Hopscotch: A Novel

by Julio Cortázar

  How strange that in the inventory read on the day of the great transaction there had been no mention of a morgue. But they’ve got to keep their coldcuts somewhere until the family comes for them or the city sends its wagon. The inventory probably mentioned a storeroom, or a transfer room, or a cold chamber, euphemisms like that, or maybe it simply spoke of the eight freezers. A morgue, after all, was not a pretty thing to mention in a document, Remorino thought. And why eight freezers? Oh, that … Some requirement of the federal Department of Health or some arrangement the ex-superintendent had made when he was taking bids, but it hadn’t been a bad idea because sometimes there were streaks, like the year San Lorenzo had won the cup (what year was that? Remorino couldn’t remember, but it was the year San Lorenzo had ended up in first place), four patients suddenly kicked the bucket, all in one stroke, like nobody’s business. Not very usual, of course, with Number 56 you knew in advance, what could you do. Speak low along here so we don’t wake the bums up. What do you want at this time of night, back to bed with you, back to bed. He’s a good boy, look how he takes off. He gets the notion to come out in the hall at night, but don’t get the idea he’s after the women, we’ve got that business all taken care of. He comes out just because he’s crazy, that’s all, just like any one of us if you really think about it.

  Oliveira and Traveler thought that Remorino was great. A fellow with experience, you could see that right off. They helped the man with the cart, who when he wasn’t a stretcher-bearer was simply Number 7, a curable case so that he could help out with easy jobs. They took the cart down on the freight elevator, a little crowded, and they felt close to Number 56’s shape underneath the sheet. His family was coming for him on Monday, they were from Trelew, poor people. They still hadn’t come for Number 22, it was too much. People with money, Remorino thought: the worst kind, real vultures, no feelings. And did the city let Number 22 …? The order was floating around somewhere, one of those things. So the days were going by, two weeks, you can see the advantage of having lots of freezers. For one reason or another there were three of them there now, because Number 2 was there too, she was one of the original patients. That was really something, Number 2 had no family, but the Bureau of Burials had notified them that the truck would come by within forty-eight hours. Remorino added up the hours to be funny, and it was three hundred and six already, almost three hundred and seven. He called her an original patient because she was a little old lady left over from the early days, before the time of the doctor who had sold out to Don Ferraguto. Don Ferraguto seems to be a nice guy, doesn’t he? To think he used to own a circus, that’s really something.

  Number 7 opened the door of the elevator, pulled out the cart, and went driving wildly down the hallway until Remorino suddenly put on the brakes and took out a key to open the metal door while Traveler and Oliveira took out cigarettes simultaneously, those reflections … They really should have brought their overcoats, because there was no heat wave in the morgue, which looked like a barroom with a long table on one side and a refrigerator that reached up to the ceiling on the other wall.

  “Go get a beer,” Remorino ordered. “You didn’t see anything, eh? Sometimes the rules here are too … Better not say anything to Don Ferraguto, we just have some beer once in a while.”

  Number 7 went to one of the doors of the refrigerator and took out a bottle. While Remorino was opening it with an opener he had on his jackknife, Traveler looked at Oliveira, but Number 7 spoke first.

  “Maybe we’d better put him away first, don’t you think?”

  “You …” Remorino began, but he just stood with the open jackknife in his hand. “You’re right, boy. Let’s go. That one’s empty.”

  “No,” said Number 7.

  “Are you going to contradict me?”

  “I beg your pardon, please,” Number 7 said. “But that’s the one that’s empty.”

  Remorino stood there looking at him, and Number 7 smiled at him and after a kind of salute went over to the door in dispute and opened it. A bright light came out, something like an aurora borealis or some other Hyperborean phenomenon, in the middle of which could be seen the clear outline of two rather large feet.

  “Number 22,” said Number 7. “Didn’t I tell you? I can tell them all by their feet. Number 2’s in there. What do you want to bet? Take a look if you don’t believe me. Convinced? Well, then, let’s put him in this empty one. If you would give me a hand, easy, he has to go in head first.”

  “He’s a real champ,” Remorino said to Traveler in a low voice. “I really can’t see why Ovejero keeps him in here. We haven’t got any glasses, so we’ll have to use what we were born with.”

  Traveler inhaled smoke all the way down to his knees before taking the bottle. It passed around from hand to hand, and Remorino told the first dirty story.

  (–66)

  54

  FROM the window of his room on the third floor Oliveira could see the courtyard with its fountain, the trickle of water, Number 8’s hopscotch, the three trees shading the geranium beds, and the high wall that hid the houses on the street. Number 8 had been playing hopscotch all afternoon, he was unbeatable, Number 4 and Number 19 had tried to get Heaven away from him, but it was useless, Number 8’s foot was a precision instrument, a shot at a square, the stone always stopping in the most favorable position, it was extraordinary. At night the hopscotch had a sort of weak phosphorescence about it and Oliveira liked to look at it from his window. In his bed, giving in to the effects of a cubic centimeter of hypnosis, Number 8 was probably sleeping like a stork, mentally standing on one leg, moving his stone with sharp, infallible strokes towards the conquest of a heaven that seemed to lose its charm once it had been gained. “You’re an insufferable romantic,” Oliveira thought to himself, preparing a mate. “When will you be ready for the pink pajamas?” He had a letter from the disconsolate Gekrepten on the table, because you can only get out on Saturdays, but what kind of a life is this going to be, my love, I refuse to resign myself to being alone so much of the time, if you could just see our little room. Resting the gourd on the windowsill, Oliveira took a pen out of his pocket and answered the letter. In the first place, there was a telephone (followed by the number); second, they were very busy, but the reorganization shouldn’t take more than two weeks and then they would be able to see each other at least on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Third, he was running out of yerba. “I write as if I were imprisoned,” he thought, signing the letter. It was almost eleven o’clock, soon it would be his turn to relieve Traveler who was doing guard duty on the fourth floor. Mixing another mate, he read the letter again and licked the envelope. He preferred writing, the telephone was a confusing instrument in Gekrepten’s hands, she didn’t understand what was being explained to her.

  In the left wing the light in the pharmacy went out. Talita came out into the courtyard, locked the door (it was easy to see her in the light of the hot and starry sky) and went indecisively over to the fountain. Oliveira whistled softly, but Talita kept on looking at the jet of water, and even put out an experimental finger and held it in the water for a moment. Then she crossed the courtyard, walking across the hopscotch without any continuity, and disappeared under Oliveira’s window. Everything had had something of Leonora Carrington pictures about it, the night with Talita and the hopscotch, a crossing of lines that are unaware of one another, a trickle of water in a fountain. When the figure in pink came out of somewhere and went slowly over to the hopscotch, not daring to step on it, Oliveira knew that everything was coming back into order, that of necessity the pink figure would pick a flat stone out of the several that Number 8 kept piled up next to the flowerbed, and that La Maga, because it was La Maga, would double up her left leg and with the tip of her shoe propel the marker into the first square, would push the marker into the second (and Oliveira trembled a little because the marker had been on the point of going off the hopscotch, the uneven paving had stopped it exactly on the edge of the second square), wo
uld enter lightly and remain motionless for a second, like a pink flamingo in the half-light, before bringing her foot slowly up to the marker, calculating the distance to the third square.

  Talita raised her head and saw Oliveira in the window. It took her a while to recognize him, and in the meantime she was balancing on one leg, as if holding herself in the air with her hands. Looking at her with an ironical disenchantment, Oliveira recognized his mistake, he saw that the pink was not pink, that Talita was wearing an ash-gray blouse and a skirt that most likely was white. Everything (in a manner of speaking) had an explanation: Talita had come in and had gone out again, attracted by the hopscotch, and that break of a second between her passage and reappearance had been enough to trick him just as on that other night in the prow of the ship, as probably on so many other nights. He scarcely answered the gesture from Talita, who was lowering her head now, concentrating; she calculated and the marker left the second square with force and went into the third, straightened up on end, started rolling along on its edge, left the hopscotch, went one or two paving stones’ distance away from the hopscotch.

  “You’ll need more practice if you want to beat Number 8,” Oliveira said.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “It’s hot. Guard duty at eleven-thirty. Letters.”

  “Oh,” Talita said. “What a night.”

  “Magical,” Oliveira said and Talita laughed briefly before disappearing under the entranceway. Oliveira heard her go up the stairs, pass by his door (but she was probably going up on the elevator), reach the fourth floor. “I’ve already admitted that they do look a lot alike,” he thought. “That, along with my being an idiot, explains it all, right down to the last detail.” But just the same he stayed there looking at the courtyard for a while, the deserted hopscotch, as if to convince himself. At ten past eleven Traveler came down to get him and gave him the report. Number 5 rather restless, notify Ovejero if he got bothersome; the rest were asleep.

  The fourth floor was as perfect as a glove, and even Number 5 had calmed down. He accepted a cigarette, smoked it intensely, and explained to Oliveira how the conspiracy of Jewish publishers was holding up the publication of his great work on comets; he promised him an autographed copy. Oliveira left the door half open because he was on to his tricks, and he began to go up and down the hall, looking from time to time through the magic eyes installed thanks to the astuteness of Ovejero, the superintendent, and Liber & Finkel Co.: each room a little Van Eyck, except for that of Number 14 who as always had pasted a stamp over the lens. At twelve o’clock Remorino arrived under the influence of a few glasses of gin; they talked about horses and soccer, and then Remorino went off to the ground floor to sleep for a while. Number 5 had quieted down completely, and the heat closed in on the silence and half-darkness of the corridor. The idea that someone might try to kill him had not occurred to Oliveira until that moment, but all he needed was an instantaneous picture, a sketch that had more of a shiver than anything else about it, to make him realize that it was not a new idea, that it did not come from the atmosphere of the corridor with its closed doors and the shadow of the freight elevator in the background. The same thing could have occurred to him in Roque’s, or in the subway at five in the afternoon. Or much earlier, in Europe, some night when he was wandering through poor neighborhoods, vacant lots where an old tin can could be used to slit a throat almost as if the two objects were in agreement. Stopping by the shaft of the freight elevator, he looked into the black depths and thought again about the Phlegrean Fields, the way in. In the circus it had been just the opposite, a hole up above, the opening in communication with free space, an image of consummation; now he was at the edge of the pit, the hole of Eleusis, the clinic wrapped in sulphurous vapors, the descent. Turning around he saw the straight line of the hallway to its end, with the faint purple light from the bulbs on the frames of the white doors. He did a foolish thing: picking up his left leg, he took little hops along the hall up to where he was opposite the first door. When he put his left foot down on the green linoleum again he was bathed in sweat. With each hop he had muttered the name of Manú between his teeth. “To think that I had expected a passage,” he said to himself leaning against the wall. Impossible to objectivize the first fraction of a thought without finding it grotesque. Passage, for example. To think that he had expected. Expected a passage. Letting himself slide down, he sat on the floor and stared at the linoleum. Passage to what? And why did the clinic have to serve as a passage? What kind of temples did he go around needing, what intercessors, what psychic or moral hormones that could project him outside or inside himself?

  When Talita arrived with a glass of lemonade (those ideas of hers, little teacher of the workers’ quarter and The Drop of Milk), he brought the matter up right away. Talita wasn’t surprised by anything; sitting down opposite him she watched him drink the lemonade in one gulp.

  “If Cuca could see us stretched out on the floor she’d have an attack. What a way you have of standing guard. Are they asleep?”

  “Yes, I think so. Number 14 covered her peephole, who knows what she’s up to. For some reason I don’t feel like looking in.”

  “You’re the model of delicacy,” Talita said. “But maybe I, as one woman to another …”

  She returned almost immediately, and this time she sat down next to Oliveira, leaning against the wall.

  “Sleeping the sleep of the chaste. Poor Manú had a horrible nightmare. It’s always the same, he goes back to sleep but I’m so upset I end up getting out of bed. I thought you might have been warm, you or Remorino, so I made some lemonade. What a summer, and with those walls out there that shut out the breeze. So I look like that other woman.”

  “A little bit, yes,” Oliveira said, “but that’s not important. What I would like to know is why I saw you dressed in pink.”

  “Influence of the environment, you’ve assimilated her in among the others.”

  “Yes, that’s the easiest explanation if you take everything into account. But you, why did you start to play hopscotch? Have you become assimilated too?”

  “You’re right,” Talita said. “Why did I? I never really did care for hopscotch. But don’t you go making up one of your theories about my being possessed, I’m nobody’s zombie.”

  “You don’t have to shout it.”

  “Nobody’s,” Talita repeated, lowering her voice. “I saw the hopscotch as I was coming in, there was a pebble … I played and I went away.”

  “You lost on the third square. The same thing would have happened to La Maga, she’s incapable of keeping things up, she doesn’t have the least sense of distance, time falls apart in her hands, she goes around bumping into everyone. Thanks to which, I might say in passing, she is absolutely perfect in her way of denouncing everybody else’s perfection. But I was talking about the freight elevator, I think.”

  “Yes, you said something and then you drank your lemonade. No, wait, first you drank your lemonade.”

  “I was probably feeling sorry for myself; when you came I was in the midst of a shamanistic trance, on the point of jumping into the hole to put an end once and for all to conjectures, that svelte word.”

  “The hole ends in the basement,” Talita said. “There are cockroaches, if you want to know, and colored rags on the floor. Everything is dark and damp, and a little beyond is where the dead people start. Manú told me about it.”

  “Is Manú asleep?”

  “Yes. He had a nightmare, he shouted something about a lost necktie. I already told you.”

  “It’s a great night for confiding,” Oliveira said, looking at her slowly.

  “Very great,” Talita said. “La Maga was just a name, and now she already has a face. The color of her clothes may still be wrong, though.”

  “Her clothes are the least important, when I see her again who knows what she’ll be wearing. She’ll be naked, or she’ll be walking with her child in her arms singing him Les Amants du Havre, a song you don’t know.
”

  “Oh yes I do,” Talita said. “They used to play it a lot on Radio Belgrano. La-lá-la, la-lá-la …”

  Oliveira sketched out a soft slap which turned into a caress. Talita threw her head back and bumped it against the wall of the hallway. She frowned and rubbed the back of her neck, but she kept on humming the tune. She heard a click and then a buzzing that seemed blue in the half-light of the hallway. They heard the freight elevator coming up, they looked at each other for a second before jumping up. Who could it be at that hour … Click, it passed the second floor, the blue buzzing. Talita drew back and got behind Oliveira. Click. The pink pajamas were perfectly visible in the cube of wired glass. Oliveira ran over to the freight elevator and opened the door. An almost cold breath of air came out. The old man looked at him as if he didn’t know him and kept on petting the pigeon; it was easy to see that the pigeon had been white once and that the continuous caressing of the old man’s hand had turned it ash-gray. Motionless, with wild eyes, it was resting in the hollow of the hand that held it at chest level, while the fingers kept passing over it from neck to tail, from neck to tail.

  “Go to bed, Don López,” Oliveira said, breathing heavily.

  “It’s hot in bed,” Don López said. “Look how happy she is when I take her for a walk.”

  “It’s very late, go to your room.”