Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) by Julio Cortázar Read Free Book Online

called a dog and that’s a house, as the guy from Duino used to say. You’ve got to show, Perico, not explain. I paint, therefore I am.”
    “Show what?” Perico Romero asked.
    “The only reasons for our being alive.”
    “This creature thinks that the only sense is the sense of sight and all that can come from it,” Perico answered.
    “Painting is more than just a visual product,” Étienne said. “I paint with my whole body. In that sense I’m no different from your Cervantes or your Tirso de What’s-his-name. What I can’t stand is this mania for explanations, the Logos understood exclusively as a verb.”
    “And so forth,” Oliveira said grumpily. “Speaking of senses, the pair of you sound like a dialogue between two deaf men.”
    La Maga squeezed him tighter. “Now this one is going to come out with one of her asinine comments,” thought Oliveira. “She has to rub first, make an epidermic decision.” He felt a sort of hateful tenderness, something so contradictory that it must have been truth itself. “We ought to invent the sweet slap, the bee-kick. But in this world ultimate syntheses are yet to be discovered. Perico is right, the great Logos is watching. What a pity. We would have to have amoricide, for example, the real black light, the antimatter that troubles Gregorovius so much.”
    “Say, is Gregorovius coming to the record session?” asked Oliveira.
    Perico thought that he was, and Étienne thought that Mondrian.
    “Think about Mondrian a minute,” Étienne was saying. “Next to him Klee’s magic symbols are nothing. Klee played with fate, the gifts of culture. Pure sensibility can be satisfied with Mondrian, but you need a whole bag of other tricks with Klee. A sophisticate for sophisticates. Chinese, really. Mondrian, on the other hand, paints the absolute. Stand naked in front of him and it’s one thing or the other: either you see or you don’t see. Pleasure, thrills, allusions, fears, delights are completely superfluous.”
    “Do you understand what he’s saying?” La Maga asked. “It seems to me that he’s not being fair to Klee.”
    “Fairness or unfairness has nothing to do with this,” said Oliveira. “He’s trying to say something else. Don’t go getting personal right away.”
    “But why does he say that such beautiful things are no good for Mondrian?”
    “He’s trying to say that basically a painting like one of Klee’s calls for a degree
ès lettres,
or at least
ès poésies,
while all that Mondrian wants is for a person to mondrianate and that’s all.”
    “That’s not it,” said Étienne.
    “Of course it is,” Oliveira said. “According to you a Mondrian canvas is sufficient unto itself. Therefore it calls upon your innocence more than on your experience. I mean Edenic innocence, not stupidity. Even that metaphor you used about standing naked in front of a picture has a pre-Adamite smell about it. Paradoxically, Klee is much more modest since he asks for the co-operation of the viewer and is not sufficient unto himself. The fact of the matter is that Klee is history while Mondrian is atemporality. And you’re dying to find the absolute. Do I make myself clear?”
    “No,” said Étienne.
“C’est vache comme il pleut.”
    “You said it,
coño,
” said Perico, “and that son of a bitch of a Ronald lives all the way to hell and gone.”
    “Let us stiffen our pace,” said Oliveira, mimicking his Spanish accent. “Let us sneak our bodies out from under this drizzle.”
    “There you go. I almost like your rain and your chicken better. It sure knows how to rain in Buenos Aires.”
    “The absolute,” La Maga was saying, kicking a pebble from puddle to puddle. “What is an absolute, Horacio?”
    “Look,” Oliveira said, “it’s just that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting.”
    “There comes Wong,” Perico observed. “The Chinaman’s wetter