The Heart and Other Viscera Read online

  “When he appears, I shall open the case,” he confided, “I swear.” He drew on his cigarette and ended his tale with a tremulous smile that looked more like an anguished grimace.

  I smiled too, captivated, and yet also satisfied. Peterson’s story had exceeded my expectations. I imagined that the violinist was dragging around behind him a beautiful, mysterious past, folded like a peacock’s tail—a past he had just revealed to me alone, fanning out its splendid array of colors. I imagined him growing up as a child with his violin, cut off from life in his goldfish bowl of notes and scores, like a moth hypnotized by shimmering sequins, imprisoned in a storybook fate whose ending was about to take place on my roof terrace. I was determined to witness the denouement, as if my life depended on it: Peterson, standing silhouetted against the bloodred sunset, the sweep of rooftops, his violin tucked beneath his chin, standing erect, the slumbering melody sliding toward Don Paulo’s ears, surprising him as he watered his plants. My excited expression seemed to please Peterson, and his smile became less rigid, more relaxed.

  “No one must know about this, okay?” he added. “It’ll be our secret.” I nodded, thrilled at this request, which only gave more weight to his story, and at the gentle connivance with which he had offered me a slice of his soul, like a traveler sharing his bread with anyone who came near his fire. He ventured to complete the fraternal scene by reaching out his hand to muss up my hair, a gesture he probably didn’t make very often, judging by the clumsy way he performed it, his nimble right hand like a smooth tarantula tangled in my curls. Then he returned his gaze to the sunset, which was making the sky go as red as a chilblain. I studied the back of his neck, the motion of his cigarette, the erratic scrawl of smoke, and a sensation very like affection welled up inside me. Before the violinist arrived, my heart had been incapable of such a refined feeling, of containing all together pity, admiration, sorrow, and pride.

  “Who is it you call every afternoon?’ I asked, eager to fit that piece into the intriguing puzzle of his past. I saw the hand that was holding his cigarette tense all of a sudden, just for a few seconds, before resuming its elegant ascension to his lips. Three slow inhalations brought a response.

  “Evelyn,” he said, without turning. “I call Evelyn.” And there was no need for him to say more. The anguished tone with which he uttered her name was enough for me to picture a pretty, slender woman, her hair styled like a movie actress, waiting for him in a house that seemed to grow smaller every day without his presence, wondering how long it was going to take for his dream to become a reality, how long she would be able to survive with nothing but his increasingly hoarse voice over the telephone. Evelyn and her blue eyes behind the shutters. Evelyn looking out on a street veiled with rain. Evelyn imagining that she sees silhouettes on afternoons that drag on forever. Evelyn, who no longer knows how to ration the kisses and caresses she conserves in her memory. Evelyn, the final brushstroke that completes the beautiful picture.

  The next morning, Mom sent me on various errands, which took me virtually to the outer reaches of the neighborhood. I hadn’t stopped relishing the violinist’s story during the night, marveling at the romanticism of those images imprinted on my imagination. On my way home, I decided to stop by Ed’s music store, because now more than ever I needed to see a violin, to have a more precise idea of the instrument that so implacably ruled Peterson’s life. There were two in the window, dangling like fish in a smokehouse. And yet, despite their undeniable beauty, the harmony of those contours, like a gazelle preparing to leap, I could see them only as dead things, sad, soulless objects, which without the skilled hands to give them meaning were no more than a whimsical fusion of wood and metal.

  When I returned to the guesthouse, this is what I wanted to tell Peterson. Dad was behind the counter, immersed in the sports section of the morning paper; he was one of those grown-ups who give more importance to baseball heroes than to the people in their own lives. There was no sign of the violinist in the parlor, so I assumed I would find him in his room. I ran upstairs and into the corridor. Peterson’s door was closed, which struck me as odd, because he had recently started to leave it ajar to prevent the accumulation of cigarette smoke becoming a dense fog. Maybe he was already on the roof. I was raising my hand to call out to see if that was the case, when his door opened from the inside. Mom glanced at me briefly as if she didn’t recognize me. I smiled at her, but my smile soon faded when I realized that she wasn’t returning my gesture, but was simply staring at me, her mouth set in a hard line, a suspicious look in her eyes. This intense scrutiny alarmed me. Not knowing what else to do, I held her gaze until, finally, with considerable effort, her lips curved into a smile, aimed at reassuring which one of us I wasn’t sure. I noticed she was holding a pile of tin ashtrays. Then she stroked my head and moved on to the next room to continue her task, still glancing at me over her shoulder with that strange expression.

  Peterson was in his room, smoking with his usual indolence over by the window. Smoke rings shaped like seahorses rose from his lips. I had to clear my throat to get him to notice me. He seemed to give a start when he saw me. He smiled to himself, nodded, then finally approached me terribly slowly, as if he was walking on a raft. He placed his right hand on my shoulder. He exuded a smell both strong and mild, as if he’d been sleeping on a bed of chrysanthemums.

  “Come on, I’ll buy you an ice cream,” he said.

  Rody’s was the best ice cream parlor in the neighborhood, and it was on our street. We bought two large chocolate ice creams and sat down to eat them on the sidewalk outside the guesthouse.

  The afternoon was slowly coming into its own, the temperature was rising, the air was still, and the world looked like a photograph of itself. I became absorbed in my ice cream, as soon as I saw the first trickles running down the cone like dried blood. This was the first time in my life that I’d had a large cone, and I wasn’t about to waste it. I was hoping Tom and Bobby might show up, drawn by the peculiar scent of satisfied desires, to act as dumb witnesses to my pleasure, their envy immortalizing the eternity of chocolate. Where’s the fun in a large ice cream if there’s no one to see you enjoying it?

  It was then that Peterson leaped to his feet. I looked at him, startled. He was visibly distressed, eyes open wide, lips covered with terror and chocolate. I followed his gaze to Don Paolo’s roof garden. There he was, leaning on the handrail, contemplating the street with that mixture of affection and indolence of someone who has escaped hell but allows himself an occasional visit. His thinning hair was disheveled, his belly encased in a sleeveless vest, with a woolly tuft escaping at his midriff. Peterson turned toward me, thrust his ice cream into my hand, and ran into the guesthouse.

  I was too slow to respond, to realize that the denouement of the story that had me in its grip was about to take place. Peterson was rushing to get his violin, and I had to go after him if I wanted a ringside seat. I looked at the two chocolate ice creams glistening in my hands like trophies. I looked at the rickety trash can, annoyingly close on my left. Then I looked up at Don Paolo’s roof garden and saw him idly swatting a fly from his face. I looked again at the two half-melted scepters in my hands. I cursed and threw them in the trash, relieved in the end that Tom and Bobby weren’t there, for they would have regarded my action as a sacrilege akin to urinating in a chalice.

  Dad watched with relative indifference as I shot across the hallway, immune to the caprices of his son, which he puzzled over as he might a crossword. I devoured the stairs in avid leaps and dashed along the corridor, dizzy with anticipation before the imminent finale, my chocolate-smeared fingers leaving a trail of black moth marks on the walls that would later baffle Mom. As I raced past Peterson’s room, I peered inside to make sure my suspicions were correct and that the case was no longer on the table. I let out a grunt of frustration. The violinist had a good head start over me. And I knew that if the strains of the violin finally being played on the rooftop were to reach me at that moment I would have n
o choice but to fall to my knees in the middle of the corridor and shed tears of despair. I mounted the stairs to the roof terrace, my heart pounding from the excitement and the effort, leaping over steps between gasps, overwhelmed by a sinking feeling. In fact, I would have preferred the story to reach its conclusion a couple of days later, long enough at least for me to savor the magnificent climax, to prepare myself for an ending, which, however beautiful, was the final curtain. Afterward, Peterson would leave, victorious or defeated, but he would leave. Nothing would keep him on our roof.

  I reached the terrace just in time to see Peterson slam down the lid of his violin case with a dispirited gesture, to hear the terrible creak of the clasps. I ran over to him, leaned over the handrail, gasping for breath, and searched for Don Paolo, but his terrace was empty. Peterson had arrived too late. While he was fetching his violin, Don Paolo had gone back inside, possibly tired of the flies, possibly even disgusted by his neighbors’ comings and goings, the sad way they dragged themselves through life, gnawing timidly at the world. Beside me, rigid as a totem pole, Peterson contemplated the deserted roof terrace, scarcely containing his anger, as if he couldn’t quite believe this had happened. He remained like that a long while, with no energy or desire for a cigarette, his left hand hovering above the lid of the case. I stood beside him, glancing by turns at Don Paolo’s roof terrace, even though it was becoming more obvious by the minute that he wouldn’t return, at the case containing that elusive violin, and at Peterson, startled by the feverish glint in his eyes, the harsh curl of his lips. I saw his face darken. I saw the afternoon fade in his hair, die slowly in his eyes. Before I knew it, night had fallen. I thrust my hands in my pockets and went downstairs to dinner knowing that I would only play with my food, that I would go to bed unable to rid myself of the bitter taste that lost opportunities leave in the mouth.

  “You look more wilted than Mrs. Flannery’s lettuces,” my mother said to me the next morning, when she saw me slumped over the counter. About time too: I had been silently trying to catch her attention all morning, scowling in the corner, adopting dejected postures in her line of sight. I needed to speak with her, to find out whether with her scalpel-like comprehension she could lance the boil of anxiety that had grown in me overnight, once the previous afternoon’s events had settled in my head and I was able to go over them with the terrible lucidity insomnia bestows upon us. I had reached the conclusion that this was the first time, the only time, Peterson had gone out without his violin, and I realized with a pang of anguish that I was ultimately to blame for this omission. Because, while the ice cream had been his idea, it was my presence in his room that had brought it about. There was no doubt in my mind that if I hadn’t appeared, the violinist would have gone up to the roof with his violin, the way he always did, or maybe he would have gone out. In any event, he would have taken the case with him. The aim of my confession was to rid myself of guilt, or at least to assuage it, even though I would feel fresh guilt at betraying Peterson by letting my mother in on our secret. But I considered this a harmless exchange, from which I hoped to come out better off.

  Mom listened to my tale, a smile playing on her lips, while every so often Dad glanced up from his paper, irritated, as if he couldn’t understand what possible significance this could have when one of the best third basemen of the New York Yankees had broken a leg.

  “Don’t torment yourself, sweetie—sometimes things turn out one way and not another,” she tried to reassure me. “Besides, I’m sure Don Paolo won’t be going just yet. You wait and see, Peterson will soon have another chance, and he’ll seize it.”

  Talking to Mom reassured me somewhat, but that day I didn’t dare go near Peterson, who even brought his case with him down to dinner, as though he too acknowledged my guilt and was trying to reproach me. I watched him pacing up and down the sidewalk, eyes fixed on Don Paolo’s terrace, smoking on the roof, the black violin case on his knees, and more dejected than ever when he called Evelyn. I would have spent the whole of the next day doing the same thing, if my father hadn’t asked me around midday to bring the violinist down to reception. I climbed the stairs grudgingly. On top of everything else, I was now forced to break the silence that had descended between us with more bad news, because it was obvious that Dad didn’t wish to see Peterson in reception to discuss music. In all likelihood, Peterson owed several days’ rent. This setback would doubtless finish him off. I found him in his room, smoking over by the window, and I delivered the message in a faint voice, too afraid to look at him. Peterson nodded reluctantly, picked up the violin case, and followed me downstairs.

  Neither of us expected to encounter Don Paolo’s radiant smile in reception. Dad stood next to him, also smiling, shamelessly revealing his crooked, yellow teeth like a sad parody of Don Paolo’s gesture. I could see Mom watching silently in the background. Don Paulo was dressed in an elegant white suit, hair glistening with brilliantine, the pudgy fingers of his right hand wrapped around a cigar, whose rich aroma would linger in the hallway for days.

  “This is the young fellow, Don Paolo,” Dad announced. Don Paolo stepped forward, examining the violinist from head to toe, studying his angular face and his threadbare black jacket, and finally coming to rest on the case he was holding in his pale hand. Then he looked straight at Peterson, whose bewildered eyes met his.

  “So, you want to join my orchestra,” he said. Peterson turned white. Don Paolo’s lips curved in an amused smile. His gold tooth seized the opportunity to glint like a stiletto.

  “Everything is ready,” a voice reached them from the parlor. My father gave a contented nod and, linking arms with Don Paolo, led him toward the room.

  A couple of other guests had arranged the armchairs in the parlor into an improvised auditorium. With dramatic solemnity, Dad invited the violinist to sit down on the chair that presided over the room while the rest of us hurriedly took up the other seats, forming an expectant and rather noisy huddle. But the whispers ceased when Don Paolo sliced the air with an authoritative wave of his hand, initiating that deep, reverential silence that fills holy places. I observed the hushed company, the familiar faces now curiosity-stricken, yet solemn as Roman busts. Apart from the two guests who had moved the furniture, a few loafers had wandered in off the street. Mom had also joined the audience, although she preferred to watch from the hallway. When Dad saw her, his raggedy smile broadened.

  Ensconced in his chair, Don Paolo contemplated the violinist, beaming as if it were his daughter’s wedding day. From his makeshift seat of honor, Peterson observed us, intimidated, lips pursed, eyes full of misgiving. Events had gone way beyond his control. I watched him take a deep breath as he tried to collect himself, to accept as true this crazy situation, which he saw as utterly insane, to stop the violin case dancing on his cicada knees. I sat back in my chair, also trying desperately to control my nerves. Although not how I’d imagined it, I was about to witness the denouement of Peterson’s story, the finale of his electrifying feat. I was going to see his violin, hear his music, take part in his dream. Once he had managed to absorb what was taking place, Peterson recovered a degree of poise and held Don Paolo’s scrutinizing gaze for a long time.

  I was astonished at the incongruous rage congealing in his eyes, the intense anger which soon began to radiate from his sockets. I imagined he found it unpleasant to discover that, despite its chaotic appearance, the world was a terribly orderly place that could be divided into two distinct groups: those who dreamed and those who made dreams happen. Don Paolo held his furious gaze without batting an eyelid, sucking lazily on his cigar, amplifying his smile so that his lips seemed to twist into a disturbing, even menacing grimace. He appeared to enjoy the discomfort of the violinist, an insect writhing beneath the glare of his magnifying glass. This staring contest seemed to have gone on for an eternity, when Don Paolo pointed his eyes at the case and invited Peterson to proceed with a polite tilt of his head that seemed to infuriate the violinist even more. With a mixture of loa
thing and trepidation, Peterson looked down at the case in his lap; then he looked again at Don Paolo’s defiant smile, his shiny gold teeth, before resting his eyes once more on the case. Mournfully, his pale fingers caressed the catches, even as his face took on an appearance of profound determination. Then, just as we were all expecting the lid of the case to spring open, Peterson leaped from his chair, clasped hold of the case, and hurried out of the room, elbowing aside the astonished guests who were blocking the exit.

  The violinist’s unexpected flight caused a chorus of murmurs before Don Paolo’s disconcerting laugh rang out like a shot. He seemed to be the only one who wasn’t surprised at Peterson’s departure. Crammed into his armchair, he dissolved in a hoarse, jarring guffaw, fiendish in its intensity. I took advantage of the general confusion to slip out of the room and into the street. In the distance, I could see the violinist, who stood out like a capital letter among the other pedestrians. I watched him disappear for good down the street as if someone were extracting my spleen. This was the end, the final act of an unfinished story.