The Penguin's Song (4 page)

FROM THE WINDOW IN THE
room overlooking the sand track (the room my father calls mine, the room he entreats me to sleep in, night after night) I can see the girl who lives just below me as she steps out of the building's front entrance. I will already be in wait, there behind the window where I have been busying myself with a towel, drying my face, neck, and hands. It won't be more than a few moments before she appears, hoisting her bulky book bag and walking heavily. She drags herself along as if she hasn't yet rid herself of the sleep from which she was suddenly and unwillingly yanked. As her feet take their first steps, her body swerves toward the edge of the track: final traces of sleep still hold her in their sway. I know very well that I really should not be standing at the window so expectantly. If I stand here like this every day, I am behaving exactly like those people who are too obviously expecting something, or (even worse) I am one of those who lie in wait, anticipating a response to the look they send out. No, I must not stand like this, waiting behind the window. Girls her age activate something in those who watch them, but it's wrong. It's errant desire, misplaced desire. It's something defective in the men who watch.

I watch her slowing down, maybe stumbling, and I
figure
that she must be taking in the fact that between her and the end of the sand track there is still a long and arduous way to go. Her feet sink into the sand, and I worry about sharp grains of it finding their way into her soft white shoes and soiling her socks, which are also white. But every day at this time, I know, she will stamp her feet on the cement surface where the sand track ends abruptly. She wants to knock away the sandy soil that clings and at the same time announce to herself that she has finished with the track that so annoys her. She stamps her feet twice, then a third time to finally rid the white shoes of the sand and its dirty, clinging residue. But the sand that has worked its way inside will stay there, sticking to her socks, suspended between her soft and pliable toes, which are not yet roughened or cracked by age or by too much walking.

When she reaches the closest edge of the building where she will wait for the bus, I can no longer see her from my window. Once she is there, I turn away from the window and hurriedly finish rubbing my face and neck dry, as if to proclaim to myself that it is time for things to move on to the next stage. Come to the table! says my father as he stands gazing at the plates, which aren't very many and anyway, aren't full. He lets me have the few minutes I need to go into my room and get into my daytime clothes. Come to the table! he says to my mother, this time going to her in the kitchen. Or he might just stand at the door waiting for her, just inside the central hallway where he can also see me leaving the room that holds all the books. He waits to see which one of us will come out first, me or my mother. Come on, let's eat, he says to me as he takes a couple of steps toward me as if to meet me so that we can proceed together, as companions, to our places in the dining room.

There are not many dishes on the table. And they're the same ones we saw at breakfast, the same ones that are set down on the table every day. They are dishes whose contents never vary. We try to make up for it, though, by sitting down together and then, when we finish eating, by carrying the plates together into the kitchen. Back in our old home, my mother cooked something new every day even though we could have eaten perfectly well from leftovers of the day before. Trying to tell her not to tire herself out, when my father returned home from his shop he would declare that she was cooking food on top of food! At breakfast we would slice thin slivers of cheese from the large rounds that my father so carefully and elaborately selected—naming each kind—from the grocers near his shop.

Come to the table! my father calls with a vigor that suggests he is summoning us to an overflowing banquet, or at least to a seating that will last longer than the five or ten minutes we will actually sit there, rising quickly afterward to carry the few plates into the kitchen. My mother intones her proverb to remind us how anxious she is: We eat our own flesh if no pennies come afresh! But she no longer has it in her heart to demand that my father must search for a new shop, nor that we must economize more. For she has left to my father the business of figuring out the balance between available funds and time remaining, which of course no one can predict. She's scolding us again, says my father, exasperated but unable to let it go. How?! he asks. How can a woman who does not know how to add two numbers together have in her head the sum of money we spend daily against the amount of money we have left?

But even while saying this, my mother did not truly mean that my father should go on looking for a new shop. And no one was saying that I would need to find work
either
. The watchmakers had scattered after leaving their old workshops. It was no longer possible for my father to imagine me sitting in one of those dark shops, bringing a watch up to my eyes, perched on a chair behind a table in a place he would know well, where the surroundings would be so utterly familiar. In fact, now, none of us could really imagine any real change to our situation, now that we were so accustomed to ordering our life around the few matters we could still arrange in our reduced circumstances: a spare amount of food and as part of that ration, a portion of meat that was far too minimal. Cut it into smaller pieces! my father demands of my mother, leaning forward to peer even more closely at the knife she wields, his pointing finger accusing the meat. It's the right thing to do, he feels, since after all, the damage meat causes is greater than the benefit it brings. Cut it smaller, he tells her, meaning the meat, and then he will tell her, as she is beginning to cook it, that the fat causes more harm than good. These little things that we find ourselves doing every day as if they are necessary, like getting up to go off to bed the moment my father starts closing and locking windows and doors, like living and moving about in the apartment exactly as we have always done. My mother restores order to the modest chaos we cause by sitting on the balcony. She returns the cushions to their official positions, as if by doing so she can bring the chairs back to a pristine state untouched by our use.

By the same token, he no longer asks me if I would like him to buy me a magazine to read. As for the books—well, I have a lot of them already, he thinks. Ever since our move, the question he has directed at me will take on another meaning in his eyes whenever he looks at the books: Will you really be able to read all of them? He believes the time has come for these books I bought but still have not read, even now. I have a lot of them, he thinks, and as he watches me heading into the room after breakfast, he believes I will spend valuable time in there, with those books of mine, and yet it will not cost us anything. There's no doubt in my mind, in fact, that he thinks books are more lasting than other objects. After all, they're amenable to storage and preservation. Aging does not detract from their worth.

After breakfast each of us withdraws into our own work. My mother hoists a mass of greens into the sink. My father stands just behind or next to her as if on guard duty. They seem to find it reassuring that I'm sitting in the room reading. When the two of them, or even just one of them, walks down the hallway that runs up to its door, they are wary of the sound their feet make, lest it annoy me or distract me from my reading. They act as if I am the only one in this house whose activities should oblige others to limit the noise they make, weighing every movement and every word according to my needs. As they see it, I am the one who is working. Or I am the one who is preparing himself for work, as though I'm a student finally on the verge of mastering his chosen specialization. My father lifts his index finger to his lips, sealing them although they are already closed, so that my mother will realize that whatever she is doing is producing loud sounds. When he crosses over to the hallway I can all but see him lift his foot fully off the floor so that he can put it down slowly and precisely, as if to detach its transit from the movement of his other foot, which he will raise just like the first one but not until the first one is firmly on the floor. He believes it is possible to derive some hope from all of this time that I spend sitting and reading. It must amount to something, even if he does not know what it is, or what signs to look for that will announce this
something
when it does actually begin.

You read as much in one day as students read in a month! he exclaims when he sees me finally emerge from the room. This is his way of encouraging me and making me feel I'm almost at the finish line, and that when I'm there I'll be the winner. This does not please my mother, though. She still believes that my frail body will not be strong enough in the end to endure all of this reading. You're making him ill! she snaps at my father, who—with a dismissive wave of his hand—quiets her before he swings his whole body and face in my direction. He is ready for action. He asks me whether there is anything I would like him to do for me.

AMONG THOSE SINGING AND DANCING
on the bus, that young fellow who went off alone with her on the walk, returning at the last possible minute, monopolized her not only during the excursion but later on, too. In the long file of students winding from the recreation area to the classrooms, I saw her standing in front of the door to her classroom, waiting, and I could see the look she gave him even though there were seven or eight students between us. It was a look that did not dissolve quickly; she concluded it slowly by lowering her eyelids. She closed her eyes as though she had been met with resistance or aversion and was determined to respond, but not too quickly, by showing the same reaction. There, at the door to her classroom, she kept her eyes closed for about as long as it took for two or three students to shuffle by. When she opened them again, she seemed—in her silence—to have traveled miles away from the normal pursuits of students. She had disengaged from the others, or perhaps she had suddenly matured, and it was as if she had introduced into the school a whiff of what happens between adults, outside.

This look that, giving it, then impeded her and impelled her to respond with like resistance. . . . In the time that separated the excursion's end from her standing like this at her classroom door, many things must have happened between them, since they did not appear—judging from that exchanged look—to be simply completing what they had begun during the jaunt. They had already completed it, surely, in that short time, and then had stepped back, abandoning it, or one of them had, and then they resumed it, to carry it to completion once again. Many things had happened between them. And she—having closed her eyes for the time it took for two or three students to walk by—did not care what she might make plain in front of the students. And then she, when she opened her eyes, did not really see the students who passed by after him, one by one in file. She did not see me. I knew that before I drew even with her, yet still I hurried on so that I could quickly disappear. Even if her mind were elsewhere, engrossed in thoughts of him, I did not want to parade by her, walking in that queue in which I stood out, having to hop and scurry, thrusting my chest upward like one of those shore birds that hop on their little feet, since the smallness of their wings keeps them from flying.

When I said to my father that I would not go back to school, he thought immediately that the students had gone back to teasing and upsetting me by imitating my walk and the way I moved my hands. Indeed he seemed completely confident in his suspicions, which were based on things I used to say when I was a small boy. Tomorrow, I would declare, I am not going back to school. And then I would go quiet, waiting for him to ask me which children had harassed me. This time, though, he had to keep himself from being overly hasty, because it did occur to him that boys of this age had other ways to trouble and upset someone like me. You won't go back to school? he asked me, as if to give himself more time to comprehend, on his own, what they might be doing to me. While I waited for him, silent, I knew that he would begin his guessing from the very same starting point. Does it tire you out to carry your schoolbag when you walk to school? Does it bother you to sit so long in class? When you're sitting there does something start hurting?

So let him leave school, said my mother: I can still see her saying it. Let him stop going, she said as she poked her needles into the wool and added a stitch to the rose-pink pullover she was making for herself. School tires him out, she added without lifting her eyes from the row she was working. Before she could add anything more in that way she has of appearing not to really care, or not to be paying attention, my father told her she did not know what school means because she had never studied at one.

What will you do instead? he asked me after satisfying himself that he had squelched her interference in matters she did not understand. Will you work or will you sit at home?

He spoke to me without implying in the slightest that someone like me can only work at the kind of tasks that are taught in school. That eased my mind, because it meant he was offering me a broader range of things I might do rather than suddenly restricting my choices with his words. But his irritation surfaced as soon as my mother remarked that I could study at home. A look of anger on his face, he wheeled round to face her squarely, to make her comprehend—to warn her, even—that she must stop talking about things she simply did not understand. Now I could sense his exasperation, even though when he turned to me, he merely asked me the same question he had posed a moment before. Will you work or will you sit at home?

In his fury he looked as though he wanted to hear a single answer with a single meaning. As though he wanted me to answer, for example, that I would work, but only so that he could then come back with a second question to which, also, he wanted a single and anticipated answer. And what work will you do? His face maintained an expression that was both insistent and closed. Will you work or will you sit in the house? he asked me a third time, as if to get me to understand that he would not let up until he heard that single clear answer, with no hesitation, and no stumbling over my words.

She made him so angry. He did not ask me what had annoyed me at school, since he didn't want to appear to be taking my side. This is what happened every time I said I would not return to school. She really did know how to upset him. He began staring into my face as if he could elicit my answer more quickly. The longer I took over it, the more I amplified his rage and his fury. His facility at giving little compliments to his customers and the breezy good humor he practiced in front of them did nothing to attenuate this force of his. It was a force only his anger could awaken. His fury manifested when he disagreed with someone else, but it always seemed more like he was fighting with himself. You want to sit in the house? he asked me, but this time not so he could await my response: rather, he said it to make me understand that if such an idea even came into my head, that meant I was only interested in becoming like women who sit alone all day in empty homes.

But he would come back from wherever it was his anger had taken him as soon as my mother made one of her gestures signaling that her patience was at an end. Getting up from her chair with a muttered insult flung in my father's direction, she went into another room. I pondered her fancy appearance, which I found laughable in the circumstances. Her careful chignon and her dress smocked like a child's gown looked incongruous against her irritable mood, as though in this finery of hers she had been preening herself quietly for some secret but anticipated occasion but had been disappointed when something unexpected and contrary to her plans occurred. At least she put a stop to my father's anger, for even as, in response to her insults, he shouted at her to get out, he noticed that I was at the end of my rope. He knew he'd been harsh to me in a way I could not endure, and now he was sympathy itself to me. Me, for whom such words falling onto my body—which had no defenses, as he saw it—were like so many hard slaps.

From the kitchen where she had gone came the sharp and sullen thuds of pans moving around. I knew she was not planning to use them but merely banging them here and there to show that whatever insults she might be uttering or thinking, she was struggling to keep them confined to the kitchen. And my father did not need much time to come out of his anger. Returning to me, showing he was with me and always at my side, he asked me what had gone on at school. When he was in one of those calm states that always followed his bouts of anger, my father could concede to what he would not have accepted ordinarily, to the point where (apologetically and agreeably) he would position me—and himself along with me—to face precisely whatever it was that a few moments before had sparked his anger.

Now, what will you do if you leave school? But this time he said it as if it were a real question. He said it as if he were saying to me, Come, let's think together what would happen if we were to abandon school. This was the payment I would get for his anger. This was my reward, which, in this peacemaking state of his, he made as comprehensive as possible.

Would you like to study a language, or a trade? he inquired. I knew that this repayment was meant to be full and genuine. He would accept my staying home and at the same time he would truly believe that it didn't mean I was like the women.

I said to him that I would study what was in the books. I would do it on my own. These books, I wanted to make him understand, were not schoolbooks; and so I exaggerated their thickness, spreading my hands apart as far as they would go. He knew the books I meant. After all, he was the one who'd brought them to me from the book market where—though it was near his shop—he knew no one. These are books that are put onto bookshelves, not into school bookbags. Before he had moved them into the small hallway—that tight narrow space between the doors—I had been collecting them in my wardrobe, putting them together, one beside the next.

Lest he think that what was keeping me in the house was my laziness, I began each day exactly as I had the school day. I washed my face and got dressed, exactly as before, and sat down to read. I would start at eight o'clock, when school started. To be studying here as they were studying there. That was to placate him but also to reassure myself, because I still felt uneasy about being on my own and not at school. Like them, I would be beginning my studies at eight o'clock, and that lessened the distance I had put between myself and them. I would begin just as they did and at the very same time. And not in the room where I slept, nor on a sofa in the sitting room, but rather, in the hallway between the doors. Ever since moving into it, I had made this narrow passage into my own little classroom that had room enough to hold only me.