The Uncanny Reader (23 page)

As Father studied his huge ornithological compendiums, browsing through their coloured plates, those fledged phantasms seemed to come flying out of them, filling the room with colourful fluttering, slivers of crimson, shreds of sapphire, verdigris and silver. At feeding time, they comprised a varicoloured, surging patch on the floor, a living carpet that was torn to pieces upon anyone's incautious entry, rent asunder into animated flowers, fluttering into the air, to perch at last in the loftier regions of the parlour. A certain condor especially remains in my memory, an enormous bird with a bare neck, its face wrinkled and rank with excrescences. It was a gaunt ascetic, a Buddhist lama with impassive dignity in its whole demeanour, comporting itself in accordance with the strict etiquette of its illustrious tribe. As it sat opposite Father, unmoving in its monumental posture of the ancient Egyptian gods, its eye clouding over with a white film, which spread from the edge to the pupil, enclosing it entirely in contemplation of its venerable solitude—and with its stone hard profile—it seemed to be an older brother of my father: the same substance of its body, its tendons and its wrinkled, hard skin; the same dried up, bony face with those same deep and horny sockets. Even Father's long and thin hands, hardened into nodules and ending in his curling nails, had their analogon in the condor's talons. Seeing it asleep, I could not resist the impression that I was looking at a mummy—the mummy, shrunken by desiccation, of my father. Nor, as I suspected, had this astonishing resemblance escaped Mother's notice; although we never pursued the topic. Characteristically, both the condor and my father used the same chamber pot.

Not confining himself to incubating ever younger specimens, my father arranged ornithological weddings. He dispatched matchmakers and tethered the enticing, ardent betrothed in the gaps and hollows of the attic. And he succeeded, in fact, in turning the roof of our house—an enormous, shingled span-roof—into a veritable bird's inn, a Noah's ark to which feathered creatures of all kinds flocked from faraway places. Even long after the avian farm had been liquidated, that tradition regarding our house continued to be observed in the aerial realm, and come the period of the springtime migrations, whole hosts of cranes, pelicans, peacocks and birds of all kinds would alight on our roof.

But by and by, after its brief magnificence, the venture took a sad turn. It soon proved necessary to translocate Father to two rooms in the attic, which had served for lumber rooms, and from that time onward the mingled, early dawn clamour of the birds' voices reached us from there. Augmented by the resonance of the roof's expanse, those wooden boxes of attic rooms rang throughout with uproar, fluttering and crowing, hoots and gurgles. Father was lost to our sight throughout several weeks. He came down to the apartment only occasionally, and only then could we perceive that he was somewhat diminished; that he had lost weight and shrunk. Sometimes, in his forgetfulness, he would start up from his seat at table and let out long hoots, beating his arms like wings as a cloud of leucoma rose to his eyes. But afterward, in his embarrassment, he laughed along with us and tried to make a joke of the incident.

One day, during her general housework, Adela appeared without warning in Father's ornithological kingdom. Standing in the doorway, she wrung her hands at the stench rising in the air, at the heaps of excrement that coated the floor, the tables and the chairs. With hasty decisiveness, she threw the window open, and with her long brushes she set the whole mass of birds whirling. An infernal storm-cloud of feathers, wings and screeches flew up, in the midst of which Adela—looking like a furious mænad, half-obscured by the spinning of her thyrsus—danced a dance of destruction. My father flapped his arms in horror and tried to raise himself into the air together with his flock of birds. Gradually, the winged storm-cloud thinned, until at last on the battlefield there stood only Adela, exhausted and breathing hard, and my father, with an air of distress and shame, ready to capitulate on any terms.

A moment later, my father descended the stairway of his dominion, a broken man, an exiled king who had lost his throne and his reign.

 

THE USHER

Felisberto Hernández

Translated by Luis Harss

As soon as I grew up, I went to live in a big city. The city's downtown—where everyone rushed around among tall buildings—was near a river.

I was an usher at a movie theater, but the rest of the time I, too, scurried around like a mouse in old furniture. I knew holes everywhere with unexpected connections through which to reach my favorite places. And it gave me just as much pleasure to imagine the parts of the city I didn't know.

I had the late-afternoon shift at the theater. I rushed into my dressing room, polished my gold buttons, slipped my green tail coat on over my gray vest and trousers, and took up my post in the left aisle of the orchestra, where the gentlemen handed me the seat numbers and then fell in behind the ladies who followed my sinking steps down the red carpet. At each stop I did a minuet turn, bowed and put out my hand. I always expected to be surprised by the tip and knew how to bow at once with respect and contempt. I didn't care if people weren't aware of my superiority: I felt like an old rake with a flower in his buttonhole, wise to the ways of the world. I was happy watching the ladies in their different dresses and enjoyed the moment of confusion there was each time the screen lit up and the house darkened. Then I hurried back to the dressing room to count my tips, and afterward I set out to explore the city.

I got in tired, but on my way to my room, up stairs and along hallways, I hoped to see more sights through half-open doors. As soon as I turned on the light, the flowers of the wallpaper gave out a blaze of color: they were red and blue, on a black background. The ceiling light had been lowered on its cord until it almost touched the foot of the bed. I lay right under it to read, using a newspaper as a shade to block some of the glare and to dim the flowers a bit. At the head of the bed stood a table with bottles and other objects I watched for hours on end. Afterward I stayed awake with the light off until the sound of bones being sawed and hacked came in the window and I heard the butcher cough.

Twice a week a friend took me to a dining room where I could get a free meal. You went through an entrance hall that was almost as large as a theater lobby, into the silent luxury of the dining room. It belonged to a man who was going to go on offering those meals for as long as he lived because of a promise he had made when his daughter was saved from the river. The diners were foreigners sunk in memories. Each had the right to bring a friend twice a week. Once a month the host ate with them. He made a grand entry, like a conductor when the orchestra is ready to start playing, but the only thing he conducted was the silence. At eight o'clock sharp, a wing of the huge white double door at the far end of the room swung open on the dark emptiness of a neighboring room, and out of the darkness stepped a tall figure in black tails, his head cocked to the right and a hand raised to indicate we should remain seated. All faces turned toward him, but with blank stares, their eyes still on the thoughts inhabiting them at that moment. The conductor nodded a greeting as he sat and the players bent over their plates and sounded their instruments, each a professor of silence playing to himself. At first you heard pecking silverware, but then the noise took off and you no longer noticed it. To me it was just a meal, but to my friend, who was like the others, it meant the chance to spend a few moments remembering his country. Suddenly I felt confined to a circle the size of my plate, as if I had no thoughts of my own, surrounded by sleepers eating in concert, watched over by the servants. We knew we were finished with a plate when it was whisked away; soon we were cheered by the next one. Sometimes we had to divide our surprise between the plate and the neck of a bottle that came enveloped in a white napkin. At other times we were surprised at how the dark stain of the wine seemed to grow in the air, suspended in its crystal glass.

After a few such meals I had gotten used to the objects on the table and learned to play the instruments to myself alone, but the remoteness of the guests still troubled me. When the “conductor” made his appearance on the second month I no longer believed his generosity was because his daughter had been saved: I insisted on supposing she had drowned. In my wayward thoughts, a couple of long, nebulous steps carried me down the few blocks that separated us from the river, where I pictured the girl floating just below the surface. A yellowish moon shone on her but at the same time her gorgeous dress and the skin of her arms and face were all bright white—a privilege due perhaps to her father's wealth and his untold sacrifices on her behalf. I imagined the guests across the table from me, with their backs to the river, had also drowned: they hovered over their plates as if they were trying to come up to the surface from the bottom of the river. Those of us eating on my side of the table bowed in their direction but did not reach out to them.

Once during the meal I heard some words. A very fat guest said: “I'm dying,” and immediately his head rolled forward, into his soup, as if he were trying to drink it without a spoon. All the other heads swiveled to look at the one served up in the soup plate, and all the silverware stopped clicking. Then there was the sound of scraping chair legs, the servants carried the dead man into the hat room and made the phone ring to call the doctor, and before the body was cold everyone was back in place clicking and pecking again.

In those days I had begun to slow down at my job, sick with silence. I was sinking into myself the way you sink into a swamp. My colleagues at work kept bumping into me—I had become an aimless obstacle. The only thing I did well was polish my gold buttons. Once I heard a colleague say: “Move it, hippo!” The word fell into my swamp, stuck to me, and sank in. It was followed by other insults that piled up in my mind like dirty dishes. By then everyone avoided me, changing direction to stay out of my swamp.

Some time later I was fired and my foreign friend got me another job in a less elegant theater. Here the women dressed badly and there were no big tippers. Still, I tried to hang on.

But on one of my most miserable days something appeared before my eyes that made up for all my ills. I had been catching glimpses of it now and then. One night I woke up in the dark silence of my room and, on the wall papered with purple flowers, I saw a light. I suspected at once that something extraordinary was happening to me and I was not frightened. I moved my eyes sideways and the spot of light shifted with them. It was like the spot you see in the dark when you put out a lamp, but it lasted longer and you could see through it. I lowered my eyes to the table and saw my bottles and other objects. There could be no doubt: the light was coming from my eyes and had been developing for some time. I stared at the back of my hand and saw my open fingers. Soon I felt tired: the light dimmed and I closed my eyes. In a minute I opened them again to make sure I was not imagining things. I looked at the electric lightbulb and it lit up with my light—so I was convinced. I smiled to myself: who else in the world saw with his own eyes in the dark?

The light grew stronger every night. In the daytime I stuck nails all over the wall and at night I hung glass and porcelain objects—the ones I could see best—from them. In a small cabinet engraved—before my time—with my initials I kept goblets with strings tied to their stems, bottles with strings around their necks, frilly saucers with looped edges, teacups with gold lettering, and so on. One night I was seized by a terror that almost drove me mad. I had gotten up to see if there was anything left in the cabinet, and, before I could turn on the electric light, I saw my face and eyes in the mirror, lit with my own light. I fainted, and when I woke up my head was under the bed and I saw the metal frame as if I were under a bridge. I swore never again to look at that face of mine with its otherworldly eyes. They were greenish yellow eyes in which some unknown disease gleamed triumphant: glowing round holes in a face broken into pieces no one could put together or understand.

I stayed awake until the sound of the bones being sawed and hacked came in the window.

The next day I remembered that as I had made my way up the shadowy orchestra aisle a few nights before, a woman had caught my eye with a frown. On another night my foreign friend had made fun of my eyes, saying they shone like cat eyes. Now I began to watch for my face in dark store windows, where I could ignore the objects behind the windows. After much thought, I had decided I ought to use my light only when I was alone.

At one of the free dinners, before the host appeared in the white doorway, I saw the darkness through the half-open door and felt like penetrating it with my eyes. So I began planning a way to get into that room, where I had already detected glass cases loaded with objects that intensified the light in my eyes.

The hall leading from the street into the dining room was actually the back entrance to a house that stretched clear across the block and had its main entrance on another street. The only person you ran into in the back entrance at that time of day—by now I had seen him more than once on my walks up and down the street—was the butler, who had an apelike way of lumbering toward you with bow legs and flap arms, although seen from the side in his stiff tails he looked more like a stuffed bird. One afternoon, before dinner, I dared to address him. He watched me from under thick brows as I said:

“There's something I'd like to discuss with you. But I must ask you to keep it to yourself.”

“At your pleasure, sir.”

“It's just that”—now he waited, staring at his feet—“I have a light in my eyes that allows me to see in the dark.”

“Indeed, sir, I understand.”

“How could you understand?” I was annoyed. “You can't ever have met anyone capable of seeing in the dark.”