The Penguin's Song (10 page)

EVER SINCE THAT EXPEDITION OF
ours from which we returned tired and dispirited, my father had begun spending most of his time sitting on the balcony, even though out there he could no longer enjoy anything but the gusts of cool air coming from the deep emptiness below him. It had been a while now since he had begun to experience extreme eye fatigue and disease, and he could no longer see anything at any distance. The old city, remote and far below us, he could no longer see at all, for it was encased in the blackish fog that was now composed of everything his eyes could not distinguish clearly. He could see only nearby objects, and to do even that he had to bring them very close to his eyes if he wanted to see them as they really were. When he looks at me I assume that he sees me obscured and darkened, as if I'm covered by a dense and undulating smoky fog, just the way his eyes themselves seem covered. It's become hard to imagine their smooth surface beneath that nylon skin that has grown into the thick and wrinkled crust that covers them entirely.

Out there on the balcony, flush against the wall so that he can support his elbow on it, he no longer leaves the chair with its ottoman and back cushion that my mother sewed to allow him to sit a bit higher and straighter. He no longer enjoys anything but the surging puffs of cool breeze reaching him. He no longer asks what has happened to the shop in the old city that his finger, jabbing the air, was always seeking when we moved here. The whole of the old city has become a single façade now, a single direction to which he points with his hand or his head, making a single gesture that takes in all of it. Afterward he asks me where they are now. By this time, I know that what he means by his question is whether they have finished demolishing all of it. I tell him they have only a little work still to do, and he says to me that many things were left there whose owners should have taken them out along with their furnishings and goods. Or they should have made sure to be there during the demolition to extract these things from amongst the stones as the walls were taken down. He's remembering wardrobes and cupboards built to measure in the houses, and steel vaults in the shops of watchmakers and jewelers, which looked so solidly built and firmly attached that they seemed as if they had been constructed along with the walls themselves.

He enumerated many other things, among them the contents of the grand stores that did not have just a single owner who was always there along with his employees. They must have left all that marble where it was, he would say to me before adding that in the cinemas as well, they must have abandoned all those seats that were fixed in place, in rows. As for the curtains that had covered the screens, which consumed so much fabric that the cinema owners had to take them out to the enormous courtyards in order to even pleat them, they would have been left hanging. Sitting there, my father could not stop naming all the things that must be taken from the old city. One thing was always leading him to another, and when he remembered something else still, this seemed to make him happy, as if the thought of it had occurred to him at precisely the right moment. The electric meter boxes! he would shout to me, as if coming up with the answer to a riddle that had fatigued his brain. Doorbell buttons! he would say; they were all left at the entryways, by the doors. That was his game, his entertainment or solace; he was able to harmonize what he had already named with the new items, accommodating one thing to the next. He would grow genuinely sorry about what had been abandoned there. First, because of its cost and its worth, since nothing comes for free, as he would say; and then because, after all, these things were necessities of life, and everything that had been left behind must be bought again to replace what was lost.

That was his way, too, of expressing his fear that the funds he had remaining would dwindle to nothing. Or it was one of his ways. Another was his way of counting—every evening—the contents of the little chest and organizing the coins and bills into piles according to each one's worth. Every time my mother saw him sitting on his bed with the money spread all around him she would ask from behind the door why he was counting it again today, since we had not spent any of it since he last counted. She would raise her voice just enough so that he would hear it. No doubt she hoped that the suspicion would enter his mind that she went about describing him just this way when she talked about him to anyone else. He didn't answer her while the money was scattered over the bed. He waited until he had put it all back, organized by value and in rows, to say to her, as he returned the chest to its place in the wardrobe, that it was better than spending his time standing in front of the mirror.

When she stays silent, giving him no answer, I know what she is thinking but cannot say. All the mirror will show him if he stands in front of it is his ugliness. Instead she turns and walks away quickly, as if wanting to put some distance between her exit from the room and his going out after her. She needs nothing more than these few steps to regain her smile, which she displays, here on the balcony, with a playful and casual air. With that smile she gives the appearance of successfully leaving behind the aftermath of their spat, and now here she is once again as she was before, showing how distant she is from him, and how different. It's as if this heedless smile of hers puts him back in his place, or at least sets him again where he was before that little scuffle brought them together briefly. But she won't stop with this. She will stand on the balcony for only a short interval, as part of her preparation for going out. This is how she will augment the distance she began to create with her smile: to it she adds her punishing retribution. He falls for this immediately, looking around in confusion at her comings and goings between the kitchen and the bedroom mirror as she gets herself ready to go out. I assume that as he does this he believes that no one sees him; for as he jerks his head from side to side in response to her movements, he's showing his own submission to her authority and thereby enhancing her power.

Indeed he all but follows her as she walks toward the door, her gait as unsteady as always. He waits to hear the sound of it closing before he turns away and looks helplessly around him to figure out where he should go now, and then he heads for the chair anchored against the balcony railing. If he encounters me standing still in the sitting room or coming out of the kitchen to go to my room he tells me that she has gone, which only confirms his position and makes it easier for her to punish him. He does not like to see her leaving the house; knowing this perfectly well, she is careful to spin out her preparations so that his state of bewilderment in her busy presence is protracted and his response to the dilemma she puts him in all the more anguishing.

So she has gone, he says, staring at me as if this means I should do something. She will still be on the stairs. All we can hear is the heavy, muffled sound of her steps, as he turns away and adopts the demeanor of someone baffled by the fact that no one here can help him. He almost seems to believe, whenever she goes out, that she has gone out for the last time: that this is her final exit, that she will not return. He seems to think so even though he knows she is there, just below, and all her return requires is climbing one flight of stairs. While she's gone he remains in his chair. He doesn't try to get up even briefly, for he has come to know that even if we sit together, we will not talk. Likewise he has stopped asking me—every time he senses from where he sits that I'm going to the kitchen—whether there is anything I want.

He is there in his chair when she comes back. His hand grasps the railing as if he's readying himself to stand up, but then he brings his head forward in order to learn, without turning his head, where in the house she is now and what she is doing. She is in her bedroom right now, and not in the kitchen or the sitting room. There, where she leaves the door half closed behind her, she adds another interval to her spell of remoteness from us, by staying in that room where no one will pass by unless they are expressly going there.

He waits for her to be in the kitchen or the sitting room. But there, too, she maintains this spell of distance from us, since her heavy gait sounds wobbly, the same as when she left. She's still in her high-heeled sandals that compress and all but splay open to each side under her large, heavy body, or her heaviness drops into the heels, making them look as though they've sunk into the floor tiles like nails firmly lodged there. Her clothing is tight across her body, and this particular dress accentuates how large she is, how very prominent are the swellings under the tightly stretched fabric. Commenting on how my father hates seeing her standing in front of the mirror, she remarks to me that she's not costing us anything by doing this. He washes too, she says, as if to make me understand that with all her décor and finery she is using nothing more than a simple bar of soap, which is not even scented by anything other than its own basic fragrance and which, when she washes herself with it, gives her face a uniformly glacial hue. Women color their faces, she says to me, as if to make me understand that, alone of all women, she does not blanket her face with powder and tint.

She does not cost him anything by going out or by standing in front of the mirror. And her clothing, as stretched and worn as it is, will keep her close by, as much as she may have a penchant for making visits. She'll go no farther than the apartment beneath us or the spot where they sit outside, there on the sand, and where no one else will see her. These tight garments she can only substitute with dresses that are even tighter. In her bedroom she forces her large body into clothing that disfigures and dishonors it. That dress with the collar wings hanging down to her bosom on her will look like something a foreign woman would wear. The same goes for the navy blue dress made up to look like a sailor's togs.

Anyway, all the clothes in the wardrobe seem to have been tailored for a different body. She has grown so much fatter now that she can't even let out the seams in order to widen the dress, since these dresses were never made in the first place with any extra margin of fabric. And she doesn't like to refashion them—making a dress into a blouse or a skirt—because the minute you put a pair of scissors to a dress, you ruin it.

Soon enough she'll return each dress to the wardrobe on its hanger, from which she didn't even remove it. All she does is take these dresses out and look at them, as if to simply make certain, yet again, that wearing this one or that one would not be suitable for the moment. Still, she returns them to the wardrobe exactly like old belongings whose time will come, she figures, and when it does, she can revive them. Anyway, no one throws away anything unless it can be replaced with something else. Besides, wardrobes that are made to hold clothes must remain full of clothes. Filling! says my mother about her old clothes that she has abandoned but also kept. They're filling for the wardrobe, she adds as she comes out of the room dressed in the same thing she had on when she went in. Tight and worn and faded, it does not restrain her heedless, playful smile, which appears a moment or two after she has emerged.

MORE THAN ONCE, HER HEAVY
steps clattering against the floor tiles, she has intimated to me that she's going to their place, below. She gives me that sly and teasing look, which means that she knows what's what with me and that she's telling me I can, if I wish, go down there with her. As she's conveying this, I have the impression that she has transformed her irritation into a sport that is no less fevered or reckless. And with this wicked little intimation of hers, she is returning me to my little-boyhood, a lad absorbed in the suddenly suspect look on a familiar face, a cagey expression he has never seen on it before.

But after all, she did succeed in getting me to follow her in her excursions. The first time, I followed her out to where she would sit down—she and the woman—out there on the sand. I didn't wait until the two of them had already arrived at their spot. Someone standing at my window, just overhead, could have seen me walking behind the two of them, hurrying along, my feet flapping in the sand that pulled me downward as I tried to catch up. Despite all the things they were carrying that weighed them down, they arrived before I did. They didn't see me until after they had put all their various trappings on the ground. He has come, I heard the woman saying as she stared at me, as if her eyes couldn't detach themselves from my sudden appearance there, which had startled her. Then she put her hand out to me in greeting while I was still several steps away. That allowed me to slow down the usual jerk of my shoulder, a quick and wrenching motion that helps my hand to extend farther out or higher in the air.

My mother believed that it was the woman who kept me at my window; that she was the one who led me to spy and eavesdrop as I moved through the house. Out there on the sand, her face had a doubting expression as she put out her own hand, after the woman had done the same, to shake mine. It was as if, as soon as she saw me, her face bubbled over with that imbecilic joy of hers, but at the same time it showed the uncertainty of a schemer who knows there is much left to accomplish. When I saw that the woman was acting flustered and unsure of how to position herself on the mat they had set down, clearly wondering how the three of us would arrange ourselves, I figured that my mother must have made some progress already in furthering her plot, perhaps starting by telling the woman that I lurked there behind the window. As the two of them sat down, leaving an empty space on the mat where I could sit, I had the uneasy feeling that if I stayed I would see my mother in a position that would make me deeply uncomfortable. But here she was already insisting that I sit down. Come and sit down, come on, she began saying to me as her eyes took on a look of confusion about what she was preparing for and what she would do next if I really did sit down.

This time, too, my mother triumphed in getting me to follow her. When the woman opened the door to her home for us to come in, my mother seemed more sure of herself, preparing to shake hands with the woman and to initiate an exchange of greetings. Indeed, before we even reached their sitting room, which was directly below the room we used as a dining room, she was getting ready to launch her provocative little gestures that would add new meaning and significance to whatever she actually said, making her words more comprehensible. When the woman withdrew as if she had an urgent task, calling her to one of the other rooms, I sensed that she needed these few moments in there to rid herself of a nervousness she feared would show all too clearly. Their home was laid out differently than ours was. The salon and the adjoining room, which they had made their sitting room, were separated by an arch supported on two white marble pillars. The floor tiles had a different pattern and were older than ours, though they had a higher gloss. They looked to me as if they were made from a more pliant material that would feel softer to the bare feet that I instantly began to imagine sticking to them from sweat that had half-dried on them and gone tacky.

When the woman came back from wherever she had been, further inside, I was convinced that she hadn't done anything in there but soothe her nerves. She appeared calmer now, and to confirm it she began welcoming us again as she tugged her tight dress downward so as not to reveal her legs when she sat down on the little sofa opposite us. She began pulling on it again as soon as she was seated, and my mother said to her with another wink that she should sit however she liked and relax. I was uneasy and somewhat exasperated at my mother's winking. I thought it would return the woman to her state of agitation; only her question to my mother seemed to extract her from it: Why had my mother gone upstairs early yesterday? But in spite of the woman's apparent bashfulness and confusion, the two women appeared to me as though they had come to some sort of understanding about what my mother was attempting to do with her comments and her winks. And not so much through these hints and suggestions, which surely left each of them to act on her own, but rather with a pact they seemed to have made in which, no doubt, my mother had dictated each step and each bit of timing. So the woman had accepted me then. Faced with her confusion, I certainly had the sense that I could settle myself on the sofa in whatever position would be most comfortable for me, not worrying about holding my head rigidly high to prove that I had a neck above my chest. So she had accepted me, and my mother was thinking that she would have to do nothing more than verbally conduct us as far as necessary to get us to do what she expected us to do.

The sight of the woman's legs set me on edge. It was no use: every time I glanced at her, trying to keep my eyes level with the top of her head, I could still see them. Pressed together, their whiteness only appeared more emphatic, the skin stretching tautly across the mounds of her thighs so that the surfaces looked especially smooth and soft while emphasizing the fleshiness beneath the skin. The sight of them unnerved me, yes, and in my dread that my eyes might slip irrecoverably to fasten on them, I no longer found it enough to raise my eyes as far upward as I could, but rather, I began shifting my gaze from one end of the room to the other, staring now into the corners and now at the walls. When I looked at my mother she seemed to be closely observing what was playing out before her, the expression on her face a blend of dopiness and slyness. When she realized that we might well go on sitting here in this silence, she said to the woman, with another incautious wink, that she had not done anything yet to host us properly.

When the woman got up to go to her kitchen I almost asked my mother if there was anyone else in the apartment. From her room in there—and I knew exactly how far its door was from where I was sitting—I could hear not a single one of the sounds that I knew so well. But the way the woman sat across from us tugging at her tight dress told me that no one else was at home. They had contrived all of this, she and my mother. No doubt the two of them worked together to get the place ready and to arrange how the woman would remove her daughter. Even to the point that my mother, wanting to show that we could behave freely and however we wished, began to lean forward, lifting her massive backside as she batted the sofa cushions with her hand to fluff them up evenly before she returned them to their places. The two of them had made her leave the house and surely they had shut the door to her room as they busied themselves straightening and rearranging. Still, I did consider asking my mother if anyone was in the house but us. Not to hear her response, which would be nothing more than another series of hints and insinuations, but so that I could ask her then whether I could look over the apartment to see how it was divided up and how its rooms were situated. From the little sofa where she sat, my mother asked the woman in a loud voice if she needed help with anything. When the woman's voice came back after a moment's delay my mother got up and said that she was going in there. I knew that the two of them must have neglected some detail in their arrangements and they were meeting to rectify that. Alone in the sitting room I could look around at everything without feeling any embarrassment or confusion if they were to appear suddenly, since it wouldn't look as if I were spying or being overly curious. I would just be trying to entertain myself, that's all, trying to pass the time as I waited for them to return. High on the wall, which had no windows and doors to interrupt the space, hung a picture in a voluminous frame: men and women in flowing, old-fashioned dress were gathered, necks and heads craned, waiting to descend to a boat separated from the ledge where they stood by no more than the span of a step or two. The picture, on fabric, had not been done by hand. The work was too perfect for that, the colors too well matched. Below, though, the armrests and backs of the sofas were covered in pieces of finely worked, lacy fabric that was repeated on the surfaces of the cushions placed at the ends and midpoints of the sofas. As the sound of their low, staccato voices, which I could not make out clearly, reached me from the kitchen, I noted that the apartment's cupboards and shelves didn't hold anything that men wear or use for their personal needs. In their bathroom, too, there would be only the tools and powders that women use—the bathroom, whose location I also know, even though if its door were open in front of me now I would find it to be different from our bathroom, directly above it. Not only the color of the tiling on the floors and walls but also how the fittings and shelves are arranged. The bathroom, in which without a doubt certain things of hers have been left sitting out. Her small underclothes will be arranged neatly in the narrow cabinet, which is also in a different place in their bathroom than it is in ours. I might even find her panties, the ones she had taken off most recently, slipping them down over her legs; small and white, they would have been left in the corner next to the door. Or I would find the miniature towels, the kind shaped and worked like handkerchiefs, with which she would dry herself after every trip to the bathroom. Or I would find, on the edge of the basin, a razor blade still on the razor head, cleaned of the hair that had been plucked and shaved—light hair that has not yet coarsened. The bathroom, which I will not be able to enter on any excuse or pretext. For I would be going where the two of them, she and her mother, go only in a state of undress, intimate with their naked, private parts.

We kept you waiting, the woman said as she stood in front of me bending slightly forward, holding out a tray on which sat three glasses of iced orange blossom–flavored syrup. As she did so, she brought her face very close to mine. Moving my head back slightly, I understood that she did this with my mother's encouragement. It seemed as if I were their guest, the two of them together, for both women remained standing in front of me as each one took her glass from the tray without any of the ceremony normally accorded guests. When they sat down, maintaining their silence, I realized that they had agreed on something and each was waiting for the other to begin. But the woman, who set her glass down on the table next to her, went on pressing her legs together and pulling her tight dress forward to cover her knees. My mother asked whether anyone wanted anything from the kitchen before getting up from the sofa, her nearly empty glass in her grip. Stepping between us, she turned toward the woman and leaned down to pick up the tray and the woman's nearly untouched glass. Then I could hear the water gushing from the tap and I knew she would stay in there, occupying herself by slowly washing the glasses and then looking out of the big kitchen window, leaving us alone to do the thing she was waiting for us to do, or at least to begin doing it. As soon as she could see that we had begun to talk, she would say that we'd left my father alone and she was going up to him.