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

spite of being exasperated all the time with that business of not doing things the way they ought to be done, of the way she resolutely ignored the larger figuresof an account to go into ecstasies over the tail of a modest 3, or would stop short in the middle of the street (a black Renault came to a halt about five feet away and the driver stuck his head out and used his Picardy accent to call her a whore). She would stop as if there was a real view to be seen from the middle of the street, as if the sight of the distant Panthéon was much better from there than from the sidewalk. Things like that.
    Oliveira already knew Perico and Ronald. La Maga introduced him to Étienne and Étienne introduced them both to Gregorovius. The Serpent Club began to take shape at night in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Everybody accepted La Maga’s presence right away as something inevitable and natural, even though they would get annoyed with having to explain to her almost everything they were talking about, or because she would send a serving of fried potatoes flying through the air simply because she didn’t know how to use a fork in the proper fashion and the potatoes would almost always land on the heads of the people at the next table, and excuses would have to be made, telling how thoughtless La Maga was. La Maga did not get along very well with them as a group. Oliveira realized that she preferred to be with them individually, to walk along the street with Étienne or with Babs, to bring them into her world, never consciously, but bringing them in all the same because they were people who only wanted to escape the ordinary routine of buses and history, and therefore, in one way or another, all the people in the Club were thankful to La Maga even though they would rain insults on her at the slightest provocation. Etienne, sure of himself as a dog or a mailbox, would get furious when La Maga would come out with one of her comments concerning his latest painting, and even Perico Romero had to admit that-when-it-came-to-being-a-female-La-Maga-took-the-cake. For weeks or months (keeping track of time was difficult for Oliveira, happy,
ergo
futureless) they walked and walked around Paris looking at things, letting happen whatever had to happen, loving and fighting, and all of this outside the stream of news events, family obligations, and physical and moral burdens of any sort.
    Toc, toc.
    “Come on, let’s wake up,” Oliveira would say from time to time.
    “What for?” La Maga would reply, watching the
péniches
sail under the Pont Neuf. “Toc, toc, you’ve got a bird in your head.Toc, toc, he picks at you all the time, he wants you to give him some Argentinian food to eat. Toc, toc.”
    “O.K.,” grumbled Oliveira. “Don’t get me mixed up with Rocamadour. Before we’re through we’ll be speaking Gliglish to some clerk or doorman and there’ll be hell to pay. Look at that guy following the Negro girl.”
    “I know her. She works in a café on the Rue de Provence. She likes girls. The poor guy has had it.”
    “Did she try anything with you?”
    “Naturally. But we became friends just the same. I gave her my rouge and she gave me a book by somebody called Retef, no … wait, Retif …”
    “I see. So you didn’t go to bed with her, right? It could have been fun for a woman like you.”
    “Did you ever go to bed with a man, Horacio?”
    “Sure. For the experience, you know.”
    La Maga looked at him out of the corner of her eye, suspecting that he was kidding her, that all of this came from his being furious over the toc-toc bird in his head, the bird that asked him for Argentinian food. Then she threw herself at him to the great surprise of a couple strolling along the Rue Saint-Sulpice, and she mussed up his hair as she laughed. Oliveira had to hold her arms down and they began to laugh. The couple looked at them and although the husband had a hint of a smile, his wife was much too scandalized by such