The Penguin's Song (5 page)

NOW, WITH THE THIRTEENTH YEAR
since our move coming to a close, I know that what forced us to vacate the city, leaving it completely empty, was simply that it no longer had space enough to hold them. By
them
I mean the boys on that school outing who, in the course of a single trip, managed to divide up and then redistribute the girls among themselves.
Them
: those who entertained themselves, on the bus, blending dancing with laughter, mingling jokes and song. It was as if there was too little time and so they tried to stretch it by cramming in more activities. We vacated the city only because it could no longer hold them. It was too cramped; its narrow confines pressed in on them. It was too old for them, and so they had carried themselves as if they were living in their families' city and not in their own. It was like living in a house furnished by your grandfather. It pressed in on them, it was too old, and that is how they experienced it, as cramped and ancient. All the while, everything they said or did in their games served only to mark out the distance between themselves and everything around them, or to flaunt their sense of how ahead of everyone else they were, how new and modern. If the bus slowed to a crawl climbing the steep streets, they sang about it and let the jokes fly. Yes, that is exactly what they did, as if they were mocking the creaky backwardness of their own people and the slow pace of their folk's buses. If they danced it was for the sake of imitating certain styles of dance or to mimic dancing bodies too old to be seemly but who danced nevertheless. It was the same idea when they called things out the windows to passersby they spotted on the road, to make them—for these young lads' amusement—smile the dopey embarrassed smiles that were their response to greetings they could not understand.

No matter what they were doing, they would mock the situation they were in. The city had become too small for them—it was a city they regarded as behind or beneath them. This is how they were in the bus, on the trip where their joking and dancing united them. In the years to follow, when they broke apart to go their separate ways, the city hemmed them in even more as their lives grew ever more crowded and various, proliferating beyond their old familiar low-hanging horizon. Because of them we left the city. As enormous and spread out as it appeared to me, the part of it that I actually inhabited was a tiny space indeed: that little bit of the city that had room enough only for me. That passage between the three doors (one of them the door to the toilet whose odor my mother constantly feared would poison me), that hallway so well fortified from all outside commotion by the rooms that surrounded it, seeming to put vast distances between me and the outside world.

I chose to remain inside that narrow hallway while they tugged at their spaces, as if to lengthen and broaden them by pulling on the corners. Whenever my mother began to feel certain that there were too many books around me, she would ask in a voice whose tone she could not modulate: In the whole wide world, who but me would abandon a spacious room overlooking the street to spend his days here! And every time I handed my father a piece of paper on which I had written the title of a book, or maybe two, she would comment, in that high querulous voice of hers, that at least I should get out of the house for a bit. Or she would observe: The humidity in there would wear down even the strongest body. She meant, of course, that my fragile body was far more in need than most—indeed, it was the neediest—of exposure to clean, fresh air. But my father would take the piece of paper from me, delighted that I remained so attached to reading books. He would even—if it was morning and he was still in a good mood—ask me if this book whose title I had written down was one of those fat books that no one, in his view, ever read except judges and scholars of religion.

When my father brought me those books I always added them immediately to the ones already on the shelves as if the more books my library held, the surer I could be that eventually I would have lined the hallway walls with them, floor to ceiling. Now, after all these years have gone by, I know that what kept me shut in with my books was that they would take me back to the ancient times from which they hailed. I could read them and come to know those eras. In my mind I could even imagine myself to be living alongside the people of that time; it was easy, even without having actually experienced any of the events that occurred so long ago. As I read anecdotes, tales, vignettes of people's lives, dialogues, poems, and poetic duels, I could decide whether these were words on a page or real events in which real lives unfolded. Either way, I could be at a distance. I could play listener when I wanted to regard what I read as words, or I could play observer or witness when I decided to take them as things that actually happened to people of old. Listener or witness: just as I was in school, or on the outing, and whether standing or sitting. But always between me and what I saw there was an empty space, an extra space I made sure to leave in place, just in case I needed it. After all, they might well spill out of their own space; they might need more room. It was an empty space I would leave between them and me so that no one's arm would collide with me as its owner whipped around, suddenly making me a part of the circle even if only marginally so. It might put me inside the arena where their silly clowning created such a hubbub. I had to leave an empty space between them and me so that I could remain apart from their glee because I could not endure its intensity. Or I needed that space so that I would be able to flee at the point when I realized it would be better for me not to watch whatever was going on.

I had to keep a distance between them and me: the distance created by the empty seats in the bus or the space of the entire classroom. I had to sit at the very back of the classroom, my back to the wall, the students with their backs to me between myself and the teacher. At the very back of the class, in the last row and in the farthest seat. When the teacher pointed his finger in the air, asking himself which pupil he would single out, I would start playing the disappearing game. I'd shrink my sense of my own physical presence as much as I could, figuring that if he saw my reduced self he would pass right over it. I will not go back to school, I would say to my father after every occasion when I fell into their trap and found myself the butt of their stares. All it took was one of them saying something about me that he assumed only I would not understand. Or someone else imitating something about me behind my back, making all of them laugh and believing they were keeping the laughter among themselves. When I made a mistake writing two French words on the blackboard, the teacher asked me in front of all of them what kind of work I thought I could do if neglecting my homework got me expelled from school. He was about to go on, naming trades that required only hands and bodies, except that the students' heavy silence made him hesitate.

Each time, I would tell my father that I was not going back to school. I will read books on my own, I said to him that last time, and then he did keep me at home. Those books: I brought them along with me to this home of ours in this building that rises like a short fat tower. I am still reading them. These are the same books, on the same shelves; after my father left his shop in the old city I added no more. Taking them down from where I had put them, and reading them, it is as if I'm repeating the same class every year and I am never promoted to the next grade.

Those books: we line them up along the high shelves in anticipation that their time will come—their time to be read. We store them away carefully like household provisions that we must conserve. They grow old where they sit on the shelf because their expiration date begins to approach from the moment they're put up there. When we bring them down it's as though we're repeating ourselves, once again reading books we've already read and often disliked.

Those books: I had also begun to put them at a distance. Or perhaps they were putting me at a distance as they lay there on the table, open but face down. At night, as I lie sleepless in bed, the book on the table moves even farther away. The effort I calculate having to make to get up and go over to it is far more than the two or three steps separating the bed from the table. And by day I don't need my books, since I am waiting for her. As soon as we stand up from the table after our midday meal, I start waiting for her. As soon as I wash my hands and then don't know what to do next, I'm already waiting for her. My father tells me to take a break when he sees me coming out of my room so soon after going in. When he returns to the kitchen to stand next to my mother as she distributes the leftovers into their storage bowls and puts them away, I go to the window overlooking the sand track. It is two hours before she will appear. I know I won't see her there now. And I know that I might not be successful at catching sight of her when she is at the very top of the road so that I can watch her walk the entire distance. I might not, even if I spend the entire time between now and then pacing along that window, which is half open, half closed.

I spend a little time after our meal moving between my tiny space at the end of the apartment, and the empty bedroom whose window looks out on the road below. I pace back and forth, covering the breadth of the apartment, and I am only a little cautious. My father and mother, I know, have gone beyond a light doze into their heavy afternoon sleep, and I am free as I move about the house. I don't need to be more than minimally watchful where they are concerned. The sand track, warmed by the sun and dyed the intense yellow of sunshine, remains empty. Each time I glance out it is deserted. But she will come and I'll be here, from the moment she turns off the crowded main street to walk the length of the track, dragging her feet, showing how tired she is. Even from this distance I'll be able to see how her face is flushed and coated in a light sweat, which I see in my mind's eye covering her shoulders and upper arms and moistening her underarms with a dewy touch. I imagine the moisture of her exertions dampening her feet that the sand heats up inside her shoes. She won't remove her shoes until she's inside, at home, sitting in a chair she finds comfortable. Still not in any hurry, she'll take off her socks, white although soiled slightly from the dust and sand of the route she has to take. She'll put up her feet to wiggle her toes, observing them as they move, bare, free, released from their long hours in the prison of socks and shoes.

AND THEN, AT THE OPPOSITE
window that looks out over the long stretch of sand, I wait for her to enter her room, just as I waited, and will wait, for her to leave it. But I will not actually see any of these things I'm waiting for. She won't come near the small area next to her window, since she has nothing to do in that space. I see no part of her entrance or exit, nothing of what she is doing in the meantime, but from the sounds she makes I'm able to make a very good guess. From the sound of her footfalls I can figure out which direction she has gone and where in the room she is right now. I can tell that she has pulled open one of the double doors to the wardrobe, and so I know she'll pull out one of the drawers inside. I can even hear the soft thud of her book falling onto her mattress and the swish of her blouse as she lifts it off her body and hangs it on the wardrobe doorknob.

And then the light switch—I hear its tiny click just as the light sails out her window and across the sand, making a long thin patch that is off-center from the light coming from my window. But that oblong of light creates no shadow of her on the sand, since she only moves around in the room's inner half. It's almost as if she believes that coming near the window means knowing that someone is surely standing there at the other edge of the sand and will see her. Or perhaps she stays in that part of the room because she's in a hurry and wants to stay near the door. As for me, waiting overhead, I figure she does not even know I'm here. She doesn't know about me. If she did know about me, she would not let these irritable phrases—these angry, sharp words—slip from her mouth. No, not if she knew I was here, immediately above her window. Not those words, which are very nearly swear words and which come out of her whenever something slows her down or she can't find what she's looking for. She does not know about me. The light in my room going out just now does not alert her to anything at all because a few moments ago, there in her room, she didn't notice that my light was on. Or she didn't realize the light up here had been turned on after it was off. She would have to be slower and more deliberate in her movements, she would need to be calmer, for her to be able to work her brain over a sound she hears or a light she sees. A person in as much of a hurry as she is—indeed, any person her age—does not take shadow created by light falling from the window above to mean that someone is there behind the window. Her head is not occupied with what she sees or hears, because it's just following her body in its abrupt changes of course, as if a reverse current has suddenly charged through it and driven it back from the direction in which it was heading.

This body of hers: hardly has it come into the room before it goes out. Only a moment or two, no more; and in those moments it's as if I'm actually seeing it, this body of hers. When the drawer opens I can practically see that form bending over it, and as the wardrobe door clicks firmly shut it's as if I'm watching this body leaning forward ever so slightly to heave the door into place. I sit waiting for it, preparing myself to get up from my chair, to go over to the windowsill and hang my head and shoulders out if I sense that the charge governing it will send it over to where I can see it. Really see it.

That evening I realized it was going to happen. Every time she came into the room she spent more time in it than usual. Her steps were slow and few, and everything she touched or looked at stopped her. When she opened the wardrobe door and then I heard no further sound, I said to myself, She is looking at herself in the mirror right now. Then I had the thought that perhaps she had begun revealing parts of herself to the mirror. This idea dawned on me when she nearly ran out of the room, or at least as far as the door, as if she were making certain no one had come anywhere near the door, which she had mistakenly left open. She would return, though. After all, she had not shut the wardrobe door, nor had she turned off the light. So I knew that she would return. And that it was going to happen. Leaning over my windowsill, angling my head and shoulders down, I would see her.

She did not stay long in the interior of the apartment where the sitting room was. When she was once again in the room, directly below me, she closed the door and went immediately back to the mirror. It must be a mirror that rose as high as the wardrobe door itself, so high that a person standing at it would be invisible to the emptiness there near the sweep of sand. She is concealed by the long slender rectangle formed by the closed door of the room and the wardrobe door opposite it, the two creating a sort of narrow hallway. Even I, watching and listening so attentively above, sensed that she was perfectly hidden there. Only my imagination could help me know what she was doing. For she had removed her body from the space commanded by her open window, from where she sent a part of it outward, carried by air and light, into the boundless emptiness that I share with her. All I could do was imagine her, try to fix her in a series of overlapping images that crowded in on each other only to erase one another as if, hidden there, she had severed every gesture, every sign or indication, by which I might have been able (just possibly) to reach her.

On that particular evening however, standing in front of the mirror would not be enough for her. It seemed as though something in her had awakened suddenly and—even in such a short interval—had transformed her. Hanging over the window ledge, I would wait for her to appear below me, to stand here where I can see, revealing now this part of her body and now that one to the outside where she knows there is no one. If this is what she is doing then it is a way of taking another step forward in accepting and responding to the abrupt change that has come over her.

This is what I want and do not want at the same time. I would love to see the bare skin of her shoulders as close as this but I am not happy with the thought that she is exposing herself bare-shouldered to the wide-open space beyond the windows as if to challenge someone out there to see her. Nor do I like the idea of her standing hidden behind the wardrobe mirror, where only she can see herself and where, I imagine, some internal urge is locked in a quarrel with some other instinct, one part of her trying to entice the other out of its accustomed state. This is what I do not want because it causes her to know her body. I want her body to stay small and childlike, unconscious of itself, knocking into everything around it haphazardly the way a child's body does, as when she walks in the morning to the end of the sand track. I love to see her then, her heavy school bag swaying, striking her between the shoulders so that she jerks forward, still grumbling because someone woke her up from a deep sleep. I desperately want to be the one—the only one—who will bring something unchildlike from her body, a body that returns sweaty and exhausted from school. I want her to be ignorant of her body, unaware of its forces. Only then—and if there were to happen between us what normally happens between neighbors who have lived near each other for a long time—can I put my hand on her arm and invite her to come in. Then my hand could go to her face, wiping off a muddy or oily splotch left by the school bus, and she would believe the only reason I touched her was to wipe away the dirty spot. I would see her bare feet as she padded through the house, with me there, nearby, so close I can muse about reaching out a hand and touching those little feet, just like that, naturally, as if I'm brushing off the dust that clings to them. Maybe I could reach out and catch hold of one foot, from the inside, from that inner arch that slopes down to the bottom of her foot. If the people sitting with us were to leave, if she were the only one still there, alone, sitting with me, that is what I would do.

On this particular evening as I lean against the window ledge and hang down over it, I know that she will come close to where I can see her and not just the shadow of her. She will come so near that she'll be exactly beneath me, I know it. She'll stand in front of the open square of the window, poised there exactly as she stood in front of the mirror. She will think she's risking nothing. She's only offering what was in the mirror to onlookers she creates in her mind. That's what she will do. The same way she stood before the mirror, that's how she will stand now, but in front of that open square of the window. And so from where I am, immediately overhead, I will see her; when she comes over here I will see her and she'll be just as she was there, showing her self to herself in the mirror.

Behind me, the light in my room is out. There is no light to create a shadow of me across the sand that lies so close beneath us. I can wait like this for hours, assured that no one sees me or knows that I'm here. But I will not need to wait very long. Although she has come away from where she stood, there below, she has left the wardrobe door open. Did she go over to her bed, perhaps? Or maybe she walked toward a table that I haven't realized was there, near the bed. And then . . . but here she is now, coming back this way: something has moved in the light descending from her room. It's not her shadow; it's merely the phantom image of her movement inside the room.

She will come.

She has come closer; she has walked toward the window. What was a formless movement playing on the sand, a flickering of the light, is now a real and solid image. She is coming, now; her shadow arrives. In the instant when her shadow becomes complete out on the sand she appears behind it; and I, in that selfsame moment, have prepared myself to see her appear, fully and truly appear. Her golden hair is combed and wound in the way of older women. Farther down, below her neck whose nakedness seems (from the back) so elongated, she wears nothing but a child's sleeveless cotton undershirt that reveals the rounding of her small breasts, not yet fully developed. She wears a shirt worn not to be seen but only to lie beneath other clothes. And the breasts beneath it—these small breasts that I want only to pass my hands over, for desire has not yet reached them, has not arrived to touch them. Yes, this is what I want: I am he who desires the body whom desire has not yet caught.