The Balcony
I liked to visit this town in summer. A certain neighborhood emptied at that time of the year when almost everyone left for a nearby resort. One of the empty houses was very old; it had been turned into a hotel, and as soon as summer came it looked sad and started to lose its best families, until only the servants remained. If I had hidden behind it and let out a shout, the moss would have swallowed it up.
The theater where I was giving my concerts was also half empty and invaded by silence: I could see it growing on the big black top of the piano. The silence liked to listen to the music, slowly taking it in and thinking it over before venturing an opinion. But once it felt at home it took part in the music. Then it was like a cat with a long black tail slipping in between the notes, leaving them full of intentions.
After one of those concerts, a timid old man came up to shake my hand. The bags under his blue eyes looked sore and swollen. He had a huge lower lip that bulged out like the rim of a theater box. He barely opened his mouth to speak, in a slow, dull voice, wheezing before and after each word.
After a long pause he said:
“I’m sorry my daughter can’t hear your music.”
I don’t know why I imagined his daughter was blind, although I realized at once that that would not have prevented her from hearing me, so that she was more likely deaf or perhaps out of town — which suddenly led to the idea that she might be dead. Yet I was happy that night: everything in that town was quiet and slow as the old man and I waded through leafy shadows and reflections.
Suddenly bending toward him, as if sheltering some frail charge, I caught myself asking:
“Your daughter couldn’t come?”
He gasped in apparent surprise, stooped to search my face and finally managed to say:
“Yes, that’s it. You’ve understood. She can’t go out. Sometimes she can’t sleep nights thinking she has to go out the next day. She’s up early in the morning preparing for it, getting all excited. But after a while it wears off, she just drops into a chair, and she can’t do it.”
The people leaving the concert soon disappeared into the surrounding streets and we went into the theater café. He signaled the waiter, who brought him a dark drink in a small glass. I could only spend a few minutes with him: I was expected elsewhere for dinner. So I said:
“It’s a shame she can’t go out. We all need a bit of entertainment.”
He had raised the glass to his big lip but interrupted the motion to explain:
“She has her own way of keeping entertained. I bought an old house, too big for just the two of us, but it’s in good shape. It has a garden with a fountain and in her bedroom there’s a door that opens onto a winter balcony. It’s a corner room, facing the street, and you could almost say she lives in that balcony. Or sometimes she goes for a walk in the garden and on some nights she plays the piano. You can come and have dinner with us whenever you want and I’ll be grateful to you.”
I understood at once. So we agreed on a day when I would go for dinner and play the piano.
He called for me at the hotel one afternoon when the sun was still high. From a distance, he showed me the corner with the winter balcony. It was on a second floor. The entrance to the house was through a large gate on one side. It opened onto a garden with a fountain and some statuettes hidden in the weeds. Around the garden ran a high wall. The top of the wall was all splintered glass stuck in mortar. A flight of steps led up into the house, through a glassed-in corridor from which one could look out at the garden. I was surprised to see a large number of open parasols in the long corridor. They were different colors and looked like huge hothouse plants. The old man hastened to explain:
“I gave her most of the parasols. She likes to keep them open to see the colors. When there’s nice weather she picks one and goes for a short walk in the garden. On windy days you can’t open this door because the parasols blow away, we have to use another entrance.”
We reached the far end of the corridor by going along the space left between the wall and the parasols. We came to a door and the old man rapped on the glass. A muffled voice answered from inside. The old man showed me in, and there was his daughter standing in the center of the winter balcony, facing us, with her back to the colored panes. We were halfway across the room before she left the balcony and came forward to meet us. Reaching out through space she offered me her hand and thanked me for my visit. Backed against the darkest wall of the room was a small open piano. Its big yellowish smile looked innocent.
She apologized for not being able to leave the house and, pointing to the balcony, said:
“He’s my only friend.”
I indicated the piano and asked:
“How about this sweet soul? Isn’t he your friend, too?”
We were lowering ourselves into chairs at the foot of her bed. I had time to notice many small paintings of flowers, all hung at the same height, along the four walls, as though parts of a frieze. The smile she had abandoned in the middle of her face was as innocent as the piano’s, but her faded blonde hair and wispy figure also seemed to have been abandoned long ago. She was starting to explain why the piano wasn’t as close a friend as the balcony when the old man left the room almost on tiptoes. She went on saying:
“The piano was a great friend of my mother’s.”
I made as if to go over and look at it, but she raised a hand and opened her eyes wide to stop me.
“I’m sorry but I’d rather you tried the piano after dinner, when the lights are on. Since I was a little girl I’ve been used to hearing the piano only at night. That was when my mother played it. She used to light the four candles in the candlesticks and play each separate note so slowly in the silence, it was as if she were also lighting up the sounds, one by one.”
A minute later she rose and, excusing herself, went out on the balcony, where she leaned her bare arms on the panes as if she were resting them on someone’s breast. But she came right back and said:
“When I see the same man go by several times through the red pane, he usually turns out to be violent or hot-tempered.”
I couldn’t help asking her:
“Which pane did you see me through?”
“The green one. It usually means someone who lives alone in the country.”
“I happen to like being alone among plants,” I said.
The door opened and the old man came in followed by a maid who was so short that I couldn’t tell whether she was a child or a dwarf. Her ruddy face shone over the little table she was carrying in her stubby arms. The old man asked me:
“What will you have?”
I was about to say “nothing,” but I thought that would offend him, so I named the first drink that came to mind. He had the maid bring him a small glass with the same dark drink I’d seen him take after the concert.
As night fell we started for the dining room. We had to go through the corridor of the parasols. The girl rearranged a few of them and glowed when I praised them.
The dining room was below street level. Through the small barred windows one could see the feet and legs of the people going by on the sidewalk. A lamp with a green shade poured its light straight onto the white tablecloth, where old family treasures had gathered as if to celebrate happy memories. We sat down, without a word, and for a moment each object seemed like a precious form of silence. When our pairs of hands started to appear on the tablecloth it seemed as natural as if they’d always lived there. I couldn’t stop thinking of the life in hands. Years back, hands had molded these objects on the table into certain shapes. After changing hands many times, the plates, glasses, and other small beings had found their home in a sideboard. Over the years they’d had to serve all sorts of hands. Any one of those hands could pile food on the plates’ smooth bright faces, make the pitchers fill and empty their hips and the knives and forks sink into the meat, cut it up and bring the pieces to the mouth — after which the small beings were scrubbed, dried, and led back to their small dwellings in the sideboard. Some of these beings could outlive many pairs of hands, some of which would treat them lovingly and be long remembered, but they would have to go on serving in silence.