The Heart and Other Viscera

by Félix J Palma

  The noise distracted the lovers, who both puzzled over the source of the wriggling fish writhing about the floor. It was the anesthetist who spotted me first from his prone position, and, arms flailing as if he were wading through thick mud, he hurriedly dismounted the girl in pursuit of respectable verticality. After the laborious decoupling, he stood before me, a confused hominid, ridiculously tragic in the midst of the gasping fish. He looked at me warily at first, but then exploded in a wild torrent of words. “This isn’t what it seems,” he explained, waving his arms about exaggeratedly, as if he had just made the discovery that everything in the world was a mistake, and he wanted to share it. The ashtray wasn’t really an ashtray, then? Maybe I had tried to smash his head in with a theater season ticket, or a crab cake? “I can explain,” he kept saying, even as the explanation covered up her curvaceous arguments and hurriedly disappeared, having fulfilled her woodworm role. I watched her flee with the prancing grace of a filly, and I longed to be her age, her shape, to accompany her as she continued wreaking havoc on other families, to flee that situation myself, for which I could see no solution. I longed not to be the one destroyed. But that was not possible. We each have our allotted role in life’s great tragicomedy, and mine was clearly to stay there, with your father flapping around me, engaged in a tedious monologue of torment that was undermined by his skinny nudity.

  My head was throbbing. Suddenly, I felt this was all wrong, absurd. And yet, what else could I expect from such a crazy world, where women with stammers don’t have Siamese twins, and no one knows what question flamingos are posing with their necks? I raised my fingers to my temples, but the distressed anesthetist didn’t get the message. He pressed on with his heated discourse, because the thing needed to be resolved there and then, in the heat of the moment, before it all coagulated in my head. He talked and talked, sometimes in a pleading tone, at others in the voice of a man of the world, as if he couldn’t decide whether to grovel or act casually. It was only when I placed at his feet a suitcase into which I had flung a few of his things that he broke off his speech and announced with a solemn expression that this meant nothing to him, that he still loved me.

  So you see, Elenita dear, on top of everything else, I was meant to feel grateful that he had scarcely been implicated in that dog show he had played a starring role in on the table, his unstinting loyalty to me while he was plugging another woman’s pussy. The fearless son of a whore.

  That’s why the fish are no longer in the living room, and why I was late picking you up from school for the first time in eight years. And if there’s one thing I’ll never forgive your father for, it’s your unnecessary tears soaking my handkerchief with the softness of dew. I won’t forgive him your sobs, or the look of shock on your teacher’s face when she sniffed on my breath the two martinis I had needed to steady my hands on the wheel, the barroom smell that so inexplicably explained my delay. That’s why, Elena dear, that’s why I’ve been so subdued all day, secretly drinking in the kitchen; staring at myself in the mirror trying to convince myself that wrinkles are characterful; trying to understand your father, while in the middle of your homework you tried to understand me. And that’s why I’m reading you this story, the way your father used to do every night, although God knows I have little desire to do so, for you to go to sleep believing that the world is just as it was before, even if my footsteps padding around the apartment seemed to contradict this.

  And where is your father now? He has probably gone to a hotel and is devouring the salted almonds in the minibar, waiting for my anger to subside. Or maybe he is roaming the darkest, loneliest streets, dragging his suitcase and his sins behind him like a ghost consumed with guilt. I can only hope that at some point during his wanderings he bumps into a big ugly brute, which is what has just happened to the tailor in our story. Not a gentle giant who challenges him to throw stones into the sky, and whom he fools by releasing a bird from his pocket, but one encased in bike leathers, dark deeds, and childhood traumas: a professional who realizes that your father’s wallet is ripe for the picking the moment he ventures into his territory. And if possible, who wouldn’t be content for him to hand over the wallet meekly, but is offended that this makes him feel like a beggar. A giant who can’t resist the desire to beat up the anesthetist in a quiet alleyway, disgusted, for example, by his suit—the impeccable cut of which suggests a comfortable, smug life—one of those unashamed lives with a sense of entitlement. And now to the alleyway, to observe the pain and suffering while we still have time. So that the same fate that took him from me in the morning returned him to me in the evening, admittedly all beaten up and remorse-stricken, with the penance of multiple fractures that will take time to heal, and an inner dread that for years will wake him drenched in sweat. The indelible memory of a steel toecap in the ribs.

  That’s what I want, Elena dear, for your father to suffer the way I have. For the emergency department to call and say, “Señora Cardenas? Look, don’t be alarmed, but your husband has suffered—” and for them to break off in midsentence. I would calmly put on my lipstick while a cab waits outside, and head to the hospital to find him in pieces on a gurney, crying my name like a drunken sailor, bandaged from head to toe. Except for his hands. Yes, except for his hands, my love, as if the giant had also been bewitched by your father’s hands.

  I can still remember the first time I saw them, emerging from the jacket sleeves of that ordinary-looking man who approached me in a bar, and who I left with shortly afterward. I remember him offering to buy me a couple of drinks, and accepting reluctantly, tired as I was of being pestered by men, until I looked at his hands. After that, I didn’t mind his toad-like eyes, his rabbit teeth, and his unfunny jokes. I wanted to spend the rest of my life contemplating those hands. I wanted to touch them. I wanted them to touch me. They were unbelievably slender, as if they might snap if they held more than one cigarette at a time, and so pale they seemed to give off a moonlit phosphorescence. For a while I was mesmerized, watching them dart across the bar, between the glass and the ashtray, like deep-sea fish. I soon asked him what he did for a living, convinced that with such hands he must surely devote himself to pleasuring angels. As if I had pressed a button, his eyes clouded and his voice grew somber.

  “I kill people,” he confessed, slowly exhaling his cigarette, “then I bring them back to life. I’m a faux assassin, a pretend criminal, an impotent toreador. I am the eternal siesta, the artificer of death, the commuter train to Hades. I’m not concerned with the material world. I manipulate souls.”

  That’s what he said, just like that, melancholy and remote. Although I was tipsy, I managed to arch my eyebrows gracefully, and he knew that he had me. He went on to explain, moving his ivory hands like a conjurer without cards, that while the surgeon was mired in the mud of flesh, he captured the essence of the spirit, hooked it on his line, and with a nimble flick of his wrist cast it into the abyss, only to rescue it enveloped in supernatural vapors, soaked in God’s own breath. I didn’t mind being one of many women bewitched by his brooding reflections. All I wanted was to feel those porcelain hands on my body, hands that that very morning had doubtless hovered over some patient, gently lulling them to sleep with an infusion of ether, while binding them to the world with threads of oxygen. That night we ended up in his apartment anaesthetized by love, enveloped in a pleasure-induced narcosis. And the sight of his hands running over my body like albino mice was so beautiful that I decided there and then that no one else would ever caress me, that those shimmering hands could explore my mud forever, even if that was only possible with the aid of Pentothal.

  And so, my sweet, after several chapters in which the tailor reveals how quick-witted he is, he finally succeeds in marrying the princess and inheriting a kingdom. And everyone lives happily ever after, because that’s the reason for fairy tales.

  But what if there was no call from the hospital, Elena dear? What if when the telephone rang, I picked up the receiver and heard your father’s vo
ice curled up in a ball, repeating my name like a moist prayer, savoring each syllable, clawing at the letters like a man in love? What would I do, Elenita darling? Would I keep this up, or would I forgive him, so that our lives could carry on resembling a children’s story?

  So why doesn’t he call?

  Meows

  For Juan Bonilla, who endured the first part of this story.

  I can’t see it from the terrace, so I don’t know how big it is, or what color. The only thing I know is that every night, perched up on the roof, it wails my name at the moon. I’m no cat expert, but I think it must be in heat. It sounds like a heartbroken child. I could even describe it as terrifying. It reminds me of the screams of those pale creatures locked in basements in horror films. And I’m increasingly convinced it’s mewling my name.

  Of course, I’d love a second opinion. Someone I could ask: Hey, listen, don’t you think that cat is mewling my name? But Virginia left me two months ago, before it began, as stealthily as she had come into my life. On a day like any other, she set off to buy lettuce to restock my bare fridge and never returned, even though that very same morning, her body entwined with mine, she had assured me that now that she had found me, she would never leave.

  After her flight, I regretted that the two months of passion we had spent shut up in my apartment, far from the outside world, had left me with nothing more useful than happiness: no phone number, address, or surname to complement the first name that, once she had disappeared, I found myself compulsively muttering at all hours of the day like a spell that no longer conjured her up. But that was how she had wanted it: two naked souls, stripped of their everyday identities and impurities, each yearning for the other. She wanted her body, her green-flecked eyes, her damp hair, to be enough for me; for me to know nothing whatsoever about her when we weren’t together. She wanted a love apart from the world, outside even of time, free from the bonds of circumstance—a love composed solely of flesh and blood and electric skin. There would be plenty of opportunities later for all the rest, all the stuff that would make us worldly and wise and other. The stuff that would probably destroy us. And I accepted her conditions, which revealed her to me as she wished to be seen: a wood sprite, an elfin being, the last throwback to a mythical lineage garlanded with fairies, fauns, and elves, and about whom the only thing I needed to know was that she loved me like no one else ever had or ever would. Although, had I suspected that one fine day she would simply vanish into thin air, I would have asked for every last detail, down to her dentist’s address. That way I could have sought her in more accessible and obvious places than in an enchanted wood.

  Virginia, the woman who vowed she would never leave me, disappeared one afternoon about two months ago. Ever since, I’ve been unable to sleep at night. Darkness descends on the city, and from my bed I watch the world, which in those small hours emits only the creaking sounds of a drifting ship: the snorting fridge, the metallic belch of the elevator secretly running through the bowels of the building, a solitary car horn in the distance like the lament of a dying man. I listen to it all conscientiously, but above all I listen for the cat, the only living being apart from me that seems to be awake in this corner of the universe.

  Had I been called Evaristo, Froilan, or Salustiano, perhaps things would have been easier. Cats find names like that impossible to pronounce. But my name is Juan, like my father, like my grandfather, like the fictitious Don Juan Tenorio. And the cat seems to be aware of this, for every night, with startling punctuality, she turns up on the roof and desperately, painfully, calls to me. Like someone calling her lover.

  I don’t want to believe that I’m right, because it could well be the first step toward losing my mind. But the truth is, I can’t help it. I spend the whole day obsessed, waiting for nightfall, when I will get another chance to prove that I’m mistaken, that I’m not mad, and that the cat is not really calling my name. Yet each time I hear more clearly that she is mewling my name: Juan, Juan . . . Tirelessly, yearningly.

  I’m the only Juan in the apartment building. I’ve checked the mailboxes. There are dozens of Antonios, numerous Pedros and Luises, even a Froilan, but no Juan. If that cat is calling to anyone, it has to be me. I’m the one she’s looking for. There’s no other possibility.

  The fourth time I heard her, fearful that she was turning me into an insomniac, I decided to act. I knocked on some of the doors. Apparently, no one hears a cat mewling desperately in the middle of the night, but this might be because I am the only occupant on the top floor. In the end, someone gave me a clue: maybe she belonged to our new neighbor, the girl who had just moved into the building.

  Ever since Virginia left me, I’ve turned my back on the world, so I was not surprised to discover we had a new neighbor of whom I knew nothing. In my current state of self-absorption, I’d only have noticed her arrival if they had dragged a grand piano up the stairs for her. But the new neighbor arrived without musical accompaniment, muffled in the insulation of a dense silence. And from the balcony I assumed was hers, no cat would have had trouble reaching the roof. I could have done it myself. I think there can be no doubt about who the little pussycat that ruins my nights belongs to.

  I resolve to put an end to my ordeal and ring her doorbell the following afternoon. I can’t decide whether the woman who answers is beautiful or not, but she seems attractive enough. Thin, not too tall, one of those women who would go to her grave with a smile. Based on her clothes—a tight-fitting crop top that exposes her pierced navel—and the sweat beading under her arms, I deduce that I’ve interrupted a workout. Perhaps she was running on a treadmill or doing sit-ups on one of those contraptions you can store folded up beneath the bed, where in olden times a chamber pot used to be kept. I’ve always admired the kind of woman who can set aside a few hours a day to sculpt her body, possibly because I count myself among those who leave their shape to chance and the wind. But I know nothing could possibly ever happen between us, because we’re condemned to start off on the wrong foot.

  I politely inquire whether she has a cat. A female cat, she confirms. Even more politely, I suggest she stick a ballpoint pen up the cat’s rectum, because I’m utterly fed up with hearing her mewling every night. But, as is well-known, we don’t live in a world where we can freely express ourselves. The woman’s smile vanishes, and she stares at me as if I had just dropped squid guts onto her fresh laundry. The dark circles under my eyes don’t seem to affect her. With infinite politeness, she informs me that, despite the fact that she would be more than happy to introduce a ballpoint pen—or any similar sharp object—into my rectum, she has not the least intention of doing so to her cat’s. Earplugs are available from any pharmacy, she concludes, and starts to shut the door.

  That is when the pussycat appears. And that changes everything. What can I say? The sight of her moves me greatly. She’s a white cat, of such a delicious whiteness that I can’t help thinking that some extremely skilled craftsman made her out of a snowball. She is neither plump nor emaciated, with a light, lissome body. And her eyes are of an indefinable green verging on yellow. But what surprises me most is the way she behaves. The cat stands stock-still in the kitchen doorway and studies me with a mixture of mistrust and rapture. Finally, she overcomes her paralysis and advances slowly toward me with measured steps, as if I were some apparition that might vanish at any moment. When she reaches me, she rubs against my legs with such sincere affection it makes me uncomfortable. Her rhythmic and ecstatic rubbing provokes a vague quiver of excitement. I pick her up and look into her eyes.

  “Why do you call out to me? What do you know about me?” I ask in a whisper, so the woman won’t hear me.

  The cat says nothing. She restricts herself to staring at me with a look that appears to conceal another behind it, a double look. My neighbor breaks the silence. “I don’t believe it,” she says, shaking her head as if she has seen a miracle. “It’s the first time she’s behaved like this with someone she doesn’t know. She’s usually h
ostile. She doesn’t let anyone come near her, let alone pick her up.”

  I return the cat to the floor, from where she goes on staring at me, as if she wants to be sure I got the message. But what message? What is she trying to tell me?

  “Would you like a coffee?” asks the woman, friendly all of a sudden.

  I accept and she asks me in, still expressing her amazement, in a rushed outpouring, at the pussycat’s extraordinary behavior. It’s obvious she’s only just moved in, because the passage to the living room is a real obstacle course: crates, bags, and filing cabinets block the hallway and spill into corners. She invites me to sit down on a narrow sofa in front of a table improvised from a closet door and a few bricks.

  “I’m going to put on the coffee and take a shower. Make yourself comfortable.”

  I try to obey, but it’s hard to make yourself comfortable with a cat in front of you that won’t stop scrutinizing you with a disconcertingly fixed stare. She has a gaze that could trip up a trapeze artist; render sleepwalkers self-conscious; make a man ask himself why no woman has ever looked at him like that. I feel obligated to respond to her attention, but how? Meanwhile, her owner is busying herself in the kitchen preparing the coffee. From the amount of noise she makes, it would have been less work to build a pyramid. In the end, just as I am considering venturing into the kitchen to inquire whether she might need assistance in undertaking such a complicated procedure, I hear the water start to run in the shower. Her cat and I continue to study each other, without knowing what to say. I wonder whether the animal is absorbed in the same thoughts as me, or if I am attributing to her a sensitivity and intelligence she doesn’t possess. After all, she’s only a cat. But why doesn’t she seem like that to me? Why do I have the unnerving feeling that for her being a cat is only an assumed role, a disguise?