Hopscotch: A Novel

by Julio Cortázar

  Eighteen years old, blond, blue eyes. Alone in Paris.

  In order to soften my misfortune I turned myself completely over to pleasure. I always attracted attention in the cabarets because I was alone, squandering champagne on the chorus and tips on the waiters. I had no idea of the value of money.

  Sometimes, somebody out of that element that always lives off the cosmopolitan environment discovers my secret sorrow and recommends a remedy for forgetfulness to me … Cocaine, morphine, drugs. Then I began to look for exotic places, strange-looking dancers, dark-hued South Americans with their long hair.

  In those days a recent arrival, a cabaret singer, was collecting success and applause. He opened in the Florida and sang strange songs in a strange language.

  He sang in exotic garb never seen before in those places, Argentine tangos, rancheras, and zambas. He was a rather thin young man, a little dark, with white teeth that captured the attention of all the pretty women in Paris. It was Carlos Gardel. His weepy tangos that he sang with all his soul captivated the audience without anyone’s knowing why. His songs at that time—Caminito, La chacarera, Aquel tapado de armiño, Queja indiana, Entre sueños—were not modern tangos but songs of old Argentina, the pure soul of the gaucho of the pampas. Gardel was in vogue. No elegant dinner party or reception to which he was not invited. His dark face, his white teeth, his fresh and luminous smile, shone everywhere. Cabarets, theaters, music halls, race tracks. He was a permanent guest at Auteuil and Longchamps.

  But Gardel preferred to have a good time in his own way, among his own friends, in the circle of his intimates.

  At that time there was in Paris a cabaret called Palermo, on the Rue Clichy, frequented almost exclusively by South Americans … That’s where I met him. Gardel was interested in all women, but all I was interested in was cocaine … and champagne. Of course it pleased my feminine vanity to be seen in Paris with the man of the hour, with the idol of womanhood, but it did not tell my heart anything.

  That friendship became established on other nights, other walks, other confidences, under the pale Parisian moon, through flowering fields. Many days of romantic interest went by. The man was getting into my soul. His words were silken, his phrases were digging at the rock of my indifference. I went crazy. My luxurious but sad little flat was now full of light. I did not go back to the cabarets. In my beautiful gray living room, by the light of electric lamps, a blond little head became united to a firm, dark-featured face. My blue bedroom, which had known all the nostalgias of a soul without direction, was now a real love nest. It was my first love.

  Time flew fast and fleeting. I can’t say how much time went by. The exotic blond who had dazzled Paris with her extravagances, with her toiletts dernière cri [sic], with her garden parties in which Russian caviar and champagne were the daily main course, had disappeared.

  Months later the eternal habitués of the Palermo, the Florida, the Garon, learned in the press that a blond ballerina with blue eyes who was now twenty years old was driving the señoritos of the River Plate capital mad with her ethereal dances, with her startling brazenness, with all the voluptuousness of her youth in flower.

  It was IVONNE GUITRY.

  (Etc.)

  La escuela gardeleana, Editorial Cisplatina, Montevideo

  (–49)

  112

  MORELLIANA

  I am revising a story that I wanted to be the least literary possible. A despairing job from the word go, in the revision intolerable phrases start to pop up right away. A character comes to some stairs: “Raymond commenced his descent …” I scratch it out and write: “Raymond began to go down …” I turn away from the revision to ask myself again the real reasons behind this rejection of “literary” language. Commence his descent has nothing bad about it unless maybe it is too easy; but begin to go down is exactly the same except cruder, more prosaic (that is, a mere vehicle of information), while the other form seems to combine what is useful with what is pleasant to hear. In short, what repels me in “commenced his descent” is the decorative use of a verb and a noun that we almost never use in everyday speech; in short, literary language repels me (in my work, let it be understood). Why?

  By persisting in this attitude that has rapidly impoverished almost everything I have written in the last few years, it will not be long before I feel incapable of setting forth the slightest idea, of undertaking the simplest description. If my reasons were those of Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos, there would be no motive for complaint, but if this rejection of rhetoric (because basically that is what it is) is due only to a verbal withering, correlative and parallel to another one which is vital, then it would be preferable to renounce all writing at the roots. Rereading the results of what I have written these days bores me. But at the same time, behind that deliberate poverty, behind that “begin to go down” substituted for “commence his descent,” I get a glimpse of something that encourages me. I write very badly, but something is happening through it all. The previous “style” was a mirror for lark-readers: they looked at each other, they consoled each other, they recognized each other, like those audiences that wait for, recognize, and enjoy the answers of the characters of a Salacrou or an Anouilh. It is much easier to write like that than to write (to “unwrite,” almost) as I would want to do now, because there is no longer any dialogue or meeting with the reader, there is only the hope of a certain dialogue with a certain and remote reader. Of course, the problem is located on a moral plane. Perhaps arteriosclerosis, the advance of age accentuates this tendency—a little misanthropic, I fear—to exalt the ethos and discover (in my own case it is a rather tardy discovery) that aesthetic orders are more a mirror than a passage for metaphysical anxiety.

  I still thirst for the absolute as much as when I was twenty years old, but the delicate twitching, the acid and biting delight of the creative act or of the simple contemplation of beauty, no longer seem to me to be a prize, an access to absolute and satisfactory reality. There is only one beauty which can still give me that access: the one that is an end and not a means, and which is so because its creator has identified in himself his sense of the human condition with his sense of the artist’s condition. On the other hand, the merely aesthetic plane seems just that to me: merely. That is the best way I can explain it.

  (–154)

  113

  NODULES of a trip from the end of the Rue de la Glacière to the Rue du Sommerard:

  “How long are we still going to date things ‘A.D.’?”

  “Literary documents seen two hundred years from now: coprolites.”

  “Klages was right.”

  “Morelli and his lesson. Sometimes repulsive, horrible, pitiful. So many words in order to cleanse himself of other words, so much filth so that Piver, Caron, Carven, A.D. will no longer smell. Maybe he has to go through all of that in order to recover a lost right, the original use of words.”

  “The original use of words (?). Probably an empty phrase.”

  “Small coffin, pack of cigarettes, Charon puffs a little and you cross the puddle rocking like a cradle. The boat is for adults only. Women and children free, a push and soon the other side. A Mexican death, a sugar skull; Kindertotenlieder…”

  “Morelli will look at Charon. One myth facing another. An unforeseeable trip on the black waters.”

  “A hopscotch on the sidewalk: red chalk, green chalk. CIEL. The sidewalk, back there in Burzaco, the pebble selected with such tender care, the quick push with the tip of the shoe, slowly, slowly, even if Heaven is close by, all life in front of one.”

  “An infinite game of chess, so easy to imagine. But cold enters through an opening in the sole, in the window of that hotel a face like a clown’s grimaces behind the glass. The shadow of a dove rubs up against the excrement a dog has left behind: Paris.”

  “Pola Paris. Pola? Go see her, faire l’amour. Carezza. Like lazy larva worms. But larva also means mask, Morelli wrote about it somewhere.”

  (–30)

  1
14

  MAY 4, 195…(AP) In spite of the efforts by his lawyers and a final attempt at appeal on May 2, Lou Vincent was executed this morning in the gas chamber at San Quentin prison in the state of California.

  …his hands and legs tied to the chair. The warden ordered the four jailers to leave the chamber, and after patting Vincent on the back, left in turn. The condemned man was alone in the room as 53 witnesses watched through small windows.

  …he threw back his head and took a deep breath.

  …two minutes later his face was bathed in perspiration and his fingers moved as if to free himself from the straps…

  …six minutes, the convulsions were repeated, and Vincent pitched his head backward and forward. He began to froth at the mouth a little.

  …eight minutes, his head fell forward on his chest after one final convulsion.

  …At 10:12 Dr. Reynolds pronounced the condemned man dead. The witnesses, who included three reporters from…

  (–117)

  115

  MORELLIANA

  Using as a basis a series of notes that were often contradictory, the Club deduced that Morelli saw in the contemporary narrative an advance towards what has been poorly termed abstraction. “Music is losing its melody, painting is losing its anecdotal side, the novel is losing its description.” Wong, a master at dialectical collages, summed up this passage here: “The novel that interests us is not one that places characters in a situation, but rather one that puts the situation in the characters. By means of this the latter cease to be characters and become people. There is a kind of extrapolation through which they jump out at us, or we at them. Kafka’s K. has the same name as his reader, or vice versa.” And to this must be added a rather confused note in which Morelli was working up an episode in which he would leave the names of his characters blank, so that in each case the supposed abstraction would have to be resolved in a hypothetical attribution.

  (–14)

  116

  IN a passage from Morelli, this epigraph from L’Abbé C,, by Georges Bataille: “Il souffrait d’avoir introduit des figures décharnées, qui se déplaçaient dans un monde dément, qui jamais ne pourraient convaincre.”

  A penciled note, almost illegible: “Yes, he suffers once in a while, but it is the only decent way out. Enough of hedonistic and prechewed novels, with psychologies. One must aim at the maximum, be a voyant as Rimbaud wanted to be. The hedonistic novelist is nothing but a voyeur. On the other hand, enough of purely descriptive techniques, of ‘behaviorist’ novels, mere movie scripts without the saving grace of images.”

  Relating it with another passage: “How can one tell a story without cooking, without make-up, without winks at the reader? Perhaps by rejecting the supposition that a narrative is a work of art. To feel it the way we would feel the plaster we put on our face to make a mask of it. But the face should be ours.”

  And maybe also in this odd note: “Lionello Venturi, speaking of Manet and his Olympia, points out that Manet did not need nature, beauty, action, and moral intent in order to concentrate on the plastic image. Thus, without his knowing it, he is working as if modern art were going back to the Middle Ages. The latter understood art as a series of images, replaced during the Renaissance and the modern period by the representation of reality. The same Venturi (or is it Giulio Carlo Argan?) adds: ‘The irony of history has decreed that in the very moment in which the representation of reality was becoming objective, and ultimately photographic and mechanical, a brilliant Parisian who wanted to be realistic should be moved by his formidable genius to return art to its function as the creator of images …’ ”

  Morelli adds: “To accustom one’s self to use the expression figure instead of image, to avoid confusions. Yes, everything coincides. But it is not a question of a return to the Middle Ages or anything like it. The mistake of postulating an absolute historical time: There are different times even though they may be parallel. In this sense, one of the times of the so-called Middle Ages can coincide with one of the times of the Modern Ages. And that time is what has been perceived and inhabited by painters and writers who refuse to seek support in what surrounds them, to be ‘modern’ in the sense that their contemporaries understand them, which does not mean that they choose to be anachronistic; they are simply on the margin of the superficial time of their period, and from that other time where everything conforms to the condition of figure, where everything has value as a sign and not as a theme of description, they attempt a work which may seem alien or antagonistic to the time and history surrounding them, and which nonetheless includes it, explains it, and in the last analysis orients it towards a transcendence within whose limits man is waiting.”

  (–3)

  117

  I HAVE seen a court urged almost to the point of threats to hang two boys, in the face of science, in the face of philosophy, in the face of humanity, in the face of experience, in the face of all the better and more humane thoughts of the age.

  Why did not my friend, Mr. Marshall, who dug up from the relics of the buried past these precedents that would bring a blush of shame to the face of a savage, read this from Blackstone:

  “Under fourteen, though an infant shall be judged to be incapable of guile prima facie, yet if it appeared to the court and the jury that he was capable of guile, and could discerne between good and evil, he may be convinced and suffer death.”

  Thus a girl thirteen has been burned for killing her mistress.

  One boy of ten, and another of nine years of age, who had killed their companions were sentenced to death; and the one of ten actually hanged.

  Why?

  He knew the difference between right and wrong. He had learned that in Sunday School.

  CLARENCE DARROW, Defense of Leopold and Loeb, 1924

  (–15)

  118

  HOW shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him?

  MALCOLM LOWRY, Under the Volcano

  (–50)

  119

  AUSTRALIAN LOVE-BIRD UNABLE TO SPREAD WINGS

  AN inspector of the RSPCA entered a house and found the bird in a cage barely 8 inches wide. The owner of the bird was required to pay a fine of 2 pounds. In order to protect defenseless creatures we need more than just your moral support. The RSPCA needs your financial support. Contact the Offices, etc.

  The Observer, London

  (–51)

  120

  at siesta-time everybody was asleep, it was easy to get out of bed without waking up his mother, creep up to the door, go out slowly, smelling the warm earth floor avidly, escape out the door over to the grazing pen in back; the willows were full of basket bugs, Ireneo chose a rather large one, sat down beside an anthill, and began to squeeze the bottom of the cocoon little by little until the grub popped its head out through the silky collar, then he had to take it delicately by the scruff of the neck like a cat, pull it gently so as not to hurt it, and there was the grub, naked now, twisting comically in the air; Ireneo set it next to the anthill and lay down in the shade on his stomach, waiting; at that moment the black ants were working furiously, cutting grass and hauling back living and dead insects from everywhere, a scout spotted the grub, his bulk twisting grotesquely, she touched him with her antennae as if she had to be convinced of such good luck, she ran back and forth rubbing antennae with the other ants, a minute later the grub was surrounded, climbed on, he twisted uselessly trying to free himself from the pincers that dug into his flesh while the ants pulled him in the direction of the anthill, dragging him along, Ireneo particularly enjoyed the puzzlement of the ants when they could not get the grub through the mouth of the anthill, the trick was to pick a grub that was thicker than the entrance to the anthill, ants were stupid and did not understand, they pulled on all sides trying to get the grub in but he was twisting furiously, what he was feeling must have been horrible, the ants with their feet and pincers all over his body, on his eyes and skin, he was struggling to free himself and it was worse because
more ants came, some really fierce, who stuck their pincers into him and would not let go until they got the head of the grub so that it began to go into the pit of the anthill, and others who came up from down below must have been pulling from inside with all their might to drag him in, Ireneo might have wanted to be inside the anthill also, to see how the ants pulled on the grub sticking their pincers in his eyes and mouth and pulling with every ounce of strength until they got him all inside, until they took him down into the depths and killed him and ate him

  (–16)

  121

  WITH red ink and manifest complacency, Morelli had copied in one of his notebooks the ending of a poem by Ferlinghetti:

  Yet I have slept with beauty

  in my own weird way

  and I have made a hungry scene or two

  with beauty in my bed

  and so spilled out another poem or two

  and so spilled out another poem or two

  upon the Bosch-like world

  (–36)

  122

  THE nurses came and went speaking of Hippocrates. With just a small effort any piece of reality could attach itself to a famous line of poetry. But why bring up enigmas for Étienne, who had taken out his notebook and was happily sketching a flight of white doors, stretchers piled up along the walls and up to the windows where a gray and silky material was coming in, the skeleton of a tree with two doves with bourgeois crops. He would have liked to tell him about the other dream, it was so strange that all morning he had been obsessed by the bread dream, and boom, on the corner of Raspail and Montparnasse the other dream had fallen on him like a wall, or rather, as if all through the morning he had been pushed up against the wall of bread complaining and suddenly, like a movie being run backwards, the wall had come away from him, straightening up in one jump to leave him facing the memory of the other dream.