The Heart and Other Viscera

by Félix J Palma

  Peterson didn’t have the courage to fulfill his dream, and now all his sacrifices seemed painfully in vain. Perhaps the icy disdain, the savage hatred I had seen explode in his eyes was directed only at himself, for when the moment of truth arrived, he had realized he was a coward, diminished, incapable of taking the leap, of confronting the possible failure that would make his life hollow, annihilate his existence in one fell swoop. I imagined him framed in Evelyn’s window like a wounded shadow, dragging the violin case along the ground, broken, stooped, drunk perhaps, secretly glad that the rain was concealing his tears. I shook my head. The scene was too painful. I decided not to judge him. I refused to think of him as a coward. Perhaps instead of destroying him, this ordeal would make him stronger. Evelyn would soothe him with her caresses, would lighten his load with her unwavering support. And maybe one day, Peterson would find the courage to settle his fate, to face Don Paolo with a beaming smile, open the case, and take out his violin, for better or worse.

  “He can’t be very good,” I heard my father say with his bucktoothed laugh in the parlor.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Don Paulo agreed, his laughter beginning to slacken. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  That afternoon I went up to the roof terrace and smoked a cigarette as a tribute to the violinist while the sky became permeated with the usual colors.

  After Peterson’s departure, the days lost their sparkle. They returned to normal, flowing monotonously and predictably, with their smattering of the same pranks performed a thousand times, the same lurid banter exchanged a thousand times, of large chocolate ice creams once again beyond reach. Sometimes, when dusk began to infiltrate the sky, I would meet with Tom and Bobby on the roof terrace and tell them the story of the violinist. I spoke to them of his mysterious gaze, his black suit, his dying cigarettes, his life devoted to the violin, and, although here I was obliged to embellish, of the beautiful instrument slumbering in its case, Paganini’s refrain crackling on its strings, of its frailty, its weightlessness, how it seemed it might crumble in my hands. But, since Bobby kept insisting that, according to his father, the only orchestra in Don Paolo’s dive was a mediocre jazz band, we grew bored of the subject, and ended up talking about baseball and Mrs. Flannery’s daughter, who it was rumored had begun wearing a bra that summer. I thought no more about the violinist until a few months later, when we heard that Don Paolo had died. Death had surprised him as he left his theater, piercing his skull in the form of a bullet someone had fired from a rooftop.

  “It was bound to happen sooner or later. People like that never die in their beds,” my mother remarked when she found out, as if Don Paolo had been born with that bullet clasped in his tiny closed fist. Comments like my mother’s were widespread. Even so, for two days, everyone in the neighborhood mourned Don Paulo. I mourned for Peterson, who now would never be able to turn his dream into reality.

  The Man behind the Curtain

  I fell in love with Marta when, on one of our first dates, I heard her swear she’d never experienced that well-known sensation of entering somewhere for the first time and feeling she had been there before. I remember she emphasized the unusual nature of her confession with a wave of the arm that ended up spilling her coffee over the nightstand, and I stared at her, suddenly spellbound, as she tried to repair the damage by soaking tissues in the pool of coffee. Since I too had never felt that prickling in the nape of the neck that affects others when they cross certain thresholds, I felt a sudden onrush of affection for this skinny girl I had been courting in a lackluster way for some time. This was strong enough to intertwine our lives as poor creatures immune to this kind of déjà vu. A more passionate kiss than usual sealed her revelation. And as the days went by, we realized that neither of us had any wish to look for anything else, that we were both content with this bonanza that was so akin to boredom. As a result, in front of an altar decked out with spikenards and besieged by a mob of relatives who had appeared out of the most remote hiding places, we decided to close the file on the dark days of the past when we had treated love in the same way as children treat electric sockets. And it was now, our backs bent from seven years of conjugal routine that had produced a fast-growing daughter and a grandmother on her way to the scrap heap, that all of a sudden, the old flame was rekindled, without either of us wishing it. The reason was none other than our search for a new roof to shelter under, because when I took my eyes off the swaying hips of the girl from the real estate agency to actually look at the spacious apartment she was showing us, I felt a prickling at the back of my neck that made me turn toward Marta. I could tell from her eyes that she also had the impression of having been there before.

  There was no doubt it was the home of our dreams. It had an immense living room, light and airy bedrooms, and two bathrooms, which meant we would be able to avoid family life being suspended in a painful impasse whenever Grandma decided to barricade herself in one of them. The only thing that detracted from it being our dreamed-of den was the presence of the man behind the curtain.

  “Who is he?” Marta wanted to know.

  The girl from the real estate agency simply shrugged. There wasn’t much she could tell us. She didn’t know his name or the reason why he was there, hidden or waiting for heaven knows what. The only thing she could say was that the man behind the curtain came with the apartment, that he was, as it were, part of the furniture. If we eventually decided to rent it, he came included in the price, and if, at some point, we decided to move, we also had to hand the apartment over with him inside. That was how it had always been, according to the agreement the first owner had established with the agency.

  After informing us of these peculiar conditions, she left Marta and me on our own to make up our minds in private. Of all the ones we had seen, this apartment came closest to satisfying us. And yet, although we had moved several times in the course of our marriage, we had never lived with an unknown presence behind the living room curtain. Would we get used to it? The agent had told us that, according to previous tenants, it didn’t make much difference, because the man behind the curtain was very reserved by nature and it took only a few days for them to forget he was there. Marta seemed to study closely the tips of the shoes poking out from the curtain hem. When she glanced toward me again, I understood that for her the presence of an intruder was no obstacle to our renting the place, and so I dipped my head meekly to show my agreement. After all, it was a relief to discover that the apartment wasn’t haunted, as we had feared from the rumors circulating in the neighborhood.

  We moved in at once. Apart from converting one of the bedrooms into a study for Marta and moving some of the furniture around, we made hardly any changes. However, our family life took some time to return to normal. I never learned whether the man behind the curtain regarded our arrival as an invasion of his territory or a welcome distraction from his solitude. In fact, we didn’t notice any modification in his behavior because, as the girl from the real estate agency had informed us, he remained engrossed in his silent vigil, apparently indifferent to the domestic whirlwind all round him. He would move his head timidly in response to the questions my daughter, Eva, put to him—she was the only one who made an effort to be friendly toward that strange stowaway in our routine. Otherwise, it was only those of us who crossed the living room in the early hours to get a glass of water that had the privilege of hearing sounds coming from behind the curtain, almost always an unintelligible word mingled with the calm breathing of sleep. But it was precisely this circumspect attitude, the fact that we didn’t have the slightest idea what he thought about our conduct, that we found most difficult to accept. For some time, it obliged us to avoid swearing or making polite conversation, and to dress up our actions with a grotesque solemnity, implausible ethics. Fortunately, we soon stopped feeling inhibited by his presence, and our attitudes went back to their abandoned simplicity, their unfussy vulgarity. It soon ceased to bother me that Marta strolled around the living room dressed only in
the towel from her shower. I even encouraged her to do so, because I wanted to convey to our intruder by this show of tolerance that I considered him a eunuch in all senses of the word, a being to whose vegetative state one could freely abandon oneself to one’s worst vices or even commit murders in the sure knowledge that one was in the most complete intimacy. To me, he was nobody, almost nothing at all; at most, a little animal with no awareness that I occasionally allowed Eva to offer a bowl of milk or my razor.

  Days went by and turned into years without the mystery of his being there ceasing to intrigue us. Each family member drew their own conclusions about the man behind the curtain. Grandma, who rarely considered us worthy of sharing her lengthy meditations with, startled us at supper one evening by issuing a gloomy warning that the presence behind the curtain was no less than death himself. I supposed that this suggestion of hers was due to the repeated surgical pillaging, gouging, and sewing up she had been subjected to throughout the previous decade, useless temporary repairs that led her to imagine that any moment now a hooded figure bearing a scythe would appear from behind the curtain, place the scaly sparrow of a hand on her shoulder, and declare: Come, Dolores, say farewell to this bunch of ingrates—there’s nothing left for you here. And she would get to her feet meekly and permit herself to be led behind the curtain without any parting wave of the hand or, at most, a brief attempt to caress her granddaughter’s head. But not a word of thanks to her daughter, still less to her daughter’s unfortunate husband, who time and again threatened her with the old people’s home whenever, in the midst of a meal, she triumphantly yielded to the mortifying demands of her intestines. For her part, my daughter Eva, by now submerged in the hormonal cataclysm of adolescence, soon stopped considering the man behind the curtain as an exotic pet to be fed and began to look at him in a different way, to study with a mixture of curiosity and hope the hominid specimen vaguely outlined by the drape. Eva grew up fascinated by the curtain, dreaming of the outline it projected, while her girlfriends fantasized about actors of the day, even though both of them were irredeemably headed for the pedestrian reality of the boys in adjacent desks. It took only a couple of Eva’s failed dates with her schoolmates for me to realize that Eva would never be happy with a man, that something within her would inevitably spoil her relationships at the least sign of them continuing, that no male, however perfect he was, would ever be able to rival the person hidden behind the curtain, that anonymous silhouette onto which she had projected all her fantasies. Of all the family, it was Marta’s attitude that was closest to mine. The man behind the curtain did not seem to give her pause for thought in any way: she simply accepted his presence there with the same forced smile that you adopt to receive those ghastly wedding gifts you know are unavoidable.

  But conjectures about the intentions of the man behind the curtain were not monopolized by our family. My work colleague Soriano also allowed himself an opinion on the subject during our coffee breaks. Although, thanks to his prosaic nature, his considerations never ventured into the realm of philosophy, but remained grounded in the sexual arena, the only one that appeared to interest him. Didn’t two and two make four? Didn’t Marta work at home, stuck in her study while a total stranger lurked in the living room? How many hours could she translate Milton without becoming weary, without having a break for a drink of water or a shower, or, why not, to fornicate wildly with the man behind the curtain? How was it possible that I had never stopped to consider the obvious, that while I was busy at work this stranger had the run of my domain, and could appropriate what was mine, convert my home sweet home into a garden of lust? Soriano was a poor guy who was constantly leaving work to run the ridiculous errands his wife loaded him with, and so his insinuations didn’t worry me in the slightest. It wasn’t that I had a blind faith in Marta, but because I was incapable of imagining the man behind the curtain emerging from a years-long paralysis, the way the warriors of ancient Greece had poured out of the Trojan horse. Besides, Grandma was there, like a kind of drooling censor whose mere presence was enough to cool the most passionate libido. It was when we had to hospitalize her for the umpteenth time that the seed Soriano had tried so hard to plant in my mind began suddenly to sprout, as a result of the answer my wife gave when I asked how long her mother was going to be in the clinic for. “Forever, I hope,” she muttered with a soft, sleepy pursing of the lips that was not hard to interpret as a smile of secret satisfaction. Under Soriano’s influence, it seemed to me this comment could express both Marta’s wish to see the family freed of the troublesome burden as the certainty that this made it open season for licentiousness.

  One night, weary of struggling to get to sleep because of these baseless suspicions, I got out of bed and went into the living room, determined to speak for the first time to the man behind the curtain. He was sleeping peacefully, even snoring quite tunefully with the kind of methodical hum of household appliances. Placing a chair directly in front of him, I asked straight out if he was having an affair with my wife. It took him a while to wake up and realize that the head of the family he had attached himself to with such impunity was addressing him. I heard him clearing his throat noisily, and shortly afterward, out of the curtain came a friendly, melodic little voice. After giving me an excessively polite greeting, he informed me that he had not so much as noticed my wife, even though he was sure that she must be as attractive as I was. Then, as though feeling responsible for the ensuing silence, he made a timid attempt to break it, adding a few details to the topic, and when he discovered I was making no attempt to restrain him, he continued with a tale that soon took on a confidential note.

  He explained that there was no longer any room for love in his heart. He only had eyes for one woman—the one whose return he was waiting for behind the curtain. He had fallen in love at first sight with Virtudes almost seventy years ago, and his love was requited, but life had led them to meet three years too late, the length of time she had been married to a man for whom she felt nothing more than a calm affection that was a pale shadow of the passion burning inside her whenever she was in the presence of our stranger. In those days, it wasn’t considered the thing to do to shuffle the cards you were dealt by life, and so they could only assuage the fever coursing through their veins by having recourse to the obscure mechanics of furtive meetings that only served to make them feel ashamed of themselves. During one of these encounters, the husband’s key turned in the lock sooner than expected, and the love of his life obliged him to hide behind the curtain. From there, he witnessed their re-encounter, and the slow passage of the following hours that soon turned into days and then months, wishing only for the moment when she finally confronted her feelings and resolved to pull back the drape and wipe the frost from his lips. This moment never arrived. His eyes clouded by tears, he had watched her dreaming on the sofa as the leaves on the trees outside turned yellow, stroll around the apartment while he was comforted by the more-than-welcome heat from the stove, but on those nights when his rival stretched out his arms in response to the effervescence of spring, the moans of his beloved told him she had been brought up on edifying biographies that meant she rejected any kind of outrage and accepted that life had an unalterable order, like the queues in a butcher’s shop. Even so, he did not give up, and remained behind the curtain, confident that if not her, then at least life, with its swings and roundabouts, would take it upon itself to draw back the drape separating them. It seemed on the point of doing so when Virtudes’s husband disappeared. She came back from an outing with her female friends to discover he was not at home. She waited up for him, but he did not come back either that night or those that followed, so that Virtudes realized her husband must finally have noticed the man behind the curtain and been unable to carry on with what he supposed was nothing more than a farce. At that point, the man behind the curtain believed that there was no longer any reason for her not to pull back the drape and for them at last to live happily ever after. And yet, convinced that no happiness could be
built on another person’s suffering, Virtudes had in fact decided to move, and to rent out the apartment as soon as she found the strength or the dignity to renounce the love waiting behind the curtain for her.

  Despite this, my anonymous interlocutor still felt that having known Virtudes had been the best thing that had ever happened to him, even though it had condemned him to this statuesque existence in which only the regular beat of his heart reminded him he had not died. Every cloud has a silver lining, and he had been able to find tiny pleasures in his voluntary marginalization. Over time, the curtain had exceeded its role as a hiding place and become a sort of privileged observatory, not only of other people’s joys and misfortunes but also of the changes in the world, as he heard from the voice of the television. By dint of observing without interfering, like a diffident God, he had learned that life was nothing more than a joke in bad taste, a riddle that had to be solved through decisions that always involved losing, and for this at least he had to be thankful. While his status as a household totem pole had deprived him of certain pleasures, at the same time it had spared him a lot of remorse and frustration.

  However, his explanation did not dispel my suspicions. All I had to do was pay close attention to Marta’s behavior to detect at least a dozen clues of a joyous, continuing betrayal. The unconcerned way in which she paraded her nakedness, for example, rather than demonstrating her disdain for the virility of our intruder, began to seem to me the corollary of a lover’s intimacy. And, although the fellow had appeared sincere, it was not unlikely that Marta, despite the lack of imagination she showed in bed with me, knew enough tricks of the trade for the man behind the curtain’s passivity not to present any problem. Whatever the truth, the fact was that my flammable mistrust ended up collapsing the fragile scaffolding holding up our marriage. Both of us gave up on any rescue mission and turned with satisfaction to the slow invasion of the devouring moths.