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

and spun around on the tip of his toe among pieces of glass, instant constellations, five stars, three stars, ten stars, he was putting them out with the tip of his slipper, he was rocking in a hammock twirling a Japanese parasol wildly in his hand and the whole band came in on the final fall, a hoarse trumpet, earth, down again, floating to a landing,
finibus,
all over. Gregorovius was listening to the whisper of Montevideo according to La Maga, and perhaps he would finally learn more about her, about her childhood, whether her name really was Lucía like Mimi in
La Bohème;
he was at that vodka level where the night began to become magnanimous and everything promised him fidelity and hope.Guy Monod had doubled up his legs and his hard soles no longer dug into Gregorovius’s spine. La Maga was leaning on him a bit and he felt the soft warmth of her body, every movement she made to follow the music or the rhythm of her speech. With his wits ajar Gregorovius managed to make out the corner where Ronald and Wong were selecting and passing records, Oliveira and Babs were on the floor, leaning against an Eskimo pelt on the wall, Horacio keeping cadence with the smoke, Babs lost to vodka, unpaid rent, and dyes that faded at three hundred degrees, a blue which melded into orangey rhombuses, something intolerable. Oliveira’s lips were moving in the silence of the smoke, he was talking to himself, backwards, to some other thing that imperceptibly twisted Gregorovius’s innards, he didn’t know why, probably because that apparent absence of Horacio’s was a fraud, which left him for La Maga to play with while he was there moving his lips in silence, speaking to La Maga through himself in the midst of the smoke and the jazz, laughing to himself inwardly at so much Lautréamont, at so much Montevideo.
    (– 136 )

12
    GREGOROVIUS had always enjoyed meetings of the Club because it was really not a club at all in the strictest sense. He liked Ronald because of his anarchy, because of Babs, because of the way they were carefully killing themselves without worrying about anything, given over to the reading of Carson McCullers, Miller, Raymond Queneau, to jazz as a quiet exercise in freedom, to the unrestricted knowledge that they both were failures in the arts. He liked, if that’s the word for it, Horacio Oliveira, with whom he had a sort of persecutive relationship in that Oliveira’s presence always exasperated Gregorovius from the moment they came together, even after he had been out looking for Horacio, although he would not admit it, and Horacio would be amused by the cheap mysteries Gregorovius used to cover up his origins and way of life, by the fact that Gregorovius was in love with La Maga and did not think that Horacio knew, and the two of them would accept and reject each other at the same time in a sort of tight bullfight which in the last analysis was one of the reasons for the Club’s get-togethers. They worked hard at being the knowing ones, at arranging a set of allusions to frustrate La Maga and infuriate Babs; all they had to do was mention something in passing, as now when Gregorovius was thinking that there really was a disillusioned persecution between him and Horacio, and right off one of them would quote the hound of heaven, “I fled him,” and so forth, and all the while La Maga would look at them with a kind of humble despair as one of them was in a state of I-flew-so-high-so-high-I-caught-my-prey and they would end up laughing at themselves. But it was too late because Horacio would be appalled at this exhibitionism of associative memory, and Gregorovius would feel himself touched with the annoyance that he had helped bring about, and between them both a certain resentment ofaccomplices would build up and two minutes later they would be at it again, and that, among other things, is what went on at meetings of the Club.
    “This is one of the few times I’ve had such lousy vodka here,” said Gregorovius