Words&Dirt

“‘We’d all like to have a millenary kingdom, a kind of Arcadia where it would probably be much more unhappy than here, because it’s not a question of happiness, Doppelgänger, but where there wouldn’t be any more of this dirty game of substitutions that occupies us for fifty or sixty years, and where we could really hold out our hands instead of repeating the gesture of fear and wanting to know if the other person has a knife hidden between his fingers.  Speaking of substitutions, it wouldn’t seem strange to me at all if you and I were the same, one on each side.  Since you called me vain, it appears that I’ve chosen the more favorable side, but who can tell, Manú.  One thing I do know and that’s that I can’t be on your side any more, everything falls apart in my hands, I get into every kind of mess that can make you go crazy, if it’s all that easy.  But you’re in harmony with the territory and don’t want to understand this coming and going, I give a push and something happens to me, then five thousand years of rotten genes draw me back and I fall into the territory again, I splash for two weeks, two years, fifteen years…One day I stick my finger into habit and it’s incredible how one’s finger sinks into habit and comes out the other side, it looks as if I’m finally going to get the last square and suddenly a woman drowns, let’s say, or I get an attack, an attack of useless pity, because that business of pity…I mentioned substitutions to you, didn’t I?  What filth, Manú.  Look up that business of substitutions in Dostoevsky.  In a word, five thousand years pull be back again and I have to start all over.  That’s why I feel that you’re my Doppelgänger, because all the time I’m coming and going from your territory to mine, if I really ever do get to mine, and in those weary passages it seems to me that you’re my form staying there looking at me with pity, you’re five thousand years of man piled up into six feet, looking at that clown who wants to get out of his square.  Amen.’”

––Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, pg. 344-5