de.Tales

Ch. 73

YES, but who will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that

at nightfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette , emerging from the

crumbling doorways , from the little entranceways, of the imageless

fire that licks the stones and lies in wait in doorways, how

shall we cleanse ourselves of the sweet burning that comes

after, that nests in us forever allied with time and memory, with

sticky things that hold us here on this side , and which will burn

sweetly in us until we have been left in ashes. How much better,

then, to make a pact with cats and mosses, strike up friendship

right away with hoarse-voiced concierges, with the pale and

suffering creatures who wait in windows and toy with a dry

branch. To burn like this without surcease, to bear the inner

burning coming on like fruit's quick ripening, to be the pulse of

a bonfire in this thicket of endless stone, walking through the

nights of our life, obedient as our blood in its blind circuit.

How often I wonder whether this is only writing, in an age in

which we run towards deception through infallible equations

and conformity machines. But to ask one's self if we will know

how to find the other side of h abit or if it is better to let one's

self be borne along by its happy cybernetics, is that not literature

again? Rebellion, conformity, anguish, earthly sustenance,

all the dichotomies : the Yin and the Yang, contemplation or the

Tiitigkeit, oatmeal or partridge faisandee, Lascaux or Mathieu,

what a hammock of words, what purse-size dialectics with

paj ama storms and living-room cataclysms. The very fact that

one asks one's self about the possible choice vitiates and muddies

up what can be chosen. Que si, que no, que en esta estli . . . It

would seem that a choice cannot be dialectical, that the fact of

bringing it up impoverishes it, that is to say, falsifies it, that is

to say, transforms it into something else. How many eons

between the Yin and the Yang? How many, perhaps, between

yes and no? Everything i s writing, that is t o say, a fable. But

what good can we get from the truth that pacifies an honest

property owner? Our possible truth must be an invention, that is

to say, scripture, literature, picture, sculpture, agriculture, pisciculture,

all the tures in this world. Values, tures, sainthood, a

ture, society, a ture, love, pure ture , beauty, a ture of tures. In

one of his books Morelli talks about a Neapolitan who spent

years sitting in the doorway of his house looking at a screw on

the ground. At night he would gather it up and put it under

his mattress. The screw was at first a laugh , a jest, communal

irritation, a neighborhood council, a mark of civic duties unfulfilled,

finally a shrugging of shoulders, peace, the screw was

peace, no one could go along the street without looking out of

the corner of his eye at the screw and feeling that it was peace.

The fellow dropped dead of a stroke and the screw disappeared

as soon as the neighbors got there. One of them has it; perhaps

he takes it out secretly and looks at it, puts it away again and

goes off to the factory feeling something that he does not understand,

an obscure reproval. He only calms down when he takes

out the screw and looks at it, stays looking at it until he hears

footsteps and has to put it away quickly. Morelli thought that

the screw must have been something else, a god or something

like that. Too easy a solution. Perhaps the error was in accepting

the fact that the object was a screw simply because it was

shaped like a screw. Picasso takes a toy car and turns it into the

chin of a baboon. The Neapolitan was most likely an idiot, but

he also might have been the inventor of a world. From the screw

to an eye, from an eye to a star . . . Why surrender to Great

Habit? One can choose his ture, his invention, that is to say, the

screw or the toy car. That is how Paris destroys us slowly,

delightfully, tearing us apart among old flowers and paper

tablecloths stained with wine, with its colorless fire that comes

running out of crumbling doorways at nightfall. An invented

:fire burns in us, an incandescent ture, a whatsis of the race , a

city that is the Great Screw, the horrible needle with its night

eye through which the Seine thread runs, a torture machine like

a board of nails, agony in a cage crowded with infuriated

swallows. We burn within our work, fabulous mortal honor,

high challenge of the phoenix. No one will cure us of the dull

fire, the colorless :fire that at nightfall runs along the Rue de la

Huchette. Incurable, perfectly incurable, we select the Great

Screw as a ture, we lean towards it, we enter it, we invent it

again every day, with every wine-stain on the tablecloth, with

every kiss of mold in the dawns of the Cour de Rohan, we invent

our conflagration, we burn outwardly from within, maybe that is

the choice, maybe words envelop it the way a napkin does a loaf

of bread and maybe the fragrance is inside, the flour puffing up,

the yes without the no, or the no without the yes, the day

without manes, without Ormuz or Ariman, once and for all and

in peace and enough.

-Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch