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

because he had a toothache. He grabbed it and started to look at it, it was terribly hard for him to decide to swallow it. He said funny things, that it was unhealthy to use things one really knew nothing about, things invented by other people to calm other things that we also know nothing about … You know how he is when he goes off on a tangent.”
    “You repeated the word ‘thing’ several times,” Gregoroviussaid. “It’s rather vulgar, but it does show, on the other hand, what’s wrong with Horacio. Obviously a victim of thingness.”
    “What is thingness?” La Maga asked.
    “Thingness is that unpleasant feeling that where our presumption ends our punishment begins. I’m sorry I have to use abstract and almost allegorical language, but I mean that Oliveira is pathologically sensitive to the pressure of what is around him, the world he lives in, his fate, to speak kindly. In a word, he can’t stand his surroundings. More briefly, he has a world-ache. You had an inkling of it, Lucía, and with delightful innocence you felt that Oliveira would be happier in any of the pocket-size Arcadias manufactured by the Madame Léonies of this world, not to mention my mother, the one in Odessa. Because you probably didn’t believe that business about the pineapples, I suppose.”
    “Or the chamber pots either,” said La Maga. “It’s hard to believe.”
    Guy Monod decided to wake up when Ronald and Étienne agreed to listen to Jelly Roll Morton; opening one eye he decided that the back outlined in the light of the green candles must belong to Gregorovius. He shuddered, the green candles seen from a bed made a bad impression on him, the rain on the skylight was strangely mixed with the remnants of his dream-images, he had been dreaming about an absurdly sunny place, where Gaby was walking around nude and feeding crumbs to a group of stupid pigeons the size of ducks. “I have a headache,” Guy said to himself. He was not in the least interested in Jelly Roll Morton although it was amusing to hear the rain on the skylight as Jelly Roll sang: “Stood on a corner, an’ she was soakin’ wet …” Wong would certainly have come up with a theory about real and poetic time, but was it true that Wong had mentioned making coffee? Gaby feeding the pigeons crumbs and Wong, the voice of Wong going in between Gaby’s nude legs in a garden with brightly colored flowers, saying: “A secret I learned in the casino at Menton.” Quite possible, after all, that Wong would appear with a pot full of coffee.
    Jelly Roll was at the piano beating the time softly with his foot for lack of a better rhythm section. Jelly Roll could sing
Mamie’s Blues
rocking a little, staring up at some decoration on the ceiling, or it was a fly that came and went or a spot thatcame and went in Jelly Roll’s eyes. “Eleven twenty-four took my baby away-ay …” That’s what life had been, trains bringing people and taking them away while you stood on the corner with wet feet, listening to a nickelodeon and laughing and cussing out the yellow windows of the saloon where you didn’t always have enough money to go in. “Eleven twenty-four took my baby away-ay …” Babs had taken so many trains in her life, she liked to go by train if in the end there was some friend waiting for her, if Ronald softly put his hand on her hip the way he was doing now, sketching out the music on her skin, “Eleven-thirteen’ll carry her back one day,” obviously some train would bring her back again, but who knows if Jelly Roll was going to be on that platform, at that piano, that time he sang the blues about Mamie Desdume, the rain on a Paris skylight at one o’clock in the morning, wet feet, and a whore who muttered “If you can’t hand me a dollar then hand me a rotten dime,” Babs had said things like that in Cincinnati, every woman had said things like that somewhere, even in the bed of a king, Babs had a very special idea of what the bed of a king was