A while back, when we were in the girl’s bedroom and she had not yet turned on the light — she wanted to enjoy every last bit of the evening glow coming from the balcony — we had spoken about the objects. As the light faded we could feel them nestling in the shadows as if they had feathers and were preparing for sleep. She said they developed souls as they came in touch with people. Some had once been something else and had another soul (the ones with legs had once had branches, the piano keys had been tusks). But her balcony had first gained a soul when she started to live in it.
Suddenly the ruddy face of the dwarf maid appeared over the edge of the tablecloth. Although she reached out confidently to grasp things in her tiny hands, the old man and his daughter slid their plates toward her. But when she handled them, the objects on the table lost their dignity. The old man also had a hasty, tactless way of grabbing the pitcher by the neck and wringing the wine out of it.
At first, conversation was difficult. Then a grandfather’s clock made its presence felt by pounding out the time. It had been ticking against the wall behind the old man, but I had forgotten it was there. When we started up again the girl asked me:
“Aren’t you fond of old clothes?”
“Sure I am! And going back to what you were saying about objects, clothes are the ones that have been in closest touch with us” — here I laughed but she remained serious — “and I wouldn’t be surprised if they kept something more of us than just the shapes of our bodies and a whiff of our skin.”
But she wasn’t listening. Instead, she had been trying to interrupt, like someone watching others play jump-rope, waiting for her chance to cut in. No doubt she had asked the question thinking of what she would have answered. Finally she said:
“I make up my poems in bed” — she had already mentioned those poems in the afternoon — “and I have a white nightgown that has been with me ever since my first poems. Some summer nights I wear it in my balcony. Last year I wrote a poem for it.”
She had stopped eating and did not seem to notice the dwarf’s arms coming and going. Staring as in a vision she began to recite:
“To my white nightgown.”
I braced myself to listen, at the same time observing the dwarf’s hands. Her tiny stubby fingers were clenched as they approached things. They unbent only at the last moment, to clasp them.
At first I looked for different ways to show attention, but then I just nodded in time with the swinging motion of the clock’s pendulum. This bothered me, adding to the agony I was already in, trying to think of something to say before the girl finished. Besides, the old man had a bit of chard dangling from his lower lip near the corner of his mouth.
The poem was corny, but she seemed to have kept count of her syllables. She’d found an unexpected rhyme for “nightgown”: I would tell her it was fresh. Watching the old man, I had passed my tongue over my lower lip — but he was listening to his daughter. Now I began to feel the poem would never end. And then suddenly she rhymed “night” with “white” and it was over.
I sat there in serene contemplation, listening to myself, hoping to convey the impression that I was about to come up with something.
“I’m struck by the childish quality of the poem,” I began. “It’s very fresh and. .”
The word “fresh” wasn’t out of my mouth when she started to say:
“I have another one. .”
I felt miserable. . and treacherously concerned only with my own selfish needs. The dwarf was back with the next platter and I made a show of helping myself to a generous amount. All the glamour was gone from the objects on the table, the poem, the house overhead, even the parasols in the corridor and the ivy that grew up one whole side of the house. Wrapped up in myself, I gorged on the food, shamelessly. There wasn’t a time the old man clutched the neck of the pitcher when my glass wasn’t empty.
When she had finished her second poem I said:
“If this weren’t so tasty” — and I nodded at my plate — “I’d ask to hear more.”
The old man said at once:
“She ought to eat first. There’ll be time for that later.”
I was starting to feel cynical and at that moment I wouldn’t have minded growing a huge paunch. But then something made me want to cling to the poor old man and be kind to him. So, pointing to the wine, I said I’d recently heard a funny story about a drunkard. I told the story and when it ended they both laughed desperately, so I told them some more stories. There was sorrow in the girl’s laughter, but she begged me to go on telling my stories. Her mouth had stretched at the edges, into a painful gash. Her eyes, caught in their web of “crow’s feet,” were full of tears, and she was pressing her clasped hands between her knees. The old man was coughing so hard he had to put down the pitcher before filling his glass. The dwarf laughed, bending over as if to bow.
We had all been miraculously united and I felt not the least regret.
That night I did not play the piano. They begged me to stay and showed me to a bedroom on the side of the house where the ivy grew. As I started up the stairs I noticed a cord that ran from the grandfather clock all the way up the winding staircase. I followed it into the bedroom, up to the canopied bed, where it ended, tied to one of the slender bedposts. The room had ancient, paunchy furniture that shone yellowish in the lamplight. I put my hands on my stomach and eyed the old man’s stomach. His last instructions that night were:
“If you can’t sleep and want to know what time it is, pull on the cord. You’ll hear the dining room clock from here. First it will give you the hour, then, after a pause, the minutes.”
Suddenly he began to laugh and went out, waving good-night. He was probably remembering one of the stories, the one about the drunkard who talked to a clock.
He was still making the wooden stairs creak with his heavy steps when I started to feel alone with my body: it had absorbed all that food and drink like an animal swallowing other animals, and now it would have to struggle with it all night long. I stripped it naked and made it go barefoot around the room.
Later, in bed, I tried to figure out what I was doing with my life those days. I fished a few recent events out of my memory and thought of some people who were very far away. By then I was sinking into something like the bowels of silence, feeling sad and a bit lewd.
The next morning I looked back over my life with a smile, almost happily. It was very early. I dressed slowly and went out into a corridor built over the edge of the garden. On this side, too, there were weeds and tall, shady trees. I heard the old man and his daughter talking and realized they were on a bench right beneath me. I caught her words first:
“Ursula is unhappier now. She not only loves her husband less, but loves someone else more.”
The old man asked:
“Can’t she get a divorce?”
“No, because she loves her children and the children love her husband and not the other man.”
Then the old man said timidly:
“She could tell the children that her husband has several mistresses.”
She got up angrily:
“Just like you to say that! When will you understand Ursula? She would never say such a thing!”