Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) by Julio Cortázar

tiny bit of mescaline, brother, the rest is bliss and diarrhea (all in English). But let’s get serious (yes, it was Johnny Dodds, you find the proof by indirection. The drummer had to be Zutty Singleton,
ergo
the clarinet is Johnny Dodds, jazzology, deductive science, particularly easy after four o’clock in the morning. Hardly advisable for ladies and clerics). Let’s get serious, Horacio, before we struggle up in a while and head for the street, let’s ask ourselves a question while we have our soul in the palm of our hand (the palm of the hand? In the palm of our tongue, like, or something like that. Toponymy, anatology, descriptology, two volumes with il-lus-tra-tions), let’s ask whether we should attack from above or from below (but, hey now, I’m making sense, the vodka has pinned them like butterflies onto a tray, A is A, a rose is a rose is a rose, April is the cruelest month, everything in its place and a place for every rose is a rose is a rose…).
    Huf. Beware of the Jabberwocky my son.
    Horacio slid down a little more and saw very clearly everything he wanted to see. He wasn’t sure whether he should attack from above or from below, with a concentration of all his forces or rather as now, dispersed and liquid, full forward to the skylight, against the green candles, or to La Maga’s sad, sheep-like face, or against Ma Rainey who was singing
Jelly Bean Blues.
Better this way, spread out and receptive, spongy, the way everything is spongy as long as a person looks a lot and has good eyes. He wasn’t so drunk that he didn’t have the feeling that his house was a shambles, that inside nothing was in place but at the same time—to be sure, marvelously sure—on the floor or on the ceiling, under the bed or floating in a washbasin there were stars and chunks of eternity, poems like suns andenormous faces of women and cats where the fury of their species was fired up, in the mixture of garbage and jade plaques in their own language where words were woven night and day into furious battles between ants and centipedes, blasphemy existed with the pure mention of essences, the perfect image with the basest slang. Disorder was triumphant and ran through the rooms with its hair entangled in disgusting braids, glass eyes, its hands holding cards that would not meld, letters without heading or complimentary close, and the soup was getting cold upon the table, the floor was covered with cast-off pants, rotten apples, stained bandages. And suddenly from all this there came some horrid music, it was beyond the felted order of homes where untouchable kin put things in order, in the midst of the confusion where the past was incapable of finding a button on a shirt and the present shaved itself with pieces of a broken bottle because it could not find a razor stuck away somewhere in some flowerpot, in the midst of a time which opened up like a weather vane to whatever wind was blowing, a man breathed until he could no longer do so, he felt that he had lived until he reached the delirium of the very act of taking in the confusion which surrounded him and he asked himself if any of this had meaning. All disorder had meaning if it seemed to come out of itself, perhaps through madness one could arrive at that reason which is not the reason whose weakness is madness. “To go from disorder to order,” thought Oliveira. “Yes, but what kind of order can there be which does not mimic the basest, most debased, and most unhealthy of disorders? The order of the gods is called cyclone or leukemia, the poet’s order is called antimatter, firm space, flowers of trembling lips, God, I’m drunk, Jesus, I’ve got to get to bed.” And La Maga was crying, Guy had disappeared, Étienne had left after Perico, and Gregorovius, Wong, and Ronald were looking at a record that was spinning slowly, thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, no more no less, and in these revolutions there was
Oscar’s Blues,
Oscar himself on piano, of