Felisberto Hernandez - Piano Stories

The concert ended early and afterward I had time — before the stores closed — to buy books, colored pencils for underlining, and an indexed notebook I’d find some use for later on. As soon as I’d had dinner and taken the books to bed with me I thought of the movies and couldn’t resist the temptation: I got dressed again and went to see an old film in which a couple exchanged long kisses. I was very happy and didn’t want to go to bed, so I sat in a café where there was an ostrich. It was a very tame ostrich which wandered around with slow steps among the tables. I was staring at it absently, turning my tiepin over between my fingers, when suddenly it lunged toward me, plucked the pin from my hand and swallowed it. I watched in horror as the pin worked its way down the bird’s throat like a bulge in a sock. I would have liked to squeeze it back up, but the waiter arrived with my coffee and said:

“Never mind, sir.”

“Not at all! It’s only an heirloom!”

“If you’ll allow me, sir,” the waiter was saying, raising a hand like a policeman stopping a car. “The ostrich has swallowed all sorts of things before and always returned them. So, rest assured — tomorrow or the next day you’ll have your pin back, good as new.”

The next day the newspapers carried the reviews of my concert. But one of them appeared under a front-page headline that said: “Pianist’s stay depends on ostrich,” and was full of jokes.

That same day I received a letter from my mother in which she said Ivonne’s mother made powder puffs, that the swan down she used for them came in all colors, and that her plucking must have been when she was picking at the down in its envelope, because sometimes it was packed in very tight.

The following day the waiter at the cafe brought me my pin and said:

“What did I tell you, sir? It’s a very reliable ostrich — it always gives everything back.”

The next time I come to this little lost town for a rest, maybe the number of inhabitants will have increased with new memories. But the old greenish newspaper is almost sure to be here, as well as the quintuplets and the holes poked in their eyes with the pin.

The publicity for this furniture took me by surprise. I had been spending a month’s vacation at a nearby resort, not wanting to know what was going on in town. When I got back it was very hot and that same night I went to the beach. I returned to my room fairly early and in a bit of a bad mood because of what had happened to me on the trolley. I had caught the trolley at the beach and found a spot on a bench facing the aisle. Because it was still very hot, I had folded my jacket on my lap, and — since I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt — my arms were bare. Suddenly one of the persons going by in the aisle leaned over me and said:

“With your permission, please. .”

I said at once, “It’s yours.”

But by then — already too late — I was frightened. In a flash several things had happened. The first was that even before he had finished asking for my permission or I’d had a chance to answer, the man was already rubbing something cold — for some reason it felt like spit — on my bare arm. And by the time I’d finished saying “It’s yours,” I had felt a needle prick and seen the large syringe with letters on it. At the same time, a fat woman across the aisle had said:

“I’m next.”

I must have jerked my arm because the man with the needle said:

“Careful or it’ll hurt. Just hold still. .”

In a minute he withdrew the needle and — the passengers all around me were smiling: they had seen my face — he started rubbing on the arm of the fat woman, who watched appreciatively. I noticed the large syringe squirted only a small amount of liquid, the plunger bouncing right back out. Then I read the yellow letters down the side: LOVEBIRD FURNITURE. I was too embarrassed to ask what the injection was for and decided to find out the next day from the newspapers. But the moment I got off the trolley I thought, “It can’t be a tonic — it has to be something with an immediate visible effect if it’s really a promotional stunt.” I still couldn’t figure out how it would work, but I was very tired and made up my mind to ignore it. In any case, I was confident the Lovebird people wouldn’t be allowed to dope the public with some drug. Before going to sleep I wondered whether they might be trying to induce a state of physical pleasure or well-being. I was still awake when I heard a birdsong inside me. It didn’t have the quality of a remembered sound or one reaching you from the outside. It felt abnormal, like a new disease, but with an ironic twist to it as well, as if the disease were happy and had started to sing. These sensations soon wore off and were followed by something more concrete: a voice — also ringing in my head — that said:

“Hello, hello, this is your Lovebird station. . Hello, and welcome to our special broadcast. The persons sensitized to these transmissions. . ” and so on.

I heard all this standing barefoot by my bed, without daring to turn on the light. I had jumped out of bed and frozen on the spot: I couldn’t believe the sounds were in my head. I dropped back in bed, waiting to see what would happen next. The voice was giving instructions for buying Lovebird Furniture on the installment plan. Then suddenly it said:

“And now stay tuned for our first selection, the tango. .”

Desperate, I pulled a heavy blanket over my head, but that only made the sound worse because the blanket muffled the street noise and I could hear what was going on inside my head more clearly. So I threw off the blanket and started to walk up and down the room, which helped a little — until I caught myself listening in secret, as if perversely determined to go on feeling sorry for myself. I got back into bed and, hanging on to the bedstead, heard the tango again, even louder than before.

When I’d had enough, I went out searching for other sounds to block the ones in my head. I thought of buying a newspaper, looking up the radio station’s address and finding out how to neutralize the effects of the injection. But a trolley went by and I got on, and soon we were going over a rough spot in the rails and the clatter and jangle relieved me of the next tango. Then, suddenly, looking around the trolley, I saw another man with a syringe: he was injecting some children in the seats facing forward. I went up and asked him what I could do to neutralize the effects of an injection I had received an hour earlier. He stared at me in amazement and said:

“You don’t like our programming?”

“Absolutely not.”

“If you wait a few minutes you’ll catch a soap opera.”

“I couldn’t bear it,” I said.

He went on with the injections, shaking his head and smiling. The tango was over and the voice was back with another sales pitch. Finally, the man of the injections said:

“Sir, haven’t you seen the ad for Lovebird pills? It’s in all the papers. If you don’t like our programming, you simply take a pill and that’s the end of it.”

“But all the drugstores are closed at this time and I’m losing my mind!”

Just then I heard the announcer say:

“And now for a poem entitled ‘My Favorite Armchair.’ It’s a sonnet composed specially for Lovebird Furniture.”

Whereupon the man of the injections drew up close to me and whispered in my ear:

“I can fix things for you — another way. I’ll only charge you a buck: you look like I can trust you. If you give me away I’ll lose my job, because the company would rather have people buy the pills.”

I pressed him to reveal his secret and he extended his hand and said: