Once our host had wound both keys, he pressed the button and the toy started up. My friend placed it on his palm facing us so we wouldn’t miss a single detail. The door to the bedroom opened and a fat young man entered, took two steps along an invisible rail to the foot of the bed, then started to sing a tango, in French. In spite of the toy’s age, the music box worked well, though the sound quality was considerably deteriorated. The fat singer’s voice was high-pitched and metallic; it was difficult to make out the melody, and the words were unintelligible. He gestured with both arms, and threw his head back histrionically, fatuously, as if he were on stage. The old woman on the bed also moved, though very discreetly and almost imperceptibly: she shook her head from side to side, effectively imitating the way a blind person moves. And, by observing closely, you could tell that she was picking crumbs or fuzz off the bedcover with the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. It was a true miracle of precision mechanics, if you take into account that those tiny movable porcelain hands measured no more than one-fifth of an inch. I had once heard that this action of picking up imaginary crumbs was typical of the dying. The makers of the toy must have wanted to show that the old woman’s death was close at hand. Which made me think that the whole scene was telling a story: until that moment I had only admired the prodigious art of the toy’s mechanics, without wondering what it meant. But its meaning, buried in a superior strangeness, could only be guessed. Perhaps it was about an old woman, bedridden and on the verge of death, whose son came to entertain her with his singing. Or maybe he was a professional singer, whom the old woman had hired. Supporting this hypothesis was the fat man’s black suit, and his elegant bearing and self-confidence. Against it was the modesty of the small room, a modesty that was highlighted with very deliberate details. However, the myth of tango made it more appropriate for it to be a son and his “old mother,” in which the man, disappointed by womankind, proclaims that she was the only good woman, the one who never betrayed him. He might have returned to live at his mother’s house after his wife, “that battle axe,” left him, and then he let himself go, got fat, wore pajamas and flip-flops. But every afternoon at the same time, he put on clothes, and spruced himself up (purely for the sake of ritual because his blind mother couldn’t see him), and showed up in his mother’s room to sing her a few tangos, with that voice and those feelings through which she felt the essence of the life she was departing… But if it was a French toy, why tangos? That was strange, and it wasn’t the only thing that had no explanation. What happened next was even stranger.
As soon as the tiny fat automaton began to sing, the second mechanism kicked in. As my friend had said, there were two simultaneous mechanisms; until now, the gears of the “music box” had activated the device — conventional though very sophisticated. What made this one original was its second set of accompanying movements. The edges of the bedspread hanging over the sides began to move (they looked like fabric but were made of porcelain), and large birds crawled out from under the bed, cranes and storks, very white, moving across the floor and flapping their spread wings; though they were birds, they didn’t take flight but remained fixed on the floor. They kept emerging from under both sides of the bed, ten, twelve, an entire flock, until they covered the bedroom floor, all while the fat singer was belting out his mechanical tango in French. At the end of the song, he retreated without turning around, until he had passed the threshold and the door closed behind him, the birds returned to under the bed, and the old woman to her immobility, all very quickly, in a single instant, surely due to the action of the springs. My friend, laughing, placed his small marvel back into the glass cabinet, while I complimented him on it. The whole show hadn’t lasted more than two minutes, and its speed must have been the reason my mother didn’t understand anything, what the story was about or what that thing even was. I knew that due to her age her perceptions were slower and more labored than ours, and that for her to appreciate something as odd as that toy, I would have had to prepare her and give her more time. I didn’t say this to my friend because it wasn’t worth the trouble: no matter what, Mother would have found the whole business futile and reprehensible. From the moment we entered the house, she had been growing increasingly hostile. There was some understanding between them only when the names (family names) of people in town were mentioned; otherwise, she was very withdrawn. My friend might have thought that his antique toys would amuse her or bring back old memories, but this wasn’t the case. She, who had spent her entire life devoted to reality, could not have been further away from feeling any admiration for such expensive, useless objects. After all, my friend and I were grown-ups, mature men, almost old (my friend already had grandchildren); childishness was an unwholesome intrusion, from my mother’s point of view. The fact that I had remained single, that I’d never held down a decent job, worried her, though she continued to see me, in her own way, as a child, and she clung to the hope that at any moment I would begin to live. I knew that she believed that my friend had been a bad influence on me, that I had seen him as a role model, and that this was the reason for my failure. But he’d never seen himself as a role model. In spite of his oddities, he’d made a life for himself, he had a family, he’d gotten wealthy, whereas I was still waiting. That his childish side had prevailed over me like a condemnation… In reality, I think that wasn’t true. He hadn’t really influenced me. Though I must admit, I was drawn to him. That’s why I kept seeing him, or better put, listening to him. Even though he didn’t know how to recount his adventures (he didn’t have any natural talent as a storyteller), these contained elements of fables, which I mentally reconstructed and placed in sequential order. There was something magical in the way the most peculiar characters and events stuck to him. Nothing like that ever happened to me. There was always something fairy tale — like about the things that happened to him, which he didn’t seem to notice; he confused them with reality… because they were his reality. His prosaic way of recounting them — without nuances — highlighted how objective the emergence of fable was in his life. In that sense, his house was a self-portrait, his cabinet of curiosities.
All the stories he told us during dinner could have been illustrated with pictures out of storybooks — even those he told in parentheses or as digressions, as when he explained why he couldn’t use the sage he grew in his own garden for the meal. It turned out that an eighty-eight-year-old dwarf had fallen on the planting bed from a great height and had crushed his delicate herbs. Wasn’t that astonishing? Coming from someone with imagination, you would have suspected that it was invented, but he didn’t have any imagination. You could say that he didn’t need any because reality supplied it.