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

at the labels. “Before LP’s came out those guys had less than three minutes to play in. Nowadays a wild man like Stan Getz can come along in front of a mike and turn himself loose, blow anything he wants to. Poor Bix had to be satisfied with one chorus and as soon as he got warmed up, snap, it was all over. They must have got sore as hell when they cut records.”
    “I don’t know,” said Perico. “It’s like writing a sonnet instead of an ode, and I don’t know a damned thing about this crap. I only came because I was sick of staying in my room reading an endless essay by Julián Marías.”
    (– 65 )

11
    GREGOROVIUS let his glass be filled with vodka and began to drink with dainty sips. Two candles were burning on the mantelpiece where Babs kept bottles of beer and her dirty stockings. Gregorovius admired the listless burning of the candles through the hyaline glass, it was so foreign to all of them and so out of their time, like Bix’s cornet, coming and going from a different time. He was annoyed by the feet of Guy Monod, who was on the couch either sleeping or listening with his eyes closed. La Maga came over and sat on the floor with a cigarette in her mouth. The green candles burned in her eyes. Gregorovius looked at her in ecstasy and remembered a street in Morlaix at dusk, a high aqueduct, clouds.
    “This light is so much like you, something that comes and goes, always moving.”
    “Like Horacio’s shadow,” La Maga said. “His nose grows and shrinks. It’s amazing.”
    “Babs is a shepherdess of shadows,” Gregorovius said, “she works in clay, concrete shadows … Here everything breathes, a lost contact is established again; music helps, vodka, friendship … Those shadows in the cornice; the room has lungs, it palpitates. Yes, electricity is eleatic, it has turned our shadows to stone. Now they are part of the furniture and the faces. But here, on the other hand … Look at that molding, how its shadow is breathing, that volute that rises and falls. In those days man lived in a soft and porous night, in a continuous dialogue. The terrors, what a luxury for the imagination …”
    He put his palms together, keeping only his thumbs apart: a dog began to open his mouth and move his ears on the wall. La Maga laughed. Then Gregorovius asked her what it was like in Montevideo, the dog suddenly dissolved, because he wasn’t surethat she was Uruguayan; Lester Young and the Kansas City Six. Shh…(Ronald, finger to his lips).
    “Uruguay always sounded so strange to me. I picture Montevideo with lots of steeples all with bells cast after a battle. And you can’t tell me that Montevideo doesn’t have giant lizards along the river bank.”
    “Certainly,” said La Maga. “All you have to do is take the bus to Pocitos.”
    “And do people in Montevideo really know Lautréamont?”
    “Lautréamont?” asked La Maga.
    Gregorovius sighed and drank more vodka. Lester Young, tenor; Dickie Wells, trombone; Joe Bushkin, piano; Bill Coleman, trumpet; John Simmons, bass; Jo Jones, drums.
Four O’Clock Drag.
Yes, tremendous lizards, trombones on the river bank, blues crawling along,
drag
probably meant a lizard in time, an endless crawling at four o’clock in the morning. Or maybe something completely different. “Oh, Lautréamont,” La Maga said, suddenly remembering. “Yes, I think they know him quite well.”
    “He was from Uruguay, although you wouldn’t think so.”
    “No, you wouldn’t,” said La Maga, coming to.
    “Actually, Lautréamont … But Ronald’s getting annoyed, he’s put on one of his idols. I guess we’ll have to shut up. But let’s talk very low while you tell me about Montevideo.”
    “Ah, merde alors,”
said Étienne, looking at them furiously. The vibes were testing the air, taking wrong steps upstairs, skipping a step, jumping five at once and coming down again on the top one. Lionel Hampton was balancing
Save It Pretty Mama,
letting it go as it fell down