He felt very well, as he always did when La Maga and he could come to the end of a date without fighting or annoying each other. He wasn’t worried too much by the letter from his brother, a solid-citizen lawyer from Rosario, who had filled up four onionskin pages with an account of the filial and civic duties which Oliveira had poured down the drain. The letter was a real delight and he had hung it on the wall with Scotch tape so that his friends could enjoy its full flavor. The only important item was the confirmation of some money sent through the black market, which his brother delicately referred to as his “agent.” Oliveira planned to buy some books he had been wanting to read and he would give La Maga three thousand francs which she could do with as she pleased, probably buy a near-life-size felt elephant to surprise Rocamadour with. In the morning he would have to go to old man Trouille’s and bring the correspondence with Latin America up to date. Going out, doing things, bringing up to date were not ideas calculated to help him get to sleep. To bring up to date: what an expression. To do. To do something, to do good, to make water, to make time, action in all of its possibilities. But behind all action there was a protest, because all doing meant leaving from in order to arrive at, or moving something so that it would be here and not there, or going into a house instead of not going in or instead of going into the one next door; in other words, every act entailed the admission of a lack, of something not yet done and which could have been done, the tacit protest in the face of continuous evidence of a lack, of a reduction, of the inadequacy of the present moment. To believe that action could crown something, or that the sum total of actions could really be a life worthy of the name was the illusion of a moralist. It was better to withdraw, because withdrawal from action was the protest itself and not its mask. Oliveira lit another cigarette and this little action made him smile ironically and tease himself about the act itself. He was not too worried about superficial analyses, almost always perverted by distraction and linguistic traps. The only thing certain was the weight in the pit of his stomach, the physical suspicion that something was not going well and that perhaps it never had gone well. It was not even a problem, but rather the early denial of both collective lies and that grumpy solitude of one who sets out to study radioactive isotopes or the presidency of Bartolomé Mitre. If he had made any choice when he was young it was that he would not defend himself with the rapid and anxious accumulation of “culture,” the favorite dodge of the Argentine middle class to avoid facing national reality, or any other reality for that matter, and to think of themselves as safe from the emptiness surrounding them. Thanks, perhaps, to this systematic mopiness, as his buddy Traveler had defined it, he had managed to steer clear of that order of Pharisees (many of his friends did belong to it and generally in good faith, because it was just possible and there were examples), those who plumbed the depths of problems with some sort of specialization, and who, ironically, were awarded the highest pedigrees of Argentinity for doing just that. Furthermore, it seemed slippery and facile to mix up historical problems, such as one’s being Argentinian or Eskimo, with problems like the ones that deal with action or withdrawal. He had lived long enough to be suspicious of anything stuck to someone’s nose that keeps falling off: the weight of the subject in the notion of the object. La Maga was one of the few people who never forgot that someone’s face would always have something to do with his interpretation of communism or of Creto-Mycenaean civilization, and that the shape of someone’s hands had something to do with what he felt about Ghirlandaio or Dostoevsky. That’s why Oliveira tended to admit that his blood-type, the fact that he had spent his childhood surrounded by majestic uncles, a broken love affair in adolescence, and a tendency towards asthenia might be factors of first importance in his vision of the cosmos. He was middle class, from Buenos Aires, had been to an Argentinian school, and those things are not dismissed lightly. The worst of it was that by dint of avoiding excessively local points of view he had ended up weighing and accepting too readily the yes and no of everything, becoming a sort of inspector of scales. In Paris everything was Buenos Aires, and vice versa; in the most eager moments of love he would suffer loss and loneliness and relish it. A perniciously comfortable attitude which even becomes easy as it grows into a reflex or technique; the frightful lucidity of the paralytic, the blindness of the perfectly stupid athlete. One begins to go about with the sluggish step of a philosopher or a clochard, as more and more vital gestures become reduced to mere instincts of preservation, to a conscience more alert not to be deceived than to grasp truth. Lay quietism, moderate ataraxia, attent lack of attention. What was important for Oliveira was to experience this Tupac Amarú quartering and not faint, not fall into that pitiful egocentrism which he heard all about him every day in every possible shape. When he had been ten years old, during an afternoon spent under some paraíso trees and surrounded by uncles and historico-political homilies, he had shown his first timid reaction against that so very Hispano-Italo-Argentine ¡Se lo digo yo! punctuated with a pound on the table. Glielo dico io! I say so, God damn it! That I, Oliveira had begun to think, does it have any value as proof? What omniscience was contained in the I of grownups? At the age of fifteen he discovered the business of “all I know is that I know nothing”; the hemlock that went with it seemed inevitable. One doesn’t challenge people that way, I say so. Later on he was amused to see how more refined forms of culture produced their own versions of “I say so!” delicately disguised even for the person using them. Now he heard, “I’ve always thought so,” “if I’m sure of anything…,” “it’s obvious that…,” almost never softened by a disinterested appreciation of the other person’s point of view. As if the species in every individual were on guard against letting him go too far along the road of tolerance, intelligent doubt, sentimental vacillation. At some given point the callus, the sclerosis, the definition is born: black or white, radical or conservative, homo- or heterosexual, the San Lorenzo team or the Boca Juniors, meat or vegetables, business or poetry. And it was all right, because the species should not trust people like Oliveira; his brother’s letter was the precise form of that rejection.
“The worst part of all this,” he thought, “is that it always ends up in the Animula vagula blandula. What is there to do? With that question I’ll never get to sleep. Oblomov, cosa facciamo? The great voices of History stir us to action: revenge, Hamlet! Shall we avenge ourselves, Hamlet, or settle for Chippendale, slippers, and a good fire? The Syrian, after all, made the scandalous choice of Martha, as is well known. Will you give battle, Arjuna? You cannot deny values, reluctant king. Fight for fight’s sake, live dangerously, think about Marius the Epicurean, Richard Hillary, Kyo, T. E. Lawrence … Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.”
Perhaps. Why not? But it’s also possible that your point of view is the same as that of the fox as he looks at the grapes. And it also might be that reason is on your side, but a lamentable and mean little reason, the reason the ant uses against the grasshopper. If lucidity ends up in inaction, wouldn’t it become suspect? Wouldn’t it be covering up a particularly diabolical type of blindness? The stupidity of a military hero who runs forward carrying a keg of powder, Cabral, the heroic soldier covering himself with glory, is hinted to be a revelation, the instantaneous melding with something absolute, beyond all consciousness (that’s a lot to ask for in a sergeant), face to face with which ordinary vision, bedroom insight at three o’clock in the morning and with a half-smoked cigarette, is about as good as a mole’s.
He spoke to La Maga about all this. She had awakened and was snuggling up against him, mewing sleepily. La Maga opened her eyes and remained thoughtful.
“You couldn’t do it,” she said. “You think too much before you do anything.”
“I believe in the principle that thought must precede action, silly.”
“You believe in the principle,” said La Maga. “How complicated. You’re like a witness. You’re
the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you’re in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I’m a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Étienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you’re in this room, but you’re not. You’re looking at the room, you’re not in the room.”
“This girl could leave Saint Thomas way behind,” Oliveira said.
“Why Saint Thomas?” asked La Maga. “That idiot who had to see to believe?”
“Yes, sweet,” said Oliveira, thinking that underneath it all La Maga had hit upon the right saint. Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life. Happy was she who was in the room, who had the freedom of the city in everything that she touched or came in contact with, a fish swimming downstream, a leaf on a tree, a cloud in the sky, an image in a poem. Fish, leaf, cloud, image: that’s it precisely, unless…
(–84)
4
SO they had begun to walk about in a fabulous Paris, letting themselves be guided by the nighttime signs, following routes born of a clochard phrase, of an attic lit up in the darkness of a street’s end, 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 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 figures of 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 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!”