Words&Dirt

“Emmanuèle lay down on the floor of the truck, face down and wailing, and Oliveira put his feet on her behind and settled himself comfortably on the bench.  Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe.  The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors.  On top is Heaven, on the bottom is Earth, it’s very hard to get the pebble up to Heaven, you almost always miscalculate and the stone goes off the drawing.  But little by little you start to get the knack of how to jump over the different squares (spiral hopscotch, rectangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often) and then one day you learn how to leave Earth and make the pebble climb up into Heaven (Et tous nos amours, Emmanuèle was sobbing face down), the worst part of it is that precisely at that moment, when practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb up into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you’re into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too.  And since you have come out of childhood (Je n’oublierai pas le temps des cerises, Emmanuèle was kicking about on the floor) you forget that in order to get to Heaven you have to have a pebble and a toe.”

––Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, pg. 214