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

thighs, holding off the stroke that would have plucked me out of this vigilance in the depths of emptiness for just a moment. Too late, always too late, because even though we made love so many times, happiness must have been something else, something sadder perhaps than this peace, this pleasure, a mood of unicorn or island, an endless fall in immobility. La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzypilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
    During those days in the fifties I began to feel myself penned in between La Maga and a different notion of what really should have happened. It was idiotic to revolt against the Maga world and the Rocamadour world, when everything told me that as soon as I got my freedom back I would stop feeling free. A hypocrite like few others, it bothered me to spy on my own skin, my legs, my way to get pleasure from La Maga, my attempts at being a parrot in a cage reading Kierkegaard through the bars, and I think that what bothered me most was that La Maga had no idea at all that she was my witness, and on the contrary, was convinced that I was eminently master of my fate. But no, what really exasperated me was knowing that I would never again be so close to my freedom as in those days in which I felt myself hemmed in by the Maga world, and that my anxiety to escape was an admission of defeat. It grieved me to recognize that with artificial blows, with Manichaean beams of light, or desiccated, stupid dichotomies I could not make my way up the steps of the Gare de Montparnasse where La Maga had dragged me to visit Rocamadour. Why couldn’t I accept what was happening without trying to explain it, without bringing up ideas of order and disorder, of freedom and Rocamadour, as one sets out geranium pots in a courtyard on the Calle Cochabamba? Maybe one had to fall into the depths of stupidity in order to make the key fit the lock to the latrine or to the Garden of Olives. For the moment it surprised me that La Maga had let fantasy carry her to the point of calling her son Rocamadour. In the Club we had quit looking for reasons. La Maga had only said that her son had been named for his father, but after his father had disappeared it had seemed better to call him Rocamadour and send him to the country to be brought up
en nourrice.
Sometimes La Maga would go for weeks without mentioning Rocamadour and those would always be the same times that she was hoping to become a singer of
Lieder.
Then Ronald would sit down at the piano with his cowboy-red hair and La Maga would bellow something from Hugo Wolf with a ferocity that made Madame Noguet tremble as she sat next door stringing plastic beads to sell at a stand on the Boulevard de Sébastopol. La Maga’s singing of Schumann was rather pleasant, but it all depended on the moon and what we were going to do that night, and also on Rocamadour,because no sooner did La Maga think of Rocamadour than her singing went to pot and Ronald was left alone at the piano, with all the time in the world to woodshed some of his bop ideas or to kill us softly with some blues.
    I don’t want to write about Rocamadour, at least not right now, because I would have to get so much closer to myself, to let everything that separates me from the center drop away. I always end up talking about the center without the slightest guarantee that I know what I’m saying, and I slip into the trap of geometry, that method we Occidentals use to try to regulate our lives: axis, center,
raison d’être,
Omphalos, nostalgic Indo-European names. Even this existence I sometimes try to describe, this Paris where I move about like a dry leaf, would not be visible if behind it there did not beat an anxiety for an axis, a coming together with the center shaft. All these words, all these terms for the same disorder. Sometimes I am convinced that