He sits alone in his tenement room, his cell, and waits for his prisoner to begin singing again. He is certain she will, certain she will forget the beatings, the rages, the sight of her lover’s corpse lying half out of the bathtub, his blood befouling the porcelain, and then she will raise her lovely voice in song, He knows of these matters; he knows that some people are born to sing, and this girl is one of them. It is her nature.
He, too, is a prisoner; he is both the girl’s warden and his own. There are millions like him, infesting the cities, unfettered, unguarded, garbed in civilian clothes, yet prisoners as surely as if they were chained in the Black Hole of Calcutta. They stoop; they tremble; and their skin is pale, always pale, untouched by light even when they are standing in brightest sunshine. They inhabit invisible oubliettes, of their own making. You see them and you can’t imagine a history, a childhood, a wife, aspirations, lusts, sorrows.
The girl’s warden had all those things once: the wife, the child, and considerably more than a normal portion of lust and aspiration.
Some said he had greatness. Personally, he doubts it. A great-man would never have made a series of stupid mistakes that led him to a courtroom and from there to a county jail where, one hideous night, he learned of a weakness in his nature he had not suspected and—
No matter exactly what he did. The act, which another might have forgotten, destroyed his pride, his will, his reasons. He knew that after he finished serving his six-month sentence, he would remain a prisoner. Forever. His weakness condemned him for eternity, plus 99 years.
He went to New York City, East Second Street, to a building built to house twenty people. It now shelters varying numbers, up to fifty, depending on the neighborhood supply of heroin and the availability of naive folk for mugging. He is never mugged, and wouldn’t care if he were.
He does not drink, smoke, shoot up. These are hot prison pasttimes. As do all the truly condemned, he sits, remembers, listens. About a year ago, he quite suddenly realized he was hearing a sound different from the auto horns and the clanking cans and the firecrackers and the shouts — “Eres un bastard”; “Shut the mouth, spick bitch” — and this new sound was — well, it was music. A clear contralto, slightly husky, the vocal equivalent of musk, coming from the apartment above. The words were muffled; he moved to the window and raised it, hoping to hear more clearly. She must have had her window open, too, because he could understand the words. He recognized them: a blues.
Memories of women: those he had loved, those he had used, those who had loved him. Sweet memories.
He sat by the window the long summer afternoon, into the noisy evening and the not-silent night, remembering that he would never be either free or young, and glad of it. His young body had made many demands, and in heeding it he always lost some piece of beauty. Young, free, he would have been stirred by the song, his loins would have stirred, and thus deafened him to the simple loveliness of the voice, the music.
He stood, stretched, wondered briefly how many hours ago the singing had stopped, and sank content to his bare mattress.
It resumed the following day, at the same time, and continued through the ensuing days and weeks. Always the blues; always the husky, sad contralto. The concert — that was how he thought of it — became the event around which his existence centered, the single important thing in his routine. He would not cash his welfare check, nor go to the store, nor look in the mailbox, if there was any chance that in so doing he would miss a second of the concert. He resented the street noises as, in an earlier incarnation, he would have resented a loud drunk at an opera hall. And he feared winter; in cold weather, she would close her windows. Meanwhile, though, the windows weren’t closed and, despite the street, he could have his concert and his reveries. Occasionally, he asked himself: What is she like? Old? Young? White? Black? Although the patter of her footfalls skipping down the stairs outside his door was soon achingly familiar to him, and he could have easily peeked out, he never saw her. It was better to have the music pure, untainted by other impressions. For instance, suppose she resembled a woman he had wronged, or who had wronged him? Intolerable, it would be. No, better to cherish the song and let the rest remain unknown.
Still, he came to know something of her personal life. She lived alone, arose late in the morning, ten-thirty. On weekdays she left the building at five — going to work? — and returned by cab after midnight. Weekends, she watched television and, he guessed, read. She was not, he was convinced, a junkie, alcoholic or whore — actually, not the sort of person one expected to live in a New York slum. Nor was she, like himself, a prisoner. She was... just visiting.
In the fall, her life changed. The harbingers of change were the heavy tread of male shoes on the floor of her apartment, and the peel of masculine mirth in the hallway leading to her door, generally late at night. At first, these evidences of the newcomer were occasional; quickly, they became frequent, and then perpetual. The girl had taken a lover — no doubting it — and the lover was in residence. She sang:
Very well, thought the listener, it was to be expected, and no cause for alarm. She was still singing at the appointed hour each afternoon, and the weather was yet warm enough for open windows. She was performing her duty to him, her audience; let her have fun.
But it wasn’t fun, not for long. Either the lover was a vicious creep, or the singer provoked him mercilessly. The fights began as shouts, shrill, half-articulated threats. Initially, they occurred once a week. By early October, they were nightly, and more than screaming matches. Yells. Crashing crockery. Slaps. The sickening thud of a frail form falling hard to the floor. Often.
The listener listened, and writhed in helplessness.
The singing gave way to an older sound: weeping.
The listener found himself full of emotion; he was startled to discover in himself the forgotten, unprisoner-like feeling of hate. His prisoner’s tranquility was ruined. He hated this lover, this anonymous brute, as his younger self had hated a few people he ultimately crushed. He wished — no, he prayed — for the power to crush the foul-fisted stealer of his music, his tranquility. But he was old, weak, ineffectual, fit only for listening, dreaming — and, he learned, for bearing witness.
It happened, his witness bearing, on Halloween. The fight between the singer and the brute had started earlier than usual, at noon, and, perhaps sustained by the pagan spirit of the holiday, raged on without ceasing to twilight, to darkness. It moved from the girl’s quarters into the hall, arid back. While the two were in the hall, the listener heard them perfectly, and shuddered at the ugliness.
“You aren’t a man! You stink.”
“I’m warning you — shut up.”
Slap.
“Hitting me give you a thrill? I’m glad something does.”