could still be heard in the bedrooms of those more fortunate women, who were not yet grandmothers or aunts or spinsters, a quieter, sweeter, more resigned song, a prelude to sleep, an expression of weariness, the same song Miriam had inadvertently sung to me in her hotel room identical to mine, after nightfall in Havana, such a hot night, on my honeymoon with Luisa, while Luisa neither sang nor spoke, but merely pressed her face into her pillow.
The songs my grandmother used to sing came mainly from her own childhood, songs from Cuba and from the black nannies who'd looked after her until she was ten years old, the age when she left Havana and moved to the country across the ocean where she and her parents and her sisters imagined they belonged but which they knew only by name. Songs and stories (I can no longer separate them out in my memory) full of animal characters with absurd names - Verum-Verum the Cow, Chirrinchinchin the Monkey - sombre stories, African stories, for example, as I remember it, Verum-Verum the Cow was much loved by the family who owned her, she was a beneficent, friendly cow, rather like a nanny or a grandmother, and yet one day, goaded by hunger or by evil thoughts, the members of the family decided to kill her and cook her and eat her, which, understandably enough, poor Verum-Verum the Cow found hard to forgive in people with whom she lived so closely, and right there in the dining room, the moment each member of the family ate a piece of her butchered, aged flesh (thereby participating in a kind of metaphorical anthropophagy) a cavernous voice that never ceased issued forth from their stomachs, tirelessly repeating in the booming voice affected by my grandmother, trying hard not to laugh: "Verum-Verum the Cow, Verum-Verum the Cow", issuing ceaselessly forth from their stomachs forever and ever. As for Chirrinchinchin the Monkey, his adventures were, I think, so multifarious that I've forgotten what they were, but I have the impression that the fate he suffered proved no kinder and that he ended up roasting on the spit of some unscrupulous white man. The song Miriam had sung in the next room had no meaning for Luisa and, in that respect, as regards our knowledge or understanding of what was going on and being said through the balcony doors and the wall, there was now at least one definite difference. Because my grandmother used to tell me that fragment of a story learned from her black nannies, a story whose obvious sexual symbolism I'd never noticed until that moment, when I heard Miriam singing it or, rather, when I heard her sing the gloomy, slightly comical song that formed part of the story my grandmother used to tell me to frighten me, to fill me with a fear that was both transitory and tinged with humour (it taught me what fear was and how to laugh at it) : the story told how a young woman of great beauty and even greater poverty was sought in marriage by a very rich, handsome stranger with excellent prospects, a foreigner who'd installed himself in Havana amidst a show of great luxury and ambitious plans for the future. The girl's mother, a widow who was dependent on her only daughter or rather on the success of her very necessary marriage, was beside herself with joy and gave the man her daughter's hand in marriage without a moment's hesitation. Throughout the wedding night, the mother kept a distrustful or knowing watch on the door of the newlyweds' room and, again and again, she heard her daughter sing this plea for help: "Mamita, mamita, yen yen yen, the snake's gonna eat me up, yen yen yen." Any possible alarm the greedy mother might have felt was assuaged by her son-in-law's repeated and eccentric reply, which he too sang again and again through the door, throughout the long night: "Mother-in-law, she lyin', yen yen yen, we jus' playin', yen yen yen, the way we do back home, yen yen yen." The following morning, when the mother, and now mother-in-law, decided to go into the newlyweds'
The songs my grandmother used to sing came mainly from her own childhood, songs from Cuba and from the black nannies who'd looked after her until she was ten years old, the age when she left Havana and moved to the country across the ocean where she and her parents and her sisters imagined they belonged but which they knew only by name. Songs and stories (I can no longer separate them out in my memory) full of animal characters with absurd names - Verum-Verum the Cow, Chirrinchinchin the Monkey - sombre stories, African stories, for example, as I remember it, Verum-Verum the Cow was much loved by the family who owned her, she was a beneficent, friendly cow, rather like a nanny or a grandmother, and yet one day, goaded by hunger or by evil thoughts, the members of the family decided to kill her and cook her and eat her, which, understandably enough, poor Verum-Verum the Cow found hard to forgive in people with whom she lived so closely, and right there in the dining room, the moment each member of the family ate a piece of her butchered, aged flesh (thereby participating in a kind of metaphorical anthropophagy) a cavernous voice that never ceased issued forth from their stomachs, tirelessly repeating in the booming voice affected by my grandmother, trying hard not to laugh: "Verum-Verum the Cow, Verum-Verum the Cow", issuing ceaselessly forth from their stomachs forever and ever. As for Chirrinchinchin the Monkey, his adventures were, I think, so multifarious that I've forgotten what they were, but I have the impression that the fate he suffered proved no kinder and that he ended up roasting on the spit of some unscrupulous white man. The song Miriam had sung in the next room had no meaning for Luisa and, in that respect, as regards our knowledge or understanding of what was going on and being said through the balcony doors and the wall, there was now at least one definite difference. Because my grandmother used to tell me that fragment of a story learned from her black nannies, a story whose obvious sexual symbolism I'd never noticed until that moment, when I heard Miriam singing it or, rather, when I heard her sing the gloomy, slightly comical song that formed part of the story my grandmother used to tell me to frighten me, to fill me with a fear that was both transitory and tinged with humour (it taught me what fear was and how to laugh at it) : the story told how a young woman of great beauty and even greater poverty was sought in marriage by a very rich, handsome stranger with excellent prospects, a foreigner who'd installed himself in Havana amidst a show of great luxury and ambitious plans for the future. The girl's mother, a widow who was dependent on her only daughter or rather on the success of her very necessary marriage, was beside herself with joy and gave the man her daughter's hand in marriage without a moment's hesitation. Throughout the wedding night, the mother kept a distrustful or knowing watch on the door of the newlyweds' room and, again and again, she heard her daughter sing this plea for help: "Mamita, mamita, yen yen yen, the snake's gonna eat me up, yen yen yen." Any possible alarm the greedy mother might have felt was assuaged by her son-in-law's repeated and eccentric reply, which he too sang again and again through the door, throughout the long night: "Mother-in-law, she lyin', yen yen yen, we jus' playin', yen yen yen, the way we do back home, yen yen yen." The following morning, when the mother, and now mother-in-law, decided to go into the newlyweds'
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