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

stopping in little confidential squares to kiss on the benches or look at the hopscotch game, those childish rites of a pebble and a hop on one leg to get into Heaven, Home. La Maga spoke about her friends in Montevideo, about her childhood years, about a certain Ledesma, about her father. Oliveira listened without interest, a little sorry that he was not interested; Montevideo was just like Buenos Aires and he had to finish breaking away (what was Traveler up to, that old drifter? What kind of majestic hassles had he got into since he had left? And poor, silly Gekrepten, and the bars downtown). That’s why he listened with displeasure and was making sketches in the gravel with a stick while La Maga explained why Chempe and Graciela were good girls and how it had hurt her that Luciana had not come to the ship to see her off. Luciana was a snob and she couldn’t take in anybody.
    “What does snob mean to you?” asked Oliveira, picking up interest.
    “Well,” La Maga answered, lowering her head with the air of someone who senses that she is about to say something stupid, “I was traveling third class, but I think that if I had gone second class Luciana would have come to say goodbye.”
    “That’s the best definition I’ve ever heard,” said Oliveira.
    “And besides, there was Rocamadour,” La Maga said.
    That’s how Oliveira found out about the existence of Rocamadour, who in Montevideo had been plain Carlos Francisco. La Maga didn’t seem disposed to go into very great detail about Rocamadour’s origins except that she had not wanted an abortion and was beginning to regret the fact now.
    “But I don’t really regret it all. My problem now is making ends meet. Madame Irène costs a lot and I have to take singing lessons. All that costs a lot.”
    La Maga didn’t really know why she had come to Paris, and Oliveira was able to deduce that with just a little mixup in tickets, tourist agents, and visas she might just as well have disembarked in Singapore or Capetown. The main thing was that she had left Montevideo to confront what she modestly called “life.” The great advantage of Paris was that she knew quite a bit of French (in the style of the Pitman School of Languages) and that she would be able to see artistic masterpieces, the best films,
Kultur
in its most eminent forms. Oliveira was moved by all this (although Rocamadour had shaken him up a bit, he didn’t know why), and he thought of some of the slick girls he had known in Buenos Aires, incapable of getting any farther away than Mar del Plata, in spite of such great metaphysical desires for planetary experience. And this kid, with a child to boot, gets herself a third-class ticket and takes off to study singing in Paris without a dime in her pocket. For what it was worth, she was already giving him lessons in how to look at and see things; lessons she was not aware of, just her way of stopping suddenly in the street to peep into an entranceway where there was nothing, but where a green glow could be seen farther in, then to duck furtively into the courtyard so that the gatekeeper would not get annoyed and sometimes look at an old statue or an ivy-covered curbing, or nothing, just the worn-out paving made of round stones, mold on the walls, a watchmaker’s sign, a little old man sitting in the shade in a corner, and the cats, always, inevitably the
minouche morrongos miaumiau kitten kat chat gato gatto;
grays and whites and blacks, sewer cats, masters of time and of the warm pavement, La Maga’s invariable friends as she tickled their bellies and spoke to them in a language somewhere between silly and mysterious, making dates with them, giving advice and admonitions. Suddenly Oliveira felt funny walking with La Maga, but it was no use getting annoyed because La Maga almost inevitably would knock over beer glasses or pull her leg out from under the table in just the right way so that the waiter would trip over it and start to curse. He was happy in