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  “Are you sure that was the sentence?” I asked only to buy a little time while my finger swept over each line unsuccessfully and a revealing blush colored my face.

  The mother didn’t answer me. They’d just discovered my secret: I didn’t pay attention to what I read. At that moment the grandmother returned to her place on the sofa. Finally, the blessed word appeared beneath my finger.

  “Here it is!” I exclaimed, and the three boys gave a shout of glee that, in spite of myself, made me smile. The mother and grandmother laughed as well. I’d just shown them that I was deafer than they were, since I couldn’t hear myself, and that embarrassed me. Luckily, something unexpected occurred that shook the family, mobilizing all of them as if they were a single body. The mother got up and went to her sick husband’s room, followed swiftly by the grandmother, and one of the boys, the middle one, went to the kitchen; the youngest hesitated, followed his brother, and I was left alone with the eldest, the only one who hadn’t stood up. He smiled at me and I smiled at him. Then it occurred to me to stand up and approach the sofa to look at the painting hanging above it. While I pretended to look at it, I pulled a coin out of my pocket and let it fall behind me. The sound of the coin hitting the floor made him look down, and he bent over to pick it up.

  “See?” I said to him. “You heard the coin fall. Look,” and I dropped it again. “Did you hear that?”

  He nodded yes.

  “You’re not deaf, and your brothers aren’t deaf. Keep the coin, play the same game with them and you’ll see that I’m right.”

  The boy ran to the kitchen with the coin, a minute later the mother came into the living room to tell me we couldn’t continue the reading because her husband had fallen out of bed, hurting his shoulder, and they were going to call a doctor. How had they heard the father fall, if they were deaf?

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

  She pointed to the floor and walls and told me she’d perceived the vibrations produced by the impact of his fall. She explained it with such naturalness that she convinced me. It must be a specific faculty of the deaf, one those of us who can hear and speak have lost. I put the Verne book in my briefcase and she walked me to the door. Already with one foot outside, I told her, “I could teach your kids how to read and write, if you want. I wouldn’t charge you anything, it would be part of my community service.”

  I didn’t know if they’d allow me to use it for my community service, but I felt like I owed them something after the embarrassing performance I’d given a few minutes earlier. She looked at me, frightened, as if she’d always feared that moment when someone would offer to educate her children, and I suspected that they’d walled themselves up in their illiterate deaf world, reluctant to open themselves to the outside, except for the connection they had with their clients, and that I was their only real link to the world.

  “Think about my offer, you have intelligent children,” I said, and she looked at me with hostility, as if the word intelligent made her uncomfortable. Maybe she didn’t want her children to be intelligent but only wanted them to be good tailors. It was hard not to see her point, after I’d demonstrated how precarious my intelligence was, that it didn’t save me from straying from what I read, and the depth of my deafness, which didn’t allow me to notice any vibrations through the walls or floor.

  That night I told Celeste about my discovery in the Vigil house, and I was surprised that she agreed with the parents’ decision to keep their boys out of school. She told me that, because they were deaf, their classmates would have made fun of them. I told her that they really weren’t deaf, that they acted like they were deaf because they lived in a house with deaf people and besides, there were schools for the deaf, where they would have been taught to read and write. In the passion of my tirade I’d forgotten that Celeste herself was illiterate, and she fell silent after that. I’d hurt her feelings, made her feel like I was reprimanding her for this flaw, and I tried to make things right. “I’m not saying this about you. You’ve made something of your life, you know how to take care of yourself, but these boys, what kind of life will they have without some kind of education?”

  I was afraid she’d answer: And this is a good life, Eduardo, caring for an old man who hardly speaks, seven days a week, never seeing my only child, who lives far away, and that’s not to mention you, Eduardo, even quieter than your father, even though you’re young and you live in this house as if it were a hotel, and you never smile or joke around?

  She said none of this but kept quiet, and I thought that, if she could choose, she wouldn’t have thought twice about changing my father’s house for the deaf one, even if it meant becoming deaf herself. She’d have more opportunities to talk there than in our house. The phone rang. It was Father Clark. I have taken matters into my own hands, he told me after we greeted each other. He liked that phrase, apparently. Some foreigners tend to fall in love with certain structures in our language and they use them for everything. I met a German woman who used to say, “It remains to be seen,” and repeated it whenever she could. “It remains to be seen if it will rain later,” she’d say seeing the sky covered with clouds, or “It remains to be seen how badly my daughter-in-law dresses.” Father Clark liked to take matters into his own hands and used the expression “That seems reasonable to me.” He told me that he’d spoken with Carlos Jiménez on the phone, and he was willing to withdraw his complaint against me, provided that I completed the twenty minutes of reading I’d taken from them.

  “I don’t trust those people,” I told him. “I’ll go if you come with me. I want a witness who can testify that I fulfilled the remaining twenty minutes of reading that I’m short.”

  “That seems reasonable to me,” the priest said, “but I cannot go with you, Eduardo. I am very busy. Ask Celeste to go with you.”

  That he knew about Celeste confirmed that he and my sister were really close. We hung up, and I asked Celeste if she wanted to come with me to the house of the gentlemen who spoke with their stomach the following Thursday. She asked me if she had to dress up and I said no.

  “Then I’ll go,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  A CAR ACCIDENT three or four years ago had left Margó Benítez wheelchair-bound. She was the one who told me, before the Jiménez brothers, that I didn’t pay attention to what I was reading.

  “You don’t seem to care about what you read,” she blurted out when I walked into her house, still standing, holding the briefcase where I kept the book we were reading, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I thought she revealed a certain lack of refinement on her part saying it that way without first asking me to sit down. Aurelia, the maid, an ugly woman with a prominent bust, came in with the coffeepot and the aroma of the coffee engulfed the living room. As she bent over to fill our cups, she let me see the great size of her boobs and, seeing that I was still standing, she asked why I wasn’t sitting down, to which Margó Benítez, realizing her lack of manners, exclaimed, “Forgive me, Eduardo! I’ve kept you standing there, holding your briefcase and waiting. Please sit.”

  Aurelia went back to the kitchen and I sat down, took a sip of coffee, and said, “If I read out loud, I don’t understand what I’m reading.”

  “No, you are in love with your own voice,” Margó Benítez replied. “You have a seductive voice and you let it do all the work for you.” She was silent for a moment, then she added, “Let’s try a different book. Maybe, if it’s a book I’m familiar with, your reading style won’t bother me so much. Do you know Daphne du Maurier? She’s an English writer.”

  I told her I didn’t, she called Aurelia and asked her to go to her room and bring the book that was on her desk. Aurelia’s daughter, an eight-year-old girl, ugly like her mother, followed her, giving me a frightened look as they passed. Aurelia came back with the book and Margó indicated that she should give it to me. Mother and daughter went back to the
kitchen, and I opened the book to the first page and cleared my voice, ready to start reading.

  “You are upset,” Margó said.

  “Why?”

  “You haven’t even looked at the title of the book.”

  It was true, I hadn’t looked. I closed the book to read the title: My Cousin Rachel.

  “I have a problem with titles,” I told her. “I usually skip them. I notice that they’re there, but I don’t read them.”

  “For goodness’ sake, I’ve never met anyone like you, Eduardo. When you read out loud you don’t understand what you are reading, and when you see a title you skip it.”

  She straightened the hem of her skirt. Although it’s difficult to know the height of someone you’ve only seen in a wheelchair, she was, without a doubt, tall. I asked her why she’d signed up for the home reading program, since she was a cultured person used to reading on her own.

  “Eduardo, it’s clear that you are still in your youth. Because I get bored and no one visits me, it’s that simple. And you have a beautiful manly voice, though you don’t understand anything you read.”

  “I try to read as best as I can.”

  “You have already told me that.” She laughed. “Don’t pay any attention to me, I’ve become a bitter woman since this happened to me,” she pointed to the wheelchair, “and I see flaws everywhere.”

  I was going to ask her what had happened, but I decided to keep quiet. It was none of my business. Besides, it’s not easy to ask an attractive older woman how she came to be shackled to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

  She asked me to read. I opened the book to the first page, but I closed it again to read the title: My Cousin Rachel. It was a good title, suggesting an unhappy love story, like love between cousins usually is. I maintained my focus throughout the first page, but on the second the words began to march around, becoming meaningless before my eyes. I stopped to look at my host, who asked me what was wrong.

  “I got lost.”

  “I know, I can tell almost immediately when your voice and head go in different directions,” and she told me she was fond of the opera, that she took lessons from a voice coach and that had made her sensitive to voice modulations. I wondered how she could sing opera with that slightly rusty voice of hers, and had I been a little more daring, I would have asked her to sing something.

  “There are many singers who do the same thing as you, Eduardo, they sing without knowing what they’re singing,” she said. “Pure voice and lung.”

  I asked where she had performed, and she replied that she’d never sung in public. She lacked the courage and regretted that.

  “I could have been an admirable mezzo-soprano; not an eminence but, yes, admirable. And then this happened,” she said, pointing again to her wheelchair. “And it’s hard to sing sitting down.”

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY I found this poem by the Mexican poet Isabel Fraire, which my father had copied out by hand in one of his old account books when he still kept track of the furniture store sales and expenses:

  Your skin, like sheets of sand, and sheets of water swirling

  your skin, with its louring mandolin brilliance

  your skin, where my skin arrives as if coming home

  and lights a silenced lamp

  your skin, that nourishes my eyes

  and wears my name like a new dress

  your skin a mirror where my skin recognizes me

  and my lost hand comes back from my childhood and reaches

  this present moment and greets me

  your skin, where at last

  I am with myself

  Isabel Fraire was his favorite poet, and he always said that she was by far the best poet in Mexico. Sometimes he’d read a poem to me and Ofelia, one of hers or someone else’s, and when he finished both of us would be quiet, because we thought that was how you had to respond to a poem, as if it were a prayer, without offering any opinion about it. We thought all poems, by the mere fact of being poems, were good and that judging them was foolish. But one day my father read us “Nocturne for Rosario” by Manuel Acuña, telling us that it was the worst Mexican poem of all time. Not only did I not think it was bad but I found it moving, and I hid that feeling as best as I could, because my father paused every two or three lines to make fun of it. That day I understood that there were good and bad poems, that it was possible after reading them to say “I like it” and “I don’t like it,” and that there were bad poems that could be liked a lot, like “Nocturne for Rosario,” and good poems that can leave you indifferent. I wasn’t very interested in poetry, but I was no longer afraid of it, and from then on, if I came across a poem in a magazine or newspaper, I’d read it to see if it was one of the good ones or the bad ones, one of those I liked or one of those that left me unmoved.

  The poem was written in Papá’s handwriting, so I thought it was his, and though I understood it from the first line to the last, I decided it was one of the bad ones. Discovering that my father, that rather melancholy man, a steady breadwinner for his family, wrote poems, didn’t fill me with a lot of enthusiasm. There was something pitiful in imagining him gripped by some lyric rapture, erotic as well, because it was an erotic poem, and I was relieved when I turned the page over and read Isabel Fraire’s name under the last line. I reread the poem and it instantly transformed before my eyes. Not only was it good, it was wonderful. In truth, it was the first wonderful poem I’d read, and the fact that Papá had written it out by hand confirmed for me that it was truly good. I decided to copy it myself and read it to Margó Benítez on my next visit because she was the only one of my hosts who could appreciate a contemporary erotic poem. I sat at the dining-room table while Celeste was in the kitchen and Papá slept in his room, and when I finished copying it, I read it out loud. I didn’t like how it sounded and I remembered that Papá used to read us poems in the neutral tone one reads a business letter, because according to him you had to let the poem make itself clear without dressing it up with trembles and shivers. I reread it that way and noticed a sudden silence in the kitchen. I turned my head and saw Celeste standing in the doorway with one hand on her chest and her breathing agitated, and I asked her what was wrong.

  “Nothing. I heard you speaking out loud and I thought you were calling me, Eduardo. That’s why I came in.”

  “I was reading a poem by a Mexican poet; my father had written it out by hand,” I told her. “I’m practicing so I can read it this afternoon.”

  “Great. Please, don’t let me stop you,” and she went back to the kitchen.

  But now I didn’t feel like continuing and I doubted whether I should read the poem to Margó Benítez. The mere thought of her blushing and pressing her hand to her chest like Celeste would have mortified me. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water, Celeste stood oddly motionless in front of the sink, her back turned to me, and I knew she was crying, so I walked out, went to my room, and realized that she’d heard that poem before, probably because my father had read it to her. That upset me more than if he’d written it himself, because it further exposed the depth of his solitude and his detachment from his children. Why had Celeste cried when she heard that poem? Were they tears of love? I grappled with the image of the two of them kissing and hugging each other, which I dismissed as something ridiculous, and the same discomfort I’d felt reading the poem, thinking it was my father’s, struck me, an affair had quite possibly been going on in our house for the last several years, without me and my sister knowing about it. I was standing beside the window and I looked at the sink where Celeste scrubbed Papá’s clothes when they were covered with urine and sometimes something worse, with that squish-squash, squish-squash that had become a permanent sound in the house. She’d been taking care of him for three years, cleaning him, getting him out of bed and putting him back, handling his most intima
te parts, where I’m sure my mother had never gone, and I wondered if out of that other squish-squash something like infatuation couldn’t emerge, all the coarseness and quiet, everything disguised as jokes and fits of rage one could want, but in the end falling in love, with poetry readings included.

  I felt like an intruder in that house, my father’s house, and I thought that maybe Papá would have been happier if I had left, because then he would have had the freedom to have a proper marriage with Celeste, with its quarrels, its embraces, its resentments, and its secrets.

  I got dressed, put the sheet of paper where I’d copied Isabel Fraire’s poem into my briefcase, and left.

  I went to the furniture store, where I thought I’d wait around for a few minutes just to make an appearance, but Jaime showed me some outstanding accounts he wanted to go over and I had to give up eating lunch at Sanborns de Piedra as I’d planned. When we sat at the desk, he told me that Güero had come by that morning to pick up the envelope with the money. I nodded, avoiding his eyes, because I knew that Jaime thought every bit of this was disgraceful, most of all dealing with Güero, an ex-employee of the furniture store, not to mention the first employee my father had hired. He was convinced that this situation was the result of my father no longer being in charge of the furniture store. He never told me this, of course, but I guessed it from certain things he said, and I, out of respect for my father, didn’t tell him the truth, that it had all started when Papá was still running the business, and if Jaime didn’t know about it, it was because we hid it from him, afraid his fear would get the better of him and he’d quit.

  I asked if Güero had come alone or with someone. He told me he’d come in alone, but the other guy waited outside.

  “The tall one?”