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

behavior.
    “You’re right,” Oliveira confessed finally. “I’m incurable. Talking about waking up when, after all, it’s so nice to be asleep like this.”
    They stopped by a shop window to look at book titles. La Maga began to ask questions, using the colors of the covers as her guide. Flaubert had to be put in his period for her, she had to be told that Montesquieu, how Raymond Radiguet, explained to about when Théophile Gautier. La Maga listened, drawing on the window with her finger. “A bird in my head wants me to give him some Argentinian food to eat,” Oliveira was thinking as he heard himself talking. “Oh, me. Oh, brother!”
    “But don’t you see that you can’t learn anything this way,” he finally told her. “You think you can get an education on the street, love, and you can’t. If that’s what you want, subscribe to the
Reader’s Digest.
”
    “Oh, no. Not that crap.”
    A bird in his head, Oliveira was saying to himself. Not her, but him. But what did she have in her head? Air or chick-pea flour, something hard to grasp. The center was not in the head.
    “She closes her eyes and hits the bull’s-eye,” thought Oliveira. “The Zen method of archery, precisely. But she hits the bull’s-eye because she doesn’t know that it is the method. But in my case … Toc, toc. And that’s how it goes.”
    When La Maga would ask about Zen (such things could happen with the Club, where they were always talking about nostalgic things, wisdom so distant that they came to think of it as fundamental, the obverse of a medal, the far side of the moon, always), Gregorovius would try to explain the rudiments of metaphysics while Oliveira would sip his pernod and watch, enjoying it. It was madness to try to explain anything to La Maga. Fauconnier was right, for people like her the mystery begins precisely with the explanation. La Maga heard the words
immanence
and
transcendence
and she opened up two big beautiful eyes which cut off Gregorovius’s metaphysics. Finally she convinced herself that she had understood Zen and sighed with fatigue. Only Oliveira knew that La Maga was always reaching those great timeless plateaus that they were all seeking through dialectics.
    “Don’t learn any stupid facts,” he would advise her. “Why wear glasses if you don’t need them?”
    La Maga was not quite sure. She was terribly in awe of Oliveira and Étienne, who could keep an argument going for three hours without a stop. There was something like a circle of chalk around Étienne and Oliveira and she wanted to get inside, to understand why the principle of indetermination was so important in literature, why Morelli, of whom they spoke so much, whom they admired so much, wanted his book to be a crystal ball in which the micro- and the macrocosm would come together in an annihilating vision.
    “It’s impossible to explain to you,” said Étienne. “This is Meccano number 7 and you’re barely in number 2.”
    La Maga became sad, she picked up a leaf from the edge of the sidewalk and spoke to it for a while, moved it along the palm of her hand, put it rightside up and upside down, stroked it, and finally she took off the leafy part and left the veins exposed, a delicate green ghost was reflected against her skin. Étienne snatched it away brusquely and held it against the light.That’s why they admired her, a little ashamed at having been so brutish with her, and La Maga would take advantage by ordering another pint or, if possible, some fried potatoes.
    (– 71 )

5
    THE first time had been in a hotel on the Rue Valette. They were walking along there aimlessly and stopping in the doorways, drizzle after lunch is always bitter and something ought to be done about that frozen dust, against those raincoats smelling of rubber, and suddenly La Maga drew herself close to Oliveira and they looked at each other like fools. HOTEL , the old woman behind the rickety desk greeted them with an understanding air and what