“But don’t you see that you can’t learn anything this way,” he finally told her. “You think you can get an education on the street, love, and you can’t. If that’s what you want, subscribe to the Reader’s Digest.”
“Oh, no. Not that crap.”
A bird in his head, Oliveira was saying to himself. Not her, but him. But what did she have in her head? Air or chick-pea flour, something hard to grasp. The center was not in the head.
“She closes her eyes and hits the bull’s-eye,” thought Oliveira. “The Zen method of archery, precisely. But she hits the bull’s-eye because she doesn’t know that it is the method. But in my case … Toc, toc. And that’s how it goes.”
When La Maga would ask about Zen (such things could happen with the Club, where they were always talking about nostalgic things, wisdom so distant that they came to think of it as fundamental, the obverse of a medal, the far side of the moon, always), Gregorovius would try to explain the rudiments of metaphysics while Oliveira would sip his pernod and watch, enjoying it. It was madness to try to explain anything to La Maga. Fauconnier was right, for people like her the mystery begins precisely with the explanation. La Maga heard the words immanence and transcendence and she opened up two big beautiful eyes which cut off Gregorovius’s metaphysics. Finally she convinced herself that she had understood Zen and sighed with fatigue. Only Oliveira knew that La Maga was always reaching those great timeless plateaus that they were all seeking through dialectics.
“Don’t learn any stupid facts,” he would advise her. “Why wear glasses if you don’t need them?”
La Maga was not quite sure. She was terribly in awe of Oliveira and Étienne, who could keep an argument going for three hours without a stop. There was something like a circle of chalk around Étienne and Oliveira and she wanted to get inside, to understand why the principle of indetermination was so important in literature, why Morelli, of whom they spoke so much, whom they admired so much, wanted his book to be a crystal ball in which the micro- and the macrocosm would come together in an annihilating vision.
“It’s impossible to explain to you,” said Étienne. “This is Meccano number 7 and you’re barely in number 2.”
La Maga became sad, she picked up a leaf from the edge of the sidewalk and spoke to it for a while, moved it along the palm of her hand, put it rightside up and upside down, stroked it, and finally she took off the leafy part and left the veins exposed, a delicate green ghost was reflected against her skin. Étienne snatched it away brusquely and held it against the light. That’s why they admired her, a little ashamed at having been so brutish with her, and La Maga would take advantage by ordering another pint or, if possible, some fried potatoes.
(–71)
5
THE first time had been in a hotel on the Rue Valette. They were walking along there aimlessly and stopping in the doorways, drizzle after lunch is always bitter and something ought to be done about that frozen dust, against those raincoats smelling of rubber, and suddenly La Maga drew herself close to Oliveira and they looked at each other like fools. HOTEL, the old woman behind the rickety desk greeted them with an understanding air and what else was there to do in this rotten weather. She dragged one foot and it was painful to see her climb the stairs, stopping at each step to drag up her sick leg, which was thicker than the other, and go through the same maneuver all the way to the fourth floor. There was a smell of toilet soap, of soup, on the rug in the hallway someone had spilled a blue liquid which had taken the shape of a pair of wings. The room had two windows with red curtains, full of patches. A damp light spread out like an angel over to the bed with a yellow spread.
La Maga had thought to play it innocent, staying by the window, pretending to look at the street while Oliveira checked the bolt on the door. She must have had a system all worked out for this sort of thing, or maybe it just always happened the same way. First she put her purse on the table and looked for her cigarettes, she looked at the street, taking deep drags, she commented on the wallpaper, she waited, obviously she waited, all effort was being made so that the man could best play his role and would have all the time necessary to take the initiative. At one point they had burst out laughing, it was all too silly. Flung into a corner, the yellow bedspread looked like a shapeless doll against the wall.
They had got into the habit of comparing spreads, doors, lamps, curtains. They preferred the hotel rooms of the cinquième arrondissement to those of the sixième. In the septième they had no luck at all, something was always happening: pounding in the room next door or the plumbing made a lugubrious sound, and it was then that Oliveira had told La Maga the story of Troppmann. La Maga listened as she held him tight, and she would have to read the story by Turgenev. It was incredible what she would have to read in those two years (she didn’t know why they were two years). Another time it was Petiot, another time Weidmann, another time Christie. It ended up with the hotel always giving them the urge to talk about crimes, but La Maga would also be engulfed by a wave of seriousness and she would ask with her eyes fixed on the flat ceiling whether Sienese painting was really as fantastic as Étienne claimed, whether they shouldn’t try to save up to buy a phonograph and the works of Hugo Wolf, which she would sometimes hum, breaking off in the middle, forgetful and furious. Oliveira liked to make love to La Maga because there was nothing more important to her and at the same time, in a way hard to understand, she was in a sense dependent on his pleasure, she would reach him for a moment and would therefore cling desperately and prolong it. It was as if she had awakened and recognized her real name, and then she would fall back into that always somewhat twilight zone which enchanted Oliveira, fearful of perfection, but La Maga really did suffer when she returned to her memories and to everything that in some obscure way she had to think about but could not. Then he would have to kiss her deeply, incite her to new play, and the other woman, the reconciled one, would grow beneath him and pull him down, and she would surrender then like a frantic animal, her eyes lost, her hands twisted inward, mythical and terrible, like a statue rolling down a mountainside, clutching time with her nails, with a gurgling sound and a moaning growl that lasted interminably. One night she sank her teeth into him, bit him in the shoulder until the blood came, because he had fallen to one side, a little forgetful already, and there was a confused and wordless pact. Oliveira felt that La Maga wanted death from him, something in her which was not her awakened self, a dark form demanding annihilation, the slow wound which on its back breaks the stars at night and gives space back to questions and terrors. Only that time, off center like a mythical matador for whom killing is returning the bull to the sea and the sea to the heavens, he bothered La Maga in a long night which they did not speak much about later. He turned her into Pasiphaë, he bent her over and used her as if she were a young boy, he knew her and he demanded the slavishness of the most abject whore, he magnified her into a constellation, he held her in his arms smelling of blood, he made her drink the semen which ran into her mouth like a challenge to the Logos, he sucked out the shadow from her womb and her rump and raised himself to her face to anoint her with herself in that ultimate work of knowledge which only a man can give to a woman, he wore her out with skin and hair and drool and moans, he drained her completely of her magnificent strength, he threw her against a pillow and sheet and felt her crying with happiness against his face which another cigarette was returning to the night from the room and from the hotel.
Later on Oliveira began to worry that she would think herself jaded, that the play would move on to sacrifice. Above all he feared that most subtle form of gratitude which turns into doglike love. He did not want freedom, the only suit that fit La Maga, to be lost in any strong femininity. He didn’t have to worry, because as soon as La Maga was back on the level of black coffee and a trip to the toilet, it was obvious that she had fallen back into the worst of confusions. Terribly mistreated that night, opened up to an absorbent space that beats and expands, his first words when she was bac
k on this side came like whiplashes, as they had to, and when she came back to the side of the bed she was the image of a progressive consternation which tried to soften itself with smiles and a vague hope, which left Oliveira quite satisfied. Since he did not love her, since desire would stop (because he did not love, desire would stop), he would have to avoid like the devil any kind of sacred ritualizing of their play. For days, for weeks, for some months, every hotel room and every square, every position of love, and every dawn in a marketplace café: a savage circus, subtle operation, and rational balance. That’s how it came to be known that La Maga was really waiting for Horacio to kill her and that hers would be a phoenix death, entry into the council of philosophers, that is to say, the discussions of the Serpent Club. La Maga wanted to learn, she wanted to be ed-you-kay-ted. Horacio was the exalted, the chosen one, the one to fill the role of purifying priest, and since they never understood each other because when they were discussing something they would be off on different tracks and different interests (and she knew this and understood it well), therefore the only possibility of coming together would be if Horacio were to kill her while making love, where she could get together with him in the heaven of some hotel room where they would come together equal and naked and there the resurrection of the phoenix could take place after he had strangled her delightfully, dripping a string of saliva into her open mouth, looking at her ecstatically as if he had just begun to recognize her, to make her really his, to take her to his side.
(–81)
6
THE technique was to make a vague date in some neighborhood at a certain hour. They liked to challenge the danger of not meeting, of spending the day alone sulking in a café or on a park bench, reading-another-book. The another-book theory was Oliveira’s, and La Maga had accepted it by pure osmosis. For her, in truth, almost all books were one-book-less; she would have liked to be overcome by an immense thirst and for an infinite period of time (figured as between three and five years) to read the complete works of Goethe, Homer, Dylan Thomas, Mauriac, Faulkner, Baudelaire, Roberto Arlt, Saint Augustine, and other writers whose names would keep coming up in conversation in the Club. Oliveira would answer this with a sour shrug of his shoulders and talk about the distortions of the Río de la Plata, where a breed of full-time readers has developed, where libraries swarm with old maids who have forsaken love and sunshine, where the smell of printer’s ink can end the joy of garlic in a home. He wasn’t reading much then, too busy looking at trees, pieces of string he found on the ground, the yellowed films he saw in movie clubs, the women in the Latin Quarter. His vague intellectual tendencies had become resolved in aimless meditation, and when La Maga would ask him for help, a date or an explanation, he would only supply it grudgingly, as if it were something useless. “But you already know it,” La Maga would say, peeved. Then he would take the trouble to explain to her the difference between familiarity and knowledge, and he would ask her to try some individual research projects, which La Maga would not finish and which would drive her to her wit’s end.
Since they would never normally be in certain places, they would agree to meet there and they almost always found each other. The meetings were so incredible at times that Oliveira once more brought up the problem of probability and examined the case cautiously from all angles. La Maga could not possibly have decided to turn that corner of the Rue de Vaugirard at the precise moment in which he, five blocks down the street, decided not to go along the Rue de Buci and headed for the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince for no apparent reason, letting himself go along until suddenly he saw her stopped in front of a shop window, absorbed in the contemplation of a stuffed monkey. Seated in a café they carefully reconstructed their routes, the quick changes, trying to find some telepathic explanation and always failing, and yet they had met in that labyrinth of streets, they almost always met and they laughed wildly, certain of some enriching power. Oliveira was fascinated by La Maga’s store of nonsense, her calm disdain for the simplest calculation. What for him had been analysis of probabilities, choice, or simply faith in himself as a dowser, for her was simple chance. “And what if you hadn’t met me?” he would ask her. “I don’t know, but you’re here, you see …” For some reason the answer made the question worthless, it showed the logical basis of ordinary common sense. After that Oliveira would feel better able to resist his bookish prejudices, and paradoxically La Maga would fight off her disdain for scholarly knowledge. Thus they went along, Punch and Judy, attracting each other and repelling, as love must do if it is not to end up as calendar art or a pop tune. But love, that word…
(–7)
7
I TOUCH your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.
You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth, playing in corners where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.
(–8)
8
IN the afternoon we used to go to see the fish on the Quai de la Mégisserie, in March, the leopard month, the crouching month, but now with a yellow sun which took on a little more red each day. From the sidewalk on the riverside, paying no attention to the bouquinistes who give nothing without pay, we would wait for the moment when we could see the fishbowls (we went along slowly, delaying), all the fishbowls out in the sun, and as if hung in the air hundreds of pink and black fish, motionless birds in their round air. An absurd joy would take us by the waist and you would sing, dragging me across the street to enter the world of fish hanging in the air.
They bring out the bowls, those great pitchers, onto the street and there among tourists and excited children and ladies who collect types (550 fr. pièce) are the fishbowls underneath the sun, spheres of water which the sun mixes with the air and the pink and black birds dance around softly in a little chunk of air, slow cold birds. We would look at them, trying to bring our eyes up to the glass, touching it with our noses, annoying the old women who sell them, as they go about with their nets to hunt aquatic butterflies, and we understood less and less what a fish is. We went along that path of not understanding and getting closer to those creatures that could not understand each other. We walked through the fishbowls and were as close as our friend, the woman in the second shop as you come from the Pont Neuf, who told you: “Cold water kills them, cold water is a sad thing …” And I remember the maid in the hotel who told me about a fern: “Don’t water it, put a plate of water under the pot, then when it wants to drink it can, and when it doesn’t want to, it doesn’t …” And I thought about that unbelievable bit that we had read, that a single fish will get sad in its bowl and that all one has to do is put a mirror next to it and the fish is happy again…
We used to go into the shops where the more delicate species would have special tanks with thermometers and red worms. We would find out along with exclamations which used to infuriate the saleswomen—they were so
sure that we were not going to buy anything at 550 fr. pièce—all about the behavior, the love, and the shape of the fish. The moment was delicately delicious, something like very thin chocolate or orange paste from Martinique, and we were getting drunk on metaphors and analogies, always trying to get into it. And that perfectly Giotto fish, do you remember, and those two that played about like jade dogs, or a fish which was the exact shadow of a violet cloud … We found out how life goes on in shapes without a third dimension, that they disappear when they face you, or at most leave a thin motionless pink line in the water. A flick of a fin and there he is miraculously again with eyes, whiskers, fins, and from his belly sometimes coming out and floating a transparent ribbon of excrement which has not come loose, ballast which suddenly puts them amongst us, which plucks them out from the perfection of their pure imagery, which compromises them, to use one of those fine words we so much liked to use around there in those days.
(–93)
9
THEY came into the Rue Vaneau from the Rue de Varennes. It was drizzling and La Maga clutched Oliveira’s arm even tighter, pressing herself against his raincoat, which smelled like cold soup. Étienne and Perico were arguing over the possibility of explaining the world through painting and words. Oliveira put his arm carelessly around La Maga’s waist. That might be an explanation too, an arm squeezing a thin, warm waist. As they walked he could feel the light play of her muscles, a sort of monotonous and persistent speech, an insistent Berlitz, I-love-you, I-love-you. Not an explanation: a pure verb, to-love, to-love. “And always following the verb, the copulative,” Oliveira thought grammatically. If La Maga could only have understood how suddenly he was bothered by obedience to desire, “useless solitary obedience,” as a poet had once called it, a waist so warm, wet hair against his cheek, the Toulouse-Lautrec way that La Maga used to walk snuggled up to him. In the beginning was the copulative, to rape is to explain, but not always the other way around. To discover the anti-explanatory method, so that this I-love-you, I-love-you would be the hub of the wheel. And Time? Everything begins again, there is no absolute. Then there must be feed or feces, everything becomes critical again. Desire every so often, never too different and always something else: a trick of time to create illusions. “A love like a fire which burns eternally in the contemplation of Totality. But suddenly one breaks out into wild babble.”
Hopscotch: A Novel Page 4