Felisberto Hernandez - Piano Stories

“As usual, I understood only when I woke up. Then I began to put things together and it was like the pieces of a puzzle falling into place: her parents had been awakened by the crackling of the paper, she had cried because she knew I loved another woman, and so on. But what most amazed me when I woke up was to realize that her mother was really my mother.

“I was thinking about physical and human laws when I remembered an impression I’d had just before falling asleep and, again, as I came out of the dream: that I was watching my desires go by like clouds in a checkered sky. As the dream unfolded, the pattern had broken up, but I had gone on thinking and feeling as if it were still whole, the fragments somehow held together, forming a picture so well disguised behind another picture that my mother could be hidden in hers. .”

The young man does not want to relate events in the order in which they occurred, nor does he want to speak about the characters connected with the woman he loved, not even the members of her family. Instead, he feels like doing something ridiculous, like describing her nose:

“Often while living at her side I concentrated all my attention and my adoration on her nose. It seemed to me, as well, that many strange thoughts drifting by in the air got into my head and came out my eyes to settle on her nose. I was convinced, then, that the way she sat, perfectly upright, the way she raised her head, sticking out her chin, and everything else that was physically and spiritually beautiful in her was a trick her nature played on the mind and soul to incline them toward adoring her nose.

“Her nose stood out in her face like a passionate desire not openly declared, rather, just barely insinuated and perhaps even taken back a little after having been insinuated, not without malice. When I looked her full in the face and her big blue eyes were half closed, her nose showed how sensitive it was to the tears streaming from those eyes and drying on it, their traces still faintly visible in the two tiny pale bumps shining on the very tip of the nose.

“When I was the one insinuating passionate desires — with words, now: clumsy words coming out to be heard like grotesquely shy men stepping out to dance for the first time — it was her nose that seemed to be listening and — since her eyes were almost shut — even looking at me. And when she leaned out the window to see what was going on in the street, it seemed her nose was waiting for the opera glasses that would slowly settle on it.”

“I can’t spend time thinking why I need to explain the horrible thought floating around in my mind today. The fact is that right now I feel like spreading it out on this page.

“First I sat on the bed and gazed at the little table with the walnut stain, then I looked around at the number of other things in my room. . I realize I feel like saying what all the things in my room are like so I can put off remembering exactly how the thought came to me, but I won’t torture myself all that much over it, since it’s only the first time I have to remember it. . Suddenly I felt a clear space inside my mind, where a sort of airplane was floating. I’ll assume my eyes were looking outward as well as inward and that, being round, when they moved looking inward they also moved looking outward, which explains why I was — if only vaguely — aware of the objects in the room. But I was focusing my attention on the airplane floating in the clear space inside me.

“Then it happened that the part of my eyes absently looking outward came — as the most commonplace lover’s eyes might have come — on a picture of her which stood on the little table with the walnut stain, and at that point I shifted my attention from the airplane inside me to the picture outside. When I tried to return to the airplane it had vanished into the clear space. I told myself, ‘It’ll be back in a while — the delay is because it’s being loaded.’ But when it reappeared it didn’t just seem loaded — it wasn’t the same airplane. And it seemed to be headed straight toward me, toward my stupid self of that moment, and all I could think of doing was to pull out a cloth from some other part of my mind and try to wave it past. . But instead I must have flagged it down because it came and smashed right into me, blowing up my head and all the hidden places of my stupid self.”

I think it will be a long time before I can get over my amazement at what happened to me today: I spoke to the young man of the story and he told me he doesn’t want to go on writing it and may never feel like taking it up again.

Too bad he feels that way, because after gathering so much information that I find interesting I won’t be able to make use of it for this story. But I’ll be sure to keep these notes, because they will always tell another story — the one that took shape in reality when a young man tried to capture the one in his mind.”

I

Next to a garden was a factory, and the noise of the machines seeped through the plants and trees. And deep in the garden was a dark weathered house. The owner of the “black house” was a tall man. At dusk his slow steps came up the street into the garden, where — in spite of the noise of the machines — they could be heard chewing on the gravel. One autumn evening, as he opened the front door, squinting in the strong light of the hall, he saw his wife standing halfway up the grand staircase, which widened out into the middle of the courtyard, and it seemed to him she was wearing a stately marble gown, gathered up in the same hand that held on to the balustrade. She realized he was tired and would head straight up to the bedroom and she waited for him with a smile. They kissed and she said:

“Today the boys finished setting up the scenes. .”

“I know, but don’t tell me anything.”

She saw him up to the bedroom door, ran an affectionate finger down his nose and left him to himself. He was going to try to get some sleep before dinner: the dark room would divide the day’s worries from the pleasures he expected of the night. He listened fondly, as he had since childhood, to the muffled sound of the machines, and fell asleep. In a dream he saw a spot of lamplight on a table. Around the table stood several men. One of them wore tails and was saying: “We have to turn the blood around so it will go out the veins and back through the arteries, instead of out the arteries and back through the veins.” They all clapped and cheered, and the man in tails jumped on a horse in the courtyard and galloped off, through the applause, on clattering hooves that drew sparks from the flagstones. Remembering the dream when he woke up, the man in the black house recognized it as an echo of something he had heard that same day — that the traffic, all over the country, was changing from left- to right-hand driving — and smiled to himself. Then he put on his tail coat, once more remembering the man in the dream, and went down into the dining room. Approaching his wife, he sank his open hands in her hair and said:

“I always forget to bring a lens to have a good look at the plants in the green of your eyes. I know how you get your complexion, though: by rubbing olives in your skin.”

She ran her forefinger down his nose again, then poked his cheek, until her finger bent like a spider leg, and answered:

“And I always forget to bring scissors to trim your eyebrows!”

As she sat down at the table he left the room, and she asked:

“Did you forget something?”

“Could be. .”

He came right back and she decided he had not had time to use the phone.

“Won’t you tell me where you went?”

“No.”