I was dragging these thoughts along, strolling up an avenue in the Prado with my hands clasped behind my back, when someone tickled one of my palms. I swung around and it was Dolly. She said:
“I saw you go by my window and I followed you.”
“So you’re no longer at Miss Moppet’s?”
“That old bag of bones? She’ll remember me for the rest of her life. One afternoon I told her: ‘You can start looking for someone else — I’m leaving tomorrow.’ She was stunned and asked: ‘What did I do now?’ So I let her have it: ‘It’s not you but me, dear. I’m getting married. . to your brother.’ She started to shake all over and foam at the mouth, because that very morning she’d put the little house where we’re living in her brother’s name.”
We had been walking along, but when she mentioned Spider and the house I stopped to look at her. She took my hand and said:
“Come on, I’ll show you the house. Spider’s always at work at this time.”
I freed my hand and said:
“Maybe some other day.”
She flew into a rage, just like when I had refused to climb her tree, and, curling her lip at me, said:
“Get out of here, you poor pieanist.”
The Green Heart
Today, in this room, for several hours, I’ve been happy. So what if I’ve left the table full of pinpricks. If only I didn’t have to change the newspaper spread out on it: it’s been there for a while and I’ve grown fond of it. It’s a greenish color, with orange headlines over a picture of some quintuplets.
Toward evening, as the heat died down, I was on my way home, tired after a long walk. I had gone out to pay an installment due on the overcoat I bought last winter. I was a bit disappointed with life but careful not to get run over by a car. Thinking of my room, I remembered the bald heads of the quintuplets, which reminded me of fingertips. Back at my table, with my bare arms on the green paper and a round spot of light shining on the books I’ve been underlining in colors, I opened my pencil box and took out my tiepin. I turned the pin over between my fingers until they were numb, absently poking holes in the quintuplets’ eyes.
Once the head of that pin had been a small green stone worn by the sea into the shape of a heart, then the heart had been attached to the pin on a mount embedded — like a filling — in a square the size of a horse’s tooth. At first, when I turned the pin over between my fingers, it brought nothing special to mind, but suddenly I began to think of my mother, then a horse-drawn tram, the lid of a candy jar, a trolley, my grandmother, a French lady who wore a paper hat and was always sprinkled with tiny feathers, her daughter Ivonne who had a hiccup as loud as a scream, a dead man who used to sell chickens, a doubtful neighborhood in a city in Argentina where I slept on the floor one whole winter under layers of newspapers, an elegant neighborhood in another city where I slept like a king under a pile of blankets, and, finally, an ostrich and a cup of coffee.
All these memories lived in some part of me that was like a small lost town known only to itself, cut off from the rest of the world. For many years no one had been born or died there. The founders of the town had been my childhood memories. Then, years later, some foreigners had arrived: my memories of Argentina. This afternoon I had the feeling I was in that town for a rest, as if misery had granted me a holiday.
During much of my childhood in Montevideo, we lived on the Hill. The people climbing the street toward my house carried their bodies bent forward, as if looking for something among the stones, and going the other way they bent backward, although it meant tripping over the stones, as if they were too proud to look down. In the afternoons my aunt took me to a high knoll near the old fortress. From there you could see the ships at dock with their many tall and short masts like fishbones. When the fortress cannon was fired at sundown, we started home.
One afternoon my mother said she was taking me to visit a grandmother who lived in the port area, and that I’d see a trolley. And yet I had misbehaved that morning: I’d been sent to the store to get a box of starch but instead I’d bought loose starch, and gotten scolded. A bit later I’d been sent with some change to buy mate, and since I’d insisted it had to be in a box, the grocers — who were friends of the family — had put it in a shoebox, but I’d done something else wrong: I’d come home with the change and gotten scolded for not paying. Next I’d been sent with paper money for some noodles and I’d remembered to pay — but I hadn’t accepted the change so I wouldn’t be scolded again. At home they were alarmed when I didn’t have the change and they had sent me back for it. The grocers scribbled my mother a note, which had seemed to calm her, at last. I had peeked and it said: “The change is in the noodles.”
That afternoon all the women in the house tried to fasten a big starched collar on me. The only one who could handle the metal buttons that attached it to my shirt was another grandmother — not the one who lived in the docks and wore the pin with the green heart on her breast. This grandmother had hot, pudgy fingers, and when she stuck them inside the collar to fasten it, she pinched my neck and I choked a couple of times and nearly threw up.
Out in the street, the sun made my patent leather shoes shine and I hated scuffing them on the stones as I hopped along after my mother, who was leading me by the hand, almost running. But I was happy, and when she didn’t answer my questions I answered them myself, until suddenly she said:
“Will you stop your chattering! You sound like the loony with the seven horns.”
A moment later we passed the loony’s place. It was an ancient house with crumbling walls. Tied with wires to a window grille were some cans through which the loony bellowed at the people who went by. He was a large fat man in a checkered shirt. Sometimes his tiny, thin wife could be seen trying to make him shut up, but in a minute he was clinging to the bars again, shouting himself hoarse.
Then we went by the butcher shop, where I spent entire mornings waiting in lines, in a silence broken only by a loud thrush that kept singing the same boring song.
At the foot of the Hill was the street where you caught the horse-drawn tram. It came blowing its horn, with a clatter of hooves, rattling chains and the sound of the long whip snapping over the horses’ heads. I used to kneel on one of its two long benches to look out the window. After a long while I had to hold my nose as we went by the packing houses near a stream. Sometimes, rumbling over the bridge, I forgot to hold my nose and caught a whiff of the smell. That afternoon we got off at the Paso Molino stop and went into a candy shop, where my mother chatted with the lady who owned the place. After a long while, the lady said:
“Your boy’s looking at the candy.”
And, pointing to the different jars, she asked me:
“Would you like one of these? How about these here?” I told my mother I wanted the lid of a candy jar. They both laughed and the lady brought me the lid of another jar that had broken recently. My mother didn’t want me to carry it in the street, but the lady wrapped it up and tied it with a string to which she attached a small wooden handle.
It was evening when we left the shop, and in the middle of the street I saw a lit gallery. As my mother led me toward it, I admired its colored windows. She was telling me it was a trolley, but coming on it from behind I went on thinking it was a gallery. At that moment a bell clanged and the “gallery” let out a loud sigh and slowly heaved forward. At first it barely moved and the people I could make out inside sat still as dummies in a show window, but we didn’t reach it in time and soon it was far away, slipping around a bend between some trees.