Hopscotch: A Novel

by Julio Cortázar

  “Along with some similar nihilism, hara-kiri,” Étienne said.

  “Well of course,” Oliveira said. “But getting back to the old man, if what he’s after is absurd, because it’s like hitting Sugar Ray Robinson with a banana, because it’s an insignificant offensive in the midst of the crisis and complete breakup of the classic idea of Homo sapiens, we musn’t forget that you are you and I am I, or at least so it seems to us, and that even if we don’t have the slightest certainty about everything our gigantic parents accepted as irrefutable, we still have the pleasant possibility of living and acting as if, choosing working hypotheses, attacking like Morelli what seems false to us, in the name of some obscure feeling of certainty, which is probably just as uncertain as the rest, but which makes us lift up our heads and count the little goats or look for the Pleiades again, those childhood animals, those bottomless fireflies. Cognac.”

  “It’s all gone,” Babs said. “Let’s go, I’m falling asleep.”

  “In the end, as always, an act of faith,” said Étienne, laughing. “It’s still the best definition of man. Now, getting back to the subject of the fried egg …”

  (–35)

  100

  HE put the slug in the slot, slowly dialed the number. At that hour Étienne was probably painting and he hated for people to call him in the middle of his work, but he had to call him just the same. The telephone began to ring on the other end, in a studio near the Place d’Italie, three miles from the post office on the Rue Danton. An old woman with the look of a rat had stationed herself in front of the glass booth; she looked furtively at Oliveira who was sitting on the little bench with his face up against the apparatus, and Oliveira felt the old woman looking at him, implacably counting the minutes. The glass in the booth was strangely clean: people were coming and going in the post office, one could hear the dull (and funereal, it was hard to say why) canceling of stamps. Étienne said something on the other end, and Oliveira pushed the nickel button that established contact and definitively swallowed up the twenty-franc slug.

  “Why do you always fuck things up,” complained Étienne, who appeared to have recognized him immediately. “You know I’m always working like crazy at this hour.”

  “Me too,” said Oliveira. “I called you because right when I was working I had a dream.”

  “What do you mean when you were working?”

  “Yes, around three in the morning. I dreamed I was going into the kitchen, I was looking for some bread, and I cut off a slice. The bread was different from what we have around here, French bread like the bread in Buenos Aires, you know there’s nothing French about it but they call it French bread. You know it’s a much thicker loaf, light in color, with lots of soft center. A loaf made to be spread with butter and jam, you understand.”

  “I know what you mean,” Étienne said. “I’ve eaten it in Italy.”

  “You’re crazy. It’s not like that at all. Someday I’ll have to draw you a picture so you can see. Look, it’s shaped like a short, fat fish, barely six inches long but quite fat in the middle. That’s Buenos Aires French bread.”

  “Buenos Aires French bread,” Étienne repeated.

  “Yes, but this happened on the Rue de la Tombe Issoire, before I moved in with La Maga. I was hungry and I took out the loaf to cut off a slice. Then I heard the bread crying. Yes, of course it was a dream, but the bread started to cry when I put the knife to it. An ordinary loaf of French bread and it was crying. I woke up without knowing what was going to happen, I think I still had the knife stuck in the bread when I woke up.”

  “Tiens,” said Étienne.

  “Now you can see, you wake up from a dream like that, go out into the hallway and stick your head under the tap, go back to bed, spend the whole night smoking … What could I do, the best thing was to call you, apart from the fact that we could make a date to go see the old man in the accident I told you about.”

  “You did the right thing,” Étienne said. “It sounds like a child’s dream. Children can still dream things like that, or imagine them. My nephew told me once that he had been on the moon. I asked him what he had seen. He answered: ‘There was a loaf of bread and a heart.’ You realize that after bakery experiences like this you can’t look at a child any more without being frightened.”

  “A loaf of bread and a heart,” Oliveira repeated. “Yes, but I only saw a loaf of bread. So. There’s an old woman out there who’s starting to give me dirty looks. How long do they let you talk in these booths?”

  “Six minutes. Then she’ll start rapping on the glass. Is there only one old woman?”

  “An old woman, a cross-eyed woman with a kid, and a traveling-salesman type. He must be a traveling salesman because besides the notebook he’s thumbing through like mad, I can see the points of three pencils sticking out of his lapel pocket.”

  “He could also be a bill collector.”

  “Now there are two more, a kid of fourteen who’s picking his nose, and an old woman with a wild hat, like out of a painting by Cranach.”

  “You’re feeling better,” Étienne said.

  “Yes, this booth isn’t bad. It’s a shame so many people are waiting. Do you think we’ve been talking six minutes?”

  “Nowhere near,” Étienne said. “Barely three, and not even that.”

  “Then the old woman has no right to rap on the glass, eh?”

  “Let her go to hell. Of course she has no right. You can use your six minutes to tell me about as many dreams as you want to.”

  “It was just that one,” Oliveira said, “but the worst is not the dream. The worst is what they call waking up … Don’t you think that actually it’s now that I’m dreaming?”

  “Who can tell? But it’s an overworked theme, old man, the philosopher and the butterfly, they’re things that everybody knows.”

  “Yes, but please excuse me for insisting a little. I wanted you to imagine a world where you can cut a loaf of bread without its complaining.”

  “It’s difficult to believe, really,” Étienne said.

  “No, seriously. Hasn’t it ever happened to you that you’ve awakened sometimes with the exact feeling that at that moment a terrible mistake is beginning?”

  “In the midst of that mistake,” Étienne said, “I paint magnificent pictures and it doesn’t matter to me very much whether I’m a butterfly or Fu Manchu.”

  “That has nothing to do with it. It seems that thanks to various mistakes Columbus reached Guanahani or whatever the name of the island is. Why that Greek criterion of truth and error?”

  “But it wasn’t me,” Étienne said resentfully. “You’re the one who spoke of an incredible mistake.”

  “That was a figure of speech too,” Oliveira said. “The same as calling it a dream. It can’t be catalogued, the mistake is precisely the fact that you can’t even say whether or not it is a mistake.”

  “The old woman’s going to break the glass,” Étienne said. “You can hear her from here.”

  “Let her go to hell,” Oliveira said. “The six minutes can’t be up.”

  “Just about. But then, you have that South American courtesy one hears praised so much.”

  “It’s not six minutes. I’m glad I told you about the dream, and when we get together …”

  “Come by whenever you want to,” Étienne said. “I’m not going to paint any more this morning, you’ve got me all out of sorts.”

  “Can you hear her beating on the window?” Oliveira asked. “Not just the old rat-faced woman, but the kid and the crosseyed woman too. An attendant’ll be here any minute.”

  “Of course you’re going to punch them all in the eye.”

  “No reason to. My great technique is to pretend I don’t understand a single word of French.”

  “You really don’t understand very much,” Étienne said.

  “No. The sad thing is that this is a big joke for you, and really it’s not a joke at all. The truth is I don’t want to understand anything, if by understa
nding one must accept what we used to call mistakes. Hey, they’ve opened the door and there’s a guy here tapping me on the shoulder. Ciao, thanks for listening to me.”

  “Ciao,” said Étienne.

  Straightening his jacket, Oliveira left the booth. The attendant was shouting the repertory of the rules in his ear. “If I only had the knife in my hand now,” Oliveira thought, taking out his cigarettes, “this guy would probably start to cackle or turn into a bouquet of flowers.” But things had become petrified, they were lasting terribly long, it was necessary to light his cigarette, being careful not to burn himself because his hand was shaking very much, and he could still hear the shouts of the guy, who was going away, turning around after every two steps to look at him and gesture, and the cross-eyed woman and the traveling salesman were looking at him out of one eye while with the other one they began to keep watch over the old woman so she wouldn’t go over six minutes; the old woman in the booth looked exactly like a Quechua mummy in the Museum of Man, one of those that lights up if you push a button. But it was just the opposite as in so many dreams, the old woman was pushing a button on the inside and began to talk with some other old woman stuck away in some attic in the immense dream.

  (–76)

  101

  BARELY lifting her head Pola saw the calendar of the PTT, a pink cow in a green field with a background of purple mountains underneath a blue sky, Thursday 1, Friday 2, Saturday 3, Sunday 4, Monday 5, Tuesday 6, Saint Mamert, Sainte Solange, Saint Achille, Saint Servais, Saint Boniface, lever 4 h.12, coucher 19 h.23, lever 4 h.10, coucher 19 h.24, lever coucher, lever coucher, levercoucher, coucher, coucher, coucher.

  Putting her face to Oliveira’s shoulder she kissed perspiring skin, tobacco, and sleep. With a very distant and free hand she caressed his stomach, came and went along his thighs, played with the hair on his body, wrapping it around her fingers a little and tugging softly so that Oliveira got a little annoyed and bit her in play. A pair of slippers was dragging along the stairway, Saint Ferdinand, Sainte Pétronille, Saint Fortuné, Sainte Blandine, un, deux, un, deux, right, left, right, left, good, bad, good, bad, forward, back, forward, back. A hand went along her shoulder, playing spider, one finger, another, another, Saint Fortuné, Sainte Blandine, a finger here, another farther on, another on top, another below. The caresses slowly penetrated her, from a different plane. The hour of luxury, surplus, slowly biting, looking for contact with delicate exploration, with feigned hesitancy, putting the tip of the tongue against a skin, slowly digging in a nail, murmuring coucher 19 h.24, Saint Ferdinand. Pola raised her head a little and looked at Horacio who had his eyes closed. She wondered whether he did that with his girlfriend too, the mother of the kid. He didn’t like to talk about the other girl, he required as a sort of respect that he would not refer to her except when obliged to. When she would ask him, opening one of his eyes with two fingers and kissing him wildly on the mouth that refused to answer, the only consolation then was silence, remaining there one against the other, listening to themselves breathe, with a foot or a hand traveling over to the other body, undertaking soft itineraries without consequence, leftovers of caresses lost in the bed, in the air, ghosts of kisses, little larva worms of perfumes or of habit. No, he didn’t like to do that with his girlfriend, only Pola could understand, could fit so well into his whims. So well that it was extraordinary. Even when she moaned, because once she had moaned, she had wanted to free herself, but it was too late, the loop had closed and her rebellion had only served to deepen the pleasure and the pain, the double misunderstanding that they had to overcome because it was false, it could not be that in an embrace, unless yes, unless it had to be that way.

  (–144)

  102

  EXPLORING like an ant, Wong turned up in Morelli’s library an inscribed copy of Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless, by Musil, with the following passage firmly underlined:

  What are the things that seem strange to me? The most trivial. Especially inanimate objects. What is there that seems strange about them? Something that I do not know. But it is precisely that! Where in the world do I get this notion of “something” from? I feel that it is there, that it exists. It produces an effect in me as if it were trying to speak. I become exasperated, as one who makes an effort to read the twisted lips of a paralytic, without managing to do so. It is as if he had an additional sense, one more than other people, but one which has not been developed completely, a sense that is there and can be perceived, but which does not function. The world for me is full of silent voices. Does that mean that I am a seer, or that I am having hallucinations?

  Ronald found this quotation from Lord Chandos’s Letter, by Hofmannsthal:

  Just as I had looked at the skin on my little finger in a magnifying glass one day, something like a field with furrows and hollows, so I looked at men and their actions now. I could no longer perceive them with the simplifying look of habit. Everything was breaking down into fragments which in turn were becoming fragmented; I was unable to grasp anything by means of a defined notion.

  (–45)

  103

  NOR would Pola have understood why at night he held back his breath to listen to her sleep, spying out the sounds of her body. Face up, satisfied, she was breathing heavily, and hardly if ever, out of some uncertain dream, did she move a hand or exhale by raising her lower lip and blowing the air up towards her nose. Horacio remained still, his head a little raised or leaning on his fist, his cigarette hanging down. At three o’clock in the morning the Rue Dauphine was quiet, Pola’s breathing came and went, then there was something like a soft running, a minute instantaneous whirlwind, an interior agitation like a second life. Oliveira got up slowly and moved his ear close to the naked skin, rested it on the tense and warm curved drum, listened. Sounds, drops, and falls, Cartesian devils and murmurs, a walking of crabs and slugs, a black and muffled world sliding out over plush, running into things here and there and covering up again (Pola breathed heavily, moved a little). A liquid cosmos, fluid, in nocturnal gestation, plasmas rising and falling, the opaque and slow mechanism moving around grudgingly, and suddenly a rumbling, a mad race almost against the skin, a flight and a gurgling of contention or leaking, Pola’s stomach a black sky with fat and slow stars, glowing comets, a tumbling of immense vociferant planets, the sea like whispering plankton, its Medusa murmurings, Pola the microcosm, Pola the summing up of universal night in her small fermented night where yogurt and white wine were mixed with meat and vegetables, center of a chemistry infinitely rich and mysterious and remote and so near.

  (–108)

  104

  LIFE as a commentary of something else we cannot reach, which is there within reach of the leap we will not take.

  Life, a ballet based upon a historical theme, a story based upon a deed that once had been alive, a deed that had lived based upon a real deed.

  Life, a photograph of the noumenon, a possession in the shadows (woman, monster?), life, pimp of death, splendid deck of cards, ring of forgotten keys that a pair of palsied hands degrade into a sad game of solitaire.

  (–10)

  105

  MORELLIANA

  I think about forgotten gestures, the multiple signals and words of grandparents, lost little by little, not inherited, fallen one after the other off the tree of time. Tonight I found a candle on a table, and as a game I lit it and walked along the corridor with it. The breeze stirred up by my motion was about to put it out, then I saw my right hand come up all by itself, cup itself, protect the flame with a living lampshade that kept the breeze away. While the flame climbed up again alert, I thought that the gesture had belonged to all of us (I thought us and I thought well, or I felt well) for thousands of years, during the Age of Fire, until they changed it on us to electric lights. I imagined other gestures, the one that women make when they lift the hem of their skirts, the one that men make looking for the hilt of their swords. Like words lost in childhood, heard for the last time by old people who are hea
ding towards death. In my home no one talks about the “camphor closet” any more, no one talks about “the triv”—the trivet—any more. Like music of the moment, 1920 waltzes, polkas that warmed grandparents’ hearts.

  I think about those objects, those boxes, those utensils that sometimes would turn up in storerooms, kitchens, or hidden spots, and whose use no one can explain any more. The vanity of believing that we understand the works of time: it buries its dead and keeps the keys. Only in dreams, in poetry, in play—lighting a candle, walking with it along the corridor—do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

  (–96)

  106

  Between now and tomorrow, babe, morning, we’ll have to part,

  midnight to morning, babe, tomorrow we’ll have to part.

  Please remember just one thing about it, I’ve always been

  in your heart.

  * * *

  Cold feet on the kitchen floor, cold feet on the ground,

  cold feet everywhere since my man left town.

  Cold feet in the butcher shop, cold feet in the store

  since nobody comes around to grind my meat no more.

  Cold feet on the motor and cold feet on the stones,