(–153)
19
“I THINK I understand you,” La Maga said, running her hand through his hair. “You’re looking for something you don’t know. I’ve been doing the same thing and I don’t know what it is either. But they’re two different things. What you were talking about the other night … Yes, you’re a Mondrian and I’m a Vieira da Silva.”
“So,” Oliveira said, “I’m a Mondrian after all.”
“Yes, Horacio.”
“You meant to say someone of a rigorous nature.”
“I said a Mondrian.”
“And didn’t it occur to you that behind this Mondrian there might lurk a Vieira da Silva reality?”
“Yes, but up till now you haven’t come out of the Mondrian reality. You’re afraid, you want to be sure of yourself. I don’t know … You’re more like a doctor than a poet.”
“Forget about poets,” Oliveira said. “And don’t try to hurt Mondrian with the comparison.”
“Mondrian is wonderful, but he doesn’t let you breathe. I always strangle a little bit inside. And when you start talking about the search for unity, then I start to see a lot of beautiful things, but they’re all dead, pressed flowers and things like that.”
“Let’s see, Lucía: are you quite sure what unity is?”
“My name is Lucía but you don’t have to call me that,” La Maga said. “Unity, of course I know what it is. You’re trying to say that everything in your life comes together so that you can see it all at the same time. Is that what you mean?”
“More or less,” Oliveira conceded. “It’s incredible how hard it is for you to grasp abstract ideas. Unity, plurality … Can’t you feel them without feeling the need for examples? Can’t you? Let’s see, now: your life, do you think it is a unity?”
“No, I don’t think so. It’s pieces, things that happened to me.”
“But you in turn went through those things like the string went through those green stones. And speaking of stones, where did you get that necklace?”
“Ossip gave it to me,” La Maga said. “It was his mother’s, the one from Odessa.”
Oliveira sucked slowly on his mate. La Maga went over to the cot that Ronald had loaned them so that they could have Rocamadour in the apartment. With the cot and Rocamadour and the complaints of the tenants there was barely any living-space left, but nobody could tell La Maga that Rocamadour would have been better off in a children’s hospital. It had been necessary to go with her to the country the same day that Madame Irène had sent the telegram, wrap Rocamadour up in a bunch of rags and blankets, put him to bed, stoke up the fire in the stove, tolerate Rocamadour’s wailing when the time came for a suppository or a pill or the bottle which was useless in covering up the taste of the medicine he had to take. Oliveira made himself another mate and out of the corner of his eye looked at the cover of a Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft that Ronald had loaned him, wondering when he could listen to it without getting Rocamadour wailing and twisting. He was horrified by La Maga’s laziness in diapering and undiapering Rocamadour, the way she would sing at him to distract him, the smell that emanated from his bed, cotton, wails, the stupid assurance of La Maga that it wasn’t anything, that if she did what she should for her son he would be all right in a matter of days. It made no sense, it was all maybe, maybe not. What was he doing there? A month ago they both had had their places still, even after they had decided to live together. La Maga had said that they could save money this way, they only had to buy one paper a day, they wouldn’t waste food. She could iron his clothes, and heat, electricity … Oliveira had been about to admire that brusque attack on common sense. He finally accepted because old Trouille was having troubles and owed him close to thirty thousand francs, at the time it seemed just as logical to live with La Maga as by himself, he had been walking around thinking about every detail and pondering every little thing that seemed to come upon him like a great crisis. He had come to the conclusion that the continuous presence of La Maga would stop him from speculating so much, but naturally he had not thought about the possibilities of Rocamadour. Even so, he had been able to keep to himself from time to time, until Rocamadour’s howls would bring him back to a healthy grouchiness. “I’m going to end up like a character out of Walter Pater,” Oliveira would think to himself. “One soliloquy after another, an endless vice. Marius the Epicurean, ‘pure vice.’ The only salvation left to me is the smell of that brat’s piss.”
“I always figured you would end up going to bed with Ossip,” Oliveira said.
“Rocamadour has a fever,” La Maga said.
Oliveira made himself another mate. He had to watch out for his mate, in Paris it cost five hundred francs a kilo in drugstores and it was terrible stuff, sold in the pharmacy of the Saint-Lazare station next to a gaudy sign that said “maté sauvage, cueilli par les indiens,” diuretic, antibiotic, and emollient. Luckily the lawyer from Rosario, who happened to be his brother, had sent him ten pounds of Cruz de Malta brand, but there wasn’t much left. “If my mate runs out I’ve had it,” Oliveira thought. “My only real conversation is with this green gourd.” He studied the strange behavior of the mate, how the herb would breathe fragrantly as it came up on top of the water and how it would dive as he sucked and would cling to itself, everything fine lost and all smell except for that little bit that would come up in the water like breath and stimulate his Argentinian iron lung, so sad and solitary. It had been some time now that Oliveira had been paying attention to unimportant things, and the little green gourd had the advantage that as he meditated upon it, it never occurred to his perfidious intelligence to endow it with such ideas as one extracts from mountains, the moon, the horizon, an adolescent girl, a bird, or a horse. “This mate might show me where the center is,” Oliveira thought (and the idea that La Maga and Ossip were seeing each other became frail and lost its strength, for a moment the green gourd was stronger, it proposed its own little petulant volcano, its smoky crater, an atmosphere which hovered over the other rather cold air of the flat in spite of the stove that had been lighted around nine o’clock that night). “And just what is this center that I don’t know what it really is; can it be the coordinates of some unity? I’m walking back and forth in an apartment whose floor is tiled with flat stones and one of these stones is the exact spot where I ought to stop so that everything would come into its proper focus. The exact spot,” Oliveira said emphatically, kidding himself a little so as to know that he was not just playing with words. “A shapeless quadrilateral in which we must look for the precise angle (and the importance of this example is that the angel is horribly a cute and won must have his knows right up on to the canvas so that suddenly all the senseless lines will come together to form a portrait of Francis I or the Battle of Sinigaglia, something that deflies descrumption).” But that unity, the sum of all the actions which define a life, seemed to go into hiding in the face of any previous sign that life itself could end like a played-out drink of mate, that is to say that only those left behind, the biographers, would recognize the unity, and all that was really not of the least importance as far as Oliveira was concerned. The problem consisted in grasping that unity without becoming a hero, without becoming a saint, or a criminal, or a boxing champ, or a statesman, or a shepherd. To grasp unity in the midst of diversity, so that that unity might be the vortex of a whirlwind and not the sediment in a clean, cold mate gourd.
“I’m going to give him a quarter piece of aspirin,” La Maga said.
“If you can make him take it you’ll be better than Ambroise Paré,” said Oliveira. “Come have a mate, I just made some.”
The idea of unity was worrying him because it seemed so easy to fall into the worst traps. When he had been a student on the Calle Viamonte around 1930, he had found out (first off) to his surprise and (later) with irony, that an awful lot of people would set themselves up comfortably in a supposed unity of person which was nothing but a linguistic unity and a premature sclerosis of character. These p
eople would set up a system of principles which had never been legalized basically, and which were nothing more than a concession to the word itself, to a verbal idea of strength; rejection and attraction were subjected, displaced, gotten out of the way, then replaced by their verbal equivalents. And in this way duty, morals, the immoral and the amoral, justice, charity, the European and the American, day and night, wives, sweethearts, and girlfriends, the army and the bar, the flag and Yankee or Moscow gold, abstract art and the Battle of Caseros came to be like teeth and hair, something accepted and inevitably incorporated, something which was not alive or capable of being analyzed because that’s the way it is and it makes us what we are, fulfills and strengthens. Man’s rape by word, the masterful vengeance of word upon its progenitor, all this filled Oliveira’s thoughts with bitter lack of confidence, forced to seek help from the enemy itself to open a path to the point where he might just be able to be mustered out and follow it—but with what means, on what clear night or shady day?—until he could reach a complete reconciliation with himself and with the reality in which he lived. To arrive at the word without words (how far, how improbable), to grasp a deep unity without recourse to reasoning conscience, something that when all was said and done would be like sitting there sipping mate and looking at Rocamadour’s little ass up in the air as La Maga’s fingers came and went with bits of cotton, and Rocamadour wailed because he could not stand being plucked at.
(–90)
20
“I ALWAYS suspected you’d end up going to bed with him,” Oliveira said.
La Maga diapered her son, who was not bleating as much now, and wiped her hands with a piece of cotton.
“Please wash your hands like a civilized person,” Oliveira said, “and get rid of all that crap.”
“Right away,” La Maga said. Oliveira was able to stand her look (which was always hard on him) and La Maga got a newspaper, opened it up on the bed, put in the cotton, bundled it up, and left the room to go throw it in the toilet on the landing. When she came back her hands were red and shining; Oliveira handed her the gourd. She sat down on the low easy chair and sucked the mate in a deliberate sort of way. She always damaged the gourd, moving the sipper around from one side to another as if she were mixing batter.
“After all,” Oliveira said, blowing smoke through his nose, “the least you could have done was to tell me. Now it’s going to cost me six hundred francs to hire a taxi to move my stuff. And it’s not easy finding a room these days, either.”
“You don’t have to move out,” La Maga said. “How long do you plan to go on lying to yourself?”
“Lying to yourself,” Oliveira said. “You sound like a best-selling novel from the Río de la Plata. All you have to do now is laugh with all the force of your insides at my unparalleled boorishness, and we can put it all in print.”
“He’s stopped crying,” La Maga said, looking at the bed. “Let’s speak low, he’ll go to sleep quite easily with the aspirin. I never in my life went to bed with Gregorovius.”
“Oh, yes you did.”
“No, Horacio. Why wouldn’t I have told you? Ever since I met you I haven’t had any other lover but you. I don’t care if I sound stupid and you laugh at the way I say it. I speak the best way I can, I don’t know how to say what I feel.”
“O.K., O.K.,” Oliveira said in a tired tone, having another mate. “Maybe your son has changed you then. For some time now you’ve been converted into what they call a mother.”
“But Rocamadour is sick.”
“All right,” Oliveira said, “if that’s the way you want it. But I see a different kind of change. Really, it’s that we can’t stand each other very much any more.”
“You’re the one who can’t stand me. You’re the one who can’t stand Rocamadour.”
“That’s true. I hadn’t thought about the kid. Three is too many for one room. And to think that with Ossip it will be four is more than I can take.”
“Ossip has nothing to do with this.”
“Please put the kettle on,” Oliveira said.
“He has nothing to do with this,” La Maga repeated. “Why do you want to make me suffer, silly? I know you’re tired of me and don’t love me any more. You never did love me, it was something else, some kind of dream you had. Leave, Horacio, you don’t have to stay. The same thing has happened to me so many times …”
She looked over at the bed. Rocamadour was asleep.
“So many times,” Oliveira said, putting fresh yerba mate into his gourd. “You have a remarkable frankness when it comes to amorous autobiography. Just ask Ossip. To meet you and hear the story about the Negro is one and the same thing.”
“I have to tell it, you don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand, but it’s awful.”
“I think I have to tell it even if it is awful. It’s only right that a woman tell a man what her life has been like if she wants to. I’m talking about you, not Ossip. You could have told me about your girlfriends or not if you wanted to, but I had to tell everything. You know, it’s the only way to get rid of a man before you start to fall in love with someone else, the only way to get them out the door so the two of us can be alone in the room.”
“A kind of ceremony of expiation, and maybe propitiatory too. First the Negro.”
“Yes,” La Maga said, looking at him. “First the Negro. Then Ledesma.”
“Then Ledesma, of course.”
“And the three up the alley, on carnival night.”
“Por delante,” said Oliveira, sipping his mate, as he remembered an obscene game he played as a boy in Buenos Aires, and kept it up to show his exasperation.
“And Monsieur Vincent, the hotel keeper’s brother.”
“Por detrás.”
“And a soldier who was weeping in a park.”
“Por delante.”
“And you.”
“Por detrás. But the idea of putting me on the list in my presence just bears out my gloomiest premonitions. You really should have recited the complete list to Gregorovius.”
La Maga stirred with the sipper. She had lowered her head and her hair fell over her face all at once, covering up the expression that Oliveira had been studying with an indifferent air.
Después fuiste la amiguita
de un viejo boticario
y el hijo de un comisario
todo el vento te sacó
Oliveira was singing the old tango in a low voice. La Maga sucked on the sipper and shrugged her shoulders, not looking at him. “Poor thing,” Oliveira thought. He reached out his hand and drew her hair back, brutally, as if opening a curtain. The sipper made a dry sound between her teeth.
“It’s almost as if you had slapped me,” La Maga said, putting two fingers to her trembling lips. “I really don’t care, but …”
“You just do happen to care,” Oliveira said. “If you hadn’t been looking at me like that I would have despised you. You’re a marvel, Rocamadour and everything.”
“What good is it for me for you to say that?”
“It’s good for me.”
“Yes, it’s good for you. Everything’s good for you if it helps you keep on searching.”
“Sweet,” Oliveira said softly, “it’s a known fact that tears ruin the taste of mate.”
“Maybe my crying is good for you too.”
“Yes, it is as long as you hold me to blame.”
“Go away, Horacio, that’s the best thing.”
“It probably is. But look, anyway, if I leave now I will be committing an act that would be awfully close to heroism, I mean, leaving you alone and with a sick child.”
“Yes,” La Maga said with a Homeric smile coming out from behind her tears. “Awfully close to heroism, yes.”
“And since I’m by no stretch a hero, I think I’d better stay until we find out on what we can abide, as my brother says with his elegant style.”
“Stay then.”
“But you do understand how and why
I reject that heroic course?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Come on, explain to me why I’m not leaving.”
“You’re not leaving because you’re just bourgeois enough to think what Ronald and Babs and your other friends would say.”
“Precisely. I’m glad you see that you didn’t figure in my decision at all. I’m not staying out of friendship or out of pity or because someone has to give Rocamadour his bottle. And much less because you and I still have something in common.”
“You’re so funny sometimes,” La Maga said.
“Sure I am,” Oliveira said. “Bob Hope is just a turd next to me.”
“When you said that we didn’t have anything in common any more, you held your mouth in a certain way … sort of like this, eh?”
“Yes, it’s incredible.”
They had to take out their handkerchiefs and cover their faces with both hands, they let out such loud guffaws that Rocamadour might wake up, it was something terrible. Although Oliveira tried to hold her, biting his handkerchief and weeping with laughter, La Maga slowly slipped out of the chair, which had the front legs shorter than the rear ones and so helped her slide down until she was on the floor caught between Oliveira’s legs as he laughed with a sort of jerky hiccup and finally spit out the handkerchief in one last burst.
“Show me the face again, the one I make when I say things like that,” Oliveira begged.
“Like this,” La Maga said and again they rolled around until Oliveira doubled over holding his stomach, and La Maga saw his face opposite hers, and his eyes shining at her among the tears. They kissed backwards, she face up and he with his hair hanging down like a fringe, they kissed and bit each other a little because their mouths did not recognize one another, they were kissing different mouths, trying to find each other with their hands in a devilish mess of hanging hair and mate, which was dripping onto La Maga’s skirt from the gourd which had tipped over on the edge of the table.
Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) Page 9