Hopscotch Chapter 132 - Julio Cortazar

And while somebody explains something as always, I don't know why I am in this cafe, in all cafes, in the Elephant & Castle, in the Dupont Barbes, in the Sacher, in the Pedrocchi, in the Gijon, in the Greco, in the Cafe de la Paiz, in the Cafe Mozart, in the Florian, in the Capoulade, in Les Deux Magots, in the bar that puts its chair out on the Colleone Square, in the Cafe Dante fifty yards away from the tomb of the Scaligers and that face on a pink sarcophagus that looks as if it had been burned by the tears of Saint Mary of Egypt, in the cafe across from the Giudecca, with aged and impoverished marchionesses drinking a tiny tea and getting expensive with dusty ambassadors, in the Jandilla, in the Floccos, in the Cluny, in the Richmond in Suipacha, in El Olmo, in the Closerie des Lilas, in the Stephane (which is on Rue Mallarme) , in the Tokio (which is in Chivilcoy), in the Au Chien Qui Fume, in the Opern Cafe, in the Dome, in the Cafe du Vieux Port, in cafes anywhere

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets

Hart Crane dixit. But they're more than that, they are the neutral territory for the stateless soul, the motionless center of the wheel from where one can reach himself in full career, see himself enter and leave like maniac, wrapped up in women or IOU's or epistemological theses, and while the coffee swirls around the little cup that goes from mouth to mouth along the edge of days, can loosely attempt revision and balance, equally removed from the ego that came into the cafe an hour ago and from the ego that will leave within another hour. Self-witness and self-judge, an ironical autobiography between two cigarettes.

In cafes I remember dreams, one no man's land revives another; now I rememeber one, but no, I only remember that I must have dreamed something marvelous and that in the end I felt as if expelled (or leaving, but forcibly) from the dream that remained irremediably behind me. I don't even know if I closed a door behind me, I think I did; in fact a separation was established between what had already been dreamed (perfect, spherrical, fnished) and the present. But I kept on sleeping, that business of expulsion and the door closing I also dreamed. A single terrible certainty dominated that instant of transition within the dream; to know that irremediably that expulsion brought with it the complete fogetting of the previous marvel. I suppose that the feeling of a door closing was just that, fateful and instantaneous forgetting. The most startling is remembering also having dreamed that I was forgetting the previous dream, and that that dream had to be forgotten (my expulsion from its finished sphere).

All this must have, I imagine, an Edenic root. Perhaps Eden, as some would like to see it, is the mythopoetic projection of good old fetal times that persist in the unconscious. I suddenly understand better the frightening gesture of Masaccio's Adam. He covers his face to protect his vision, what had been his; he preserves in that small manual night the last landscape of his paradise. And he cries (because the gesture is also one that accompanies weeping) when he realizes that it is useless, that the real punishment is the one about to begin: the forgetting of Eden, that is to say, bovine conformity, the cheap and dirty joy of work and sweat of the brow and paid vacations.

(-61)