Felisberto Hernandez - Piano Stories

“No, just say it.”

I did, in a strangled voice.

She made me repeat it and then said:

“Heavens! And it isn’t even Carnival!”

I hadn’t wanted the title of the song to bring back her bad memories, but I was drawn to the tragedies in other lives and one of the purposes I had been hoping to achieve with my concert was to make new acquaintances who would help me find my way into unknown homes.

One afternoon when I was thinking about people’s tragedies I caught the pungent smell of roast suckling in the dark dining room and said to Dolly:

“What a stink! Can’t you get that thing out of here? It’s a shame, in such a nice dining room. .”

She was annoyed:

“Why, pet , don’t you think suckling is a dining room smell? Would you rather have it in the living room?”

There it was, on the sideboard, in a blue enameled serving dish, covered with a white cheesecloth. Dolly had left the room in a huff, but soon she came back in and said:

“I know what’s eating you, pet : you’d like a piece.”

I protested vigorously, but she kept shushing me, trying to stifle my voice and grab my hands. While I waved them around and she reached after them, we drew groping figures in the air and I felt the wind raised by the four hands blow on my hot face. Finally, I put my hands behind my back, resigned to hear her say:

“Listen, pet , come around the back way tonight at ten o’clock. There’s a tree in the street with thick branches reaching to the kitchen window. I can’t let you in the front door because there’d be gossip and I’m engaged to be married.”

I tried to interrupt but she had managed to trap one of my hands, and while I snatched it back and then wondered about my violent gesture, she was explaining:

“Just climb the tree and come in — at ten. I’ll have the suckling ready, with a bottle of wine, and we’ll have some fun.”

Finally I was able to say:

“What if Miss Moppet catches me? Do you think I want to lose my job over a piece of meat?”

She watched me for a moment in silent disbelief, then she said:

“By nine thirty I’ll have put her to bed sound asleep and I won’t even need to undress her until morning.”

“You mean she’s such a heavy sleeper?”

At that she laughed so hard she collapsed in a chair. She kicked off her red shoes, curled her bare feet around the legs of the chair, and said:

“The moment you leave, she starts drinking wine. She drinks some more with her dinner, goes on drinking after her dessert, and when she’s dead drunk I put her to bed.”

What she saw in my face emboldened her and she went on:

“There she is with her fancy ways, carrying on about what’s right and proper, forbidding me to talk to her visitors, even her brother, and then she goes and gets drunk as a pig.”

I hung my head and she asked:

“So, how about it, pet ? You want suckling tonight or don’t you?”

I started to make up clumsy excuses, one of the lamest being that I was afraid of falling off the tree. She understood and stepped back into her shoes, curling her lip as she left, saying:

“Go on, poor baby — and remember to wipe your nose.”

*

One afternoon, a short time later, Dolly didn’t come out to receive me. Instead there was a bewhiskered footman in a vest and striped sleeves, who handed me an envelope with my wages and a letter from Miss Moppet informing me that my services were no longer needed.

After that I spent some time without work, and was even on the point of climbing the tree into Dolly’s room.

One summer morning I was very depressed, thinking about all my failures. My concert not only hadn’t brought me money, it had not fulfilled any of my expectations or even opened the doors of any unknown homes to me, except for the one with the dark dining room, where I had caught only the faintest whiff of tragedy in Miss Moppet’s drinking and none at all in Dolly.

I was dragging these thoughts along, strolling up an avenue in the Prado with my hands clasped behind my back, when someone tickled one of my palms. I swung around and it was Dolly. She said:

“I saw you go by my window and I followed you.”

“So you’re no longer at Miss Moppet’s?”

“That old bag of bones? She’ll remember me for the rest of her life. One afternoon I told her: ‘You can start looking for someone else — I’m leaving tomorrow.’ She was stunned and asked: ‘What did I do now?’ So I let her have it: ‘It’s not you but me, dear. I’m getting married. . to your brother.’ She started to shake all over and foam at the mouth, because that very morning she’d put the little house where we’re living in her brother’s name.”

We had been walking along, but when she mentioned Spider and the house I stopped to look at her. She took my hand and said:

“Come on, I’ll show you the house. Spider’s always at work at this time.”

I freed my hand and said:

“Maybe some other day.”

She flew into a rage, just like when I had refused to climb her tree, and, curling her lip at me, said:

“Get out of here, you poor pie anist.”

Today, in this room, for several hours, I’ve been happy. So what if I’ve left the table full of pinpricks. If only I didn’t have to change the newspaper spread out on it: it’s been there for a while and I’ve grown fond of it. It’s a greenish color, with orange headlines over a picture of some quintuplets.

Toward evening, as the heat died down, I was on my way home, tired after a long walk. I had gone out to pay an installment due on the overcoat I bought last winter. I was a bit disappointed with life but careful not to get run over by a car. Thinking of my room, I remembered the bald heads of the quintuplets, which reminded me of fingertips. Back at my table, with my bare arms on the green paper and a round spot of light shining on the books I’ve been underlining in colors, I opened my pencil box and took out my tiepin. I turned the pin over between my fingers until they were numb, absently poking holes in the quintuplets’ eyes.

Once the head of that pin had been a small green stone worn by the sea into the shape of a heart, then the heart had been attached to the pin on a mount embedded — like a filling — in a square the size of a horse’s tooth. At first, when I turned the pin over between my fingers, it brought nothing special to mind, but suddenly I began to think of my mother, then a horse-drawn tram, the lid of a candy jar, a trolley, my grandmother, a French lady who wore a paper hat and was always sprinkled with tiny feathers, her daughter Ivonne who had a hiccup as loud as a scream, a dead man who used to sell chickens, a doubtful neighborhood in a city in Argentina where I slept on the floor one whole winter under layers of newspapers, an elegant neighborhood in another city where I slept like a king under a pile of blankets, and, finally, an ostrich and a cup of coffee.

All these memories lived in some part of me that was like a small lost town known only to itself, cut off from the rest of the world. For many years no one had been born or died there. The founders of the town had been my childhood memories. Then, years later, some foreigners had arrived: my memories of Argentina. This afternoon I had the feeling I was in that town for a rest, as if misery had granted me a holiday.

During much of my childhood in Montevideo, we lived on the Hill. The people climbing the street toward my house carried their bodies bent forward, as if looking for something among the stones, and going the other way they bent backward, although it meant tripping over the stones, as if they were too proud to look down. In the afternoons my aunt took me to a high knoll near the old fortress. From there you could see the ships at dock with their many tall and short masts like fishbones. When the fortress cannon was fired at sundown, we started home.