Shaking Talita, who woke up indignantly, Traveler read her the part on militarism and the two of them had to cover their heads with the pillow so they wouldn’t wake up the whole clinic. But first they came to agree that the majority of Argentine military men were born under the zodiacal sign of Taurus. Traveler was so drunk, born under the zodiacal sign of Scorpio, that he declared himself ready to appeal immediately in his status as second lieutenant in the reserves for permission to make use of adequate disguises on the part of military men.
“We will organize tremendous festivals of the type called harvest,” Traveler said, taking his head out from under the pillow and sticking it back again as soon as he finished the sentence. “You shall see along with all your fellows of the pampa race, because there isn’t the least doubt but what you’re a pampa, or that you’re formed by two or more kinds of paint.”
“I’m white,” Talita said. “And it’s too bad you weren’t born under the zodiacal sign of Capricorn, because I’d love for you to be a swordsman. Or at least a courier or an orderly.”
“Couriers are Aquarius. Horacio is Cancer, isn’t he?”
“If he isn’t, he deserves to be,” Talita said, closing her eyes.
“Aviation touches him a bit. All you have to do is imagine him piloting one of those Bang-Bangs and there you have him crashing his plane into the Confitería del Aguila at tea and crumpet time. It would be inevitable.”
Talita turned out the light and snuggled a little closer to Traveler, who was sweating and twisting, wrapped up in diverse signs of the zodiac, national corporations of commission agents who had a yellow look.
“Horacio saw La Maga tonight,” Talita said. “He saw her in the courtyard, two hours ago, when you were on guard duty.”
“Oh,” said Traveler lifting up his shoulders and looking for his cigarettes by Braille. “We would have to place him among the churchgoing guardians of collections.”
“I was La Maga,” Talita said, snuggling closer to Traveler. “I don’t know if you’re aware of that.”
“Most likely yes.”
“It had to happen some time. What surprises me is that he’s become so startled by the mixup.”
“Oh, you know, Horacio gets something started and then he looks at it with the same look puppies put on when they’ve taken a crap and stand there amazed looking at it.”
“I think it happened the very day we went to meet him at the dock,” Talita said. “It’s hard to explain, because he didn’t even look at me and between the two of you you treated me like a dog, with the cat under my arm.”
“Breeding of noncorpulent animals,” Traveler said.
“He had me confused with La Maga,” Talita insisted. “Everything else had to follow as if Ceferino had enumerated it, one thing after another.”
“La Maga,” Traveler said, dragging on his cigarette until his face was lit up in the darkness, “is also from Uruguay. So you see there’s a certain order.”
“Let me talk, Manú.”
“Better not. What for?”
“First the old man with the pigeon came, and then we went down to the basement. Horacio kept talking all the time we were going down, about those hollows that worry him. He was desperate, Manú, it was frightening to see how peaceful he seemed, and all the time … We went down on the freight elevator, and he went over to shut one of the freezers, it was horrible.”
“So you went downstairs,” Traveler said. “O.K.”
“It was different,” Talita said. “It wasn’t like going down. We were talking, but I felt as if Horacio were somewhere else, talking to someone else, to a drowned woman, for example. It comes back to me now, but he’d never said that La Maga had been drowned in the river.”
“She isn’t the least bit drowned,” Traveler said. “I’m sure of that, although I have to admit I haven’t got the slightest idea. Knowing Horacio is enough.”
“He thinks she’s dead, Manú, and at the same time he feels her close by and tonight it was me. He told me that he’s seen her on the ship too, and under the bridge on the Avenida San Martin … He doesn’t say it as if he were talking about a hallucination, and he doesn’t expect you to believe it either. He says it, that’s all, and it’s true, it’s something that’s there. When he closed the freezer and I was afraid and I said something or other, he began to look at me and it was the other one he was looking at. I’m nobody’s zombie, Manú, I don’t want to be anybody’s zombie.”
Traveler stroked her hair, but Talita pushed him away impatiently. She had sat down on the bed and he could feel her trembling. Trembling, in that heat. She told him that Horacio had kissed her and she tried to explain the kiss, and since she couldn’t find the words she kept touching Traveler in the darkness, her arms fell like cloths over his face, over his arms, slipped down along his chest, rested on his knees, and out of all this came a kind of explanation that Traveler was incapable of rejecting, a contagion that came from farther off, from some place in the depths or on the heights or in some place which was not that night and that room, a contagion that possessed him in turn through Talita, a babbling like an untranslatable announcement, the suspicion that he was facing something that could be an announcement, but the voice that brought it was broken and when it spoke the message it spoke it in some unintelligible language, and yet it was the only necessary thing there within hand’s reach, demanding recognition and acceptance, beating itself against a spongy wall of smoke and cork, unseizable and offering itself naked between the arms but like water pouring down among tears.
“The hard mental crust,” Traveler managed to think. Confusedly he heard that fear, that Horacio, that the freight elevator, that the dove; a communicable system was little by little entering his ear again. So the poor devil was afraid he would kill him, it was laughable.
“Did he really say that? It’s hard to believe, you know how proud he is.”
“It’s something else,” Talita said, taking the cigarette away from him and dragging on it with a sort of silent-movie eagerness. “I think the fear he feels is like a last refuge, the crossbar he holds onto before jumping. He’s so happy to be afraid tonight, I know he’s happy.”
“That,” said Traveler, breathing like a real yogi, “is something Cuca would not understand, you can be sure. And I must be in an exceedingly intelligent mood tonight, because that business of happy fear is a little hard to take, my love.”
Talita slid up on the bed a little and leaned against Traveler. She knew that she was by his side again, that she had not drowned, that he was there holding her up on the surface of the water and that actually there was pity, a marvelous pity. They both felt it at the same moment, and they slid towards each other as if to fall into themselves, into the common earth where words and caresses and mouths enfolded them as a circumference does a circle, those tranquilizing metaphors, that old sadness satisfied with going back to being the same as always, with continuing, keeping afloat against wind and tide, against call and fall.
(–140)
134
THE FLOWER GARDEN
ONE must be aware of the fact that a garden that is very strictly planned, in the style of “French parks,” consisting of flowerbeds, stone pots, and trellises arranged geometrically, calls for great competence and much care.
On the other hand, in a garden of “English” type, the mistakes of the amateur are more easily disguised. A few bushes, a bed of grass, and a single flowerbed with mixed flowers that stands out neatly, in the shelter of a well-located wall or fence, are the essential elements of a very decorative and very practical combination.
If some varieties unfortunately do not yield the desired results, it will be easy to replace them by means of transplants; imperfection or lack of care in the combination will not be visible because the other flowers, arranged in patches that differ as to surface, height, and color, will always form a grouping that will be pleasant to the eye.
This type of planting, very popular in England and the United States, is
called a “mixed border.” Flowers set out this way, mixed in together and showing each other off as if they had grown naturally, will give your garden a rural and natural aspect, while planting done in rows, squares, and circles always has an artificial character about it and requires absolute perfection.
Therefore, for practical as well as aesthetic reasons, it is proper to advise a mixed-border arrangement for the amateur gardener.
Almanach Hachette
(–25)
135
“THEY’RE delicious,” Gekrepten said. “I already ate two while I was frying them, they’re a real delicacy, believe me.”
“Make me another bitter mate, old girl,” Oliveira said.
“Right away, love. Wait’ll I change your cold compress first.”
“Thanks. It’s very strange eating fried cakes with your eyes bandaged. That’s how they should train the guys who are going to discover the cosmos for us.”
“The ones who fly to the moon in those machines? They put them in a capsule or something like that, right?”
“Yes, and they give them fried cakes and mate.”
(–63)
136
MORELLI’S mania for quotations:
“It would be difficult for me to explain the publication in one single book of poems and a denial of poetry, of the diary of a dead man and the notes of a prelate friend of mine …”
GEORGES BATAILLE, Haine de la poésie
(–12)
137
MORELLIANA
If the volume or the tone of the work can lead one to believe that the author is attempting a sum, hasten to point out to him that he is face to face with the opposite attempt, that of an implacable subtraction.
(–17)
138
SOMETIMES La Maga and I feel like profaning our memories. It all depends on so little, an afternoon’s bad mood, the anguish over what can happen if we start looking at each other straight in the eye. Little by little, along the meandering of a dialogue that’s like a piece of shredded rag, we begin to remember. Two different worlds, alien, almost always irreconcilable, come into our words, and as if by common consent the joke comes into being. I usually start scornfully, remembering my old blind cult of friendship, misunderstood loyalties that gave little in return, the humble obstinacy of banners carried to political rallies, to intellectual lectures, to fervent love affairs. I laugh at a suspicious honesty that so many times caused its own or someone else’s misfortune, while underneath betrayals and moments of dishonesty were spinning their webs and I could not prevent them, I could only allow others to betray or be dishonest to my face and doubly to blame could not do anything to prevent them. I make fun of my uncles and their decanted decency, stuck in shit up to their necks where the immaculate stiff collar still glows. They would fall over on their backs if they knew that they were wallowing in manure, convinced, the one in Tucumán and the other in Nueve de Julio, that they are the model of decanted Argentinity (those are the words they use). And yet I have fond memories of them. And yet I will trample on those memories on days when La Maga and I get fed up with Paris and want to do ourselves some harm.
When La Maga stops laughing and asks me why I say such things about my uncles, I wish they could be there listening behind the door like the old man on the sixth floor. I prepare a careful explanation, because I do not want to be unjust or to exaggerate. I also want it to be helpful for La Maga, because she has never been able to understand moral questions (just like Étienne, but less selfishly; just because the only responsibility she believes in is of the present, the very moment when one must be good or noble; underneath it all, for reasons just as hedonistic and selfish as those of Étienne’s).
Then I explain that my two most honorable uncles are a pair of perfect Argentines as the expression was understood in 1915, a period in the high point of their lives that varied between ranching and business. When one talks about “Latin Americans of yesteryear,” he means anti-Semites, xenophobes, bourgeoisie rooted in a nostalgia for the small ranch where Indian girls prepared mate for ten pesos a month, all with the bluest and whitest of patriotic sentiments, a respect for everything military and for expeditions into the frontier, with dozens of starched shirts, even though his salary isn’t big enough for monthly payments to that abject being the whole family calls the “Russian,” dealt with by shouts, threats, and at best with bullying phrases. When La Maga starts to share this vision (of which she personally hasn’t the slightest experience) I hasten to show her that within this general panorama of my two uncles and their respective families there are people with excellent qualities. Self-sacrificing parents and their children, citizens who go to the polls and read serious newspapers, hard-working officials well thought of by their superiors and colleagues, people capable of staying up nights on end at the bedside of a person who is ill, or of doing some magnificent gauchesque sort of thing. La Maga looks at me perplexed, afraid I’m making fun of her. I have to insist, explain why I love my uncles so much, why only when we get fed up with streets and the weather it occurs to me to haul their remains out of the shadows and trample on the memories I still have of them. Then La Maga perks up a bit and starts talking about her mother, whom she loves and detests in proportions that vary with the moment. Sometimes she terrifies me with the way in which she can refer to a childhood episode that other times she has mentioned with laughter, as if it were amusing, and suddenly it becames a sinister knot, a kind of swamp with leeches and ticks that pursue and suck. In moments like that La Maga’s face looks like a fox’s, her nostrils narrow, she turns pale, she speaks in jerks and starts, twisting her hands and panting, and like a huge, obscene piece of chewing-gum, her mother’s pasty face begins to appear, her mother’s poorly dressed body, the suburban street her mother lives on like an old spittoon in a vacant lot, the misery in which her mother is a hand that scrubs a pot with a greasy rag. The worst of it is that La Maga can’t go on for very long; soon she starts to cry, hiding her face against me, huddling down to an incredible degree, we have to prepare tea, forget about everything, go off somewhere or make love, make love without any uncles or mother, almost always that or going to sleep, but almost always that.
(–127)
139
THE notes of the piano (la, re, mi flat, do, ti, ti flat, mi, so), those of the violin (la, mi, ti flat, mi), those of the horn (la, ti flat, la, ti flat, mi, so), represent the musical equivalent of the names of ArnoLD SCHoenberg, Anton WEBErn, and ALBAn BErG (according to the German system in which H represents ti, B ti flat, and S (ES) mi flat). There is nothing new about this kind of musical anagram. It must be recalled that Bach used his own name in a similar way and that the same procedure was common property among polyphonic composers of the 16th century (…) Another significant analogy with the Violin Concerto consists in the strict symmetry of the whole. In the Violin Concerto the key number is two: two separate movements, each divided into two parts, as well as the violin-orchestra division in the instrumental grouping. In the Kammerkonzert, on the other hand, the number three stands out: the dedication represents the Maestro and his two disciples; the instruments are grouped in three categories: piano, violin, and a combination of wind instruments; its architecture is the building up of three linked movements, each of which reveals to a greater or lesser degree a tripartite composition.
From the anonymous commentary on the Chamber Concerto for violin, piano, and 3 wind instruments by ALBAN BERG (Pathé Vox recording PL 8660)
(–133)
140
IN hopes of something more exciting, exercises in profanation and the far-out, in the pharmacy between midnight and two in the morning, once Cuca had gone off to get-a-good-night’s-sleep (or before, so she would go: Cuca sticks it out, but she gets terribly tired from the effort of resisting with a bounteous smile and a sort of turning her back on the monsters’ verbal assaults. Every time she leaves a little earlier to get some sleep, and the monsters smile pleasantly as they wish her good night. Talita, wit
h her greater neutrality, is pasting on labels or consulting the Index Pharmacorum Gottinga).
The sort of thing they do: Translating with Manichaean inversion a famous sonnet:
The deflowered, dead, and fearful past,
Can it but bring us back with somber flap of wing?
Reading a page from Traveler’s notebook: “Waiting my turn in the barber shop, spotting a UNESCO publication, and picking up on the following names: Opintotoveri/Työläisopiskelija/Työväenopisto. It seems that these are the names of some pedagogical journals from Finland. Complete unreality for the reader. Does it all really exist? For millions of blond-headed people, Opinotoveri means the Supervisor of General Education. For me…(Wrath). But they don’t know what cafisho means (Buenos Aires satisfaction). Irreality multiplies. To think that specialists can foretell from the fact that one can reach Helsinki in a few hours in a Boeing 707 … The results of personal extrapolation. Give me a crew-cut, Pedro.”
Linguistic forms of alienation. Pensive Talita, face to face with Genshiryoku Kokunai Jijo, that in no way seems to resemble the development of nuclear activity in Japan. She is just becoming convinced by superposition and differentiation when her husband, that malignant provider of material picked up in barber shops, shows her the variant Genshiryoku Kaigai Jijo, evidently the development of nuclear activities abroad. Talita’s enthusiasm, convinced analytically that Kokunai = Japan and Kaigai = abroad. The confusion on the part of Matsui, the drycleaner on the Calle Lascano, when he is confronted with a polyglot exhibition by Talita, who turns away, poor thing, with her tail between her legs.
Hopscotch: A Novel Page 54