“I think so,” Gregorovius said uncertainly.
“I was; in a house with a courtyard and flowerpots where my father used to drink mate and read dirty magazines. Does your father ever come back to you? His ghost I mean?”
“No, actually my mother is more apt to,” Gregorovius said. “Especially the Glasgow one. My Glasgow mother comes back sometimes, but she’s not a ghost, just a memory that’s a little too wet, that’s all. She goes away with an Alka-Seltzer, it’s easy. But you …?”
“How should I know,” La Maga said impatiently. “It’s that music, those green candles, Horacio over there in the corner, like an Indian. Why must I tell how he comes back? But a few nights ago I was at home waiting for Horacio, I was sitting near the bed and outside it was raining a little, the way it does on that record. Yes, it was something like that, I was looking at the bed and waiting for Horacio, I don’t remember how the bed was made, and suddenly I saw my father lying with his back towards me and covering his face as he always did when he was drunk and beginning to fall asleep, I saw his legs and could make out his hand on his chest. I felt my hair stand on end, I wanted to scream, everything you feel at times like that, you must have been afraid sometime … I wanted to run away, the door was so far off, at the other end of the hallway and more hallways, the door was farther and farther away and I could see the pink bedspread going up and down, I could hear my father snoring, in a moment I would see a hand, then eyes, then his hooked nose, no, I shouldn’t be telling you all this, finally I screamed so loud that the woman upstairs came down and made me some tea, and later on Horacio said I was hysterical.”
Gregorovius stroked her hair and La Maga lowered her head. “Here it comes,” Oliveira was thinking, and he stopped following Dizzy Gillespie’s tricks as he swung on the high trapeze without benefit of net, “here it comes, it was bound to. He’s crazy about the girl and that’s his way of showing it, with his ten fingers. The same game over and over. We keep falling into worn-out molds, learning every trite role there is like idiots. But just as if I were stroking her hair while she told me sagas of the Río de la Plata, we feel sorry for her and we have to take her home, all of us a little tight, and put her to bed, petting her gently as we take off her clothes, slowly, button by button, every zipper, and she does want to, wants to, doesn’t want to, straightens up, covers her face, cries, hugs us as if suggesting something sublime, wiggles out of her slip, kicks off a shoe with a gesture that connotes protest and gets us as excited as we ever can get, how base, how base. I’m going to have to bust you in the face, Ossip Gregorovius my poor friend. No desire, no pity, exactly what Dizzy is blowing, without pity, without desire, just as absolutely without pity as what Dizzy is blowing.”
“What a damned drag,” Oliveira said. “Take that crap off the machine. I’m not coming to the Club any more if I have to listen to that clown.”
“The gentleman doesn’t like bop,” Ronald said sarcastically. “Wait a minute, I’ll put on something by Paul Whiteman for you.”
“Let’s compromise,” Étienne said. “Common consent, sweet Ronald: let’s hear Bessie Smith, the dove in a cage of bronze.”
Ronald and Babs began to laugh for some obscure reason and Ronald looked through the pile of old records. The needle made a terrible scratch, something began to move down deeper as if there were layers and layers of cotton between voice and ears, Bessie singing with a bandaged face, stuck in a hamper of soiled clothes, and her voice got more and more muffled, it came out stuck to rags and proclaimed with neither anger nor plea, “I wanna be somebody’s baby doll,” it fell back to wait, a street-corner voice, one from a houseful of grannies, “to be somebody’s baby doll,” hotter and more yearning, panting now “I wanna be somebody’s baby doll …”
Oliveira burned his mouth with a long drink of vodka, put his arm around Babs’s shoulders, and rested against her comfortable body. “The intercessors,” he thought, sinking softly into the tobacco smoke. Bessie’s voice thinned out towards the end of the side, and now Ronald was flipping the Bakelite disk (if it was Bakelite) and from this piece of worn-out material the Empty Bed Blues would be born again, a night in the twenties in some corner of the United States. Ronald had closed his eyes, his hands on his knees, faintly keeping time. Wong and Étienne also had their eyes shut, the room was almost dark and the needle scratched on the old record; it was hard for Oliveira to believe that all of this was taking place. Why there, why the Club, those stupid rites, why did those blues come out like that when Bessie sang them? “The intercessors,” he thought once more, snuggling up to Babs who was completely drunk and was crying quietly as she listened to Bessie, trembling in time to the rhythm or counterpoint, weeping inside so as not to get far away from the blues about an empty bed, tomorrow morning, shoes in puddles, unpaid rent, fear of old age, the ashen image of dawn in the mirror at the foot of the bed, the blues, life’s infinite cafard. “The intercessors, one unreality showing us another, like painted saints pointing towards Heaven. This cannot exist, we cannot really be here, I cannot be someone whose name is Horacio. That ghost there, that voice of a Negro woman killed in an automobile accident twenty years ago: links in a nonexistent chain, how do we support ourselves here, how can we be meeting tonight if it is not a mere play of illusions, of rules that are accepted and agreed upon, a deck of cards in the hands of an inconceivable dealer …”
“Don’t cry,” Oliveira whispered to Babs. “Don’t cry, Babs, none of this is true.”
“Oh yes, oh yes it is true,” Babs said, blowing her nose. “It is true.”
“It could be true,” said Oliveira, kissing her on the cheek, “but it isn’t.”
“Like those shadows,” Babs said, snuffing and swallowing the mucus and moving her hand from side to side. “And it makes you sad, Horacio, because everything is so beautiful.”
But all this, Bessie’s singing, Coleman Hawkins’s cooing, weren’t they illusions, or something even worse, the illusion of other illusions, a dizzy chain going backwards, back to a monkey looking at himself in the water on that first day? But Babs was crying, Babs had said, “Oh yes, oh yes it is true,” and Oliveira, a little drunk too, felt that the truth now lay in that Bessie and Hawkins were illusions, because only illusions were capable of moving their adherents, illusions and not truths. And there was more than this, there was intercession, the arrival through illusions to a plane, a zone impossible to imagine, useless to attempt conception of because all thought destroyed it as soon as it attempted to isolate it. A hand of smoke took his hand, started him downward, if it was downward, showed him a center, if it was a center, put it in his stomach, where the vodka was softly making crystal bubbles, some sort of infinitely beautiful and desperate illusion which some time back he had called immortality. Closing his eyes he managed to tell himself that if a simple ritual was able to excentrate him like this the better to show him a center, to excentrate him towards a center which was nonetheless inconceivable, perhaps everything was not lost and some day, in different circumstances, after other proofs, arrival would be possible. But arrival where, for what? He was too drunk even to set up a working hypothesis, to form an idea of a possible route. He was not drunk enough to stop thinking consecutively, and this poor power of thought was sufficient for him to feel that it was carrying him away farther and farther from something too distant, too precious to be seen through this stupidly propitious mist, vodka mist, Maga mist, Bessie Smith mist. He began to see green rings spinning wildly about, he opened his eyes. Usually after seeing the rings he would feel like vomiting.
(–106)
13
WRAPPED up in smoke Ronald was pulling out record after record, scarcely bothering to find out what the others wanted, and once in a while Babs would get up from the floor and start digging through the piles of old 78’s, she would pick out four or five and put them on the table within reach of Ronald, who would lean forward and pet Babs who would twist away laughing and sit on his lap but just for a moment because Ronald
wanted to be quiet while he listened to Don’t Play Me Cheap.
Satchmo was singing:
So what’s the use
if you’re gonna cut off my juice
and Babs wiggled on Ronald’s knees, excited by Satchmo’s style of singing, the theme was vulgar enough to let her take liberties which Ronald would never condone when Satchmo sang the Yellow Dog Blues, and because in the breath that Ronald was blowing on the back of her neck there was a mixture of vodka and sauerkraut that aroused Babs fantastically. From her high outlook, a sort of delicate pyramid of smoke and music and vodka and sauerkraut and Ronald’s hands marching up and down, Babs could condescend to look downward through her half-closed eyes and she saw Oliveira on the floor, his back against the Eskimo pelt on the wall, smoking and dead drunk now, with a resentful and bitter South American face whose mouth would smile from time to time between drags, Oliveira’s hps which Babs had once desired (not now) were curved a little while the rest of his face looked washed-out and absent. As much as he liked jazz, Oliveira could never get into the spirit of it like Ronald, whether it was good or bad, hot or cool, white or black, old or modern, Chicago or New Orleans, never jazz, never what was now Satchmo, Ronald, and Babs, “So what’s the use if you’re gonna cut off my juice,” and then the trumpet’s flaming up, the yellow phallus breaking the air and having fun, coming forward and drawing back and towards the end three ascending notes, pure hypnotic gold, a perfect pause where all the swing of the world was beating in an intolerable instant, and then the supersharp ejaculation slipping and falling like a rocket in the sexual night, Ronald’s hand caressing Babs’s neck and the scratching of the needle while the record kept on turning and the silence there was in all true music slowly unstuck itself from the walls, slithered out from underneath the couch, and opened up like lips or like cocoons.
“Ça alors,” said Étienne.
“Yes, Armstrong’s great period,” said Ronald, examining the pile of records Babs had picked out. “Like Picasso’s giant period, if you like. Nowadays they’re both a pair of pigs. To think that doctors have invented ways to be rejuvenated … They’ll go on screwing us for another twenty years, wait and see.”
“Not us,” Étienne said. “We’ve already shot them down and just at the right moment, and all I ask is for someone to do the same for me when my time is up.”
“Just at the right moment? You’re not asking for much, kiddo,” said Oliveira, yawning. “But you’re right, we have given them the coup de grâce already. With a rose instead of a bullet, if you want to think of it that way. What’s left is habit and carbon paper. To think that Armstrong has just now gone to Buenos Aires for the first time and you can imagine the thousands of boobs who will think they’re listening to something great while Satchmo, with more tricks than an old fighter, bobbing and weaving, tired and amortized and without giving a damn what he does, strictly routine, while some of my friends whom I respect and who twenty years ago would cover their ears if you put on Mahogany Hall Stomp now pay God knows how much for an orchestra seat to listen to that warmed-over stuff. Of course, my country itself is warmed-over too, with all my patriotic love I’m forced to admit it.”
“Starting with you,” said Perico from behind a dictionary. “You’ve come here in the same mold as all of your countrymen who take off for Paris to get their ‘sentimental education.’ At least in Spain we learn all about that in brothels and at bullfights, coño.”
“And from the Countess Pardo Bazán,” said Oliveira, yawning again. “Everything else you say is true, old boy. What I should really be doing is playing truco with Traveler. You didn’t know him, did you. You don’t know anything about all that. So what’s the use of talking about it?”
(–115)
14
HE came out of the corner he had been stuck in, he put one foot on a piece of floor after having examined it as if it had been vital to pick out the exact spot on which to place his foot, then he brought out the other one with the same caution, and six feet away from Ronald and Babs he began to shrivel down until he was impeccably installed on the floor.
“It’s raining,” said Wong, pointing at the skylight.
Wafting the smoke away with his hand, Oliveira looked at Wong with friendly contentment.
“It’s best to be at sea-level where all one can see are shoes and knees all around. Where’s your glass?”
“Over there,” said Wong.
It turned out that it was full and within reach. They began to drink, appreciatively, and Ronald put on a John Coltrane record which made Perico snort. Then a Sidney Bechet from his Paris merengue period, something that seemed to be making a little fun of Spanish prejudices.
“Is it true that you’re writing a book about tortures?”
“Not exactly,” said Wong.
“What is it, then?”
“In China one has a different conception of art.”
“I know, we’ve all read Mirbeau the Chinese. Is it true that you have photographs of tortures taken in Peking in 1920 or around that time?”
“Oh, no,” said Wong smiling. “They’re all faded, they’re not worth looking at.”
“Do you really carry the worst one around in your wallet?”
“Oh, no,” Wong said.
“And did you show it to some women in a café?”
“They were so insistent,” said Wong. “The worst of it was they didn’t understand at all.”
“Let me see it,” said Oliveira, putting out his hand.
Wong began to look at the hand, smiling. Oliveira was too drunk to insist. He drank some more vodka and shifted his position. A piece of paper folded four times was placed in his hand. Instead of Wong he saw a kind of Cheshire cat smiling, sort of bowing in all the smoke. The post must have been six feet high, but there were eight posts, except that it was the same post repeated eight times in four series of two photos each, which went from left to right and from top to bottom, the post was the same in spite of slight differences in focus, all that was different was the prisoner tied to the post, the faces of the people around (there was a woman on the left) and the position of the executioner, standing to the left out of deference to the photographer, some American or Danish ethnologist who had a firm hand but a bad camera, an ancient Kodak that took bad pictures, so that except for the second picture, where the choice of knives had indicated work on the right ear, and the rest of the naked body could be seen clearly, the other pictures, because of the blood which was beginning to cover the body and the poor quality of the film or the development, were rather disappointing, especially from the fourth one on, in which the prisoner appeared as a blackish mass on which one could make out an open mouth and a very white arm, and the three last pictures were practically the same except for the position of the executioner, in the sixth picture crouching next to his bag of knives, taking out one at random (but he must have been cheating, because if he was going to begin with the deepest cuts…), and looking more closely one could see that the victim was alive because one foot was sticking out in spite of the pressure of his bonds, and his head was thrown back, his mouth still open, on the ground Chinese gentility must have spread an abundant amount of sawdust because the pool was no bigger, it made an almost perfect oval around the post. “The seventh is the critical one,” Wong’s voice came out from behind the vodka and the smoke, and one had to look closely because blood was pouring out around the paps which had been deeply excised (between the second and third pictures), but one could see in the seventh that a decisive cut had been made because the shape of the thighs which had been turned outward a bit had changed, and if one brought the picture up close he could see that the change was not in the thighs but in the groin, instead of the hazy splotch in the first picture it looked like something pouring out of a hole, something like a little girl who has been raped, with blood flowing down her thighs. And if Wong did not think highly of the eighth picture he must have been right because the victim could not have been alive any more, no one lets
his head fall to the side that way. “According to what I have been told, the whole operation took an hour and a half,” Wong observed with ceremony. The piece of paper was folded in four, a black leather wallet opened its mouth like a crocodile and gobbled it up from amidst the smoke. “Of course, Peking is not what it used to be. I’m sorry I showed you something so primitive, but one cannot carry certain other documents in his billfold, there have to be explanations, an initiation …” His voice came from so far away it seemed to be a prolongation of the images, the gloss of a ceremonious scholar. Above or below, Big Bill Broonzy had begun to chant See, See, Rider, and as always everything came together from the unreconcilable forms, a grotesque collage which made its adjustments with vodka and Kantian categories, those tranquilizers against any too sharp coagulation of reality. Or as almost always happened, closing one’s eyes and going back, to the cottony world of any other night chosen carefully among the cards of the open deck. “See, see, rider,” Big Bill was singing, another corpse, “see what you have done.”
(–114)
15
IT was so natural for him to remember then that night on the Saint-Martin canal, the proposition they had made him (1,000 francs) to see a film at the home of a Swiss doctor. During the war an Axis surgeon had arranged to film a hanging in all of its details. Two rolls in all, but silent. However, the photography was excellent, they swore. You could pay on the way out.
In the moment necessary to resolve it all and say no and leave the café with the Haitian girl who knew the friend of the Swiss doctor, he had had time to imagine the scene and put himself as always on the side of the victim. There was no reason to waste words on the hanging of whoever-he-was, but if that somebody had known (and the refinement could have been precisely in telling him so) that a camera was going to record every moment of his grimaces and twistings for the pleasure of future dilettantes…“No matter how it hurts me, I shall never be indifferent like Étienne,” Oliveira thought. “What it amounts to is that I insist on the unheard-of idea that man was meant for something else. Then, of course … What poor tools we have to find a way out of this dungeon.” The worst was that he had looked at Wong’s picture with coldness because the one they were torturing had not been his father, not thinking about the forty years that had passed since it all took place in Peking.
Hopscotch: A Novel Page 6