Felisberto Hernandez - Piano Stories

Late in the night, my sisters brought a friend home with them: a blonde girl with a big, clear, happy face. Before the night was out I told the girl that, looking at her, I had found rest from some thoughts that had been torturing me, and that I hadn’t even realized when the thoughts had left me. She asked me what the thoughts had been like, and I told her they had been useless thoughts, that my head was like a gym where the thoughts were exercising, and that when she’d come in the thoughts had jumped out the windows.

The Street

Today I was remembering something that happened to me a few nights ago. That night I had met a woman and we were walking along a deserted street with forbidding white walls — factory or warehouse walls — on either side. The sidewalks seemed to have been born from the foot of the walls and were pleasant and friendly, but the streetlamps, which also seemed to have been born of the walls, wore little white hats and looked ridiculous. Since it was a moonless night, the lamps provided the only light, and it seemed that all they lit up was the air and the silence.

We were walking slowly. I had asked her not to speak to me for a while because I wanted to think about something. But I couldn’t concentrate on that thought because my head was busy anticipating the moment when we’d leave one spot of light only to be caught up in the next one waiting to welcome us with the same stupid glow.

Suddenly I stopped and turned to look back at a train going by, several blocks behind us. She took a few more steps before stopping. I don’t know what went through her mind. I had always been interested in the spectacle of the train going by, perhaps that was why I had turned to have another look at it; but, as it happened, that night I didn’t feel like seeing it and hadn’t meant to turn: it seemed as if at that moment I’d had someone else inside me who had come out without my consent, awakened by the clatter of the train. But then I became aware of yet another character, also sprung from me, who had gone on looking in the direction in which I had been walking and who was trying to impose his will on the previous one and pull me forward. If neither of these characters made sense and both wanted to break away from me, it was because I, my central character, was lost in my own complications. When I discovered this I tried to banish them both, get a grasp on reality and do something positive: so I looked at my hands. Then, on an impulse — it was another way of acting normal, coming back up to the surface of things — I caught up with her, and, since the street was still deserted, I kissed her. But her face was so strange when I kissed her that I realized it had been the same as with the train: I hadn’t felt like kissing her, she had been kissed by the character who had turned to look back. And when I recovered and tried to be positive once more and took her arm to go on walking, I felt it was the character pulling straight ahead who had taken over again. After proceeding a few steps, I stopped to consider what was happening to me. I reached for a cigarette, put it between my lips, and, since the emery of the matchbox was worn and I couldn’t get a spark, I left her in the middle of the street and went to strike my match on a wall.

When we had left the street behind and I was still thinking about what had happened to me there, I decided it wasn’t the same street now as before, because my match had left a scar on a wall and gone on burning after I’d dropped it on the sidewalk born of that wall. Later, as if awakening from a dream and understanding what had happened in it, it seemed to me that the forbidding white walls had exchanged a look across the silent air lit by the lamps with the ridiculous little hats. Yet I can’t say what the air or the silence was like that night in that street.

In spite of everything, I seem to be getting better all the time at writing about what happens to me. Too bad I’m also doing worse.

The Dream

In a dream that stretched on and on, I was in a bedroom, at night, seated in a chair next to a large bed. In the bed, under the covers, sat a girl. She was at the uncertain age between the child and the young woman. She was busy playing with some things that she seemed to think interested me, in constant motion, arranging the things around her. I found it hard to believe she could be so absorbed in her play, like any little girl busily engaged in the sort of activity that makes little girls happy, and at the same time feel the almost purely spiritual pleasure of a deep love like the one I knew she felt for me. At times she seemed to be reading my thoughts and carrying on intentionally: she liked to show off for me. But then suddenly she would stop playing and put her face very close to mine, with imploring eyes in which there was a hint of precocious sadness and pain. And suddenly she would slip me a quick kiss and go on playing as before, and I was convinced again that she was almost entirely absorbed in that game of hers which I couldn’t figure out, with things I couldn’t name, but which I pretended to watch with great interest, the way one feigns interest in a child’s play when what one is really interested in is the child. At such moments she was just a child to me and I forgave her for what she was doing, the way one forgives a child who doesn’t realize what a bother he’s being. Her constant movement disturbed me by causing flickering interruptions in the waves of light and shadow coming from the footlamp with a green shade that stood opposite me, across the bed. There was also a touch of malice and premeditation in my forgiveness, because I knew that after indulging her for a while by showing an interest in her play I would ask for a kiss and she would cover me with hugs and kisses. Yet the minute I found myself kissing her, I felt I didn’t love her, that I had been less than honest with myself, and that I was only trying to make the best of a complicated situation I had gotten myself into. Then I kissed her on the cheeks, trying to avoid the big tears pouring down them, because when I came in contact with them I felt obliged to lick them away and they were getting heavier and saltier all the time.

At moments, it seemed, I was in the chair pulled up very close to the bed, at other moments at some indefinite distance from the bed, watching myself seated on the chair in a light suit. When I was in the chair, with her next to me, I felt the reality of things without being aware that I felt it and I was in anguish, knowing I would catch myself either staring at her or doing things I hadn’t meant to do. At other times she was playing so far away from me that not a sound came from any of her movements, which were like the gestures in silent movies shown without music. But then I became aware of that silence, and my own, and realized I couldn’t say a word because the person sitting in the chair next to her probably wasn’t me but someone else: her boyfriend, whom her parents knew and therefore allowed into her room to talk to her.

When I was far from the bed, watching myself seated in the chair, wearing my light suit, I was less anguished because she and “I” — the “I” at an indefinite distance from me — were much more in harmony with each other.

One of the times I was next to her, she had a baby’s body and a very large head. She was playing with a sheet of paper, wrapping it around her shoulders or sometimes her entire tiny self. The paper made a loud crackling sound. Her parents, who were in the next room, leaned over the foot of their bed to watch us through the connecting door, which was open. Suddenly the mother appeared before me in her nightgown and said, “I never would have expected this victory of you.” How those words made me suffer!. . I felt my betrayal and the pain of the person betrayed as she yielded the victory to me. . I looked for my hat, which was in a different place each time I reached for it: I couldn’t get hold of it or leave. But then — suddenly I thought of this lie — I said: “My dear lady, the fact is that I’m very much in love with one of your daughter’s girlfriends and I’ve stopped by to ask your daughter about the woman I love. I was going past the house and I saw the light on inside, so I was encouraged to ring the bell and she let me in.” No sooner had I spoken than the girl was crying her eyes out and what I had said was beginning to come true. .