Hopscotch: A Novel

by Julio Cortázar

  * Why not? Morelli himself put the question on a sheet of graph paper in the margin of which there was a list of vegetables, probably a memento buffandi. Prophets, mystics, dark night of the soul: the frequent use of a story in the form of an apology or a vision. Of course a novel … But that scandal was born more from the generic and classificatory mania of the Western monkey than from a real internal contradiction.**

  ** Without saying that the more violent the internal contradiction, the more efficiently it would be able to supply a technique, as it were, in the Zen manner. Instead of a whack on the head, an absolutely antinovelish novel, with the subsequent scandal and shock, and perhaps with an opening for those best alerted.***

  *** As if a hope for this last item, another scrap of paper continued the Suzukian quotation in the sense that the comprehension of the strange language used by the teachers means the comprehension of one’s self on the part of the pupil and not that of the sense of the language. Just the reverse of what an astute European philosopher might deduce, the language of the Zen teacher transmits ideas and not feelings or intuitions. That is why it is of no use as far as language as such is concerned, but since the choice of phrases comes from the teacher, the mystery comes to a head in the region best suited for it and the pupil opens himself up, understands himself, and the pedestrian phrase becomes a key.****

  **** That is why Étienne, who had made an analytical study of Morelli’s tricks (something which had seemed a guarantee of failure to Oliveira), thought he recognized in certain passages of the book, including entire chapters, a kind of gigantic amplification ad usum homo sapiens of certain Zen slaps on the face. Those sections of the book Morelli called “archapters” and “chaptypes,” verbal nonsense in which one could deduce a mixture that was not in the least Joycean. As for what archetypes had to do with it, it was a theme of restlessness for Wong and Gregorovius.*****

  ***** An observation by Étienne: In no way did Morelli appear to climb the bodhi tree or Sinai or up to any other platform of revelation. No pedagogical attitudes were set forth by which the reader might be guided towards new and green meadows. Without servility (the old man was of Italian origin and he was quick to pick up on what came from the heart, it must be said) he wrote as if he himself, in a desperate and moving attempt, had pictured the teacher who was to enlighten him. He turned loose his Zen phrase, and one kept on listening to it—sometimes for fifty pages, the old monster—, and it would have been absurd and of little faith to suspect that those pages were directed at a reader. If Morelli published them it was partly because of his Italian side (“Ritorna vincitor!”) and partly because he was enchanted at how gaudy they had turned out.******

  ****** Étienne saw in Morelli the perfect Western man, the colonizer. When his crop of Buddhist poppies had been harvested, he would return with the seeds to the Quartier Latin. If the last revelation was perhaps the one that he had been hoping for most, one would have to recognize that his book was before anything else a literary undertaking, precisely because it was set forth as the destruction of literary forms (formulas).*******

  ******* Also Western, although it should be said as praise, from the Christian conviction that there is no individual salvation possible, and that one’s faults stain everyone else and vice versa. Perhaps that is why (Oliveira had a hunch) he chose the novel form for his meanderings, and published in addition what he kept on finding or unfinding.

  (–146)

  96

  THE newsspreadlikewildfire, and practically the whole Club was there at ten o’clock that night. Étienne had the key, Wong bowed down to the ground to counteract the furious reception they got from the concierge, mais qu’est-ce qu’ils viennent ficher, non mais vraiment ces étrangers, écoutez, je veux bien vous laisser monter puisque vous dites que vous êtes des amis du vi … de monsieur Morelli, mais quand même il aurait fallu prévenir, quoi, une bande qui s’amène à dix heures du soir, non, vraiment, Gustave, tu devrais parler au syndic, ça devient trop con, etc. Babs armed with what Ronald called the alligator’s smile, Ronald excited and slapping Étienne on the back, pushing him so he would hurry up, Perico Romero cursing out literature, second floor RODEAU, FOURRURES, third floor DOCTEUR, fourth floor HUSSENOT, it was all too fantastic, Ronald nudging Étienne in the ribs and putting Oliveira down, the bloody bastard, just another of his practical jokes, I suppose, dis donc, tu vas me foutre la paix, toi, this is all that Paris is, coño, one fucking staircase after another, you get fed up to the fifth shit with all of them. Si tous les gars du monde…Wong bringing up the rear, Wong has a smile for Gustave, a smile for the concierge, bloody bastard, coño, ta gueule, salaud. On the fifth floor the door on the right opened a few inches and Perico saw a gigantic rat in a white nightgown peeking out with one eye and all of her nose. Before she could close the door again, he stuck his shoe in and recited for her that thing that among serpents, the basilisk had an organ so poisonous for all the others and so overwhelming that he frightened them just by hissing and they scattered and fled at his coming, he could kill them with his glance. Madame René Lavalette, née Francillon, did not understand much but she answered with a snort and a shove. Perico pulled out his shoe with an eighth of a second to spare, SLAM. On the sixth they stopped to watch the solemnity with which Étienne inserted the key.

  “It can’t be,” Ronald repeated for the last time. “We’re dreaming, as the princesses of Tour et Taxis say. Did you bring the drinks, Babsie? An obolus for Charon, you know. Now the door will open and the magic will begin, I expect to get something out of tonight, it’s like the feeling of an end of the world.”

  “The god-damned witch almost broke my toe,” Perico said, looking at his shoe. “Open up, God damn it, man, I’ve had enough of stairways to last me a lifetime.”

  But the key wouldn’t work, even though Wong hinted that in ceremonies of the initiate the simplest movements are overcome by Forces that one must conquer through Patience and Slyness. The lights went out. Who’s got a lighter, coño? Tu pourrais

  “Shut up, everybody,” Ronald said. “We’re in other territory, I really mean it. If somebody has come here to have a good time, he can get his ass out of here. Give me the bottles, sweetie. You always drop them when you get overcome with emotion.”

  “I don’t like people who go around pawing me in the dark,” Babs said looking at Perico and Wong.

  Étienne ran his fingers slowly over the molding of the door. They waited in silence for him to find the light switch. The apartment was small and dusty, the soft and domesticated lights enveloped it in a golden air in which the Club breathed with relief for the first time and went about looking over the rest of the place, exchanging impressions in low voices: the reproduction of the tablet of Ur, the legend of the profanation of the Eucharist (Paolo Uccello pinxit), the photographs of Pound and of Musil, the little picture by De Staël, the enormous quantity of books along the walls, on the floor, on the tables, in the bathroom, in the tiny kitchen, where there was a fried egg halfway between rotten and petrified, most beautiful for Étienne, garbage pail for Babs, ergo a sibilant argument while Wong respectfully opened the Dissertatio de morbis a fascino et fascino contra morbos by Zwinger, Perico up on a stool as was his specialty, running through a row of Spanish poets of the Golden Age, examining a small astrolabe of tin and ivory, and Ronald standing motionless in front of Morelli’s table, a bottle of cognac under each arm, looking at the green velvet notebook, exactly the spot where Balzac would have sat down to write but not Morelli. Then it was true, the old man had been living there, a stone’s throw away from the Club, and his damned publisher had declared that he was in Austria or on the Costa Brava every time they asked for his address over the phone. Notebooks to the right and to the left, between twenty and forty, all colors, empty or full, and in the middle an ashtray that was like another one of Morelli’s archives, a Pompeiian pile of ashes and burned-out matches.

  “She threw the still life into the garbage,” Étienne said furiously. “If La Ma
ga comes she won’t leave a hair on her head. But you, her husband …”

  “Look at this,” Ronald said, showing him the table to calm him down. “And besides, Babs said it was rotten, there’s no reason for you to carry on. The meeting has come to order. Étienne is presiding, but how can we continue? What about the Argentinian?”

  “The Argentinian and the Transylvanian are missing, Guy is in the country, and La Maga’s wandering around God knows where. In any case, we have a quorum. Wong, recording secretary.”

  “Let’s wait a while for Oliveira and Ossip. Babs, treasurer.”

  “Ronald, secretary. In charge of the bar. Sweet, get some glasses, will you?”

  “We stand recessed,” Étienne said, sitting down alongside the table. “The Club is meeting tonight to fulfill a desire of Morelli’s. While we’re waiting for Oliveira, if he’s coming, let’s drink to the old man’s sitting here again one of these days. Good lord, what a ghastly spectacle. We look like a nightmare that Morelli is probably dreaming right now in the hospital. Horrible. The meeting is open for business.”

  “But let’s talk about him in the meantime,” said Ronald, whose eyes were filled with natural tears and who was struggling with the cork on the cognac bottle. “There’ll never be another session like this, all these years now I’ve been a novitiate and I didn’t know it. And you, Wong, and Perico. All of us. Damn it, I could cry. This is the way a person must feel when he gets to the top of a mountain or breaks a record, things like that. Sorry.”

  Étienne put a hand on his shoulder. They sat down around the table. Wong turned out the lamps, except the one that was lighting up the green notebook. It was almost a scene for Eusapia Paladino, thought Étienne, who respected spiritualism. They began to talk about Morelli’s books and drink cognac.

  (–94)

  97

  GREGOROVIUS, an agent of heteroclite forces, had been interested in a note of Morelli’s: “To plunge one’s self into a reality or into a possible mode of a reality, and to feel how that which at first sight seemed to be the wildest absurdity comes to have some value, to articulate itself with other forms, absurd or otherwise, until the divergent weave (in relation to the stereotyped sketch of everyday life) appears and is defined in a coherent sketch which only by timid comparison with the former will appear mad or delirious or incomprehensible. Nevertheless, am I not sinning in the direction of an excess of confidence? To refuse to make psychologies and at the same time to place a reader—a certain reader, that is true—in contact with a personal world, with a personal existence and meditation … That reader will be without any bridge, any intermediate link, any casual articulation. Raw things: behavior, results, ruptures, catastrophes, derision. There where there should be a leave-taking there is a sketch on the wall; instead of a shout, a fishing-pole; a death is resolved in a trio for mandolins. And all of that is leave-taking, shout, and death, but who is prepared to displace himself, remove himself, decenter himself, uncover himself? The outer forms of the novel have changed, but their heroes are still the avatars of Tristram, Jane Eyre, Lafcadio, Leopold Bloom, people from the street, from the home, from the bedroom, characters. For every hero like Ulrich (more Musil) or Molloy (more Beckett), there are five hundred Darleys (more Durrell). For my part, I wonder whether someday I will ever succeed in making it felt that the true character and the only one that interests me is the reader, to the degree in which something of what I write ought to contribute to his mutation, displacement, alienation, transportation.” In spite of the tacit confession of defeat in the last sentence, Ronald found a presumption in the note that displeased him.

  (–18)

  98

  AND that’s how blind people are the ones who light our paths.

  That’s how someone, without knowing it, comes to show you irrefutably that you are on a path which he for his part would be incapable of following. La Maga will never know how her finger pointed towards the thin line that shatters the mirror, up to what point certain silences, certain absurd attentions, a certain scurrying of a dazzled centipede were the password for the firm establishment of my being in myself, which meant being in no place. By the way, that metaphor of the thin line … If you want happiness the way you say / Poetry away, Horacio, away.

  Seen objectively: She was incapable of showing me anything inside my terrain, even in hers she whirled around disconcerted, touching, handling. A frantic bat, the sketch a fly makes in the air of the room. Suddenly, for me seated there looking at her, an indication, a hint. Without her knowing it, the reason for her tears or the order of her shopping list or her way of frying potatoes were signs. Morelli spoke of something like that when he wrote: “Reading Heisenberg until noon, notes, cards. The concierge’s boy brings me my mail and we talk about a model airplane he is building in the kitchen of his apartment. While he tells me about it, he gives two little hops on his left foot, three on his right, two on his left. I ask him why two and three, and not two and two or three and three. He looks at me surprised, he does not understand. Feeling that Heisenberg and I are from the other side of a territory, while the boy is still straddling with one foot in each without knowing it, and that soon he will be only on our side and all communication will have been lost. Communication with what, for what? Well, let us continue reading; Heisenberg probably …”

  (–38)

  99

  “IT isn’t the first time that he’s referred to the erosion of language,” Étienne said. “I could mention several places where characters lose confidence in themselves to the degree in which they feel they’ve been drawn through their thought and speech, and they’re afraid the sketch may be deceptive. Honneur des hommes, Saint Langage…We’re far away from that.”

  “Not so very far,” Ronald said. “What Morelli is trying to do is give language back its rights. He talks about expurgating it, punishing it, changing ‘descend’ into ‘go down’ as a hygienic measure; but what he’s really looking for is to give back all its glow to the verb ‘descend,’ so that it can be used the way I use matches and not like a decorative fragment, a piece of the commonplace.”

  “Yes, but that battle is taking place on several planes,” said Oliveira, coming out of a long silence. “In what you’ve just read to us, it’s quite clear that Morelli is condemning in language the reflection of a false or incomplete optic and Organum that mask reality and humanity for us. Basically, he didn’t really care too much about language, except on the aesthetic plane. But that reference to the ethos is unmistakable. Morelli understands that the mere writing of aesthetic is a fraud and a lie and ends up arousing the female-reader, the type that doesn’t want any problems but rather solutions, or false and alien problems that will allow him to suffer comfortably seated in his chair, without compromising himself in the drama that should also be his. In Argentina, if the Club will give me permission to fall back on localisms, that kind of fraud has kept us quite content and peaceful for a whole century.”

  “Happy is he who finds his peers, the active readers,” Wong recited. “It’s on this little piece of blue paper, in notebook twenty-one. When I first read Morelli (in Meudon, a clandestine movie, Cuban friends) it seemed to me that the whole book was the Great Tortoise turned on its back. Difficult to understand. Morelli is an extraordinary philosopher, but exceedingly stupid at times.”

  “Like you,” said Perico, getting off his stool and elbowing his way into the group at the table. “All those fantasies about correcting language are jobs for academicians, boy, not to mention grammarians. Descend or go down, the fact is that the character beats it downstairs, and that’s that.”

  “Perico,” Étienne said, “is rescuing us from excessive confinement, from getting up into abstractions that Morelli sometimes likes too much.”

  “I’ll tell you something,” Perico said threateningly. “As far as I’m concerned, this whole business of abstractions …”

  The cognac burned Oliveira’s throat and he slid thankfully into the argument, where he could still los
e himself for a while. In a certain passage (he didn’t know exactly which, he would have to hunt for it) Morelli had given some keys to a method of composition. His problem to start with was always a drying up, a Mallarmean horror of facing a blank page, coincident with the necessity of opening himself up at all cost. Inevitable that a part of his work should be a reflection on the problem of writing it. He kept getting farther and farther away from the professional utilization of literature, from that type of short story or poem on which his initial prestige had been based. In some passage or other Morelli said he had reread with nostalgia and even surprise certain texts he had written years before. How could those inventions have flourished, that marvelous and yet so comfortable and simplifying unfolding of a narrator and his narration? In those days it had been as if what he was writing were already laid out in front of him, writing was running a Lettera 22 over words invisible but present, like the diamond in the groove of the record. Now he could write only with effort, examining at every turn a possible opposite, the hidden fallacy (he would have to reread, Oliveira thought, a curious passage that had delighted Étienne), suspicious that every clear idea was inevitably a mistake or half-truth, mistrusting the words that tended to organize themselves euphonically, rhythmically, with the happy murmur that hypnotizes the reader after he has found his first victim in the writer himself. (“Yes, but poetry …” “Yes, but that note in which he talks about the ‘swing’ that puts discourse on the march …”) Sometimes Morelli was in favor of a bitterly simple conclusion: he no longer had anything to say, the conditioned reflexes of the profession confused necessity with routine, a typical case among writers beyond the age of fifty and the important prizes. But at the same time he felt that he had never been so desirous, so urged to write. Could the delightful anxiety of doing battle with himself line by line be a mere reflection, a routine? Why then immediately a counterblow, the descending stroke of the piston, gasping doubt, dryness, renunciation?