Hopscotch: A Novel

by Julio Cortázar

  GOMBROWICZ, Ferdydurke, Chapter IV. Preface to the Honer lined with child

  (–122)

  146

  LETTER to The Observer

  GENTLEMEN:

  Has there been any indication from your readers of the scarcity of butterflies this year? In this area which is usually quite prolific, I have seen practically none with the exception of a few flights of Fritillaries. Since March I have seen but one example of an Apantesis virgo, no Catocala caras at all, very few Swallowtails, one Quelonia, no Peacock’s Eyes, no Hipposcatics, and not even a single Red Admiral in my garden, which last summer was teeming with butterflies.

  I wonder if this scarcity is widespread, and if so, what is the cause of it?

  M. WASHBOURN

  PITCHCOMBE, GLOS.

  (–29)

  147

  WHY so far from the gods? Perhaps simply by asking.

  And so what? Man is the animal who asks. The day when we will really learn how to ask there will be a dialogue. Right now questions sweep us away from the answers. What epiphany can we expect if we are drowning in the falsest of freedoms, the Judeo-Christian dialectic? We need a real Novum Organum, we have to open our windows up wide and throw everything out into the street, but above all we also have to throw out the window and ourselves along with it. It is either a case of death or a continuing flight. We have to do it, in some way or another we have to do it. To have the strength to plunge into the midst of parties and crown the head of the dazzling lady of the house with a beautiful green frog, a gift of night, and suffer without horror the vengeance of her lackeys.

  (–31)

  148

  CONCERNING the etymology offered by Gabio Basso for the word person.

  A wise and ingenious explanation, by my lights, that of Gabio Basso, in his treatise On the Origin of Words, of the word person, mask. He thinks that this word has its origin in the verb personare, to retain. This is how he explains his opinion: “Since the mask covers the face completely except for an opening where the mouth is, the voice, instead of scattering in all directions, narrows down to escape through one single opening and therefore acquires a stronger and more penetrating sound. Thus, since the mask makes the human voice more sonorous and firm, it has been given the name person, and as a consequence of the formation of this word, the letter o as it appears in it is long.”

  AULIO GELIO, Attic Nights

  (–42)

  149

  Mis pasos en esta calle

  Resuenan

  En otra calle

  Donde

  Oigo mis pasos

  Pasar en esta calle

  Donde

  Sólo es real la niebla

  OCTAVIO PAZ

  (My steps along this street

  Resound

  Along another street

  Where

  I hear my steps

  Resound along this street

  Where

  Only the fog is real.)

  (–54)

  150

  HOSPITAL Items

  The York County Hospital informs us that the Dowager Duchess of Grafton, who Sunday last fractured a leg, had a restful day yesterday.

  The Sunday Times, London

  (–95)

  151

  MORELLIANA

  It is enough to take a momentary look with everyday eyes at the behavior of a cat or a fly to feel that the new vision towards which science seems to be heading, that disanthropomorphization urgently proposed by biologists and physicists as the only possible conjoinment with phenomena such as instinct or vegetative life, is nothing but the remote, isolated, insistent voice by which certain lines of Buddhism, Vedanta, Sufism, Western mysticism urge us to renounce mortality once and for all.

  (–152)

  152

  THE ABUSE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  THIS house I am living in resembles my own in every way: the disposition of the rooms, the smell of the hallway, the furniture, the light that slants in the morning, becomes attenuated at noontime, overlaps in the afternoon; everything is the same, even the paths and the trees in the garden, and that old tumbledown gate and the paving stones in the courtyard.

  The hours and minutes of the time that passes also resemble the hours and minutes of my own life. In the moment in which they spin me around, I tell myself: “They seem real. How much they resemble the real hours I am living at this moment!”

  For my part, if indeed I have done away with every reflective surface in my house, in spite of it all, the inevitable window-pane insists on returning my reflection, I see someone there who looks like me. Yes, he looks very much like me, I recognize him!

  But no one must think that it is I! After all! Everything is false here. When they give me back my house and my life, then I shall find my own true face.

  JEAN TARDIEU

  (–143)

  153

  “EVEN though you’re from Buenos Aires and all that, they’ll stick you with a blossom horse if you don’t watch out.”

  “I’ll try to watch out.”

  “That would be wise.”

  CAMBACERES, Música sentimental

  (–19)

  154

  IN any case, their shoes were walking on linoleum-like material, their noses smelled a bittersweet aseptic powder, the old man was installed in his bed up against two pillows, his nose like a hook caught in the air holding him upright. Livid, with mortuary rings underneath his eyes. The extraordinary zigzag of his temperature chart. And why had they gone to all that trouble?

  They said it was nothing, the Argentine friend had happened to be a witness to the accident, the French friend was a dauber, all hospitals, the same infinite filth. Morelli, yes, the writer.

  “It’s impossible,” Étienne said.

  Why not, stone-in-the-water-editions: plop, nothing more is known about him. Morelli took the trouble to tell them that some four hundred copies had been sold (and given away). And then this fact, two in New Zealand, a tender statistic.

  Oliveira took out a cigarette with a trembling hand, and he looked at the nurse who gave him an affirmative signal and went away, leaving them hedged in between the two yellowish screens. They sat down on the foot of the bed after pushing aside some notebooks and piles of paper.

  “If we had only seen it in the newspapers …” Étienne said.

  “It came out in the Figaro,” Morelli said. “Underneath an item about the abominable snowman.”

  “You know about it,” Oliveira managed to murmur. “But all in all I guess it’s better that way. Every fat-ass woman would have shown up with her autograph book and a jar of homemade jam.”

  “Rhubarb jam,” Morelli said. “That’s the nicest kind. But it’s better if they don’t come.”

  “As for us,” Oliveira put in, really worried, “if we’re bothering you, all you have to do is say so. There’ll be other times, and all that. You know what I mean?”

  “You came without knowing who I was. Personally, I think you should stay a while. This ward is peaceful, and the person who was hollering the most stopped last night at two o’clock. The screens are perfect, the courtesy of a doctor who had seen me writing. On the one hand he prohibited me from continuing, but then the nurses put up the screens and nobody bothers me.”

  “When will you be able to go home?”

  “Never,” Morelli said. “My bones are going to end up here, my dear boys.”

  “Nonsense,” Étienne said respectfully.

  “Just a question of time. But I feel all right, my problems with the concierge are ended. Nobody brings me my mail, not even the letters from New Zealand, with their pretty stamps. When a stillborn book is published, the only result is a small but faithful correspondence. The lady in New Zealand, the young man in Sheffield. A sensitive freemasonry, the voluptuous feeling of being one of so few partaking of an adventure. But right now, really …”

  “I never thought about writing to you,” Oliveira said. “Some friends of mine and I are familiar w
ith your work, we think it’s so … But God protect me from words like that, I think I make myself understood just the same. The fact is that we’ve spent whole nights discussing and still we never realized that you were here in Paris.”

  “Up till a year ago I was living in Vierzon. I came to Paris because I wanted to do a little exploration in some libraries. Vierzon, to be sure … My publisher had orders not to give out my address. Who knows how those few admirers found out. My back hurts me a lot, boys.”

  “You’d rather we left,” Étienne said. “We’ll come back tomorrow in any case.”

  “It would hurt just as much even if you weren’t here,” Morelli said. “Let’s have a smoke, and take advantage of the fact that they ordered me not to.”

  It was a question of finding a nonliterary way of speaking.

  When the nurse went by, Morelli reversed the butt inside his mouth with a diabolical deftness and glanced at Oliveira with the air of a child who was disguised as an old man that was a real delight.

  …starting off a little from Ezra Pound’s central ideas, but without his pedantry and the confusion of peripheral symbols and primordial meanings.

  Thirty-eight point two. Thirty-seven point five. Thirty-eight point three. X-ray (an incomprehensible symbol).

  …knowing that a few people can approach those attempts without thinking that they’re some new literary game. Benissimo. Worst of all, there is so much missing and he would die without having finished the game.

  “The twenty-fifth move, the blacks give up,” Morelli said, throwing his head back. Suddenly he seemed much older. “It’s too bad, the game is just getting interesting. Is it true that there is an Indian chess game with sixty pieces on each side?”

  “It’s possible,” Oliveira said. “The infinite game.”

  “The one who conquers the center wins. From that point he dominates all possibilities, and it’s senseless for his adversary to insist on continuing the play. But the center might be in some side square, or even off the board.”

  “Or in a vest pocket.”

  “Figures,” Morelli said. “It’s so difficult to escape from them, beautiful as they are. Mental women, really. I would have liked to have understood Mallarmé better, his sense of absence and silence was much more than just an extreme recourse, a metaphysical impasse. One day in Jerez de la Frontera I heard a cannon-shot twenty-five yards away and I discovered another meaning of silence. And dogs that can hear a whistle inaudible to us … You’re a painter, I believe.”

  His hands worked down along his sides, picking up his notebooks one by one, smoothing out some wrinkled pages. From time to time, still talking, Morelli would glance at one of the pages and slip it into the notebooks held together by paper clips. Once or twice he would take a pencil out of his pajama pocket and number a page.

  “You write, I suppose.”

  “No,” Oliveira said. “What could I write about, in order to do that you have to have some certainty that you’ve lived.”

  “Existence precedes essence,” Morelli said with a smile.

  “If you want to put it that way. My case isn’t exactly like that.”

  “You’re getting tired,” Étienne said. “Let’s go, Horacio, you’re all set to keep on talking … I know him, sir, he’s terrible.”

  Morelli kept on smiling and putting pages together, as he looked at them he seemed to be identifying and comparing them. He slid down a bit, looking for a better place to rest his head. Oliveira got up.

  “It’s the key to my apartment,” Morelli said. “I would really be very happy.”

  “It really will be quite a job,” Oliveira said.

  “No, it’s not as difficult as it seems. The notebooks will help you, there’s a system of colors, numbers, and letters. You’ll figure it out at once. For example, this goes in the blue notebook, a place I call the sea, but that’s marginal, a game so I can understand myself better. Number 52: all you have to do is put it in its place between 51 and 53. Arabic numerals, the easiest thing in the world.”

  “But you can do it for yourself in a few days,” Étienne said.

  “I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m outside of the notebook too. Do it for me, since you came to see me. Put all of this in its place and I’ll feel much better here. This is really a fine hospital.”

  Étienne looked at Oliveira, and Oliveira, et cetera. The imaginable surprise. A real honor, so undeserved.

  “Then make a package of it all and send it on to Paku. Publisher of avant-garde books, Rue de l’Arbre Sec. Did you know that Paku is the Akkadian name for Hermes? I always thought … But we’ll talk about that another day.”

  “But what if we should make a mistake,” Oliveira said, “and get things all mixed up. There was a terrible complication in the first volume, this guy here and I argued hours on end as to whether there hadn’t been some mistake in the printing of the texts.”

  “Who cares,” Morelli said. “You can read my book any way you want to. Liber Fulguralis, mantic pages, and that’s how it goes. The most I do is set it up the way I would like to reread it. And in the worst of cases, if they do make a mistake, it might just turn out perfect. A trick on the part of Hermes Paku, the winged fabricator of subterfuges and lures. Do you like those words?”

  “No,” Oliveira said. “Neither subterfuge nor lure. They both seem rather decayed to me.”

  “You’ve got to be careful,” Morelli said, closing his eyes. “We’re all chasing after purity, breaking old daubed blisters. One day José Bergamín almost fell down dead when I took the liberty of deflating two pages of his, proving that … But watch out, my friends, what we call purity is probably …”

  “Malevich’s perfect square,” Étienne said.

  “Ecco. We were saying that we have to think about Hermes, let him have his fun. Take all of this, put it in order, since you’ve come to see me. Maybe I’ll be able to drop over and take a look.”

  “We’ll come back tomorrow if you want us to.”

  “Fine, I’ll have some more things written by then. I’m going to drive you crazy. Bring me some Gauloises.”

  Étienne gave him his pack. With the key in his hand Oliveira didn’t know what to say. Everything was wrong, none of it should have taken place that day, it was a lousy move in a sixty-piece chess game, a useless joy in the midst of the worst sadness, having to drive it off the way one does a fly, prefer sadness when the only thing that had come into his hands was that key to happiness, a step towards something he needed and admired, a key to open Morelli’s door, Morelli’s world, and in the midst of happiness to feel himself sad and dirty, with his tired skin and bleary eyes, smelling like a sleepless night, like a guilty absence, like a lack of the distance necessary to understand whether he had done well all of what he had been doing and not doing during those days, listening to La Maga’s gasps, the knocking on the ceiling, bearing up under the icy rain in his face, dawn on the Pont Marie, the sour belches that came from wine mixed up with caña and with vodka and with more wine, the sensation of carrying in his pocket a hand that was not his, a hand of Rocamadour, a piece of drooling night, wetting his thighs, joy so late or maybe too soon (a consolation: probably too soon, still undeserved, but then, perhaps, vielleicht, tal vez, forse, peut-être, oh, shit, shit, see you tomorrow maestro, shit shit infinite shit, yes, on visiting hours, the interminable obstinacy of shit around the face and around the world, a world of shit, we’ll bring him some fruit, archeshit of countershit, supershit of infrashit, shit among shits, dans cet hôpital Laennec découvrit l’auscultation: maybe still … A key, an ineffable figure. A key. Still, maybe, he could go out into the street and keep on walking, with a key in his pocket. Maybe still, a Morelli key, a turn of the key and entering into something else, maybe still.

  “When you come right down to it, it was a posthumous meeting, a question of days,” Étienne said in the café.

  “Get going,” Oliveira said. “I’m sorry if I’m letting you down, but you’d better get going on
it. Tell Ronald and Perico, we’ll meet at the old man’s place at ten o’clock.”

  “The time’s no good,” Étienne said. “The concierge won’t let us in.”

  Oliveira took out the key, spun it around in a sunbeam, handed it over as if he were surrendering a city.

  (–85)

  155

  ITS incredible how all sorts of things can come out of a pair of pants, fuzz, watches, clippings, crumbly aspirins, you stick your hand in to pull out your handkerchief and you pull a dead rat out by the tail, things like that are perfectly possible. While he was on his way to pick up Étienne, still affected by the dream about bread and that other memory of a dream that had suddenly appeared like an accident in the streets, suddenly boom, nothing he could do about it, Oliveira had stuck his hand in the pocket of his brown pants, right on the corner of Raspail and Montparnasse, all the time half-looking at the gigantic twisted toad in his dressing-gown, Balzac Rodin or Rodin Balzac, and the inextricable mixture of two lightning flashes in his wrathful helicoid, and his hand had pulled out a clipping with a schedule of all-night drugstores in Buenos Aires and another one that turned out to be a list of advertisements for soothsayers and fortunetellers. It was amusing to discover that Madame Colomier, a Hungarian soothsayer (who most likely was one of Gregorovius’s mothers) lived on the Rue des Abbesses and possessed secrets des bohèmes pour retour d’affections perdues. From there one could go on to the great promise: Désenvoûtements, after which the reference to a voyance sur photo seemed slightly laughable. It would have been of interest to Étienne, an amateur Orientalist, to find out that Professor Mihn vs offre le vérit. Talisman de l’Arbre Sacré de l’Inde. Broch. c. I NF timb. B.P. 27, Cannes. How could anyone fail to be surprised at the existence of Mme. Sanson, Medium-Tarots, prédict, étonnantes, 23 rue Hermel (especially since Hermel, who was probably a zoologist, had an alchemist’s name), and discover with South American pride the rotund proclamation of Anita, cartes, dates précises, of Joana-Jopez (sic), secrets indiens, tarots espagnols, and Mme. Juanita, voyante par domino, coquillage, fleur. He would certainly have to take La Maga to visit Mme. Juanita. Coquillage, fleur! But not La Maga, not any more. La Maga would have liked to have discovered her fate by means of flowers. Seule MARZAK prouve retour affection. But why the need to prove anything? That you can tell right off. The scientific tone of Jane de Nys was better, reprend ses VISIONS exactes sur photogr. cheveux, écrit. Tour magnétiste intégral. When he came alongside the Montparnasse cemetery, after crumpling it into a ball, Oliveira took careful aim and sent the soothsayers off to join up with Baudelaire on the other side of the wall, with Devéria, with Aloysius Bertrand, with people worthy of having their hands examined by fortunetellers, the likes of Mme. Frédérika, la voyante de l’élite parisienne et internationale, célèbre par ses prédictions dans la presse et la radio mondiales, de retour de Cannes. Yeah, and with Barbey d’Aurevilly, who would have had them all burned at the stake if he could have, and also of course, Maupassant too, I hope the piece of paper landed on Maupassant’s grave or Aloysius Bertrand’s, but those were things that one had no way of knowing from outside.