Hopscotch: A Novel

by Julio Cortázar

  Oliveira waited for Babs to start the usual comments on the job of making coffee, and when Ronald got off his chair and squatted down near him, he said something in his ear. Listening to them, Gregorovius joined in the conversation about the coffee, and Ronald’s answer was lost in the praise of Mocha and how the art of making it had degenerated. Then Ronald got back up on his chair in time to take the cup La Maga was holding out to him. There was a soft pounding on the ceiling, twice, three times. Gregorovius shuddered and drank his coffee down in one gulp. Oliveira was trying not to burst out laughing, which just might have eased his cramps. La Maga looked surprised, in the shadows she looked at everybody in succession and then reached for a cigarette on the table, groping around as if she wanted to get out of something she didn’t understand, something like a dream.

  “I hear steps,” Babs said with a marked Blavatsky tone. “That old man must be crazy, you have to watch out. In Kansas City once … No, it’s someone coming up the stairs.”

  “The stairway makes a pattern in your ear,” La Maga said. “I feel very sorry for deaf people. It’s as if I had my hand on the stairs now and were moving it up the steps one by one. When I was a girl I got an A on a theme I wrote, the story of a little sound. It was a nice little sound, it came and went, things happened to it …”

  “I, on the other hand …” said Babs. “O.K., O.K., you don’t have to pinch me.”

  “My love,” Ronald said, “be still a moment so we can tell whose steps those are. Yes, it’s the king of pigments, it’s Étienne, it’s the great apocalyptic beast.”

  “He took it calmly,” Oliveira thought. “The spoonful of medicine is for two o’clock, I think. We have more than an hour of calm left.” He did not understand and he did not want to understand the reason behind the delay, that sort of denial of something already known. Negation, negative…“Yes, it’s like the negative of reality just-as-it-ought-to-be, that is … But don’t go getting metaphysical, Horacio. Alas, poor Yorick, ça suffit. I can’t help it, I think it’s better this way than if we turned on the light and released the news like a dove from its cage. A negative. Complete reversal … What’s most likely is that he’s alive and we’re all dead. A more modest proposition: he has killed us because we are responsible for his death. Responsible, accomplices in a state of affairs, that is … Oh, dear boy, where are you taking yourself, you’re the donkey with the carrot hanging down in front of its eyes. And it was Étienne, no less, it was the great painting beast.”

  “He’s out of danger,” Étienne said. “Son of a bitch, he’s got more lives than Cesare Borgia. And what a job of vomiting …”

  “Tell us, tell us,” Babs said.

  “A stomach wash, all kinds of enemas, jabs all over with a needle, a bed with springs, to keep his head down. He threw up the whole menu of the Orestias restaurant, where it seems he had lunch. What a mess, even stuffed grape leaves. Has anyone noticed that I’m soaked?”

  “We’ve got some hot coffee,” Ronald said, “and a foul drink called caña.”

  Étienne snorted, tossed his raincoat in a corner, and went over to the stove.

  “How’s the baby, Lucía?”

  “He’s asleep,” La Maga said. “He’s sleeping quite soundly, fortunately.”

  “Let’s speak low,” Babs said.

  “He regained consciousness around eleven o’clock,” Étienne explained in a sort of tender way. “He was a mess, that’s for sure. The doctor let me go over to the bed and Guy recognized me. ‘You idiot,’ I said to him. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he answered. The doctor whispered to me that that was a good sign. There were other people in the ward, I got through it pretty well, and you know what hospitals do to me …”

  “Did you go back to the flat?” Babs asked. “Did you have to go to the police station?”

  “No, everything’s all taken care of. In any case, it would be wiser if you spent the night here, you should have seen the face on the concierge when they carried Guy out …”

  “The lousy bastard,” Babs said in English.

  “I put on a virtuous air and when I passed her I lifted up my hand and said: ‘Madame, death is always respectable. This young man has tried to kill himself because he was lovesick over Kreisler.’ She just hardened up, believe me, and she kept on looking at me with a pair of eyes that looked like two hard-boiled eggs. And just as the stretcher was going out the door, Guy raised up a little, put his hand to his pale cheek, just like a statue on an Etruscan tomb, and puked up some green vomit in the direction of the concierge that landed smack in the middle of the doormat. The stretcher-bearers doubled up laughing, it was fantastic.”

  “More coffee?” Ronald asked. “And sit down over here on the floor, it’s the warmest spot in the room. Give poor Étienne a good cup of coffee.”

  “I can’t see anything,” Étienne said. “And why do I have to sit on the floor?”

  “To keep Horacio and me company, we’re keeping a sort of knight’s vigil,” Ronald said.

  “Come off it, you fool,” Oliveira said.

  “Pay attention to me, sit down here, and you will learn things that not even Wong knows about. The Libri Fulgurales, the writings of the ancient seers. Just this morning I was having so much fun reading the Bardo. They’re amazing creatures, the Tibetans.”

  “Who initiated you?” Étienne asked, sliding down between Oliveira and Ronald and drinking his coffee down in one gulp. “A drink,” Étienne said, putting his hand out imperiously towards La Maga, who put the bottle of caña in it. “Terrible,” Étienne said after taking a swig. “Product of Argentina, I suppose. What a country, my God.”

  “Don’t put my country down,” Oliveira said. “You’re like the old man upstairs.”

  “Wong put me through several tests,” Ronald was explaining. “He says that I have enough intelligence to start destroying it profitably. We agreed that I should read the Bardo carefully, and from there we would go on to the fundamental phases of Buddhism. Can there really be a subtle body, Horacio? It seems that when one dies … A sort of mental body, you understand.”

  But Horacio was whispering in Étienne’s ear and he was grunting and nodding, smelling of wet streets, hospitals, and stuffed cabbage. Babs was telling Gregorovius, who had withdrawn into a kind of indifference, all about the innumerable faults of the concierge. Bursting with erudition, Ronald had to explain the Bardo to somebody and he started on La Maga, who was outlined opposite him like a Henry Moore in the darkness, a giantess seen from below, first her knees, about to burst through the black mass of her skirt, then a torso which rose up towards the ceiling, on top of it a pile of hair, darker even than the darkness all around, and on top of all this shadow among the shadows the light of the lamp on the floor which made La Maga’s eyes shine as she sat in the easy chair and struggled from time to time against slipping out and falling on the floor because the front legs were shorter than the rear ones.

  “Lousy business,” Étienne said, taking another drink.

  “You can leave if you want,” Oliveira said, “but I don’t think anything serious will happen, things like this happen every day in this neighborhood.”

  “I’ll stay,” Étienne said. “This drink, what’s it called? It’s not bad. It smells like fruit.”

  “Wong says that Jung was all excited about the Bardo,” Ronald was saying. “It’s easy to see why, and the existentialists should give it a careful reading too. Look, at the moment of judgment for a dead person, the King puts a mirror to his face, but this mirror is Karma. The summation of all of the dead person’s acts, you see. And the dead person sees all his actions reflected, good and bad, but the reflection doesn’t correspond to any reality, it’s the projection of mental images … Tell me why old Jung shouldn’t have been a little amazed. The King of the Dead looks into the mirror, but he is really looking into your memory. Can you think of a better description of psychoanalysis? And what’s even more extraordinary, my dear, is that the judgment the King pronounces is not his but you
r own. You judge yourself without knowing it. Don’t you think that Sartre really ought to go to live in Lhasa?”

  “It’s incredible,” La Maga said. “But this book, is it philosophy?”

  “It’s a book for dead people,” Oliveira said.

  They were silent, listening to the rain. Gregorovius felt sorry for La Maga, who seemed to be waiting for an explanation and didn’t feel like asking any more questions.

  “The lamas reveal certain things to dying people,” he told her. “To guide them in the beyond, to help them be saved. For example …”

  Étienne was leaning against Oliveira. Ronald was sitting with his legs crossed and humming Big Lip Blues, thinking about Jelly Roll, who was his favorite dead man. Oliveira lit a Gauloise, and as in a painting by La Tour, for a second the flame colored the faces of his friends, it brought Gregorovius out of the shadows and tied the murmur of his voice to a pair of moving lips, brutally set La Maga in the easy chair, with her face that always became avid at moments of ignorance and explanations, softly bathed placid Babs, and Ronald the musician, lost in his moaning improvisations. Then there was a thump on the ceiling just as the match went out.

  “Il faut tenter de vivre,” Oliveira quoted from his memory. “Pourquoi?”

  The line had come out of his memory just like the faces in the light of the match, instantaneously and probably gratuitously. Étienne’s shoulder was warming him, was transmitting a deceptive presence to him, a nearness that death, that match that went out, was going to erase just as now the faces, the shapes, just as the silence closed in again around the knock from upstairs.

  “And that is how,” Gregorovius was concluding pedantically, “the Bardo brings us back to life, to the necessity of a pure life, precisely at the moment when escape is impossible and we are nailed to a bed with a cancer for a pillow.”

  “Ah, yes,” La Maga said, sighing. She had understood enough, a few pieces of the puzzle were in place, although it would never be as perfect as a kaleidoscope, where each crystal, each stick, each grain of sand arranged itself in a perfect, symmetrical, boring pattern, but with no problems.

  “Occidental dichotomies,” Oliveira said. “Life and death, this side and that side. That’s not what your Bardo teaches you, Ossip, although personally I haven’t the slightest idea what your Bardo does teach you. In any case, it must be something more fluid, less categorized.”

  “Look,” said Étienne, who was feeling remarkably well, even though the news that Oliveira had passed on to him was crawling around his insides like a crab and none of this seemed contradictory. “Look, my ball-beloved Argentine, the Orient is not so different as the Orientalists make it out to be. As soon as you start to give some serious thought to what is written there you begin to feel what you have always felt, the inexplicable attraction of intellectual suicide by means of the intellect itself. The scorpion stabbing itself in the neck, tired of being a scorpion but having to have recourse to its own scorpionness in order to do away with itself as a scorpion. In Madras or in Heidelberg it’s basically the same question: there is some sort of indescribable mistake at the very beginning of things, out of which comes this phenomenon which is addressing itself to you at this moment and which you are all listening to. Every attempt at explanation comes to grief for reasons that anyone can understand, and the fact is that in order to define and understand something one would have to be outside of what is being defined and understood. Ergo, Madras and Heidelberg console themselves manufacturing positions, some with a rational base, others intuitive, even though the differences between reason and intuition can be far from clear, as anyone who’s been to school knows. And for that reason, man only feels secure when he is on grounds that do not touch his deepest part: when he plays, when he conquers, when he puts on his various suits of armor that are products of an ethos, when he hands over the central mystery to some revelation. And on all sides the curious notion that our principal tool, the Logos that madly pulls us up the zoological ladder, is a perfect fraud. And the inevitable corollary, refuge in inspiration and babble, dark night of the soul, aesthetic and metaphysical visions. Madras and Heidelberg are different dosages of the same prescription, sometimes the Yin is in the ascendancy, sometimes the Yang, but at the two points of up and down there remain two examples of Homo sapiens, equally undefined, kicking about madly on the ground as one tries to rise at the expense of the other.”

  “It’s strange,” Ronald said. “In any case, it would be stupid to deny a reality even though we might not know what it is. Let’s take the up-down axis. How is it that this axis still hasn’t been of any use in finding out what goes on at its two extremes? Since Neanderthal man …”

  “You’re just using words,” Oliveira said, leaning a little more on Étienne. “We like to take them out of the closet and parade them around the room. Reality, Neanderthal man, see how they play, see how they get into our ears and pull each other along on toboggans.”

  “That’s right,” Étienne said harshly. “That’s why I prefer my colors: I feel sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Of their effect.”

  “Of their effect on you, in any case, but not on Ronald’s concierge. Your colors are no more certain than my words, old man.”

  “At least my colors don’t try to explain anything.”

  “And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?”

  “No,” said Étienne, “but at the same time I do things that to a small degree take away the bad taste of emptiness. And that basically is the best definition of Homo sapiens.”

  “It’s not a definition, it’s a consolation,” Gregorovius said, sighing. “Actually, we’re like a play we come in on during the second act. Everything is very pretty but we don’t understand a thing. The actors speak and move about no one knows why or for what reason. We project our own ignorance into them and they seem like madmen to us, coming and going in a very decided way. Shakespeare has already said it anyway, and if he didn’t say it he should have.”

  “I think he did say it,” La Maga said.

  “He did say it,” Babs said.

  “You see?” said La Maga.

  “He also talked about words,” Gregorovius said, “and all that Horacio has done is to raise the question in its dialectical form, in a manner of speaking. Like Wittgenstein, whom I admire very much.”

  “I don’t know him,” Ronald said, “but you all agree that the problem of reality cannot be faced with sighs.”

  “Who can tell,” Gregorovius said. “Who can tell, Ronald.”

  “Come on, let’s leave poetry out of this. Agreed, that we can’t trust words, but actually, words come after this other thing, the fact that a bunch of us is here tonight seated around a lamp.”

  “Lower your voice,” La Maga asked.

  “Without any words I feel, I know, that I am here,” Ronald insisted. “That’s what I call reality. Even if that’s all it is.”

  “Perfect,” said Oliveira. “Except that this reality is no guarantee for you or for anybody else unless you transform it into a concept, and then into a convention, a useful scheme. The simple fact that you are on my left and I am on your right makes at least two realities out of this one reality, and realize that I don’t want to get abstruse and point out that you and I are two entities that are absolutely out of touch with one another except by means of feelings and words, things that one must mistrust if he is to be serious about it all.”

  “We’re both here,” Ronald insisted. “On the right or on the left, it doesn’t matter. We’re both looking at Babs, everybody hears what I’m saying.”

  “But those are examples for boys in short pants, my son,” Gregorovius moaned. “Horacio is right, you can’t just accept like that what you think reality is. The most you can say is that you are; that can’t be denied unless you want to start a row. What’s wrong is the ergo, and what follows the ergo, that’s well known.”

  “Don’t turn it into a question of schools,” Oliveira
said. “Let’s keep it on the level of a conversation among amateurs, which is what we are. Let’s stick with what Ronald has so movingly called reality, and which he thinks is one by itself. Do you still think it’s just one, Ronald?”

  “Yes. I concede that my way of feeling it or understanding it is different from that of Babs, and that Babs’s reality is different from Ossip’s, and so on down the line. But it’s like the different theories about the Mona Lisa or about escarole salad. Reality is there and we’re inside of it, understanding it each in his own way.”

  “The only thing that matters is the business of each understanding it in his own way,” Oliveira said. “You think that there is a definable reality because you and I are talking in this room and at this time, and because you and I know that within an hour or so something predetermined is going to happen here. All of this gives you a great ontological security, I think; you feel very sure of yourself, firmly planted in yourself and in your surroundings. But if at the same time you could be present in this reality from my position, or from Babs’s, if you could be placed, you see, and right now could be in this same room, but from where I am and with everything I am and have been, and with everything that Babs is and has been, you would understand that your cheap egocentrism would not afford you any valid reality. All it would give you would be a belief based on terror, a need to affirm what is around you so that you would not fall into the funnel and come out God knows where.”

  “We’re very different,” Ronald said, “I’m very much aware of that. But we find ourselves in certain places outside of ourselves. You and I are looking at that lamp, maybe we don’t see the same thing, but neither can we be sure that we don’t see the same thing. There’s a lamp there, what the hell.”

  “Don’t shout,” La Maga said. “I’m going to make more coffee.”

  “One has the impression,” Oliveira said, “that he’s following old footprints. We’re unimportant little schoolboys warming over arguments that are musty and not at all interesting. And all because, dear Ronald, we’ve been talking dialectically. We say: you, I, lamp, reality. Take a step back, please. Go ahead, it’s not hard. Words disappear. That lamp is a stimulus to the senses, nothing else. Now take another step back. What you call your sight and that stimulus take on an inexplicable relationship, because if we wanted to explain it we would have to take a step forward and everything would go to hell.”