The Heart and Other Viscera

by Félix J Palma

  I’m absorbed in these reflections when the girl reappears, wrapped in a yellow bathrobe and carrying a little tray with two cups on it. As she walks over to the sofa, the garment intermittently falls open, like the curtain of a puppet show, to reveal a pair of soft pink thighs. I’d hardly be human if my pulse didn’t quicken when I notice that the only thing protecting the rest of her body is the precarious knot she has fastened the bathrobe with, a knot that could so easily slip even in the hands of an idiot like me, useless at origami or cardiovascular surgery. Casually, she begins to serve the coffee, as though unaware of the sensuality exuded by her damp hair and the scent of soap on her skin, but I wasn’t born yesterday: I know she is setting a trap, that she is offering me coffee with feigned insouciance, that she wants to salvage the evening after a bad day at the office and needs my help.

  As I take my cup, I let her know that she can count on me by giving her thigh a fleeting (and largely noncommittal) caress. We then launch into one of those banal and pointless conversations whose only aim is to pretend we are not animals, a preamble of words and smiles intended to civilize the imminent meeting of flesh. I think doves fluff up their crops. We, the guardians of Creation, are more refined. With calculated indifference, our bodies gradually gravitate toward each other, invading each other’s space, clearly extending an invitation. I guess she is trying not to think of something else. To forget about that bastard boss of hers. Or how she will ask me to leave when all this is over. For my part, I’m attempting not to think about Virginia. Yet, in truth, what the two of us should have been thinking about is the cat.

  It all happens incredibly fast. When our lips collide, we hear a terrifying screech. Next comes a flash of white lightning, almost too rapid to see. Before I can comprehend what has happened, the girl pulls away from me, howling with pain, covering her cheek with her hand. From between her splayed fingers spouts a torrent of blood. She flees to the bathroom and presses a towel to the claw marks scoring her cheek. I follow her, dumbfounded. Despite the impressive amount of blood, happily the wound does not appear to be too deep. The girl and the cat stare at each other, sizing each other up.

  From that moment on, I have been the proud owner of a cat. The girl gave her to me, more or less. “Get this monster out of my home,” she ordered, “or I won’t be responsible for my actions.” I opened the door and beckoned to the cat. She didn’t even hesitate, but followed me straight to my apartment.

  Now I spend most of the day in front of the television, with the cat curled up in a ball on my lap. Sometimes she licks my hands lovingly, and I absentmindedly stroke her hot, fluffy body. Most of the time, however, we simply stare at each other. We remain like this for hours on end. That’s when I think I asked the wrong questions. I should have asked her very different ones, like Who are you? or Who is looking at me through your eyes?

  I’ve no wish to think in terms of reincarnation because I’ve never believed in that sort of thing, but sometimes, at about my third or fourth drink, I can’t resist opening the bedside drawer and unfolding yet again the obituary I came across in the newspaper the day after Virginia’s disappearance, and which I cut out without knowing why, perhaps prompted by the coincidence of name and age. Now, when I consider the way the cat looks at me when I reread it, an absurd suspicion creeps into my mind. Perhaps the name is no coincidence. Perhaps, after all, Virginia died on her way home, hit by a car or felled by a heart attack. The way it occurred isn’t important. What’s important is that, as she said, once she had met me, she would never leave.

  The Violinist on the Roof

  It happened during a particularly hot summer, when everyone in Brooklyn seemed to be members of a secret society that conveyed its orders in code through white handkerchiefs raised to perspiring brows. Ice creams melted before you could find a shady spot in which to enjoy them, covering your hand in a milky mitten. Sleep was a slithery fish that could only be caught in ephemeral nets woven with the cigarettes we smoked hurriedly on fire escapes, to the sound of grown-ups making love and cats in heat in the lap of a sticky universe.

  I like to think that I alone noticed the arrival of the violinist in all his splendor, that I alone recalled every detail of his appearance, as if I knew already that later on I would have to tell his story. That morning, I was leaning out of the window in the corridor on the second floor of our guesthouse, waiting for Tom and Bobby to overcome the resistance offered by the water hydrant so that I could go down and cool myself beneath the torrent of water that by then would be blessing the sidewalk. I would make up any old excuse for my lateness, and Tom and Bobby would look at each other in silence, but the heat would postpone their protests yet again. I had just turned thirteen, and yet it was already perfectly clear to me that life belonged to those who let other people do all the hard work, especially in summer. However, that day I was all for lending a hand, as the boys seemed to have lost their dexterity and the water was taking its time coming.

  My eyes strayed down the street, along that strip of world I knew like the back of my hand, and from which I no longer expected any surprises. It was then that the violinist appeared from around the corner, erupting into our vanilla summer world with his slow gait, needle-thin frame, and radish-like paleness, encased in a suit as black as a coal miner’s spittle. But what most struck me above all was the dark, mysterious violin case quivering at knee height like a baby whale stranded on a beach. The entire street stopped whatever it was doing then to watch him walk. Perhaps it was my feverish prayers that prevented the violinist from carrying on down the road, leaving us to our sad routine, my clenched fists and vows never to upset my mother again, which made his dusty Italian shoes come to a halt outside the entrance to our guesthouse.

  He wrote only his surname on the register: Peterson, a centipede of letters that scarcely filled the blank space indicated by my father’s chubby thumb, and which helped confirm his mysteriousness alongside the drearily precise names of the other guests. He had no other luggage than his violin, no suitcase that would give me an excuse to accompany him to his room. I had to be content to watch him mount the stairs, the silence of his gentle footfalls rousing the other guests as they nodded off in the easy chairs in the living room.

  The grown-ups exchanged glances, and then went back to their newspapers; one of them, at most, devoting a moment to scratching his beard, eyes fixed on the stairs. Life is so full of mysteries that by the time you reach a certain age one more scarcely makes an impression. But I was thirteen, just old enough to make it my mission to solve the riddle posed by the violinist. What had brought him to our neighborhood? Was he a famous musician? Was he fleeing from something or hiding out? The novelty of this unusual character amid the dull patrons at our guesthouse seemed to me a unique opportunity to discover the world that lay beyond our neighborhood, away from the cluster of streets that encompassed my life. And it was clear to me that to see the violin, to hold it in my hands, could only enhance my reputation: in our neighborhood there were few chances of seeing let alone touching a violin, unless it was in Ed’s store window. And so, during the days that followed, I loitered outside his room with the discipline of a sentry, as if the mere fact of meeting a violinist could salvage my childhood or imbue it with an aura of prestige.

  For the first few days, the violinist only left his room to come down for the last serving of dinner, two hours after my bedtime. Mom told me he liked to eat alone, and that although only two other guests who were starting a shift ate at that hour, Peterson would sit at the farthest corner of the table. He seemed to have made it his own, she said, with his distant expression and his continuous cigarettes, like a presence so nervous it was calming. Mom liked to see that life wasn’t only about accepting the ups and downs with a smile or a groan, and that it was possible to remain on the sidelines, content to observe without getting one’s feet wet, refusing to choose because each choice implies a loss, spending a thousand nights and a thousand cigarettes waiting with tremendous patience for a favorabl
e wind. Perhaps simply because she liked to contradict Dad, Mom insisted that Peterson wasn’t a sad character, despite the way he looked in the far corner of the room, enveloped in plumes of smoke, but rather someone who had seen more things than were permitted to us, as if he had caught sight of his sister naked or something, and felt guilty about how much he had enjoyed it.

  On day five of my stakeout, I was rewarded by a crack in the door and took full advantage of it. I entered the room, feigning that cautious timidity grown-ups expect from a child my age and that I would occasionally use as a passkey in situations like this. Peterson was sitting on his bed, a dying cigarette ember in his right hand, and on his lap one of the metal ashtrays Mom supplied to all the guests. Never had rooms in the guesthouse seemed to me so bleak. The violinist’s posture, perched discreetly on the edge of a bed that showed only the creases made by his weight, as if since his arrival he hadn’t bothered to explore the rest of the mattress, and the fact that his occupancy within those four walls boiled down to the violin case and his jacket hanging on a hook like a flayed bat, gave the scene an air of excruciating impermanence.

  Hearing me enter, he gave me a blank stare through the cloud of smoke, which was neither a refusal nor an invitation. I approached his bed, brandishing my idiotic expression like a letter of safe conduct. Peterson didn’t seem to mind me buzzing about his smoke-clouded figure as I tried to think of a clever way to start a conversation. Only when I mentioned his violin did he appear to notice me. He added his cigarette end to the water lily of butts he was creating in the ashtray and looked at me. It was a strange, drawn-out look, encircling me like a wet towel. I could feel his eyes close in on me with infinite calm, as though reconciled to have to do so, and then firmly take root in me, as if they might remain there forever. At that moment I wanted to believe that in the dispassionate drama of the violinist’s life, I had ceased to be a prop and had become an important actor, someone with a presence onstage, which filled me with pride.

  “A silent violin is the saddest thing in the world,” he said at last, responding to a question that seemed distant to me now, as if it had been posed in another life or in a dream. His voice sounded terribly brittle and weak, like the crackle of a gramophone on a rainy day. He seemed accustomed to expressing himself only in these generous silences, never needing to compete with noises and shouts. “To contemplate a violin in its case,” he went on, “is like being confronted with a dead child in its tiny casket, enveloped by death’s passive beauty.” He drew on his cigarette and looked away. “It is an object without a soul,” he concluded, faced with my muteness. I observed the black case lying on the table with mounting curiosity.

  “Play something, then,” I said. Peterson turned his head slowly toward me with a look of annoyance. Then he squinted, pursing his lips in what seemed like a gesture of dismay. The bloodred evening filtered weakly through the narrow window, lending his angular face a conspiratorial, melodramatic air.

  “I can’t, I’m sorry,” he apologized, “not yet.” We remained silent for a while, observing each other through the smoke with a solemnity at once exaggerated and ridiculous, as though dazed by the mysterious turn the conversation had taken.

  We didn’t speak to each other again that morning. Although I was burning with curiosity, I decided to ignore all the questions in my head clamoring to be asked, and leave Peterson to his obscure reflections, playing the role of the patient confidante. I spent the next few days observing his comings and goings discreetly, acquainting myself with his routine, which resembled that of an insect trapped under a glass. Peterson would loiter for hours outside the entrance to the guesthouse, leaning indolently against a lamppost or patrolling the sidewalk, a twilight cigarette in one hand and the violin case in the other, as though waiting to catch a tram that never seemed to arrive. He paid scant attention to the other idle guests who would also wander about in the vicinity of the guesthouse; they must have seemed to him little more than souls in purgatory, and anyone attempting to start a conversation with that shy, gangly fellow would receive a slow exhalation of smoke in their faces for their pains. Like a stray dog absentmindedly sniffing at every corner, Peterson’s gaze would wander along the street, then rise to the sky with a jolt, like a startled pigeon, only to drift to the ground once more with the meager indifference of a feather. But it was on the roof terrace that Peterson spent most of his time. He would drag a chair up there, puff away on his cigarettes, always with the violin case at his feet, like an old dog dozing on his shoes. Almost every day without fail, when night began to sweep away the last rays of evening, Peterson would come down to the tiny parlor and with a doleful expression go over to the telephone. There he would conduct a brief conversation, composed of barely whispered grunts and solemn nods, from which he emerged still more dispirited.

  My tasks permitting, I would try to follow him about silently, to ensure that I was the first person his distracted gaze alighted upon when it came back to reality in search of a reference point. Whenever I saw Mom carrying a basket of wet laundry I would snatch it from her with an eagerness she probably mistook for admirable kindness. I would hurry upstairs, leaving in my wake a trail of droplets and clothes pegs, overjoyed at being able to assail the violinist in such a discreet manner. After I had hung up the washing, I would hang around on the roof and then approach Peterson on the pretext of cadging a cigarette. I would remain by his side, helping him to observe the orange sunset spreading before us.

  This was when I discovered that in common with everyone, save perhaps for the violinist himself, my patience had its limits. One afternoon, weary of his silence, and having learned by heart all the color changes in the day before it embraces night, I ventured to resume our unfinished conversation.

  “Why do you never play your violin?” I asked him. Peterson looked at me lengthily, his eyes reflecting his habitual caution and fatigue. But he just ignored my question and went on smoking, ruthlessly crushing my frail dreams of friendship. However, he did reply to it the following afternoon, after calling me over.

  I was on my way downstairs, carrying the empty basket, an exaggeratedly sullen expression on my face, the last chance for a plan that was starting to look as if it had backfired. His sudden change of attitude took me by surprise. Peterson appeared to regret the indifference he had shown me the day before; he made me sit down facing him and produced the first smile I had ever seen from him, a touchingly awkward puckering of his lips, the smile of a novice clown who has overdone the makeup. Maybe, after all, he needed a friend as well, someone who could be like an oasis on that solitary journey he had decided to make, someone on whom he could test out his words to make sure they hadn’t become defunct through lack of use. Then, in a mysterious voice, he told me about his apprenticeship as a violinist, about his many years of practice, of almost religious dedication to that proud, sensual instrument whose exquisite wooden contours had supplanted during his teenage years the warm curves his fingers desired.

  With an extraordinary series of demonstrative gestures and dramatic inhalations, he recounted the story of his long, lonely nights hammering out the raw material of his talent—a talent that the elderly teacher he’d had as a child, whose name he couldn’t remember, had emphasized to his mother—until finally his fingers had achieved a more-than-remarkable dexterity. But that wasn’t all; it remained to be seen whether he possessed true genius or not, whether there was the slightest possibility of him achieving the fantasies that were inevitably starting to invade his thoughts. To perfect his art, he chose La Campanella by the esteemed Paganini, a Genoese composer whom it was rumored had made a pact with the devil. For years he practiced tirelessly, with much anguish, approaching his goal with such disheartening slowness that he feared he would never reach it. And then one evening, while he was playing without much conviction, he was astonished to discover in the quavering silence that followed, that he had managed to play the much-practiced piece to perfection. Having once achieved this miracle, a sort of superstitio
n had prevented him from ever playing it again, possibly out of fear of discovering that his magnificent performance owed more to chance than to his imaginary ability. That troubling notion had caused him to place the violin back in its case, hoping to conserve the sublime melody intact in its strings, as one might hold a dove in one’s hands, preserving its energy, putting off the sky, delaying its flight until the right moment.

  And that moment was about to arrive, he assured me. In the penthouse apartment of the building opposite the guesthouse lived Paolo Volpi. He was a wealthy entrepreneur, who in addition to his many businesses owned a well-known Broadway theater. People in the neighborhood didn’t talk about him much, and the only thing I knew about Don Paolo was that he liked good food, expensive cigars, and chorus girls. And that he must have oodles of money, because he had a gold tooth and was always traveling. Only very occasionally would I bump into his rotund figure out in the street, greeting storekeepers with his beaming smile, like a president taking the nation’s pulse. The shutters on his windows remained closed for most of the year, and his roof terrace exhibited unabashed a wilted row of blighted pot plants. It was toward this roof terrace that Peterson’s longing gaze would stray, for Don Paolo, the violinist informed me, possessed one of the most discerning ears on the East Coast. It was little wonder, then, that, according to the critics, he had formed the only orchestra capable of competing with a choir of angels. Peterson’s dream was to join that prodigious orchestra, and yet he had never managed to get an audition. This was what had brought him to our neighborhood. This was the reason why he was forced to spend hours on the roof, smoking with a tragic air amid mangy cats and wet laundry. This was the reason why he was here, waiting at the ready with his violin on our roof, eyes fixed on Don Paolo’s terrace, fingers itching with a terrible desire to play, to climb back on that bucking bronco that was Paganini’s piece.