A Heart So White (6 page)

While I was immersed in these reflections (only briefly) and having spent some seconds (very long seconds, possibly minutes) looking at Luisa's head in the mirror and seeing that she was now keeping her eyes firmly shut, when before they had been open and thoughtful, I temporarily lost concentration, lost all sense of time (I was too busy looking to listen), or perhaps Guillermo and Miriam were still silent and were taking advantage of that pause to effect a wordless reconciliation, or else they'd dropped their voices so much that they were no longer speaking in those sharp murmurs, but in whispers that were completely inaudible from my side of the wall. I began listening again and, for a while, I heard nothing, there was nothing to hear, I even wondered if, during those few moments of distraction, they had, in fact, left the room without my noticing, had decided, perhaps, to call a truce and go downstairs to eat something, maybe they'd originally met in order to do just that and had had no intention of meeting upstairs at all. I couldn't help thinking that their wordless reconciliation, if that's what it was, would necessarily have been a sexual one, because sometimes where there's mutual dishonesty one can only find reconciliation through sex, and that perhaps they would be standing up, fully clothed, in the middle of that room identical to mine, where they would have been standing before Miriam had said the final words I'd heard her say: "Guillermo, you one real bastard", which she would have said barefoot. Those strong legs of hers, I thought, could survive any amount of standing, any attack, without weakening or retreating or looking for support, just as they'd waited in the street, stabbing the pavement like knives, she would no longer be worried about recalcitrant creases in her skirt, always assuming she still had it on of course, perhaps the skirt would be all increases by now and her bag at last put aside, or perhaps her skirt would be draped over a chair. I don't know, there wasn't a sound, not even the sound of breathing, and that's why, very carefully, but in fact not that carefully since I knew Luisa was awake and, besides, would certainly continue pretending to be asleep, I got up from the foot of the bed and went out on to the balcony, again. By then it was night-time according to the clocks as well and the people of Havana would be having supper, the streets I could see from the hotel were almost empty, it was just as well that Miriam wasn't still out there waiting, abandoned by everyone. The moon was mellow and there wasn't a breath of wind. We were on an island, in a distant corner of the world whence, in a quarter part, I originated; both Madrid, the place in which our relationship had taken shape and where we would live together, and our marriage, seemed far, far away, and it was as if being far from the place that had brought us together had the effect, while on honeymoon, of slightly forcing us apart, perhaps that sense of distance came from our refusal to share what was a secret to neither of us, but which was, nonetheless, becoming a secret by virtue of our not sharing it. The moon was still mellow. Perhaps, I thought, leaning on the balcony rail, you can only desire or hasten the death of someone so close to you from afar. Perhaps doing it from a distance, planning it from a distance, makes it all into a game, a fantasy, and in fantasies everything's allowed. Not so with facts, from which there's no going back, no possible amendment, only concealment. And when it comes to overheard words there isn't even that; with luck, there's only a final forgetting.

Suddenly, from the balcony, through the doors rather than through the wall, through their balcony doors which had remained ajar and ours which had remained open and where I was now leaning on the balustrade, I again clearly heard Miriam's voice and now she wasn't talking but singing to herself and what she sang was this:

"Mamita, mamita, yen yen yen, the snake's gonna eat me up, yen yen yen."

She stopped almost as suddenly as she'd started and with no change of tone (no hint of exasperation either) she said to Guillermo:

"You must kill her."

"All right, all right, I will, but for the moment just keep doing that with your hand," he said. But that didn't upset or worry or shock me (though I don't know how Luisa felt) because he said it like a weary mother who says the first thing that comes into her head, if it will satisfy an importunate child wanting the impossible. More than that, his reply confirmed to me that if the woman in Spain did exist, Guillermo wouldn't harm her and that the only person certain to get hurt in that situation, that affair, was Miriam. It confirmed to me that Guillermo was lying (lying about something) and I imagined that Luisa, accustomed, as I was, to translating and picking up the least tremor in someone's voice and the sincerity or otherwise of the speaker, would also have realized and would have felt relieved not for Miriam but for the sick wife.

And Miriam - who would not at that point have picked up on Guillermo's insincerity or would have decided to drop the matter and not give it any importance or allow herself to be taken in once more or simply give up for a while on her most cherished dream — started singing to herself again and I knew what she would sing. More time had passed than I thought, I thought, it wasn't possible, there hadn't been enough time for them to have had their regulation act of silent sexual reconciliation that would have brought them peace. But that's what must have happened, because it seemed now that the two of them were quietly recumbent, Miriam was even somewhat abstracted, singing abstractedly to herself, breaking off every now and then the way people do when they sing softly without even realizing that they are, while they're having a wash or caressing the person at their side (a child they're singing to). And what she sang was this:

"Mother-in-law, she lyin', yen yen yen, we jus' playin', yen yen yen, the way we do back home, yen yen yen."

Those words did startle me, even more than the first words she'd sung, because they only confirmed my initial reaction (sometimes you hear correctly but you can't believe your ears) and I felt a slight shiver run through me, the way Luisa had shivered when she began to feel ill. And Miriam added in a neutral almost languid tone, again without any change of tone:

"If you don't kill her, I kill myself. Then you get one woman's death on your hands, either her or me."

Guillermo didn't reply this time, but my sense of surprise and the shiver that had run through me were provoked not by Miriam's words but by the song, which I knew from way back, because my grandmother used to sing it to me when I was a child, or rather, she didn't exactly sing it to me, because it wasn't really a song for children but, in fact, formed part of a story or tale, which wasn't meant for children either, but which she told me simply to frighten me, to fill me with pleasurable, lighthearted fear. But there were times too, when she was bored with sitting in an armchair in her apartment or in mine, fanning herself and watching the afternoon pass by until my mother came to fetch me or to take over from her, and then she'd sing songs without realizing she was doing so, to distract herself without intending to, she'd sing without even noticing what she was doing, in the same lacklustre, indifferent tone, in the same accent as Miriam by her half-open balcony doors. That unconscious singing intended for no one was the same song that maids used to sing when they were scrubbing floors or pegging out washing or hoovering or languidly dusting on days when I was ill and stayed away from school and saw the world from my pillow, listening to them in their morning mood, so different from their evening one; the same mindless singing my own mother went in for when she sat in front of the mirror brushing or pinning up her hair or when she stuck a large decorative comb in her hair and put on long earrings to go to Mass on Sundays, that almost muttered feminine song sung between clenched teeth (with pegs or hairpins clenched between those clenched teeth) which isn't sung in order to be heard, still less interpreted or translated, but which someone, the child nestling amongst his pillows or leaning at a door other than his own bedroom door, hears and learns and never forgets, even if only because that song, unintended, intended for no one, is, despite everything, transmitted and not silenced or diluted once it's sung, when followed by the silence of adult, or perhaps I should say masculine life. In the Madrid of my childhood, that involuntary, fluctuating song must have been sung in every house, every morning for years, like a meaningless message knitting together the whole city, binding it together and making it harmonious, a persistent veil of contagious sound covering everything, filling courtyards and doorways, wafting in at windows and down corridors, into kitchens and bathrooms, up stairways and rooftops, wearing aprons, pinafores, overalls and nightdresses and expensive gowns. All the women used to sing it in those days, days that are not so very long ago, maids sang it first thing in the morning as they yawned and stretched, ladies of the house and mothers sang it a little later on, as they were getting ready to go out shopping or perform some unnecessary errand, all of them united and made equal by that continuous, communal song occasionally accompanied by the whistling of young boys not yet at school and who, therefore, still participated in the world of women in which they moved: the delivery boys with their bikes and their heavy boxes, sick children in beds scattered with comics and coloured prints and storybooks, working children and idle children, whistling and envying one another. That song was sung all the time every day, by joyful voices and sorrowful voices, voices that were strident and downcast, dark-haired and melodious, tuneless and blonde, in every state of mind and in every circumstance, regardless of what was going on in the houses, unjudged by anyone: it was sung by a maid while she watched an ice-cream cake melting in my grandparents' house, when they were not yet my grandparents because I hadn't even been born, nor was there even a possibility of my being born; whistled by a boy on that same day in that same house as he walked down the corridor to the bathroom where, only shortly before, a woman full of fear and drenched in tears and water had also perhaps hummed some tune. And in the afternoons, that song would be sung by the more cracked and tenuous voices of grandmothers and widows and spinsters sitting in their rocking chairs or armchairs or on sofas keeping an eye on their grandchildren, keeping them occupied, or casting sideways glances at the portraits of people who'd already departed this life or whom they'd been unable to hold on to, sighing and fanning themselves, their whole lives spent fanning themselves even in autumn, even in winter, sighing and singing and watching past time passing. And at night, the song, more intermittent, more disparate, could still be heard in the bedrooms of those more fortunate women, who were not yet grandmothers or aunts or spinsters, a quieter, sweeter, more resigned song, a prelude to sleep, an expression of weariness, the same song Miriam had inadvertently sung to me in her hotel room identical to mine, after nightfall in Havana, such a hot night, on my honeymoon with Luisa, while Luisa neither sang nor spoke, but merely pressed her face into her pillow.

The songs my grandmother used to sing came mainly from her own childhood, songs from Cuba and from the black nannies who'd looked after her until she was ten years old, the age when she left Havana and moved to the country across the ocean where she and her parents and her sisters imagined they belonged but which they knew only by name. Songs and stories (I can no longer separate them out in my memory) full of animal characters with absurd names - Verum-Verum the Cow, Chirrinchinchin the Monkey - sombre stories, African stories, for example, as I remember it, Verum-Verum the Cow was much loved by the family who owned her, she was a beneficent, friendly cow, rather like a nanny or a grandmother, and yet one day, goaded by hunger or by evil thoughts, the members of the family decided to kill her and cook her and eat her, which, understandably enough, poor Verum-Verum the Cow found hard to forgive in people with whom she lived so closely, and right there in the dining room, the moment each member of the family ate a piece of her butchered, aged flesh (thereby participating in a kind of metaphorical anthropophagy) a cavernous voice that never ceased issued forth from their stomachs, tirelessly repeating in the booming voice affected by my grandmother, trying hard not to laugh: "Verum-Verum the Cow, Verum-Verum the Cow", issuing ceaselessly forth from their stomachs forever and ever. As for Chirrinchinchin the Monkey, his adventures were, I think, so multifarious that I've forgotten what they were, but I have the impression that the fate he suffered proved no kinder and that he ended up roasting on the spit of some unscrupulous white man. The song Miriam had sung in the next room had no meaning for Luisa and, in that respect, as regards our knowledge or understanding of what was going on and being said through the balcony doors and the wall, there was now at least one definite difference. Because my grandmother used to tell me that fragment of a story learned from her black nannies, a story whose obvious sexual symbolism I'd never noticed until that moment, when I heard Miriam singing it or, rather, when I heard her sing the gloomy, slightly comical song that formed part of the story my grandmother used to tell me to frighten me, to fill me with a fear that was both transitory and tinged with humour (it taught me what fear was and how to laugh at it) : the story told how a young woman of great beauty and even greater poverty was sought in marriage by a very rich, handsome stranger with excellent prospects, a foreigner who'd installed himself in Havana amidst a show of great luxury and ambitious plans for the future. The girl's mother, a widow who was dependent on her only daughter or rather on the success of her very necessary marriage, was beside herself with joy and gave the man her daughter's hand in marriage without a moment's hesitation. Throughout the wedding night, the mother kept a distrustful or knowing watch on the door of the newlyweds' room and, again and again, she heard her daughter sing this plea for help: "Mamita, mamita, yen yen yen, the snake's gonna eat me up, yen yen yen." Any possible alarm the greedy mother might have felt was assuaged by her son-in-law's repeated and eccentric reply, which he too sang again and again through the door, throughout the long night: "Mother-in-law, she lyin', yen yen yen, we jus' playin', yen yen yen, the way we do back home, yen yen yen." The following morning, when the mother, and now mother-in-law, decided to go into the newlyweds' bedroom to bring them breakfast and see their happy faces, she found only a huge snake coiled on the bloody, rumpled bed and not a trace of her dear, unfortunate daughter, so full of promise.