Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) Read Free

out was that the lump was nowhere in sight, even though I had seen it leap among the shoes which now were moving about restlessly like a flock of chickens. A carpet on the floor made things worse, and despite the fact that it was dirty from so much treading on top of it, the lump had gone to hide in the pile and could not be found at all. The waiter was crawling around on the other side of the table and there we were, two quadrupeds making our way about among those chicken-shoes which all the while were cackling madly up above. The waiter was still looking for a Parker or a louis d’or, and when we were well under the table, with a feeling of great intimacy and shadow, he asked me what it was and I told him the truth. His face was ready to fly off its hinges, but I was not in any mood to laugh. Fear had doubled the knot in my stomach, and I had become by then quite desperate and began to grab at the women’s shoes to see if the lump might not be hiding under the arch of one, while the chickens cackled and the businessmen-roosters pecked me onthe back. I could hear Ronald and Étienne breaking up with laughter as I moved from one table to another until I found the lump ensconced behind an Empire foot. Everybody was furious and so was I, as I held the sugar tightly in my palm and felt it dissolve in the sweat my hand gave off, as if it were some sort of mean and sticky vengeance meant to terminate another one of those episodes that I was always getting involved in.
    (– 2 )

2
    AT first it had been like a bloodletting, being here, a flogging to be taken internally, the need to feel a stupid blue-covered passport in my coat pocket, the hotel key hung securely on its rack. Fear, ignorance, bewilderment. This is the name of this thing, that’s how you ask for that thing, now that woman is going to smile, the Jardin des Plantes starts at the end of that street. Paris, a postcard with a drawing by Klee next to a dirty mirror. La Maga had appeared one afternoon on the Rue du Cherche-Midi. When she came to my room on the Rue de la Tombe Issoire she would always bring a flower, a Klee or Miró postcard, and if she didn’t have any money she would pick up the leaf of a plane tree in the park. At that time I used to pick up pieces of wire and empty boxes on the street early in the morning and I made them into mobiles, silhouettes which swung around the fireplace, useless gadgets which La Maga would help me paint. We didn’t love each other, so we would make love with an objective and critical virtuosity, but then we would fall into terrible silences and the foam on the beer glasses would start to look like burlap, getting warm and shriveling up while we looked at each other and figured that this was Time. La Maga would finally get up and walk uselessly around the room. More than once I saw her admire her body in the mirror, cup her breasts in her hands like a small Syrian statue, moving her eyes slowly over her body in a sort of caress. I could never resist the urge to call her over to me, to have her fall on top of me, unfold again after having been so alone and so in love for a moment, face to face with the eternity of her body.
    We didn’t talk much about Rocamadour those days; our pleasure was selfish and it used to come moaning over us with its narrow brow, tying us up with its salty hands. I had come to accept La Maga’s disorder as the natural condition of everymoment, and we would go from memories of Rocamadour to a plate of warmed-over noodles, mixing wine and beer and lemonade, going to the corner to buy two dozen oysters from the old woman there, playing Schubert songs on Madame Noguet’s shell of a piano, or Bach preludes, or putting up with
Porgy and Bess
along with steak and pickles. The disorder in which we lived, or the order, rather, which saw a
bidé
quickly and naturally changed into a storage place for records and unanswered letters, seemed to me like some sort of necessary discipline, although I didn’t care