always in some way a saint and those who are not saints, and that scandalizes a poor guy like the one admiring the calf of the girl absorbed in adjusting her twisted stocking), that is to say that if there is conciliation it must be something besides a state of sainthood, an exclusive state from the word go. It has to be something immanent, with no sacrifice of lead for gold, cellophane for glass, the least for the most; on the contrary, brainlessness calls for lead to be worth as much as gold, for the most to be contained in the least. An alchemy, a non-Euclidian geometry, an up-to-date indetermination for the operations of the spirit and its benefits. It’s not a question of rising, an old mental image disproved by history, the old carrot that no longer fools the donkey. It’s not a question of perfecting, of decanting, of redeeming, of choosing, of free-willing, of going from the alpha to the omega. One is already there. Anybody is already there. The shot is in the pistol; but a trigger has to be squeezed, and it so happens that the finger is making motions to stop a bus, or something similar.

  How he talks, how he does go on, this smoking suburban tramp. The girl has already fixed her stocking, all set. You see? Forms of conciliation. Il mio supplizio…Everything is probably so simple, a pull on the mesh, a finger wet with saliva passing over the part with the run. It would probably be enough to grab one’s nose and put it where one’s ear is, upset circumstance a little. But no, that wouldn’t do it either. Nothing easier than putting the blame on what’s outside, as if one were sure that outside and inside are the two main beams of the house. But the fact is that everything is in bad shape, history tells you that, and the very fact that you’re thinking about it instead of living it proves to you that it’s bad, that we’ve stuck ourselves into a total disharmony that the sum of our resources disguises with social structure, with history, with Ionic style, with the joy of the Renaissance, with the superficial sadness of romanticism, and that’s the way we go and they can turn the dogs on us.

  (–44)

  126

  “WHY, with your infernal enchantments, have you torn from me the tranquillity of my early life … The sun and the moon shone for me without artifice; I awoke with gentle thoughts, and at dawn I folded my leaves to say my prayers. I saw nothing evil, for I had no eyes; I heard nothing evil, for I had no ears; but I shall have my vengeance!”

  Discourse of the Mandrake, in Elizabeth of Egypt, by ACHIM VON ARNIM

  (–21)

  127

  THAT’S how the monsters would bug Cuca so she’d get out of the pharmacy and leave them in peace. Along the way and much more seriously they would discuss Ceferino Piriz’s system and the ideas of Morelli. Since Morelli was little
known in Argentina, Oliveira loaned them his books and told them about some scattered notes he had seen at another time. They found out that Remorino, who was to stay on as an attendant and who would show up at mate and caña time, was a great initiate in Roberto Arlt, and that produced a considerable impression, so that for a whole week they spoke only of Arlt and how nobody had the right to step on his poncho in a country where carpets were preferred. But mostly they talked with great seriousness about Ceferino, and every once in a while it would occur to them to look at each other in a special way, raising their eyes at the same time, for example, and realizing that all three of them were doing it, that is to say, looking at each other in a special and inexplicable way, like certain looks in a game of truco or when a man who is desperately in love has to bear up under tea and pastries with several ladies and even a retired colonel who is explaining the reasons why everything is going badly in the country, and stuck in his chair the man looks at everyone the same way, the colonel, the woman he loves, and the woman’s aunts, he looks at them affably because in fact it is a shame the way the country is in the hands of a band of crypto-communists, then from the cream puff, the third one on the left in the tray, and the spoon lying face up on the tablecloth embroidered by the aunts, the affable look is raised for an instant and over the crypto-communists it joins in mid-air the other look that has risen from the Nile-green plastic sugar bowl, and there’s no longer anything else, a consummation outside of time becomes a soft, sweet secret, and if the men of today were real men and not a bunch of god-damned fairies (“Why, Ricardo!” “It’s all right, Carmen, I just get so riled up, I get so pff riled at what’s going on in this country”), mutatis mutandi it was a little like the look the monsters gave when it occurred to them from time to time to look at each other with a look that was both furtive and total at the same time, secret and much clearer than when they would look at each other for a long time, but a person isn’t a monster without good reason, as Cuca would say to her husband, and the three of them would let out a laugh and feel enormously ashamed at having looked at each other that way when they weren’t playing truco and weren’t illicitly in love. Unless.