Hopscotch: A Novel Read online

  Copyright © 1966 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published in Spanish as Rayuela, by Editorial Sudamericana Sociedad Anónima. Copyright © 1963, by Editorial Sudamericana Sociedad Anónima. © 1967 Julio Cortazar

  This translation first published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., and in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., in 1966.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Cortázar, Julio.

  Hopscotch.

  (Pantheon modern writers series)

  Translation of: Rayuela.

  I. Title II. Series.

  PQ7797.C7145R313 1987 863 86-25347

  ISBN 0-394-75284-8

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-87014-3

  The selection from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “A Coney Island of the Mind,” is reprinted with the permission of the publisher, New Directions. Copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Table of Instructions

  From the Other Side Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  From this Side Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  From Diverse Sides Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 140

  Chapter 141

  Chapter 142

  Chapter 143

  Chapter 144

  Chapter 145

  Chapter 146

  Chapter 147

  Chapter 148

  Chapter 149

  Chapter 150

  Chapter 151

  Chapter 152

  Chapter 153

  Chapter 154

  Chapter 155

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  TABLE OF INSTRUCTIONS

  In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all.

  The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience.

  The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter. In case of confusion or forgetfulness, one need only consult the following list:

  73 - 1 - 2 - 116 - 3 - 84 - 4 - 71 - 5 - 81 - 74 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 93 - 68 - 9 - 104 - 10 - 65 - 11 - 136 - 12 - 106 - 13 - 115 - 14 - 114 - 117 - 15 - 120 - 16 - 137 - 17 - 97 - 18 - 153 - 19 - 90 - 20 - 126 - 21 - 79 - 22 - 62 - 23 - 124 - 128 - 24 - 134 - 25 - 141 - 60 - 26 - 109 - 27 - 28 - 130 - 151 - 152 - 143 - 100 - 76 - 101 - 144 - 92 - 103 - 108 - 64 - 155 - 123 - 145 - 122 - 112 - 154 - 85 - 150 - 95 - 146 - 29 - 107 - 113 - 30 - 57 - 70 - 147 - 31 - 32 - 132 - 61 - 33 - 67 - 83 - 142 - 34 - 87 - 105 - 96 - 94 - 91 - 82 - 99 - 35 - 121 - 36 - 37 - 98 - 38 - 39 - 86 - 78 - 40 - 59 - 41 - 148 - 42 - 75 - 43 - 125 - 44 - 102 - 45 - 80 - 46 - 47 - 110 - 48 - 111 - 49 - 118 - 50 - 119 - 51 - 69 - 52 - 89 - 53 - 66 - 149 - 54 - 129 - 139 - 133 - 140 - 138 - 127 - 56 - 135 - 63 - 88 - 72 - 77 - 131 - 58 - 131 -

  And moved by the hope of being of particular help to youth, and of contributing to the reform of manners in general, I have put together this collection of maxims, counsels, and precepts which are the basis of those universal morals that are so much a part of the spiritual and temporal happiness of men of all ages, states, and conditions, and of the prosperity and orderliness not only of the civil and Christian republic in which we live, but of any other republic or government that the most thoughtful and serious philosophers of the world might wish to contrive.

  Spirit of the Bible and Universal Morals,

  Drawn from the Old and New Testaments

  Put down in Tuscan by the Abbot Martini

  with footnotes

  Rendered into Castilian

  by a member of the Regular Clergy of the

  Congreg
ation of San Cayetano of this Court

  With permission

  Madrid: Aznar, 1797

  Everytime it starts to get cool, I mean in the middle of autim, I start gettin nutty ideas like I was thinkin about what was forein and diffrent, like for exsample how I’d like to turn into a swallow and get away and fly to countrys where it gets hot, or be an ant so’s I could get deep into a cave and eat the stuff I stored away durin the summer or be a snake like what they got in the zoO, the ones they keep lockt up in glass cages thats heated so’s they don’t get stiff from the cold, which is what happens to poor human beans who cant buy no close cause the price is to high, and cant keep warm cause theys no keroseen, no coal, no wood, no fule oil and besides theys no loot, cause when you go around with bocoo bread you can go into any bar and get some sneaky pete that can be real warmin, even tho it aint good to overdo it cause if you overdos it it gets to be a bad habbit and bad habbits is bad for your body just like they is for youre selfrespeck, and when you start goin downhill cause your actin bad in everythin, they aint nobody or nothin can stop you from endin up a stinkin piece of human garbidge and they never gone give you a hand to haul you up outen the dirty muck you rollin around in, not even if you was a eaglE when you was young and could fly up and over the highest hills, but when you get old you like a highflyin bomber thats lost its moral engines and fall down outen the sky. I jes hope what I been writin down hear do somebody some good so he take a good look at how he livin and he dont be sorry when it too late and everythin is gone down the drain cause it his own fault.

  CÉSAR BRUTO, What I Would Like to Be If I Wasn’t What I Am (Chapter: “A St. Bernard Dog”)

  FROM THE OTHER SIDE

  Rien ne vous tue un homme comme d’être obligé

  de représenter un pays.

  JACQUES VACHÉ, letter to André Breton

  1

  WOULD I find La Maga? Most of the time it was just a case of my putting in an appearance, going along the Rue de Seine to the arch leading into the Quai de Conti, and I would see her slender form against the olive-ashen light which floats along the river as she crossed back and forth on the Pont des Arts, or leaned over the iron rail looking at the water. It was quite natural for me to climb the steps to the bridge, go into its narrowness and over to where La Maga stood. She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.

  But now she would not be on the bridge. The thin glow of her face was probably peeking into the old doorways in the Marais ghetto, or maybe she was talking to a woman who sells fried potatoes, or she might be eating a hot sausage on the Boulevard de Sebastopol. In any case, I went out onto the bridge and there was no Maga. I did not run into her along the way either. We each knew where the other lived, every cranny we holed up in in our pseudo-student existence in Paris, every window by Braque, Ghirlandaio, or Max Ernst set into cheap postcard frames and ringed with gaudy posters, but we never looked each other up at home. We preferred meeting on the bridge, at a sidewalk cafe, at an art movie, or crouched over a cat in some Latin Quarter courtyard. We did not go around looking for each other, but we knew that we would meet just the same. Oh, Maga, whenever I saw a woman who looked like you a clear, sharp pause would close in like a deafening silence, collapsing like a wet umbrella being closed. An umbrella, precisely. Maybe you remember, Maga, that old umbrella we sacrificed in a gully in Montsouris Park one sunset on a cold March day. We threw it away because you had found it half-broken in the Place de la Concorde and you had got a lot of use from it, especially for digging into people’s ribs on the Métro or on a bus as you lethargically thought about the design the flies on the ceiling made. There was a cloudburst that afternoon and you tried to open your umbrella in the park in a proud sort of way, but your hand got all wrapped up in a catastrophe of cold lightning shafts and black clouds, strips of torn cloth falling from the ruins of unfrocked spokes, and we both laughed like madmen as we got soaked, thinking that an umbrella found in a public square ought to die a noble death in a park and not get involved in the mean cycle of trash can or gutter. Then I rolled it up as best I could and we took it to the top of the park near the little bridge over the railroad tracks, and from there I threw it with all my might to the bottom of the gully where it landed on the wet grass as you gave out with a shout in which I thought I vaguely recognized the curse of a Valkyrie. It sank into the gully like a ship into green water, stormy green water, into la mer qui est plus félonesse en été qu’en hiver, into the treacherous wave, Maga, as we counted for a long time, in love with Joinville or with the park, embracing like wet trees or like actors in some second-rate Hungarian movie. And it stayed down there in the grass, small and black, like some trampled insect. And it did not move, none of its springs popped out as once before. Ended. Over. Oh Maga, and still we were not satisfied.

  Why was I coming to the Pont des Arts? It seems to me that on that December Thursday I had intended crossing over to the Right Bank to have some wine in the little café on the Rue des Lombards where Madame Léonie reads my palm and tells me of trips and surprises. I never took you to have Madame Léonie read your palm, probably because I was afraid that she would read some truth about me in your hand, because you have always been a frightful mirror, a monstrous instrument of repetitions, and what we had called loving was perhaps my standing in front of you holding a yellow flower while you held two green candles and a slow rain of renunciations and farewells and Métro tickets blew into our faces. So I never took you to Madame Léonie’s, Maga. You told me so and that is how I know that you did not like my watching you go into that little bookshop on the Rue de Verneuil, where a burdened old man fills out thousands of reference cards and knows everything there is to know about the study of history. You used to go there to play with a cat, and the old man let you in and didn’t ask questions, content to have you get him a book from the upper shelves. You used to get warm at that stove of his with its big black pipe, and you didn’t like me to know that you were going to sit next to that stove. But all of this should have been said in its proper time, except that it was difficult to know what the proper time for things was, and even now, with my elbows on the railing of the bridge, as I watched a small, must-colored péniche, sparkling clean like a great big beautiful cockroach, with a woman in a white apron hanging wash on a wire strung along the prow, as I looked at its windows, painted green, with Hansel and Gretel curtains, even now, Maga, I wondered if this roundabout route made any sense, since it would have been easier to reach the Rue des Lombards by the Pont Saint-Michel and the Pont au Change. But if you had been there that night, as so many other times, then I would have known that the roundabout made sense, while now, on the other hand, I debase my failure by calling it a roundabout. I raised the collar of my lumberjacket, and it was a matter of going along the docks until I came to where the large shops go on to the Châtelet, passing underneath the violet shadow of the Tour Saint-Jacques, and turning into my street, thinking about the fact that I had not met you and about Madame Léonie.

  I know that one day I came to Paris. I know that I was living off loans for a while, doing what the others did and seeing what they saw. I know that you were coming out of a café on the Rue du Cherche-Midi and that we spoke. Everything had been going badly that afternoon because the habits I had brought from Argentina would not permit me to cross from one sidewalk to the other to look at silly items in the dimly lit shop windows on streets I don’t remember any more. I followed you grudgingly then, finding you petulant and rude, until you got tired of not being tired and we went into a café on the Boul’ Mich’ and all of a sudden in between two croissants you told me a whole chunk of your life.

  How was I to have suspected that what seemed to be a pack of lies was all true, a Figari with sunset violets, with livid faces, with hunger and blows in the co
rners. I came to believe you later on, later on there was reason to, there was Madame Léonie, who looked at my hand which had gone to bed with your breasts, and she practically repeated your exact words: “She is suffering somewhere. She has always suffered. She is very gay, she adores yellow, her bird is the blackbird, her time is night, her bridge is the Pont des Arts.” (A must-colored péniche, Maga, and I wonder why we didn’t sail off on it while there was still time.)

  We had barely come to know each other when life began to plot everything necessary for us to stop meeting little by little. Since you didn’t know how to fake I realized at once that in order to see you as I wanted to I would have to begin by shutting my eyes, and then at first some things like yellow stars (moving around in a velvet jelly), then red jumps of humor and time, a sudden entry into a Maga world, awkward and confused, but also with ferns signed by a Klee spider, a Miro circus, Vieira da Silva ash-mirrors, a chess world where you moved about like a knight trying to move like a rook trying to move like a bishop. In those days we used to go to art movies to see silent pictures, because I had my culture, maybe not, but you, poor thing, didn’t understand anything at all about that yellow and convulsed shrieking which had all taken place before you were born, that grooved emulsion in which dead people ran about. But suddenly Harold Lloyd would go by and then you would shake off the water of your dream and would finally be convinced that all was well, and that Pabst, and that Fritz Lang. You used to make me a little sick with your mania for perfection, with your rundown shoes, with your refusal to accept the acceptable. We used to eat hamburgers in the Carrefour de l’Odéon and we used to go cycling to Montparnasse, to any hotel, any pillow. Then other times we would go all the way to the Porte d’Orléans and we became more and more familiar with the vacant lots beyond the Boulevard Jourdan, where sometimes at midnight the members of the Serpent Club used to get together to talk to a blind seer, a stimulating paradox. We used to leave the bicycles on the street and go in a little way, stopping to look at the sky because it is one of the few places in Paris where sky is worth more than ground. Sitting on a pile of rubbish we would smoke for a while, and La Maga would stroke my hair or hum songs which hadn’t been invented yet, absurd tunes broken with sighs or memories. I took advantage of such moments to think about useless things, a practice I had begun some years before in a hospital and which all seemed richer and more necessary every time since. With great effort, marshaling auxiliary images, thinking about smells and faces, I managed to extract out of nothing a pair of chestnut-colored shoes I had owned in Olavarría in 1940. They had rubber heels and very thin soles, and when it rained the water used to seep in up to my very soul. With that pair of shoes in the hand of my memory the rest came along by itself: the face of Doña Manuela, for example, or the poet Ernesto Morroni. But I rejected them because the game consisted in bringing back only the insignificant, the unnoticed, the forgotten. Trembling at not being able to remember, attacked by those moths suggested by postponement, an imbecile for having kissed time, I finally saw beyond the shoes a can of Sol brand tea which my mother had given me in Buenos Aires. And the little double teaspoon, a mousetrap spoon, where little black mice were scalded alive in the cup of water as they gave off hissing bubbles. Convinced that memory keeps everything, not just the Albertines and the great journals of the heart and kidneys, I persisted in reconstructing the contents of my desk in Floresta, the face of a girl impossible to remember named Gekrepten, the number of drawing pens in my pencil box in the fifth grade, and I ended up trembling and desperate (because I had never been able to remember those pens; I know that they were in the pencil box, in a special compartment, but I cannot remember how many they were, nor the precise moment when there were two or six), until La Maga, kissing me and blowing smoke and her hot breath into my face, brought me back and we laughed, and we began to walk around again among the piles of rubbish, looking for the members of the Club. It was about that time I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses. I spoke about pataphysics with La Maga until we both were tired, because the same thing used to happen to her (and our meeting had been like that, and so many things, dark as a match), always falling into exceptions, seeing herself stuck in huts not meant for people and all this without despising anyone, without thinking we were Maldorors at the end of the trails or Melmoths privileged to wander about. I do not believe the firefly gets any great satisfaction from the incontrovertible fact that he is one of the most amazing wonders of this circus, and yet one can imagine a consciousness alert enough to understand that every time he lights his belly this light-bearing bug must feel some inkling of privilege. In just this way La Maga was fascinated with the strange mixups she had become involved in because of the breakdown of the laws governing her life. She was one of those people who could make a bridge collapse simply by walking on it, or who could sobbingly remember having seen in a shop window the lottery ticket which had just won five million. As for me, I’m already used to the fact that quietly exceptional things happen to me, and I don’t find it too horrible when I go into a dark room looking for a record album and feel in my hand the wriggling form of a centipede who has chosen to sleep in the binding. That sort of thing. Or finding great gray or green tufts in a pack of cigarettes, or hearing the whistle of a locomotive coincide ex officio in time and pitch with a passage from a symphony by Ludwig van, or going into a pissotière on the Rue de Médicis and seeing a man apply himself to his urination and then step back from the urinal towards me as he holds in the palm of his hand as if it were a precious and liturgical object a member of incredible colors and dimensions, and my realizing at that moment that this man is the replica of another (although they are not the same one) who twenty-four hours before in the Salle de Géographie had been lecturing on totems and taboos and had held up carefully in the palm of his hand ivory sticks, lyrebird feathers, ritual coins, magic fossils, starfish, dried fish, photographs of royal concubines, offerings of hunters, enormous embalmed beetles which made the inevitable ladies present quiver with startled delight.