The Penguin's Song (15 page)

DESPITE THE MANY YEARS THAT
have passed, they still haven't erected anything I can actually see from our house, such that I could say to my father: Now they have begun. But they are building something there. In the mornings, before fatigue caught up with him and made him drowsy, he would say to me in a tone that conveyed both a question and an answer, not to mention a complaint: They are still at the same point there . . . everything is still where it was? He had stopped telling me I must go there to see what they were doing. Now, and over the past stretch of time, he has altered how he says this, so as not to appear quite so insistent, since that annoyed me. Instead, he would say to me, If one were to go there he would see it with his own eyes. Or he might remark that it was likely, now, that they were putting down the foundations of buildings, all of them at one go, but he figured you could only really see this at close range. But now he had stopped saying these things to me using any of his circuitous routes. He also simply stopped the wave of questions that, like his earlier ones, could have been voiced had his boredom and weariness not silenced him. Only two or three times did he say to me, revealing the wrath that accompanied him constantly in his silence: But they must leave marks on the ground! That way they would know how the streets were placed, so they would know how to cut them again. This he stopped repeating before he reached the point where he no longer cared; for to say it again, he would have to also tell me to go there to see whether they had done any of this at all.

He stopped telling me to go there. He knew that time would not last long enough to allow him to see anything finished, even if they were to announce today that they had begun pouring the foundations. He could no longer bear the waiting, either. For years he had waited, and he felt he had been abandoned again and again, his hopes forsaken over and over. Instead of demanding that I go down there he had begun to say to me—in the period before this final silence of his—that I should go over
here.
He meant the new city and he indicated it by retracting his hand slightly and redirecting it toward where the new city would lie, behind him. He wanted me to go there so that I would get to know the people whom—he would always add—I could not afford not to meet. I would understand that he had in mind those who worked arranging matters that people could not arrange for themselves.

In the first months following our move, when he would go around in the new city getting acquainted with what was there, none of the men he knew had died yet, obliging family and friends to organize a funeral. Making his circuits, he never saw even a patch of ground which—he could be re­assured—would be left empty for those who would die here before they could return to the old city. He wanted me to go and meet these people, to find out where they were and to see the cemetery, so I would know where it was. You must go! he would say to me, showing his irritated impatience that most of the time lay just below the surface, irritation at how I
satisfied
myself with that single route I took carrying the pages I had finished matching up. In his anger he seemed to be hastening my going there, for perhaps what he was anticipating would take us by surprise. Perhaps, especially if he remained this upset, it would come quicker, shortening the life allotted to him by fate.

I knew it was my duty to handle many tasks as we waited for it to happen, things beyond simply going there to make their acquaintance. The money in the little chest had dwindled so far—very few paper bills remained inside—that it was no longer worth hiding the box or keeping a watchful eye on it. The meager sums I gleaned from collating the piles of paper wouldn't cover the cost of a shroud, let alone a grave. Even before I got that far, I was worried that merely going to those people and getting to know them would cost me something, perhaps more than the chest held now. Even just going to them—since I would have to try out new routes and spend more time out of the house—might require money. You must go to see them, he began repeating, but his intonation suggested that he was asking me whether I had gone already, or even that he rejected the very thought that I might not have gone yet. The filmy layer that had transformed his eyesight had thickened even more; only two tiny pinpoints remained uncovered, like slits that each faced in different directions, fleeing from each other. Looking at me he would tilt his head to try to align the images he saw in one eye with those in the other. Not only (I thought) did he see me as if I were covered by a filmy substance or enveloped in a fog but also, he saw only a tiny patch of me through these pinholes.

It was not the waning of his eyesight I was seeing: it was his death. That is what I saw in his eyes, and it crept forward noticeably day by day. Since I knew he was watching it as closely as I was, and that he knew what it meant as well as I did, I could see that he was putting me in a position to say to him, Tomorrow I will go. I said it just like that, without any further explanation, as if we had already agreed on what it meant and what we would do. Tomorrow I will go, I said to him, as if to reassure him that we would get through this task without any anxiety. After I said it, he turned his face away toward the breeze coming from below. He seemed to need a moment by himself to swallow this unnamed thing we had now agreed to take care of. In streets I do not know, I will have to search for places I don't even know how to recognize. These were not simply the shops and offices of people who arrange the personal affairs of other people; they were other places still, different ones, places he might be able to name for me, those which I imagined sold or rented what was needed to prepare the dead. But the little chest did not contain money enough to allow me to prepare for this, to make ready what we would need.

Over there, I would also have to search for shops where they bought old items. From the collections in the shops I might be able to tell what I could sell from among our belongings and furnishings. Rather, I could see what things I should sell first, since in times to come I would be selling other things. I knew now that the first to go would be my father's bed, his wardrobe, and whatever was left of his personal effects. But for the moment I would go to see what they were buying, there in the shops that I did not know how to find or to recognize when I found them. When I returned from this errand, I would have to handle things on my own because my father would not even pay attention to where the commotion was coming from, made by the men who would shift around the big pieces of furniture and take some of them away. My mother would not be here, and when she did come back she might do no more than look hard at the spaces now emptied of her things, shaking her head sarcastically as she went into the kitchen or to her room to get whatever she had come for. She no longer had any interest in what happened here. She might even enjoy seeing belongings removed from where they had always been. It might relieve her to see that we were taking measures in the house without her, and she might relish seeing the appearance of the house change with the removal of his things. She would probably think it was the perfect opportunity for a certain resident to relinquish her accustomed role. As it was now, she no longer did anything for us before going out, except her scant cooking, and all that meant was adding another ingredient to the pan. Leaving the kitchen, she left the double doors open wide as if to say that this completed her work. As if to remind us that she was doing this work for us, for me and my father. She would no longer eat what she cooked here. The two of them, she and the woman, ate something else. Cooking it, they were entertaining themselves as if preparing food for their outing. From the window of the empty bedroom I watch the two of them walking down the sand track, for now their excursions involve going to the new city. I see them from the back as they walk. They do not talk and they look to me as though they are headed to some place where they're expected. From that distance I can see the woman's legs, skin containing their flesh and flattening it out delicately. I begin following the white skin of her legs to the places in her body that her clothing hides. Or her body is revealed to me in the movement of her buttocks as each one lifts in turn. Every time I see her walking I begin to imagine or remember her body, which I know, still naked, for her clothing does not succeed in covering it: naked and white, smooth but erupting and billowing in places, since her plumpness is not distributed evenly.

Her clothes don't cover her when I watch her, just as her gait along the sand track does not erase her image, silent on the bed, mute as if from embarrassment and pain together. I see them leaving, she and my mother, and I cannot believe that over there in the new city they'll be content to sit silently, doing nothing. Since they're not talking to each other they look as if they're intent on hurrying to something that awaits them. I think it's likely that my mother, whose wide shoulders remain steady and her head high as she walks, succeeded in finding someone for the woman with whom—on his bed there in the new city—she duplicates the painful embarrassed silence that I know. And no doubt my mother will be hovering there, as she did here, her heavy body pacing outside the room with the closed door as if she has something to occupy her other than simply waiting.

From the window of the empty bedroom I see them coming back. They spent exactly the same amount of time there as they do every time. They did not lose their way or follow a different route that would take them somewhere new. They go to one and the same place, every time they go out. They do not change their route, because if they did, they would have to label what they do as a bit of play, just something to pass the time.

THE SMALL TRUCK ADVANCING SLOWLY
and precariously up the sand track might have been a fugitive that happened to swerve off course and come here. No truck or car had traversed the sand track since the two old people on the ground floor left with all of their belongings. The feet tamping down the track in their rare journeys back and forth didn't harden it or even make it level. The truck swayed constantly as it approached, and then swung around with a screech. When it stopped and backed up to align its rear end with the wide main entryway, the sound it made seemed excessive for this little maneuver. From the window where I stood I saw the top of the cab and the empty truck bed behind it. There was no one in the building except me, no one to look out his window in annoyance, no one who might need to pass through the entryway that the truck had blocked. The two women had gone out to the new city as usual and would not return before their usual time, which I knew was just before the return from school of the one they would be waiting for after their own return. As for my father, he would remain sitting where he always sat, keeping his back to the sand track despite the loud screech that he must have heard. Nor, a few moments later, would he turn his face in the direction of the front door where the two men appear, turning without delay into my room. I lead the way, and then I stand nearby while they take the books down from their shelves.

They take these old books that I have neglected, leaving the dust to cover the edges of the pages and other exposed surfaces. The dust mixes with grains of sand that whip in when the breeze comes up, and which I used to remove whenever it occurred to me to take down some books from where they sat. I did that just for the sake of running my eyes over them, one book and then another, that's all, just like my father did with his money, counting and rearranging it. Lately I had neglected them as they sat there on the shelves. Even the two men, who were surely not so concerned about dust, stepped closer to the open window so that when they blew off a layer of dust it would fly outside. Or they slapped the heavy old book covers and flaps to remove the sticky specks that they couldn't blow away. Only then, once they thought the book wouldn't soil the hands of whoever would be picking it up next, they added it to those they had already piled on the table. Standing near them, or between them, I saw myself taking down books just as they did, an armful at a time, beginning at one end of a shelf and looking only at how dusty or how thick a book was. I was just like them now, or almost. Whenever I happened to see the title of one of these books, perhaps one lying atop the pile, which they had not stopped adding to even though it had begun to sway, I paused only momentarily, remembering my father as he presented it to me, his face still sweaty from walking quickly, as he always did. It was nothing more than an ephemeral image in my head, in which I saw myself sitting on that chair, there in my father's shop, turning the book over in my hands and sniffing the fragrance of ink and paper. Or I remembered picking it up where it lay open, face down on the low table in the hallway between the doors in our old home. But such memories didn't hold me for long. These were nothing but insubstantial wafts of memory that passed rapidly as one of the two men covered the book with another book placed on top of it, or when one of them reached to remove a clutch of books from the very highest shelf that they had not yet finished emptying.

As the pile of books grew higher, it seemed to me that I was tucking these flashes of memory in among them, sending them along—with the books—to the truck. Ever since I had begun working on the identical sets of pages, I had gotten into the habit of sitting at the table so that all the books were at my back—these old books that as I read them did not equip me with anything but their decrepitude. The books, all of them! I said to the two men as they paused under the shelves asking where they were to start. All of the books, I said: all of those old books, which (now I can see, as I see myself reading them in the narrow hallway between the doors) made me into the image of a boy who had already grown old and decrepit. The surface of the table was completely covered now with books they had removed from the two highest shelves where, now that they were emptied, I could see the wall, darkened and dingy from its long concealment. My mother used to say that staying among books would make me ill because she imagined my body would be desiccated by their constant company. The books, all of them . . . which now, after dusting them off, the men had begun to pile on the bed. Those books that they won't carry downstairs until all of them are off their shelves and piled in batches on the table, floor and bed.

I leave the room as they're taking down the last books. I leave so they can move among the piles they've made. Waiting behind the door, I keep my head filled with the image of the wall, but without the dark color framed by the shelves that make it even darker. I think about how it might be possible to rid the wall of that stain of darker color if a broom or a big towel were taken to it. The shelves as well, I said to the men as they clapped their hands together to rid them of the last particles of dust sticking there. The shelves, and the desk, I said. They could take the shelves down as easily as they had removed the books from them.