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

to tell my feelings to La Maga. It didn’t take me long to understand that you didn’t discuss reality in methodical terms with La Maga. Praise of disorder would have horrified her as much as criticism of it. Disorder did not exist for her, as I discovered while I was finding out simultaneously what her purse contained (it was in a café on the Rue Réaumur, it was raining and we were beginning to want each other). But I accepted it and even favored it once I had identified it. My relations with practically all the rest of the world were based on these disadvantages, and how many times had I lain on a bed left unmade for several days listening to La Maga cry because a little girl on the Métro had reminded her of Rocamadour, or watched her comb her hair after she had spent all afternoon before a portrait of Eleanor of Aquitaine and was killing herself trying to look like the painting, and it occurred to me like a sort of mental belch that this whole A B C of my life was a painful bit of stupidity, because it was based solely on a dialectical pattern, on the choice of what could be called nonconduct rather than conduct, on faddish indecency instead of social decency. La Maga was putting up her hair, taking it down, putting it up again. She was thinking about Rocamadour. She sang something from Hugo Wolf (badly), she kissed me, she asked me about her hairdo, she began to sketch on a scrap of yellow paper. That was all she, no doubt about it, and there was I on a deliberately dirty bed, drinking a glass of deliberately flat beer, always being myself and my life; there was I with my life face to face with other people’s lives. But I was proud nonetheless to be a conscious bum and to have lived under all sorts of moons, in all kinds of scrapes with La Maga and Ronald and Rocamadour and the Club and the streets and my moral sickness and other worse ones, and Berthe Trépat and sometimes hunger and old man Trouille, who used to get me out of trouble, under theeaves of vomity nights of music and tobacco and little meannesses and all kinds of exchanges, because underneath and on top of it all I had refused to pretend like normal bohemians that the chaos of my affairs and finances was some sort of higher spiritual order or something else with an equally disgusting label, nor had I accepted the notion that all one needed was just one split second of decency (decency, now, young fellow!) to crawl out from the midst of so much filthy cotton. And that’s how I had met La Maga, who was my witness and my spy without being aware of it; and the irritation of thinking about all this and knowing that since it was always easier to think than to be, that in my case the
ergo
of the expression was no
ergo
or anything at all like it, so that we used to go along the Left Bank and La Maga, without knowing she was my spy and my witness, would be amazed at how much I knew about things like literature and cool jazz, which were great mysteries for her. And I felt antagonism for all these things when I was with La Maga, for we loved each other in a sort of dialectic of magnet and iron filings, attack and defense, handball and wall. I suppose La Maga had her notions about me and she must have thought I had been healed of my prejudices or that I was coming over to hers, more and more lighthearted and poetic. In the midst of this precarious happiness, this false truce, I held out my hand and touched the tangled ball of yarn which is Paris, its infinite material all wrapped up around itself, the precipitate of its atmosphere falling on its windows and forming images of clouds and garrets. There was no disorder then. The world was still something petrified and established, swinging on its hinges, a skein of streets and trees and names and months. There was no disorder to open escape-hatches, there was only filth and misery, glasses with stale beer, stockings in a corner, a bed which smelled of sex and hair, a woman who ran her small, thin hand along my