Diagnosis: Seeker

It's funny how Horacio has been changing in these months since I first met him.  You wouldn't have noticed, I don't imagine, too close to him and too responsible for the changes.

Why one big metaphor?

He walks around here the way other people look for flight in voodoo or marijuana, Pierre Boulez or Tinguely's painting-machines.  He guesses that in some part of Paris, some day or some death or some meeting will show him a key; he's searching for it like a madman.  Note that I said like a madman.  I mean that he really doesn't know that he's looking for the key, or that the key exists.  He has an inkling of its shapes, its disguises; that's why I was talking about a metaphor.

Why do you say that Horacio has changed?

A question to the point, Lucia. When I met Horacio I typed him as an amateur intellectual, I mean an intellectual without rigor.  You're a little like that down there, aren't you?  In Mato Grosso, places like that.

Mato Grosso is in Brazil.

Along the Parana, then.  Very intelligent and alert, up to date on everything.  Much more than us.  Italian literature, for example, or English.  And the whole Spanish Golden Age, and naturally French literature on the tip of your tongues.  Horacio was pretty much like that.  It was only too clear.  I think it's admirable that he has changed like this in so little time.  Now he's turned into a real animal, all you have to do is look at him.  Well, he hasn't turned into an animal quite yet, but he's trying his best.

Don't talk nonsense, La Maga snorted.

Understand me, what I'm trying to say is that he is looking for the black light, they key, and he's beginning to realize that you don't find those things in libraries.  You're the one who really taught him that, and if he's left it's because he's never going to forgive you for it.

That's not why Horacio left.

There's a design to that too.  He doesn't know why he left and you, the reason for his leaving, are incapable of knowing unless you decide to believe what I'm telling you.

I don't believe you, La Maga said, sliding off the chair and lying down on the floor.  And besides, I don't understand any of it.  And don't bring up Pola.  I don't want to talk about Pola.

Keep on looking at what's being drawn in the darkness, Gregorovius said pleasantly.  We can talk about other things, of course.  Did you know that the Chirkin Indians, by always asking missionaries for shears, now have such a collection of them that the number of shears per capita among them far outstrips the figure for any other group of people in the world?  I read about that in an article by Alfred Metraux. The world is full of strange things.

--Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch, 133-134.