“With her good taste, no wonder. .”
She didn’t let me finish.
“It’s not her taste — a real cultured gent used to live here, a doctor. He lost his daughter and sold her the house when she was still a young girl — but already a widow and rich.”
She flicked her cigarette ash on the dessert plate, nearly knocking it off the chair.
“What the doctor didn’t have was a pieano. She bought that — and lived to regret it, I can tell you.”
I looked at her wide-eyed and possibly open-mouthed as well. She seemed to like my way of listening because the standoffishness she’d shown at first had disappeared and she chattered away until the lady of the house arrived. Her favorite topic was anything connected with Miss Moppet: no matter what else she might be talking about, it seemed she couldn’t help gradually and almost inadvertently falling back on it.
I asked her:
“Is Miss Moppet as tall as you?”
She laughed.
“When we moved into this house she made me lower all the mirrors — too bad if I have to stoop to see myself.”
Suddenly, and irrelevantly — as if she had left a pot simmering and it was time to stir it again — she returned to the topic of the pieano.
“She lived to regret it, all right. She bought it so a boyfriend she had could play it. He wrote a tango and called it ‘Moppet’ in her honor. Then, one night, he left for Buenos Aires. He hadn’t wanted her to see him off, but she insisted on going. I couldn’t stop her and went along. He was late for the boat. . and when he showed up he had another woman on his arm and they ran up the gangway together.”
I started to reach out to catch the dessert plate, which seemed about to fall again. She saw my arm twitch and told me not to bother. But just then the bell rang and she swept up the plate and vanished through the scene of the glass storks.
A few seconds later I made out a purple shadow pressed against the door to the entrance hall and heard nails rapping impatiently on the glass. The big blonde opened the door and a short woman stepped right in and started talking about the butcher. I had the impression that one of the short woman’s eyes was fixed on me. I saw her in profile, and, although elderly, she did not seem ugly. But I remember what happened when she began to turn her face slowly toward me: it was such a narrow face that it gave me a shock. I had felt the same effect coming around to the front of a house built at a sharp angle, on a diagonaclass="underline" it could almost have been said that face existed only in profile, with no front except for the bit of space between the eyes, which were skewed, the left one aimed straight ahead, the right one to the right. To compensate for the face’s narrowness, her hair was done up in a promontory that displayed its various colors — black, several shades of brown and strands of dirty white — and ended in a tight knot where all the colors combined.
Her eye fastened on me all the way, she crossed the patio without a word, until she stood before me:
“So you’re the pianist? You want to come in?”
She carried her promontory toward the dining room door. In spite of all that hair, the top of her head barely reached the foot of the stork with the fish in its beak. When we pulled the chairs back from the large table, the sound they made echoed like a roar. It was a dark room with dark furniture and its own dark silence — in which her voice sounded like a desecration.
“In my family,” she was saying (now both her eyes strayed, so I didn’t know which one to look at because I couldn’t tell which one was looking at me), “in my family we’ve always respected music. And I want music played in this house twice a week.”
She was called away because the butcher had arrived. She got up swinging a long gold chain that hung over her breast in several loops and a final coil tied to the left side of her waist.
On the sideboard, facing the patio, stood two oval trays that still caught a bit of evening light. A painting of fish that hung over the sideboard also gave off a dim glow. I felt my hand going numb from running my palm over the table cover, which was turning a dark green. When Miss Moppet returned I tried to get down to business.
“What kind of music would Madam like me to play?”
“What do you mean what kind of music? The kind everyone plays — whatever is in fashion.”
“All right. Can I try the piano?”
“You should have done that already.”
“Where is it?”
“In the corner, right behind you. Don’t you see it?”
“I’m sorry, Madam, there isn’t much light.”
She drew up a footlamp, grumbling as she tripped over it. When she managed to plug it in, its light fell on a small cherry red piano. After trying it and saying “all right” again, I remembered to ask:
“At what intervals do you want the pieces?”
“What’s that about intervals?”
“How long do you want the pause to last between one piece and the next?”
“The same as in the Japanese Café.”
I said my last “all right” and took my leave after fixing the date when I was to begin.
Again, when I arrived that afternoon for my first session, the lady was out. The big blonde showed me in to the dining room, where she kept me entertained with her chatter. Her name was Dorothy, but ever since she was a child she’d had people call her Dolly, after an unhappy heroine who had thrown herself into the sea in a film that was popular back in those days. Later I found out neither she nor the lady of the house knew that their names meant the same thing, and, for some mysterious reason, I was afraid to enlighten them on the subject. Now she was telling me about a brother of Miss Moppet’s. The lady had made him find a job, promising that if he “behaved” she would transfer a property she had — a small house in the Prado, next to a summer home also owned by her — to his name.
By then the palm of my hand had fallen asleep: I had been stroking the embossed leather of a chair next to me.
When Miss Moppet rang the bell I moved my chair to the piano, put my music on the stand and waited for instructions. She came in reaching for the left side of her waist to draw out a tiny watch that hung from the end of her long chain — a combination as disproportionate as if she’d had a lapdog on a well chain — and said: “You may begin.” She sat at the far end of the table, for some reason running her hand over the table cover, just as I had done.
I started to play a tango. But the big blonde appeared in the middle of the piece, raising her voice over the sound of the piano:
“Miss Moppet, dear, where did you put the teapot?”
Miss Moppet had a different notion of what was going on: she was paying for the music and took it seriously, as if she had hired a theater company for a private performance, and here was this creature interrupting the show and spoiling the dignity and aristocratic refinement she wanted for her home. She stood up angrily and said:
“Don’t ever come in like that, screeching and interrupting the music.”
The big blonde wheeled around and left the room, but almost at once Miss Moppet called after her:
“Dolly!”
The big blonde’s voice answered:
“Miss Moppet?”
“Fix the mate. The pot’s in the bathroom.”
I had finished the tango and was looking around at the furniture, remembering the doctor. There was something about the house that made me think of a sacred tomb hastily abandoned and then invaded by these two women who desecrated its most hallowed memories. On the sideboard stood a gaping package of mate, and the crystal goblets in a glass cabinet had been crowded back indecently to make room for a bottle of ordinary table wine.