Blow-Up and Other Stories

by Julio Cortázar

  “You see, he started shoving needles in his arm again last night. Or this afternoon. Damn that woman …”

  I answered grudgingly that Dédée was as guilty as anyone else, starting with her, she’d turned on with Johnny dozens of times and would continue to do so whenever she goddamn well felt like it. I’d feel an overwhelming impulse to go out and be by myself, as always when it’s impossible to get close to Johnny, to be with him and beside him. I’ll watch him making designs on the table with his finger, sit staring at the waiter who’s asking him what he would like to drink, and finally Johnny’ll draw a sort of arrow in the air and hold it up with both hands as though it weighed a ton, and people at other tables would begin to be discreetly amused, which is the normal reaction in the Flore. Then Tica will say, “Shit,” and go over to Johnny’s table, and after placing an order with the waiter, she’ll begin to talk into Johnny’s ear. Not to mention that Baby will hasten to confide in me her dearest hopes, but then I’ll tell her vaguely that she has to leave Johnny alone and that nice girls are supposed to be in bed early, and if possible with a jazz critic. Baby will laugh amiably, her hand stroking my hair, and then we’ll sit quietly and watch the chick go by who wears the white-leaded cape up over her face and who has green eyeshadow and green lipstick even. Baby will say it really doesn’t look so bad on her, and I’ll ask her to sing me very quietly one of those blues that have already made her famous in London and Stockholm. And then we’ll go back to Out of Nowhere, which is following us around tonight like a dog which would also be the chick in the cape and green eyes.

  Two of the guys from Johnny’s new quintet will also show up, and I’ll take advantage of the moment to ask how the gig went tonight; that way I’ll find out that Johnny was barely able to play anything, but that what he had been able to play was worth the collected ideas and works of a John Lewis, assuming that the last-named could manage any idea whatsoever, like one of the boys said, the only one he having always close at hand being to push in enough notes to plug the hole, which is not the same thing. Meanwhile I’ll wonder how much of this is Johnny going to be able to put up with, not to mention the audience that believes in Johnny. The boys will not sit down and have a beer, Baby and I’ll be sitting there alone again, and I’ll end up by answering her questions and explain to Baby, who is really worthy of her nickname, why Johnny is so sick and washed up, why the guys in the quintet are getting more fed up every day, why one day the whole shebang is going to blow up, in one of those scenes that had already blown up San Francisco, Baltimore and New York half-a-dozen times.

  Other musicians who work in the quarter’ll come in, and some’ll go to Johnny’s table to say hello to him, but he’ll look at them from far off like some idiot with wet mild eyes, his mouth unable to keep back the saliva glistening off his lips. It will be interesting to watch the double maneuvers of Tica and Baby, Tica having recourse to her domination of men to keep them away from Johnny, turning them off with a quick explanation and a smile, Baby whispering her admiration of Johnny in my ear and how good it would be to get him off to a sanitorium for a cure, and all because she’s jealous and would like to sleep with Johnny tonight even, something impossible furthermore as anyone can see and which pleases me considerably. For ever since I’ve known her, I’ve been thinking of how nice it would be to caress, to run my hand over Baby’s thighs, and I’ll be a step away from suggesting that we leave and have a drink someplace quieter (she won’t care to, and at bottom, neither will I, because that other table will hold us there, attached and unhappy) until suddenly, no notice of what’s coming, we’ll see Johnny get up slowly, looking at us, recognizing us, coming toward us—I should say towards me, Baby doesn’t count—and reaching the table he’ll bend over a little naturally as if he were about to take a fried potato off the plate, and we’ll see him go to his knees just in front of me, with all naturalness he’ll get down on his knees in front of me and look me in the eye, and I’ll see that he’s crying and’ll know without any say-so that Johnny is crying for little Bee.

  My reaction is that human, I wanted to get Johnny up, keep him from making an ass of himself, and finally I make myself the ass, because there’s absolutely nothing more ridiculous than a man trying to move another who is very well off where he is and comfortable and feels perfectly natural in that position, he likes it down there, so that the customers at the Flore, who never get upset over trifles, looked at me in a rather unfriendly fashion, none of them knowing, however, that the Negro on his knees there is Johnny Carter, they all look at me as if they were looking at someone climbing up on the altar to tug Christ down from his cross. Johnny was the first to reproach me, just weeping silently he raised his eyes and looked at me, and between that and the evident disapproval of the customers I was left with the sole option of sitting down again in front of Johnny, feeling worse than he did, wanting to be anywhere else in the world but in that chair face to face with Johnny on his knees.

  The rest hadn’t been so bad, though it’s hard to tell how many centuries passed with no one moving, with the tears coursing down Johnny’s face, with his eyes fixed on mine continuously, meanwhile I was trying to offer him a cigarette, to light one for myself, to make an understanding gesture toward Baby who, it seemed to me, was on the point of racing out or of breaking into tears herself. As usual, it was Tica who settled the problem, sitting herself down at our table in all her tranquillity, drawing a chair over next to Johnny and putting a hand on his shoulder, not pushing it, until finally Johnny rose a little and changed from that horror into the conventional attitude of a friend sitting down with us, it was a matter only of raising his knees a few centimeters and allowing the honorable comfort of a chair to be edged between his buttocks and the floor (I almost said “and the cross,” really this is getting contagious). People had gotten tired of looking at Johnny, he’d gotten tired of crying, and we of sitting around like dogs. I suddenly understood the loving attitude some painters have for chairs, any one of the chairs in the Flore suddenly seemed to me a miraculous object, a flower, a perfume, the perfect instrument of order and uprightness for men in their city.

  Johnny pulled out a handkerchief, made his apologies without undue stress, and Tica had a large coffee brought and gave it to him to drink. Baby was marvelous, all at once dropping her stupidity when it came to Johnny, she began to hum Mamie’s Blues without giving the impression that she was doing it on purpose, and Johnny looked at her and smiled, and it felt to me that Tica and I at the same time thought that Bee’s image was fading slowly at the back of Johnny’s eyes, and that once again Johnny was willing to return to us for a spell, keep us company until the next flight. As usual, the moment of feeling like a dog had hardly passed, when my superiority to Johnny allowed me to be indulgent, talking a little with everyone without getting into areas rather too personal (it would have been horrible to see Johnny slip off the chair back onto his …), and luckily Tica and Baby were both acting like angels and the people at the Flore had been going and coming for at least the length of an hour, being replaced, until the customers at one in the morning didn’t even realize that something had just happened, although really it hadn’t been a big scene if you think of it rightly. Baby was the first to leave (Baby is a chick full of application, she’ll be rehearsing with Fred Callender at nine in the morning for a recording session in the afternoon) and Tica had downed her third cognac and offered to take us home. When Johnny said no, he’d rather stay and bat the breeze with me, Tica thought that was fine and left, not without paying the rounds for us all, as befits a marquesa. And Johnny and I ordered a glass of chartreuse apiece, among friends such weaknesses are forgiven, and we began to walk down Saint-Germain-des-Prés because Johnny had insisted that he could walk fine and I’m not the kind of guy to let a friend drop under such circumstances.

  We go down the rue de l’Abbaye as far as the place Furstenberg, which reminds Johnny dangerously of a play-theater which his godfather seems to have given him when he was eight years old
. I try to head for the rue Jacob afraid that his memories will get him back onto Bee, but you could say that Johnny had closed that chapter for what was left of the night. He’s walking along peacefully, not staggering (at other times I’ve seen him stumble in the street, and not from being drunk; something in his reflexes that doesn’t function) and the night’s heat and the silence of the streets makes us both feel good. We’re smoking Gauloises, we drift down toward the river, and opposite one of those galvanized iron coffins the book-sellers use as stands along the quai de Conti, some memory or another or maybe a student whistling reminds us of a Vivaldi theme, humming it, then the two of us begin to sing it with a great deal of feeling and enthusiasm, and Johnny says that if he had the horn there he’d spend the night playing Vivaldi, I find the suggestion exaggerated.

  “Well, okay, I’d also play a little Bach and Charles Ives,” Johnny says condescendingly. “I don’t know why the French are not interested in Charles Ives. Do you know his songs? The one about the leopard, you have to know the one about the leopard. ‘A leopard …’ ”

  And in his weak tenor voice he goes on at great length about the leopard, needless to say, many of the phrases he’s singing are not absolutely Ives, something Johnny’s not very careful about while he’s sure that what he’s singing is something good. Finally we sit down on the rail opposite the rue Gît-le-Coeur and smoke another cigarette because the night is magnificent and shortly thereafter the taste of the cigarette is forcing us to think of having a beer at a café, just thinking of the taste of it is a pleasure for Johnny and me. I pay almost no attention when he mentions my book the first time, because right away he goes back to talking about Charles Ives and how numerous times he’d enjoyed working Ives’s themes into his records, with nobody even noticing (not even Ives, I suppose), but after a bit I get to thinking about the business of the book and try to get him back onto the subject.

  “Oh, I’ve read a few pages,” Johnny says. “At Tica’s they talk a lot about your book, but I didn’t even understand the title. Art brought me the English edition yesterday and then I found out about some things. It’s very good, your book.”

  I adopt the attitude natural in such a situation, an air of displeased modesty mixed with a certain amount of interest, as if his opinion were about to reveal to me—the author—the truth about my book.

  “It’s like in a mirror,” Johnny says. “At first I thought that to read something that’d been written about you would be more or less like looking at yourself and not into a mirror. I admire writers very much, it’s incredible the things they say. That whole section about the origins of bebop …”

  “Well, all I did was transcribe literally what you told me in Baltimore,” I say defensively, not knowing what I’m being defensive about.

  “Sure, that’s all, but in reality it’s like in a mirror,” Johnny persists stubbornly.

  “What more do you want? Mirrors give faithful reflections.”

  “There’re things missing, Bruno,” Johnny says. “You’re much better informed than I am, but it seems to me like something’s missing.”

  “The things that you’ve forgotten to tell me,” I answer, reasonably annoyed. This uncivilized monkey is capable of … (I would have to speak with Delaunay, it would be regrettable if an imprudent statement about a sane, forceful criticism that … For example Lan’s red dress, Johnny is saying. And in any case take advantage of the enlightening details from this evening to put into a new edition; that wouldn’t be bad. It stank like an old washrag, Johnny’s saying, and that’s the only value on the record. Yes, listen closely and proceed rapidly, because in other people’s hands any possible contradiction might have terrible consequences. And the urn in the middle, full of dust that’s almost blue, Johnny is saying, and very close to the color of a compact my sister had once. As long as he wasn’t going into hallucinations, the worst that could happen would be that he might contradict the basic ideas, the aesthetic system so many people have praised … And furthermore, cool doesn’t mean, even by accident ever, what you’ve written, Johnny is saying. Attention.)

  “How is it not what I’ve written, Johnny? It’s fine that things change, but not six months ago, you …”

  “Six months ago,” Johnny says, getting down from the rail and setting his elbows on it to rest his head between his hands. “Six months ago. Oh Bruno, what I could play now if I had the kids with me … And by the way: the way you wrote ‘the sax, the sex,’ very ingenious, very pretty, that, the word-play. Six months ago. Six, sax, sex. Positively lovely. Fuck you, Bruno.”

  I’m not going to start to say that his mental age does not permit him to understand that this innocent word-play conceals a system of ideas that’s rather profound (it seemed perfectly precise to Leonard Feather when I explained it to him in New York) and that the paraeroticism of jazz evolved from the washboard days, etc. As usual, immediately I’m pleased to think that critics are much more necessary than I myself am disposed to recognize (privately, in this that I’m writing) because the creators, from the composer to Johnny, passing through the whole damned gradation, are incapable of extrapolating the dialectical consequences of their work, of postulating the fundamentals and the transcendency of what they’re writing down or improvising. I should remember this in moments of depression when I feel dragged that I’m nothing more than a critic. The name of the star is called Wormwood, Johnny is saying, and suddenly I hear his other voice, the voice that comes when he’s … how say this? how describe Johnny when he’s beside himself, already out of it, already gone? Uneasy, I get down off the rail and look at him closely. And the name of the star is called Wormwood, nothing you can do for him.

  “The name of the star is called Wormwood,” says Johnny, using both hands to talk. “And their dead bodies shall lie in the streets of the great city. Six months ago.”

  Though no one see me, though no one knows I’m there, I shrug my shoulders at the stars (the star’s name is Wormwood). We’re back to the old song: “I’m playing this tomorrow.” The name of the star is Wormwood and their bodies’ll be left lying six months ago. In the streets of the great city. Out, very far out. And I’ve got blood in my eye just because he hasn’t wanted to say any more to me about the book, and truly, I don’t know what he thinks of the book, which thousands of fans are reading in two languages (three pretty soon, and a Spanish edition is being discussed, it seems that they play something besides tangos in Buenos Aires).

  “It was a lovely dress,” Johnny says. “You do not want to know how beautifully it fit on Lan, but it’ll be easier to explain it to you over a whiskey, if you got the money. Dédée sent me out with hardly three hundred francs.”

  He laughs sarcastically, looking at the Seine. As if he hadn’t the vaguest idea of how to get drink or dope when he wanted it. He begins to explain to me that really Dédée is very goodhearted (nothing about the book) and that she does it out of kindness, but luckily there’s old buddy Bruno (who’s written a book, but who needs it) and it’d be great to go to the Arab quarter and sit in a café, where they always leave you alone if they see that you belong a little to the star called Wormwood (I’m thinking this, and we’re going in by the Saint-Sévérin side and it’s two in the morning, an hour at which my wife is very used to getting up and rehearsing everything she’s going to give me at breakfast, along with the cup of coffee, light). So I’m walking with Johnny, so we drink a terrible cognac, very cheap, so we order double shots and feel very content. But nothing about the book, only the compact shaped like a swan, the star, bits and hunks of things, that flow on with hunks of sentences, hunks of looks, hunks of smiles, drops of saliva on the table and dried on the edge of the glass (Johnny’s glass). Sure, there are moments when I wish he were already dead. I imagine there are plenty of people who would think the same if they were in my position. But how can we resign ourselves to the fact that Johnny would die carrying with him what he doesn’t want to tell me tonight, that from death he’d continue hunting, would contin
ue flipping out (I swear I don’t know how to write all this) though his death would mean peace to me, prestige, the status incontrovertibly bestowed upon one by unbeatable theses and efficiently arranged funerals.

  Every once in a while Johnny stops his constant drumming on the tabletop, looks over at me, makes an incomprehensible face and resumes his drumming. The café owner knows us from the days when we used to come there with an Arab guitarist. It’s been some time now that Ben Aifa has wanted to go home and sleep, we’re the last customers in the filthy place that smells of chili and greasy meat pies. Besides, I’m dropping from sleepiness, but the anger keeps me awake, a dull rage that isn’t directed against Johnny, more like when you’ve made love all afternoon and feel like a shower so that the soap and water will scrub off everything that’s beginning to turn rancid, beginning to show too clearly what, at the beginning … And Johnny beats a stubborn rhythm on the tabletop, and hums once in a while, almost without seeing me. It could very well happen that he’s not going to make any more comments on the book. Things go on shifting from one side to another, tomorrow it’ll be another woman, another brawl of some sort, a trip. The wisest thing to do would be to get the English edition away from him on the sly, speak to Dédée about that, ask it as a favor in exchange for so many I’ve done her. This uneasiness is absurd, it’s almost a rage. I can’t expect any enthusiasm on Johnny’s part at all; as matter of fact, it had never occurred to me that he’d read the book. I know perfectly well that the book doesn’t tell the truth about Johnny (it doesn’t lie either), it just limits itself to Johnny’s music. Out of discretion, out of charity, I’ve not wanted to show his incurable schizophrenia nakedly, the sordid, ultimate depths of his addiction, the promiscuity in that regrettable life. I set out to show the essential lines, emphasizing what really counts, Johnny’s incomparable art. What more could anyone say? But maybe it’s exactly there that he’s expecting something of me, lying in ambush as usual, waiting for something, crouched ready for one of those ridiculous jumps in which all of us get hurt eventually. That’s where he’s waiting for me, maybe, to deny all the aesthetic bases on which I’ve built the ultimate structure of his music, the great theory of contemporary jazz which has resulted in such acclaim from everywhere it’s appeared so far.