The Penguin's Song (9 page)

IT
WAS
SO
EARLY
WHEN
we
went
out
that
as
we
walked
the
sand
track
I
assumed
that
the
merchants
would
not
have
even
come
to
their
shops
yet.
Knocking
on
my
door
with
the
tentative
rap
that
I
had
been
expecting,
my
father
was
standing
there
in
his
outdoor
clothes,
having
dampened
his
thin
hair
and
parted
it
just
as
I
do
mine.
Indeed,
in
the
long
interval
since
he
had
gotten
out
of
bed,
he
must
have
re-ironed
his
clothes
and
polished
his
heavy
black
shoes
again,
though
they
would
be
coated
with
dirt
and
dust
as
soon
as
he
took
his
first
steps
onto
the
track.
I
had
suspected
that
he
would
wake
up
very
early.
More
likely
he
had
not
gone
to
sleep
at
all.
As
soon
as
we
stepped
over
the
threshold
and
were
outside
the
building,
readying
ourselves
determinedly
for
the
long
streets
we
would
walk,
it
seemed
as
if
all
of
a
sudden
he
had
regained
his
old
manner
of
walking,
which
gave
his
short
figure
that
look
of
strength
peculiar
to
short
and
stocky
bodies,
and
a
youthfulness
that
made
me
wonder
whether
,
once
we
reached
the
beginning
of
the
paved
street
,
he
would
roll
up
his
shirtsleeves,
stopping
only
when
the
folds
reached
halfway
up
his
arms.

He had slept little that night, or perhaps not at all. Going out with me to steer me to the right place was the first
occupation
he'd had since stopping his activities all those years ago. He had to prepare for it as old men do when they feel they're about to take something new in hand. I didn't sleep well either, given how tired out I was. Indeed this fatigue of mine, which I thought would send me into a sound sleep, instead kept me awake through most of the night. In the little bursts of napping from which I would soon awaken with a start, instantly alert, my father's face would come to me, very near. He was looking at me but those watery eyes didn't really see me, and they seemed to smile out of a face that was weak and strained.

Or his silhouette would come to me as it was before we went to bed, arms straight out on the armrests of his chair, sinking into his nap with a swiftness that terrified me, for I couldn't help wondering if this onrush would stop before it paralyzed his face and killed him. I did not get the sleep I needed that night. My weariness was too heavy to banish just by lying down on my bed and closing my eyes. As we walked together side by side on the sand track, my fatigue sat on me heavily, drying up my throat and making my head heavy. My father's face, still so close to mine, had not lost the look it had had in my interrupted naps—until I would glance at him and see him next to me, real.

The merchants on either side of the street where we turned in from the sand track presented the same scenario as the day before. That they had longer to wait today before their customers would come down seemed to make no difference in their activities. These shops in close sequence, packed so tightly together at this end of the street, were ones my father knew. As we approached their proprietors my father greeted them with a wave of his hand, greeting upon greeting, to which they replied with their hands in the air as well. For him this was the opening sacrament of this work he was performing: with it he was showing me that as long as I was with him I would enjoy circumstances different from those I faced when I was on my own. Or it may be that with these first steps of ours, he was intent on trying to make me remember what he had been like in the days when we would go together to his shop down in the old city. He greeted these men whose shops followed so closely upon one another; he greeted them in turn, giving the appearance that he was one of them and was intimately familiar with their work routines. It probably pleased him no end when the men paused in whatever they were doing to return his greetings, looking at us both all the while. These were something more than the usual glances, but my father couldn't see that they were looking at us for their own reasons—to satisfy their inquisitive nature and their curiosity—and not from something due to us.

Anyway, he stopped turning his face to the men in the shops after we turned off their street. In the long street where we now found ourselves, I had the feeling we had come into the area where I'd been yesterday, for here were the streets that stretched on and on so that we would do nothing but keep walking. Walking beside him, I had to quicken my pace to stay abreast, which made me appear to onlookers as though I were hopping or jumping across the ground, since my feet appeared to be my only moving parts. I didn't tell him to slow down, even when, to keep up with him, I had to go almost at a run. At the second intersection he turned to the left without any show of hesitation or uncertainty. And when he asked me, as we went down this street that went on and on in front of us, whether I had gone this way, his intent was simply to draw my attention to his lack of hesitation at the intersection; he had not slowed his pace for a moment. This was the same route I had walked yesterday. And I thought, as I hopped along beside him, that his coming with me had not added anything thus far to my own solitary venture. I had walked in these same streets without him, and indeed I had reached other streets. I wasn't sure he would reach them with the same ease.

No, up to this point he hadn't gotten me anywhere I wouldn't have gotten to on my own. In the street where a wide and straight road cut through, he had to look in both directions before settling on one of them. From the middle of the road, his weak vision didn't allow him to see signs or landmarks that might tell him where he was, so he had to choose a direction by relying on guesswork and instinct. To reassure me that we were taking the correct route, after we had left some buildings behind he gestured in one direction as if to anoint it as the right one. He reiterated this when, a bit farther on, his eyes encountered shapes he fancied he knew. That's the one, he said, reverting to his usual rapid pace that hesitation had slowed down. What could I do but follow him, especially since the streets I had been down yesterday had not gotten me to where I wanted to be? I remained silent when his hesitation became acute as new junctions appeared. Every time we reached an intersection, all he could do was rely on seeing something up close that might tell him where we were, for his eyesight could not get him any further than that. He couldn't see the street as he remembered it, since his eyes failed him in this regard. Once he was already walking down it he would go on looking to both sides of the street to convince himself, while he was walking, that this was the correct route.

But once here, he will not be capable of retracing his steps to that intersection he left behind, in order to begin again down another street. Or it will not happen with the simplicity he practiced when we were at home: losing himself in streets he remembered, he would return to a point where he could start off again in another direction. Out here, he wouldn't be able to correct whatever error he had fallen into by a mere wave of his hand, closing his eyes to remember where he'd been before taking the wrong turn and then returning there in his mind. Now, all the while he is walking, he must continually peer around, examining whatever he can see to make sure, with every new step, that this is the route he knows. This process slowed our pace. In the very long streets we would walk looking hard at everything around us just as if we were constantly facing intersections where we would have to choose which way to go. Aha, there it is, he would say to me, pointing to a shop he saw or waving at the façade of a building. Yes, this is it, he would say; but this certainty of his would soon fade as we went a distance in which he recognized nothing. This is what began to frighten him: the street we were in would fragment into uncertain possibilities. Either it was the right street, or it was the street we ought not to have taken. I have gone through here before . . . this street, I know it . . . he would begin saying after some moments of silence, having been gripped by a flurry of confusion during the time it took to walk by two or three buildings.

He could have asked the men who were in their shops, those that sold nothing more than the foodstuffs required by residents of these buildings, yet he would not do that unless he was very certain we had really lost our way. Did you go by here yesterday? he would ask, only to realize that he had not the slightest idea of how he would make use of my response. It would not help him at all if I were to answer, No, I didn't come by here. We had moved quite far away from the streets I had learned yesterday, having turned off them to go down others. As we proceeded slowly among the people who had begun to come down from the higher floors of the buildings, the thought that came to me was that we were now in his streets, whether they were the right ones or not, for we were no longer in those closest streets of which we shared some knowledge. Read this sign, he began saying to me, wanting what I read to help him see something more clearly or to remember it. Read this, he would say, pointing to another sign or banner. It fatigued him to go on walking through the streets hesitant and confused. He was too tired now to see or to be able to read what he saw, even as close up as this. I knew that the only thing more walking would give him was further deterioration in his eyesight, and that it would not be long before he would be unable to see anything that was more than four or five steps ahead, barely enough for anyone trying to see where to put his feet and keep moving forward. Come on, let's ask someone, I would say, only to have him answer that I should wait a little, and in any case, the shop name I had just read to him had jogged his memory. But this didn't work out, either. It wasn't long before he came out of that space that was logged somewhere in his memory. They changed the streets, he began saying to me, going on to mutter something from which I gleaned only that the streets were no longer what they had been, and that they had spliced some new streets from the knots of old ones. When he meant for his words to be heard, he would turn directly to me to remark that they had expanded this new city of theirs, taking over more space, but that of course we would eventually reach areas he knew.

I had to wait for him to decide the moment when it became unavoidable: we would have to ask one of these people who were now so numerous around us, in and around the shops or walking in front of them or clustering in certain spots where they were doing nothing. But he couldn't do it. If he were to admit the necessity of asking, he thought, he would be acknowledging that it would have been better for me to come by myself and admitting that all he had done by coming with me was to usher me into these streets from which we didn't know how to get anywhere. Worse, this terrible failure would not just embarrass him but, to his way of thinking, it would mean that we would no longer listen to anything he said to us—to me and my mother—about anything. If we surrendered, he and I, and allowed passersby to show us our route, that would mean he was truly relinquishing the possibility of going out into the city, not because he no longer wanted to but because he no longer could. He knew the way, he said to me, and it was only his eyesight that had gotten him lost. He hadn't been able to tell the streets apart by sight even as his feet had gone into them of their own accord. What had made him get lost was his eyesight, he told me firmly. He was tired, breathing hard, and when I looked closely at his eyes I saw that they were empty and still, as if something inside wasn't working. At that point I didn't need to lose more time searching for someone to guide us. There were so many people around us, and all I had to do was turn my face a little to be directly facing someone whom I could ask. When I began talking to him my father stopped looking at what was around him and simply stood next to me, just like that, silent and looking at nothing.