Would I find Cortazar?
But I wasn’t really looking for Cortazar when I read his masterpiece, Hopscotch. I was, I’m sorry to say, looking for myself. And just to make the cliché complete, I was looking for myself while living a bohemian existence in Buenos Aires, with little idea of how I got there or where I was going next, after quitting a corporate job in New York.
Do reasonable people really unironically travel to foreign countries to “find themselves”? It’s not something I’m exactly proud that I did. Or felt a need to do, at any rate. One morning in Buenos Aires, I had breakfast with a friend on Avenida Independencia, the sort of lazy breakfast that followed one too many nights after one too many fernet y cokes. “What are you doing here, exactly?” he asked (in reference to Buenos Aires, not breakfast). His question was not unkind. If anything, it implied that I didn’t need to be there, that I gave off an air of capability that was foreign to young foreigners there like myself.
I was never sure how to answer that question, but – possibly out of mental ennui – I let my answer and Cortazar’s answer bind themselves together. I read Hopscotch several times while traveling, and since I returned, I’ve written about it several times, too. There are certain books that must be thrashed over and over for a reader to find satiation, but this one in particular. There is an air of banging one’s head against a wall about Hopscotch, because it is a book about a rational person searching for himself, in the excesses of bohemian Paris, in the excesses of vain intellectualism, by the seductive circularity of his own thoughts, in the pseudo-enlightenment of philosophy, jazz, and art, in the pseudo-consumption of alcohol, cigarettes, and mate, and finally, like Heraclitus, by burying himself in shit.
At one point, Cortazar’s narrator, Horacio Oliveira, considers, “Underneath it all we could be what we are on the surface.” I was given Hopscotch by a New York friend before leaving for South America. I hadn’t planned on bringing any books with me abroad, but he almost insisted, describing it as “timely and placely” for me, so I didn’t say no. I wondered about his recommendation as I read, and what it said about how I appeared on the surface. I thought: Does this make me Oliveira? When I came back to New York, another friend purchased Hopscotch after reading a short piece I wrote on it. He took a photo of the front of the book (which features La Maga, Oliveira’s mistress, in a cloud of smoke) and emailed it to me, saying if I hadn’t recommended the book, the cover would have reminded him of me. I thought: some haggard, chain-smoking old white woman reminds you of me? But then I also thought: Does this now make me La Maga?
Finding yourself in literature may be as tenuous (not to mention banal) as finding yourself in a foreign country. Hopscotch softly slashes away at those ideas, while softly slashing away at every other idea besides. But still we – and Oliveira – continue to look. Still we travel and read with the vague hope that we might find. Simply because, as Cortazar himself writes: “Without faith nothing that should happen ever would, and with it almost never either.”
