The Penguin's Song (7 page)

FROM THE WINDOW OF MY
room, and from the kitchen window and also the balcony if I choose to go out there, I can see her when she comes out to join the two of them where they've decided to sit down. They will not be far away, probably because they got tired of walking across the sand. Their feet will have sunk into it deep enough so that each time they tried to take a step that foot would feel trapped. Or perhaps they didn't go far because they wanted to stay within reach of any voices that might call out from their homes in the building. As nearby as they were, though, it looked as if they had prepared themselves for a lengthy excursion. My mother had spread out a blanket over the sand. The other woman had carried out an enormous umbrella that she anchored in the ground. Then they sat down, resting from the walk to their chosen spot and exposing their faces to the breeze gently batting at them—the very same puffs of air that would have reached them on the balcony of either apartment.

And from either balcony they could have enjoyed the very same view they now sat facing. They had even chosen to turn their faces—together—to that vista rather than sit down facing each other so that whichever one was talking could see the other. It seemed that the preferred object of their stares was not the old city at the farthest point of the panorama that lay before them, but rather, the emptiness of the wide abyss that separated them from it.

They loved to go out by themselves. They would not be expecting to see anyone but her; and anyway, they would have gone out before she could show up to join them, so that the first phase of the excursion would be entirely an outing of the older women on their own. The two of them could gab as they wished and sit exactly as they pleased, since they could be sure that no one would suddenly appear from the other direction where the sand rises in small dunes. The couple living on the ground floor would not appear from behind the shutters that they never opened except to water the greenery just below.

Whatever the circumstances, the pair of them would be taking full advantage of their little excursion, stretching their legs out in front of them, calculating the likelihood that my eyes and my father's eyes might be on them. Perhaps one of us would glance out through a window or from the balcony, not because either of us was curious but out of sheer boredom, as the women surely knew. My father, though, seemed absolutely delighted as he declared—after checking to make certain that they really were sitting together out there—that today the two of us would lunch alone. Already on his way to the kitchen and ready to manage lunch on his own, he would turn back to ask me what dish I was longing for, so that he could make it for me.

In the past few days—ever since my mother had begun going down to their apartment—he had avoided looking at her except when he was trying to work out why her enthusiasm for making visits gave her such a juvenile demeanor. When she was down there with them he behaved as though he and I were living completely alone in the house. Shall I boil you some water for tea? he would ask; or he would announce, from the other side of my closed door, that he would be on the balcony and I must raise my voice if I wanted anything from him. What would you like to eat today? he would ask me, rubbing his hands together in preparation for putting them to work.

She
had not yet left the building. The two women sat alone, their legs extended toward the vast emptiness that held their gaze. I was always able to see her the moment she rounded the building toward the rear and stood exactly below me for a moment before setting out across the sand. Or I would catch a glimpse of her from the stairwell in the moment when she opened her front door and stepped out. At that moment she would suddenly be much closer to me, since this building, with its narrow passageways and half-walls that are meant to screen us from each other, protects her from knowledge of many things. But that very fact might mean she would be more sensitive to my presence, as I hid there, hunched over close by, with just the top of my head visible above the low wall around the stairs. When my mother returned from her first visit she said they knew more about us than we knew about them. Immediately she realized what I might be thinking. She surmised that I might be suspicious that they had tried to learn more about me. Quickly she added that they knew the nature of my father's work in the old city.

Do they know where our shop was? my father asked her, elbowing himself into the conversation though he had clearly intended to appear uninterested, looking in every other direction but at her, studiously self absorbed.

Outside, the pair of them sat there doing nothing more than resting their legs and staring at the broad emptiness in front of them. They gave no sign of precisely how they had planned to enjoy themselves in making an elaborate excursion out of the building. Everything they had carried out there was in exactly the same position where they had first set it all down. From the window of my room—through the slit I had left open—I could see them gazing fixedly, as if they were expecting someone to come and rescue them from the silence into which they had fallen soon after arranging themselves out there. The way toward them across the sand remained empty, though. They took turns scrutinizing it, but they had the air of looking for something that was increasingly unlikely to happen. She had not even opened the window to her room, nor had she appeared at the kitchen window that looked out on the two of them where they sat below. Turning to look, her mother found no one to wave to. Probably, I thought,
she
liked having the house all to herself and decided to stay inside. There among the rooms, doors flung wide, she could move around however she liked. She could be as free within those spacious, empty rooms as she would normally be in her bathroom. She could expose her naked body, fully revealed, to the many mirrors in the apartment and not merely to the one that hung on her wardrobe.

And so she is not immediately below me; she is not in her own room. She is moving around. She roves through the apartment: through this home that has been emptied for her. Not even I can pinpoint where she might be right now, in what room she's standing, which way she'll move next. At the window of my room, cracked open slightly, I begin to think that like the two women I am also waiting for an event that will not take place. I stand here motionless as time runs on: but it only does so down there, below me, in a space that begins behind my back and spreads out to fill their home. No, time does not move on here. Not here at the window where I stand. Time has stopped here. The women, too: they are still sitting there, brooding. The path leading to them is still and silent too; and there is no sign that it expects anything to reverse its mute emptiness. I do not know what to do. It's useless to leave my room hoping to track her footsteps through the spaces of her home. I will not hear the sound of her bare and slightly sticky feet slowly disengaging as she pads across the glinting tiles. Time no longer passes here, not at the window. The time I have come to wait for. I wait for time to start its passage again. I wait for my father's light, cautious knock on my door and then his voice asking me, Shall I boil you some water for tea? Would you like a glass of water? Cold water?

I wait for my father to arrive, even if it's just for the sake of answering him that I don't want anything at all. Or I think about coming out of my room and going into the kitchen; perhaps by the time I reach the kitchen window I'll be able to see some sort of change in the tableau they've made out there. Or I wait for the two women—if they see me over here behind the window—to wave to me. My mother might even call out to me loudly enough that, below me,
she
will hear it. This will finally animate the scene out there, because once it happens the two women will know it's time to begin wrapping up their outing. Likewise, if my mother's voice reaches her—there below where she moves through the house—perhaps she will stop wandering among the rooms and stopping at every mirror.

Then she will return to the spot where she left her clothes thrown on the floor opposite the first mirror that captured her. And so, for me to stand at the open kitchen window will put time into motion—this time that at present is fractured among different locations, each isolated from the others. And so I must go there, I must: I will leave the window behind which I conceal myself and walk toward the door that I was certain my father would head for as soon as he heard the small sound it makes as it opens. As I lessened the distance between myself and the floors below, I let that sound reverberate as if I were summoning my father toward it, or at least, by making it as if I were pinpointing his position in the house. But as I went out into the hallway I heard no sound of him coming, nor did I see him standing in the doorway to the kitchen looking at me inquiringly to find out what I wanted. It seemed as if no sound made by any of the doors in our house had reached him. Since I had come from my room to the kitchen without hearing anything from him, I was certain that he was in his room, asleep at that early point in the day. All I would have to do was to stand behind the open kitchen window. All I would have to do was to show myself to them at the center of the window and then step back from it before I appeared again, as if I had been here in the kitchen all along, absorbed in an ordinary task that kept me busy.

From the kitchen window the spectacle they presented had not changed. Together, the two of them stared at the emptiness in front of them as if something were happening there. But they would turn to where I stood, or one of them would, catching sight of me. If together they waved to me I would behave as if I were preoccupied with something else and didn't see them waving. That's what I would do, so that my mother would call out to me. And maybe the woman would give her some help: together their voices would carry, and she would hear that from wherever she was. Once all of this had happened I would have to quickly go to the stairs to wait for her, hidden behind the balustrade. I must see her from the very first step she takes out of the apartment, for very little time will have passed since she was moving among the mirrors and looking at her body naked and fully revealed. When she appears in the doorway she will have just quickly thrown her dress on over her body, which will still be feverishly hot. From behind the balustrade I will see her while she is still in her state of confused excitement. Indeed, when she appears she'll be in more disarray than she was in there, in front of the mirrors, still trying to stop the thing that was welling up inside of her like warm and thrusting waves.

THEY BEGAN TO WAVE AT
me from where they sat on the sand, having seen me behind the kitchen window. Then they began to call out to me in unison, from that distance, to come and join them. The woman was raising her hand repeatedly and waving it around in my direction, even though I supposed she could not see me clearly. She knew of me; and sitting there with my mother, she had learned more about me, since no doubt when the two of them sat down and immediately began jabbering they were focusing on me. It might have been over very quickly, with just a few passing questions that my mother answered rapidly and without any deliberation or even shifting in her seat. Come . . . come . . . the woman's hand was saying, sweeping from the direction where I stood to dip toward her own body, a gesture to bring me to her side. When the two of them stopped calling and waving I left the kitchen empty, since there was no need now for them to see me there. In his room, its door left open, my father was stretched out on his bed, dozing. He lay on top of the bedcovers that he had left made up beneath him. Still, I thought that I wouldn't be able to behave freely in the house. Lying down on top of the made bed was a way of keeping himself ready to rise immediately if my voice came to him or if he should sense that it was time to ask me if I wanted anything. I slowly stepped back from where, in the sitting room, I was looking in at him. As I put distance between myself and his open door, I was aware that although he seemed to be submerged in sleep he would awaken at the slightest sound or movement. I retreated to my room and the mirror hanging so high on the wall that to see my face and chest in it I had to stand on the edge of the bed that was positioned directly below it. I figured I should do this before I went out there: out to the balustrade that gives me the protection of a short wall. The sound of the bolt when I opened the door was too faint for my father to hear as long as he was still dozing. But, just as I stepped outside I heard the sound of her steps below, her last swift steps bringing her to the entryway of the building, and I was only able to see her for a fleeting moment.

When I got back to the window in my room she was just stepping onto the sand. She was below me and the sand slowed her progress, exasperating her every time she had to raise her feet that had sunk into it. She even seemed on guard against the sand rising farther, for I could see her lifting the legs of her trousers, revealing just a tiny strip of white flesh that I figured wouldn't even be visible once she had gone a bit farther. Her next steps only added to her fatigue and irritation. As she poked her foot sharply into the sand she had the look of doggedly resisting something or someone while being just as stubbornly resolved to obey. Her movements diturbed her thick braid, which swung out across her shoulders, highlighting the nakedness of her neck and tracing a broad semicircle high on her back.

It did nothing to dispel her irritation that when they saw her the two women began waving at her, or that they had twisted round to stare in her direction while remaining seated with their legs poking out in front of them. It seemed the pair of them would stay like that, as if to encourage her on her way over to them. Once she had gotten close, her mother stretched out both arms to her in a festively welcoming gesture. The nearer she came the more enchanted my mother seemed; it looked to me as if in her bedazzled staring my mother had forgotten about the niceties of welcoming her.

She was already standing behind the two of them in the space between where they still sat when I became aware of my father standing behind me, about to take a step in from the doorway to my room. Both of us looked as if we'd been caught out by the other one, for we were each startled and confused, each of us waiting for the other to say something. His hand rose to point at the door, wanting me to understand that I had left it open; and then he said, to excuse his coming up behind me like this, that sleep had overtaken him and he thought I might need something that he could get for me. He hadn't taken even one more step into the room. He kept his diseased eyes fixed on my face as if to keep them from falling on anything but me. I could tell that he was suspicious of my standing there hiding behind the window, looking out through a narrow crack. Leaving me where I was, he turned to go, and I knew that he would head directly to the kitchen window to see for himself what it was that had led me to stand there hidden like that, looking surreptitiously out of the window. Even if he stared at them, he would not see them clearly, but neither would he return to ask me if what he saw was accurate. I turned back to my window and closed my eyes as if to make them dim-sighted. I began to imagine what he might be able to see of the women. Standing there, she appeared as a shadow or a ghost. I quickly brought that shape into focus, out of its haziness, to appear to me clearly once again. Suddenly I realized that my father had
probably thought I was spying on the other woman. I immediately turned my eyes to her legs that remained splayed out in front of her. He would not see her clearly from where he was standing and exposing himself to their view. He would not even know which of the two women sitting there was my mother; he would not ask me about that either, since asking would return us to our state of embarrassment. Remaining there, staring, he would make his own guesses. He would go on standing there staring at all of them, and perhaps, if he felt his standing there, directly in their line of vision, had gone on too long, he would shift sideways to stand at one edge of the window as I did, or he would close the outer, wooden panel. But he would go on staring in that direction, wanting to recognize what it was about the way the woman sat, or what it was about her body, that would call for hiding oneself to spy from behind a closed window. He would go on looking until he might discover it, doing it for my sake and not his own. Throughout the many years that have passed since I reached an age he calculated to be my adolescence he has not stopped asking himself—and asking my mother as well—whether I have matured like other boys. From among the huge sacks in his shop whose edges he would roll back, or as he filled the small sacks with the contents of the large ones, he would look at me as a woman passed in front of us and I would know, even with my back turned to him, that he was staring at me. I could be certain that once he was back at home he would be asking my mother: Have you seen anything? Are there any signs you've been able to see?

He would go on staring at them out there. At the woman seated on the sand, and not at her daughter who might as well have been outside his field of vision. He would look only at the two women who sat there, ignoring her—she who now stood apart from them almost at the edge of the steep and perilous downward slope to the chasm that divides us from the old city. She moves closer to the edge, cautiously, to examine the slope itself and to make out from there the bottom point where it ends. No doubt the two women were beginning to warn her away from the rim just as she took two steps toward it. Here is her mother now, stretching out an arm that will not be long enough to reach her at that distance, as though the force of that single gesture would bring her daughter back from the edge.

This time my father knocked on the door, lightly and slowly. Giving me a little time before he opened it, he said he would begin to heat up our lunch now, if I wished him to. The window was as nearly closed now as it had been when he left me. He tried to give a quick glance in its direction but it wasn't fast enough, and then—his hand still gripping the doorknob—he asked whether I was hungry yet. When I responded by saying that he could go ahead and eat if he wanted to, it was as if what I really wanted was for him to close my door and leave me alone. First my mother's leaving the house had disturbed him, and now I was giving him further cause for annoyance. Seeing me spying from behind the shutters had placed him in a dilemma he could not resolve by himself. He needed someone at his side, not simply to tell him whether what he thought he saw was really there, but also to help him deal with the thoughts he was having. Have you noticed anything yet? he would have said to my mother if she had not been out there sitting next to the woman whose shape he could not make out at all. You wash his clothes, he would have added, bringing his mouth close to her ear, his persistent questioning all but plastering him to her, keeping him close behind whenever she turned or took a step. In his bed, then? he would ask. Right now he desperately needed my mother's presence. Yes, her going out had disturbed him and now her absence annoyed him and made him anxious. He will not be able to stand still. He'll move constantly between the kitchen and the door to my room, like this, waiting for something to come to him, from whatever direction it might arrive.

She was still standing at the edge of the slope, though she had turned away from it to look toward the women, who seemed to be talking to her. Out there on the sand where the pair of them sat close to the edge, she couldn't be alone. She could not stand at a distance by herself and be truly apart, for there was nothing out there she could stand behind or with which she might shade herself. No wall, no tree; and so she would keep standing there—in front of them, behind them, it didn't matter—and she would have nothing to amuse herself with, there at the outer reaches of the sand. The swelling mounds rising slightly above the flat surface were not high enough to hide anything, or even to separate one stretch from another. It wouldn't be long before my father would return to my door, knocking lightly again. He would tell me he was waiting for me and wouldn't eat lunch without me. I thought about going out and telling him to eat his lunch alone if he was hungry so that I wouldn't have to wait for his knock.

He was standing at the threshold between the kitchen and the hallway that leads to my room, confused. He hesitated between completing his route toward me and returning to the kitchen, which he had not yet fully left. Realizing that I was about to return immediately to my room, he said that he wouldn't eat lunch either. But he couldn't hide his irritation, with me and with my mother whose excursion seemed to signal that her sole aim was to punish him by leaving him alone. Turning toward his own room, he told me that I could eat when I felt like it.

Back in my room, I began making the preparations that one makes before going out. I hoisted myself up toward the mirror again, but this time just to see my face in it. My part was still razor-straight and required only a pat into place, and then a stroke across my eyebrows beneath, like so, and everything was in its proper place. As for my clothes, I could see them well enough without the mirror. I had only to unbutton and rebutton, undo the belt and fasten it again. It all took only a few moments and then I was ready. Prepared. I might go out; I might even go out, to where they all sat, at the exact moment when I felt absolutely certain that I must be there. The three of them would see me, fully and completely, as soon as I put my foot down on the sand. I will move forward across the sand, step by step, advancing straight toward them. Striding determinedly and confidently toward them, I'll show myself to them. And all the while they will be looking at me, turning fully in my direction. They will not take their eyes off me as I advance, step by step. As they stare at me, perhaps they'll have the air of spectators observing a man who plunges forward to embark on an adventure before a silent, wary audience that wonders how far he'll actually go. Maybe I can go out there to them at the moment I am convinced that it's my best move. I'll keep walking toward them over the sand, step by step, until I reach the little patch of ground where they have united. I will get there. I will stand among them all. I will not say anything once I'm there among them. That will be perfectly natural, since they'll know I need to pause for a few moments of rest after my journey.