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

accepted because old Trouille was having troubles and owed him close to thirty thousand francs, at the time it seemed just as logical to live with La Maga as by himself, he had been walking around thinking about every detail and pondering every little thing that seemed to come upon him like a great crisis. He had come to the conclusion that the continuous presence of La Magawould stop him from speculating so much, but naturally he had not thought about the possibilities of Rocamadour. Even so, he had been able to keep to himself from time to time, until Rocamadour’s howls would bring him back to a healthy grouchiness. “I’m going to end up like a character out of Walter Pater,” Oliveira would think to himself. “One soliloquy after another, an endless vice. Marius the Epicurean, ‘pure vice.’ The only salvation left to me is the smell of that brat’s piss.”
    “I always figured you would end up going to bed with Ossip,” Oliveira said.
    “Rocamadour has a fever,” La Maga said.
    Oliveira made himself another
mate.
He had to watch out for his
mate,
in Paris it cost five hundred francs a kilo in drugstores and it was terrible stuff, sold in the pharmacy of the Saint-Lazare station next to a gaudy sign that said
“maté sauvage, cueilli par les indiens,”
diuretic, antibiotic, and emollient. Luckily the lawyer from Rosario, who happened to be his brother, had sent him ten pounds of Cruz de Malta brand, but there wasn’t much left. “If my
mate
runs out I’ve had it,” Oliveira thought. “My only real conversation is with this green gourd.” He studied the strange behavior of the
mate,
how the herb would breathe fragrantly as it came up on top of the water and how it would dive as he sucked and would cling to itself, everything fine lost and all smell except for that little bit that would come up in the water like breath and stimulate his Argentinian iron lung, so sad and solitary. It had been some time now that Oliveira had been paying attention to unimportant things, and the little green gourd had the advantage that as he meditated upon it, it never occurred to his perfidious intelligence to endow it with such ideas as one extracts from mountains, the moon, the horizon, an adolescent girl, a bird, or a horse. “This
mate
might show me where the center is,” Oliveira thought (and the idea that La Maga and Ossip were seeing each other became frail and lost its strength, for a moment the green gourd was stronger, it proposed its own little petulant volcano, its smoky crater, an atmosphere which hovered over the other rather cold air of the flat in spite of the stove that had been lighted around nine o’clock that night). “And just what is this center that I don’t know what it really is; can it be the coordinates of some unity? I’m walking back and forth in an apartment whose floor is tiled with flat stones and one of thesestones is the exact spot where I ought to stop so that everything would come into its proper focus. The exact spot,” Oliveira said emphatically, kidding himself a little so as to know that he was not just playing with words. “A shapeless quadrilateral in which we must look for the precise angle (and the importance of this example is that the angel is horribly a cute and won must have his knows right up on to the canvas so that suddenly all the senseless lines will come together to form a portrait of Francis I or the Battle of Sinigaglia, something that deflies descrumption).” But that unity, the sum of all the actions which define a life, seemed to go into hiding in the face of any previous sign that life itself could end like a played-out drink of
mate,
that is to say that only those left behind, the biographers, would recognize the unity, and all that was really not of the least importance as far as Oliveira was concerned. The problem consisted in grasping that unity without becoming a hero, without becoming a saint, or a criminal, or a boxing champ, or a statesman, or a