62: A Model Kit

p.34

where people squeezed together sleep in rooms with tired furniture,

with dark curtains and a breathing in of dust and beer, [...]

I will lose you again on the street car or on the train,

I'll run in my shorts
among crowded people sleeping in the compartments
where a violet light
blinds
the dusty cloth, the curtains that hide my city.

p.57 (the silent attention of Madame Germaine with a duster on Wednesdays and Saturdays)

My profession condemned me to hotels, which wasn't too pleasant when I thought about my apartment in Paris, set up over fifteen years of preference, a bachelor's manias, tendencies of the left hand or the five senses, records and bottles in their proper, obedient places, the silent attention of Madame Germaine with a duster on Wednesdays and Saturdays, life without financial problems, the Luxembourg beneath the windows...

p.60 (sad smell of time)

A friend of bars and custom-houses, of refueling stops early in the morning and beds where memories wouldn't be mixed with the sad smell of time

p.114 (tunnel, spoons nail, posters)

There were few people on the Metro platform, people like gray blotches on the benches along the concave wall with tiles and advertising posters. Hélène walked to the end of the platform where the stairway permitted - but it was prohibited - entry into the tunnel; shrugging her shoulders, vaguely passing the back of her hands across her eyes, she went back to the illuminated part of the platform. That's how, almost without seeing them, you start to look at the enormous posters one after the other, the ones that violate distraction and seek their path in your memory - first a soup, then some eyeglasses, then a make of television, gigantic photographs where every tooth of the child who likes Knorr soups has the size of a matchbox and the fingernails on the man watching television like spoons (to drink the soup in the neighbouring poster, for example), but the only thing completely attracts me is the left eye of the girl who loves Babybel cheese, an eye like the entrance to a tunnel, a series of concentric galleries and, in the middle, the cone of the tunnel which disappears into the depth like that other tunnel where I would have to have entered by going down the forbidden stairs, and which starts to vibrate, to moan, to fill with lights and squeals until the doors of the train open and I get in and sit on the bench reserved for invalids or old people or pregnant women, across from the seats where undefinable pygmies with microscopic teeth and imperceptible nails travel along with the fixed and mistrustful expression of Parisians tied to salaries of hunger and bitterness that are mass produced like Knorr soups. For four or five stations there is a kind of absurd desire for madness, for a stubbornness in fixing the illusion, which might have been enough to suggest it, to take a mental step forward, to throw oneself into the tunnel on the poster so that it would become reality, the real stairway of life, and those people in the car reduced to a ridiculous size would become a mere mouthful for the girl who loves Babybel cheese, a slap of the hand for the giant watching television. Now, at the edge of the forbidden tunnel stairs, something like an abominable caress, a demand... Shrugging your shoulders, rejecting temptations one more time; you remain, Hélène, the bitter harvest of that afternoon remains; the day isn't over yet, you'll have to get off at Saint-Michel station, the people get their normal size back, the posters are exaggerated, a naked man is small, fragile, no one has nails like spoons, eyes like tunnels. No game will make you forget: your soul is a cold machine, a lucid register. You'll never forget anything in a whirlwind that sweeps away the large and the small to fling you into another present; even when you walk through the city you're yourself, inevitably. You'll soon methodically forget, with a before and an after; don't be in such a hurry, the day isn't over yet. Come on, here we are.

p.171 -2 (lost dog, streetcar, amusement park)

... in order to get to the Calle Veinticuatro de Noviembre I would have to take one of the countless street cars that paraded by like a ride in an amusement park, passing without stopping, their sides of peeling ocher, their trolleys full of sparks, an intermittent ringing of meaningless bells which could be heard at all moments and as if because of a whim, with people with hollow and tired faces in the windows, all of them looking down, a little as if they were looking for a lost dog among the bricks of the red pavement.

Hopscotch

"The same thing happens to everybody, the statue of Janus is a useless waste, the truth is that after forty years of age we have our real face on the back of our heads, looking desperately backwards. It is what in all truth is called a commonplace. You can’t do anything about it, that’s about the strength of it."

Hopscotch - Cortazar

“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 Argentinean iron lung, so sad and solitary. It had been sometime 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 . . . 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 shepherd. To grasp unity in the midst of diversity, so that that unity might be the vortex of a whirlwind and not the sediment in a clean, cold mate gourd."

Life is - Cortazar

Life is a commentary of things we didn't do

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)