Hopscotch, Blow-Up, We Love Glenda So Much by Julio Cortazar

Author:Julio Cortazar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

100

HE PUT THE slug in the slot, slowly dialed the number. At that hour Étienne was probably painting and he hated for people to call him in the middle of his work, but he had to call him just the same. The telephone began to ring on the other end, in a studio near the Place d’Italie, three miles from the post office on the Rue Danton. An old woman with the look of a rat had stationed herself in front of the glass booth; she looked furtively at Oliveira who was sitting on the little bench with his face up against the apparatus, and Oliveira felt the old woman looking at him, implacably counting the minutes. The glass in the booth was strangely clean: people were coming and going in the post office, one could hear the dull (and funereal, it was hard to say why) canceling of stamps. Étienne said something on the other end, and Oliveira pushed the nickel button that established contact and definitively swallowed up the twenty-franc slug.

“Why do you always fuck things up,” complained Étienne, who appeared to have recognized him immediately. “You know I’m always working like crazy at this hour.”

“Me too,” said Oliveira. “I called you because right when I was working I had a dream.”

“What do you mean when you were working?”

“Yes, around three in the morning. I dreamed I was going into the kitchen, I was looking for some bread, and I cut off a slice. The bread was different from what we have around here, French bread like the bread in Buenos Aires, you know there’s nothing French about it but they call it French bread. You know it’s a much thicker loaf, light in color, with lots of soft center. A loaf made to be spread with butter and jam, you understand.”

“I know what you mean,” Étienne said. “I’ve eaten it in Italy.”

“You’re crazy. It’s not like that at all. Someday I’ll have to draw you a picture so you can see. Look, it’s shaped like a short, fat fish, barely six inches long but quite fat in the middle. That’s Buenos Aires French bread.”

“Buenos Aires French bread,” Étienne repeated.

“Yes, but this happened on the Rue de la Tombe Issoire, before I moved in with La Maga. I was hungry and I took out the loaf to cut off a slice. Then I heard the bread crying. Yes, of course it was a dream, but the bread started to cry when I put the knife to it. An ordinary loaf of French bread and it was crying. I woke up without knowing what was going to happen, I think I still had the knife stuck in the bread when I woke up.”

“Tiens,” said Étienne.

“Now you can see, you wake up from a dream like that, go out into the hallway and stick your head under the tap, go back to bed, spend the whole night smoking…What could I do, the best thing was to call you, apart from the fact that we could make a date to go see the old man in the accident I told you about.

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