Read Online The Penguin's Song by Hassan Daoud, Translated by Marilyn Booth - Free Book Online Page A

padded through the house, with me there, nearby, so close I can muse about reaching out a hand and touching those little feet, just like that, naturally, as if I’m brushing off the dust that clings to them. Maybe I could reach out and catch hold of one foot, from the inside, from that inner arch that slopes down to the bottom of her foot. If the people sitting with us were to leave, if she were the only one still there, alone, sitting with me, that is what I would do.
    On this particular evening as I lean against the window ledge and hang down over it, I know that she will come close to where I can see her and not just the shadow of her. She will come so near that she’ll be exactly beneath me, I know it. She’ll stand in front of the open square of the window, poised there exactly as she stood in front of the mirror. She will think she’s risking nothing. She’s only offering what was in the mirror to onlookers she creates in her mind. That’s what she will do. The same way she stood before the mirror, that’s how she will stand now, but in front of that open square of the window. And so from where I am, immediately overhead, I will see her; when she comes over here I will see her and she’ll be just as she was there, showing her self to herself in the mirror.
    Behind me, the light in my room is out. There is no light to create a shadow of me across the sand that lies so close beneath us. I can wait like this for hours, assured that no one sees me or knows that I’m here. But I will not need to wait very long. Although she has come away from where she stood, there below, she has left the wardrobe door open. Did she go over to her bed, perhaps? Or maybe she walked toward a table that I haven’t realized was there, near the bed. And then . . . but here she is now, coming back this way: something has moved in the light descending from her room. It’s not her shadow; it’s merely the phantom image of her movement inside the room.
    She will come.
    She has come closer; she has walked toward the window. What was a formless movement playing on the sand, a flickering of the light, is now a real and solid image. She is coming, now; her shadow arrives. In the instant when her shadow becomes complete out on the sand she appears behind it; and I, in that selfsame moment, have prepared myself to see her appear, fully and truly appear. Her golden hair is combed and wound in the way of older women. Farther down, below her neck whose nakedness seems (from the back) so elongated, she wears nothing but a child’s sleeveless cotton undershirt that reveals the rounding of her small breasts, not yet fully developed. She wears a shirt worn not to be seen but only to lie beneath other clothes. And the breasts beneath it—these small breasts that I want only to pass my hands over, for desire has not yet reached them, has not arrived to touch them. Yes, this is what I want: I am he who desires the body whom desire has not yet caught.

IX
    I CAN TELL BY LOOKING into my father’s eyes how weak his vision has become. My father’s eyes: or rather, what I see is the filmy layer that has smeared across the pupils, and which at first had looked like a thinly delicate transparent nylon skin. But it was visible even then; and I would always imagine a skilled hand treating it by peeling it carefully off the surface of the eye. I was still in school then. I would speculate that through his eyes all objects were seen as if behind a wafer-thin, watery screen. As time went on—for the film over his eyes first appeared when he still had the shop—the screen grew dirty. The nylon skin went grayish as if (it appeared to me) it had thickened and grown slightly heavier and rougher. My father’s gaze from behind it seemed changed—even imprisoned—by it; a gaze strangled, like a lung barely able to breathe because there is too little air outside.
    By looking into those eyes I could