Felisberto Hernandez - Piano Stories

Everything happened as she had foreseen, although once when we circled close to the island she gazed at the plants and seemed about to speak.

Then began an indefinite waiting period: a vague stretch of lazy days, boring moonlit nights, and all sorts of hunches and suspicions involving the husband who might or might not be buried under the plants. I knew I had great difficulty understanding others and I tried to imagine Miss Margaret a bit as if I were seeing her through Hector’s eyes, then through Mary’s eyes, but I was too lazy to keep that up for long and soon fell back on my selfish ways: listening placidly while I rowed, hoping that if I just sat there and waited with careless but genuinely affectionate goodwill for her to say whatever she pleased, in the end she would settle comfortably in my understanding. Or it might happen that by simply living next to her, letting myself fall under her spell, that understanding would gradually form in me on its own and reach out to envelop her. Afterward, in my room with my books, I would return to my view of the plain, forgetting Miss Margaret. And that was the view I would steal — harmlessly — and take with me when I left at the end of the summer.

But other things were happening.

One morning the man in charge of the waterworks had a blueprint spread on a table. His eyes and fingers were following the curves representing the pipes that wormed their way through the walls and under the floors. He had not noticed me, although his tangled hair seemed to bristle watchfully in every direction. Finally he lifted his eyes. It took him a minute to adjust to the idea that he was looking at me instead of the blueprint. Then he started to explain how the machines sucked in and vomited out the water of the house through the pipes to produce an artificial storm. I had not yet witnessed one of his storms — but I had seen the blurs of holes with metal flaps under the water. He said they were spouts that alternately opened and closed, some swallowing water, others spitting it out. I was having a hard time understanding the system of valves, and he had begun to explain it all over again when Mary came in:

“You know she wants those twisted pipes kept out of sight. She says they’re like guts showing. . and what if she comes by, like last year?. . And you, sir, if you please.” She had turned to me. “You’ve heard what I said, so keep your mouth shut. Did she tell you we’re having a ‘wake’ tonight?. . That’s right, she puts candles in pudding bowls, sets the bowls to float all around the bed, and makes believe it’s her own wake. Then she has running water sent in to sweep the bowls away.”

At nightfall I heard Mary’s footsteps, the gong that announced the rush of water, and the sound of the motors. But by then I was bored again and refused to let anything surprise me.

Another night, after too much food and drink, while rowing Miss Margaret around endlessly, I had the feeling I was in a crazy dream, hidden behind a mountain that glided along in the silence I associated with heavenly bodies. And yet it gave me a secret satisfaction to know the “mountain” moved only because my force was driving the boat. At one point she asked me to pull alongside the island and wait there quietly for a while. They had put shady plants with long stalks on the island that day, tipped forward like parasols that now blocked the moonlight shining in through the glass dome. I was perspiring in the heat and the plants hovered over us menacingly. I thought of slipping into the water, but Miss Margaret would have felt the weight of the boat shift and I gave up the idea. My mind had wandered off on thoughts of its own: “Her name is like her body — two big fat syllables carrying the main load and the third for her head and tiny features. . It’s unbelievable: such a beautiful night, with such a wide open sky, and here we are, two grownup persons sitting so close together and each off on his own stupid thoughts. It must be two in the morning and we’re still awake. . for what?. . Suffocating under these branches. . and look at her: wrapped in her solitary self, impenetrable. .”

Suddenly, without warning, there was a roar in my ear. I was badly shaken. It took me a minute to realize she had coughed to clear her throat and was saying:

“Please, no questions. .”

She broke off. I was choking back words I seemed to remember hearing late one night from the bandoneonist of a tango orchestra I used to play with: “So, no questions, all right? Why don’t you just go to sleep. .”

She completed her sentence:

“. . until I’ve told you everything.”

Finally I was going to hear the promised words — when I least expected them. The silence crowded us together under the branches, but I dared not move the boat to another spot. I had time to hear myself thinking about Miss Margaret in a smothered voice, as if there were a pillow over my head: “Poor thing — so lonely, so in need of talking to someone. . And such a huge body to manage, full of so much sadness. .”

When she began, it seemed her words also sounded inside me, as if I were speaking them — which may be why now I can’t distinguish what she said from what I was thinking. Besides, it won’t be easy to put together all the words she spoke at different times and I may have to mix in quite a few of my own.

“Four years ago, when I left Switzerland, I couldn’t stand the noise of the train, so I got off at a small town in Italy. .”

It seemed she was about to tell with whom she had gotten off, but she stopped. A long while went by and I thought she would say nothing more that night. Her voice had dragged unevenly, like the trail left by a wounded animal. In the stifling silence full of tangled branches, I decided to go over what I had just heard. It crossed my mind that I had no right to do what I was doing: relieving her of her painful memories so I could fondle them later on when I was alone. But then, as if someone were forcing me to let go of that idea, others sneaked in. The someone must have been him : they had once been in that small town in Italy together. She had left Switzerland — after losing him there — perhaps without realizing she had not yet given up all hope (Hector had told me the remains were never found), until the noise of the train carrying her away began to drive her mad. So she had decided to stay in the area and had gotten off at the small town in Italy. But there, no doubt, everything had brought back memories that made her even more desperate. “She can’t tell me all this right now, it’s too private. Or maybe she thinks Hector has already told me the whole story. But he didn’t say she was this way because of the loss of her husband, he just said: ‘Maggie’s always been a bit batty’; and, according to Mary, what’s addled her brain is ‘too many books.’ Maybe they can’t see the real problem because she hasn’t confessed her sorrow to them. I wouldn’t have understood a thing myself if Hector hadn’t let something out, because Miss Margaret has never mentioned her husband to me.”

I went on turning these ideas over in my mind and, when her words started up again, it was the night of her arrival in the small town in Italy. She was installed in a room on the second floor of a hotel. She had been in bed for a while when she heard the sound of water. She got up and looked out the window of a gallery leading into the courtyard. There were some gleams of moonlight and other lights. Then, suddenly, she saw a fountain — and it was as if she had met a face that had been watching for her. At first she could not be sure the water was not playing tricks on her, showing her only the dark face of the stone fountain, but it looked innocent enough, and she went back to bed carrying it in her eyes, careful not to spill it. The following night there was no sound, but she got up all the same. This time the water was a murky trickle, but back in bed she felt it watching her again, as it had done the night before, only now it was through leaves caught in the sluggish flow. She went on seeing it inside her own eyes, then it seemed she and the water were both contemplating the same object — so that she could not tell whether a premonition she had a moment later had come to her from depths in the water or in her soul. She had almost fallen asleep when she felt someone trying to communicate with her, sending her a message through the water, and understood why it insisted on looking at her and being seen by her. She got up in a daze and wandered barefoot around her room and up and down the gallery. But now the light and everything else had changed, as if someone had breathed a different air and another sense of things into the space surrounding her. This time she dared not look out at the water, and when she got back in bed she felt real tears, at long last, falling on her nightgown.