The Penguin's Song Read Online Free PDF Page B

matter of falling into the seat next to me as the bus shudders or swerves. Or she will seem to be coming deliberately, making it seem as though she has come especially to say a few words that have just come into her mind and that she wants very much to say to someone whose presence, also, has just come into her mind. Or she will come and sit with me, keeping me company, on the pretext—which she will not actually have to explain to anyone—that I am sitting by myself and someone really ought to talk to me.
    But the place I had left empty beside me since climbing onto the bus remained empty. They did reoccupy other seats, redistributing themselves several times as they rested after singing a set or returning to the bus after little excursions outside. But the seat next to me remained empty. Alone, I stayed in my seat, leaving the proper amount of space clear so that someone could come and sit down if they wanted to do so. Their games would bring them to particular seats that they would soon vacate, only to land on other seats also for a very short time. But I went on sitting in my seat in that place that had become mine. Even though I left the bus twice (just as they did) to take a short walk, I watched myself return to the very same seat, plastering myself to the wall of the bus and the window and leaving the place next to me empty.
    It was up to me to get up and go over to them, where they sat at the back of the bus, and to make myself part of their noisy fun. Probably it would have been better for me that way, because I could have made them forget my body, not by keeping it distant and hunched over itself but rather by losing it—by making it disappear among the movements and gestures I would extort from it. If I were to clap, that is what they would notice, not my pair of tiny hands and the way one flops against the other. If I were to attempt dancing with them they would see my flexing body simply as a series of moves, as if the maneuvers I made were a cloud of dust I would raise to distract their gaze away from me and to occupy her with something other than what she ought not see. I should have been there among them at the back of the bus. But while it was happening, while I was on that school trip, I did not see this until it was already too late. The time in which I could have changed something had already passed. She had stopped looking in that particular direction, that section of the bus where I sat. In fact, I couldn’t help but notice—in the mirror—how her attention was now turning entirely to them; how, the more she laughed at what they were doing, the more fully she appeared to have forgotten that only a few moments earlier she had been turning to gaze at me. She forgot, or else she was distracted from looking at me by something else that was going on.
    Every time they climbed down from the bus for a little excursion, leaving their tabla behind on the back seat that stretched the width of the bus, I felt as I stared at them—through the windowpane this time, not in the front mirror—that their only reason for mounting all of that noisy fun was to demonstrate how adept they were at suddenly stopping the clamor and quieting down. Their close huddle would break apart as they moved away from the bus. Four of them grouped together, five, and then three; and there was the last quartet who waited at the door of the bus until their number was complete. Coming back to the bus they would be more scattered and chaotic, looking as though they were rushing to reach it, afraid it might leave without them.
    But, returning to the bus, they will leave behind a couple of walkers dawdling along or trailing their caravan. Through the window I can see one of them walking as slowly as possible next to the girl who accompanies him. And then there’s the one who will come into view as he turns onto the street—for I can see all the way to the head of this street: she will be beside him, walking