The Penguin's Song (13 page)

THAT INSINUATING LOOK, SIMULTANEOUSLY
conspiratorial
and slightly threatening: will it reappear, I wonder, on my mother's face? From my room, where I am either sitting at the table or lying on the bed beneath the little mirror, I can tell that she has left, closing the door hard behind her. I was not there waiting in her path in order to know whether she would give me her surreptitious signal. Since I had figured she would come by my room, when she didn't I felt myself sinking heavily into a morose anguish, even though I didn't know whether I wanted to go down there again if it were suggested to me.

I am in my room when she goes by on her way to the front door. If I were out there it would not be that arch, cajoling gaze that I would get, but rather a different look that lands on me as if to keep me frozen in place. A look I can see and judge: swift, sidelong, sweeping me from top to bottom; a gaze empty of questioning since there is nothing she needs to know. No, I will not be there in her path as she walks heavily toward the door. I remain in my room sitting at the table or lying on the bed. As for standing at the window, I hesitate, holding back as I wait for the heavy knot of disappointment and failure to dissolve and go away. And anyway, in here at this table of mine or on my bed, I am still exhausted from the weight of where I have been. I haven't rid myself yet of the body and skin that, naked, I was pressed against, lapping at its regions. It still feels attached to me in places; I cannot remove the edges that stick to me; I cannot release them. I will not be able to exchange this state of being for another by going over to watch whatever might happen below me, just beneath my window. Being alone with the woman in her room, I exhausted and emptied myself not only on her body but also on the body of her daughter, which, to give my body the energy it needed, I began to imagine in front of me or beneath me, glistening, slender and delicate and new, the foamy hair never shaved. I imagine it beneath me, a body inhabiting the woman's body or springing from it. What the two shared between them helped me along. The woman's hands were ripe with the body of her daughter from all the touching she did, all the massaging of those limbs. No doubt those hands would still pat that body into place, would wash it, stopping just where it curved, stopping at what it concealed. I was in need of this strong image, every bit of it, as I struggled to replace the body beneath me with a different body. Or to pull that body from hers, not only because she had touched and rubbed it, but also because her body had given birth to it, gave it up, emerging from that place clean of the traces of childbirth, as whole and raw and new as it was now.

I was still worn out by where my body had been. I must stay in my room, or in the house, but without my mother here. In the house, so that its hallways and tiles will cool me, or on the balcony where my father sits. As I approach, his head turns only the tiny distance he needs to focus his ear in the direction of the sound he senses coming toward him. He does not lift his head to be able to see me until I'm directly in front of him, and so it seems at that instant as if my appearance has taken him unawares, and it startles him. Even so, he gets up from his chair to greet me, leaning on his cane, which was another one of the items we had preserved among our old things. He asks if I want to sit down, because if so, he'll wait so we can sit down together, him on his chair and me on the chair facing it. I will do this for the sake of soothing myself. I need to spend my time in ways I'm used to in order to distance myself from where I have been. On the balcony as I sit down I feel more affection than usual for my father; I see him in tableaux from various moments in his past. Sit down . . . Sit down . . . he would say to me as we stood in his shop, so he could parcel out his attention between his work and me. Or I see him returning with the books whose titles I had written out for him on a slip of paper; as he proffers them, hoisting their weight, he has the look of finding it strange to carry anything except sacks holding goods from his store. Here! here are the books, he says to me and stands nearby while I look at them, one after another, asking me as I make my way through them whether he has gotten anything wrong.

I need to reestablish my sense of comfort and familiarity among the things I know, to fend off the state I was in and to drive it further away from me. Lying on my bed or pacing through the gloomy hallway where there is so little light, I decide that musing about the two women who sit below will tire me out and annoy me and weigh me down. Neither do I feel any desire to get up and go over to my pages to compare each line, after which I will turn them over, making new piles. I need to rest now, to remain flat on the bed or simply sitting at my table doing nothing. Or to return to my father out there on the balcony where he will get up slowly from his chair when my shape surprises him, to ask me whether I want to sit down; and I know that if I do sit down we will not talk about anything. He won't ask me any questions because he thinks I prefer that we remain silent and still. If he asks me where they have gotten to now, down there, I will appear grumpy, muttering in my irritation at being forced to return to speech that says nothing. They are working, I answer him in a way that lets him know he must not ask me what they're working at, just as he knows that if I answer a question about the work I do, I will not add anything to what he already knows. Nothing has changed, I will say to him, or I'll simply say that they have given me some new work to do. And so we remain silent when I sit down. Sitting on the balcony as he does has made him silent. That is what it has done, as if the words we used to exchange can be elicited only by coincidental, fleeting encounters in the hallway or kitchen, or at doors that stop us momentarily. It's his sitting on the balcony, his staying out there, that has silenced him. Do you want some water? he used to ask me whenever he saw me going into the kitchen. Do you want me to make you something? As if the words themselves arose from our chance meetings. Or as if he intended to pick up the water bottle to bring it for me, as I walked beside him, all the way to the door of my room where I would take it from him. He would be talking all the while, or he would seem, coming over to do these things for me, to be doing something hardly separate at all from his talking.

Sitting on the balcony has silenced him, as if by staying there through all the hours of his day he has separated himself. He has withdrawn from what goes on inside the house. He no longer even knows whether my mother is somewhere in the house or whether she has gone to visit her. From where he sits, there, his wrist draped on the balcony railing, he appears to have gotten as far away as he possibly can. He has gone to that final point after which lies nothing but the emptiness that separates us from the old city.

Still, he gets to his feet for me when he sees me directly in front of him, as if by standing up—and remaining standing—he is welcoming me there, to the place that has become his. He doesn't sit down again until I have decided to sit down, so that we sit down together. He has no words to say to me because he no longer moves around in the house doing anything that would generate the easy, passing conversation people have without meaning much of anything. Words like
It'
s hot
when he puts his hand on the pan and finds it hot. Or, noticing that someone else has gotten up and headed for the kitchen,
Sit down, sit down, I'll bring it, I will
. These are the sort of words he no longer says. And so we remain silent, sitting together on the facing chairs, and I resume thinking about whatever it was I was thinking of before I sat down. Or I go back to sweeping away whatever it is I want to erase from my head, giving myself over, as he does, to the breezes coming from below.

THE LONG ROUTE I WALK
lugging the
pages I have tallied—a route I will retrace carrying another
set of pages—is the only one I know in the
confusion of streets that cut through the new city. Every
time I take it I am affirming once again that
it is my sole direction, and so I forget what
I knew from my earlier wanderings. These are the only
roads that exist, the only ones that are solid and
real and that deposit me at that building where my
feet know the way up. I have no reason to
angle off onto any side streets, nor even to peer
at what might be there in the blocks that lie
beyond these little intersections. There is only the route between
home and the building I know, the set of streets
I regard as the straightest and fastest way to get
me to where I must go. This is what my
route becomes every time I walk it and affirm it
as the only true route. But as I ponder my
father's words, telling me I need to search for work in other offices, I realize how wrong
I've been. My fixation on this route means that I
have neglected all the other possibilities. If I am to
act on his words, I will have to diversify. I
will have to begin again, elbowing myself in among these
jumbled streets, getting lost. But this is something I cannot
do or don't want to do, since now, every time
I leave our building, I already know how to proceed
and what I will encounter with every step.

I will not change my route. I will not change my work, even though I know this means I'll go on with the very same tedium, replacing the pages I've checked with others I will check. But this resolution doesn't mean that I'm lulled by my father's assurance that tomorrow they will change my work. I'll go on doing the same thing, and I know that. In their tiny office I will get the same treatment every time, sitting patiently with my bundle of paper. The man inside will do the same thing every time: riffle through pages to see whether I deserve to be given more pages. I will not have any other work. The books I have read—those books for which I chose the smallest, most cramped space so I could isolate myself with them—will be of no help to me now. They did not teach me to do anything else. I read only old books. That's what the man sitting alone in the room where I had to wait for someone to leave before I could go in said to me. They were nothing but old books; one would lead me to yet another old book whose title I wrote down so that my father would bring it to me. Yes, they are old books, lined up in rows above where I sit. Gazing at them, my father seemed admiring and suspicious at the same time. He worried that something in the old pages or the dust seeping into them would surely sicken my body.

Old books, that's what they are, written by old people for people of old. I shouldn't have been satisfied only with them, said the man sitting at the large table that was too big for his narrow office. Then he handed me the packet of pages to match up, and I was aware again that this was the lowest level work among the various jobs they handed out here. My book reading was of no particular use to do this job, except that I had practiced reading and gotten used to spending time sitting in front of pages and reading. That's the only help my books gave me. When the man said that to me—about my old books—I suddenly could see them in my mind's eye, a mass of useless, cast-off, secondhand items. It took me no time to believe him, because I had sensed the same thing myself. Not only about the books I read but also about the clothes I extracted from the wardrobe to wear at home where no one saw me except my mother and father. I felt old-fashioned, too, when I thought about our old shop and how I would sit silent and motionless among its goods. And also when it came to my body: I am sure I look like people who used to exist but who died before I could see or know them. I would not have believed that man, who said these things to me, if I hadn't felt this within me already. He did not tell me anything I didn't already know, but he did make me aware of knowing it. You haven't read anything but very old books, he said. He must have seen that I was as close to ancient as the books I'd read. He did not add anything to my knowledge of myself, but he did get me right when he described my old books. I did not simply take in this conviction; rather, I began to see his words in everything I knew myself to be or to do. I am a person of old when I sit on the balcony with my father—a scene that is ancient, too. Every time I get up from the dining table, carrying my empty plate into the kitchen along with the pot that's worn out from all the cooking it's seen, I am from another time, a much older time. I am like that, too, when I go over to lean on the windowsill, tipping my body over the edge of it and hanging my head down. And I saw that in myself when she looked up and saw me hunched over, waiting at the window above her. I looked as though I had always been there, set down on a corner of the windowsill like a stuffed bird. It's not that she happened to see me at the moment I appeared there, but rather, that I had not moved. She would have had many chances to see me before this. That is everything my eyes said when hers happened to meet them. But she seemed to interrupt them by straightening up and turning away from their field of vision. No muscle in my face moved, and I showed no sign of having seen anything. I offered only that steady, unchanging gaze, even after she moved back from the window and walked slowly inside.

I was ancient, again, there at the window: she probably has no image of me except as a shadow that lurks at the angle of the window, hanging down and staring, whenever she has a passing thought about what is above her. The next evening I suddenly thought I should make sounds she could hear in her room. I should bang my window shut, and the sound would tell her that I was now behind the window and not tipping downward balancing on the windowsill. By closing the window—which means that later I will open it—I am creating a change of scene. I need to create sounds she will hear in her room. I need to close the window and then return to open it, to dispel what she saw when she craned her head to look above: a motionless shape, an image that doesn't change. And if I close or I open the window, that creates a sound that's close to her. It will reach her naturally, without any of those heavy echoes that sounds make when they come from rooms. It's like that when I make sounds she hears—I am erasing this look of the ancient that my silence and lack of movement have only enhanced. So now I'm making a commotion that seems to bring me forward, where sounds travel far, preceding me. Maybe I'll even give her a pleasant distraction, banishing the loneliness that permeates the outside world and from there invades her room, that space outside she's wary of and enters only rarely.