We’ll Always Have Paris. Ray Bradbury

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СКАЧАТЬ had they forgotten that he always and always remembered? Their houses, small and locked and silent, soundless. His house, his Manger, his shop, different! Filled with squeaks and stirs and mutters of bird sound, filled with feather whisper and murmurings of pad and fur and the sound that animal eyelids make blinking in the dark. His house, ablaze with votive candles and pictures of rising – flying – saints, the glint of medallions. His phonograph circling at midnight, two, three, four in the morning, himself singing, mouth wide, heart open, eyes tight, world shut out; nothing but sound. And here he was now among the houses that locked at nine, slept at ten, wakened only from long silenced hours of slumber in the morn. People in houses, lacking only black wreaths on door fronts.

      Sometimes, when he ran by, people remembered for a moment. Sometimes they squeaked a note or two, or tapped their feet, self-consciously, but most of the time the only motion they made to the music was to reach in their pockets for a dime.

      Once, thought Pietro, once I had many dimes, many dollars, much land, many houses. And it all went away, and I wept myself into a statue. For a long time I couldn’t move. They killed me dead, taking away and taking away. And I thought, I won’t ever let anyone kill me again. But how? What do I have that I can let people take away without hurting? What can I give that I still keep?

      And the answer was, of course, his talent.

      My talent! thought Pietro. The more you give away, the better it is, the more you have. Those with talent must mind the world.

      He glanced around. The world was full of statues much like he had been once. So many could move no longer, knew no way to even begin to move again in any direction, back, forth, up, down, for life had stung and bit and stunned and beat them to marble silence. So then, if they could not move, someone must move for them. You, Pietro, he thought, must move. And besides, in moving, you don’t look back at what you were or what happened to you or the statue you became. So keep running and keep so busy you can make up for all those with good feet who have forgotten how to run. Run among the self-monuments with bread and flowers. Maybe they will move enough to stoop, touch the flowers, put bread in their dry mouths. And if you shout and sing, they may even talk again someday, and someday fill out the rest of the song with you. Hey! you cry and La! you sing, and dance, and in dancing perhaps their toes may crack and knuckle and bunch and then tap and tremble and someday a long time after, alone in their rooms, because you danced they will dance by themselves in the mirror of their own souls. For remember, once you were chipped out of ice and stone like them, fit for display in a fish-grotto window. But then you shouted and sang at your insides and one of your eyes blinked! Then the other! Then you sighed in a breath and exhaled a great cry of Life! and trembled a finger and shuffled a foot and bounded back into the explosion of life!

      Since then, have you ever stopped running?

      Never.

      Now he ran into a tenement and left white bottles of milk by strange doors. Outside, by a blind beggar on the hurrying street, he carefully placed a folded dollar bill into the lifted cup so quietly that not even the antennae fingers of the old man sensed the tribute. Pietro ran on, thinking, Wine in the cup and he doesn’t know … ha! … but, later, he will drink! And running with his dogs and birds flickering, fluttering his shoulders, bells chiming on his shirt, he put flowers by old Widow Villanazul’s door, and in the street again paused by the warm bakery window.

      The woman who owned the bakery saw him, waved, and stepped out the door with a hot doughnut in her hand.

      ‘Friend,’ she said, ‘I wish I had your pep.’

      ‘Madam,’ he confessed, biting into the doughnut, nodding his thanks, ‘only mind over matter allows me to sing!’ He kissed her hand. ‘Farewell.’ He cocked his alpine hat, did one more dance, and suddenly fell down.

      ‘You should spend a day or two in the hospital.’

      ‘No, I’m conscious; and you can’t put me in the hospital unless I say so,’ said Pietro. ‘I have to get home. People are waiting for me.’

      ‘Okay,’ said the intern.

      Pietro took his newspaper clippings from his pocket. ‘Look at these. Pictures of me in court, with my pets. Are my dogs here?’ he cried in sudden concern, looking wildly about.

      ‘Yes.’

      The dogs rustled and whined under the cot. The parakeets pecked at the intern every time his hand wandered over Pietro’s chest.

      The intern read the news clippings. ‘Hey, that’s all right.’

      ‘I sang for the judge, they couldn’t stop me!’ said Pietro, eyes closed, enjoying the ride, the hum, the rush. His head joggled softly. The sweat ran on his face, erasing the makeup, making the lampblack run in wriggles from his eyebrows and temples, showing the white hair underneath. His bright cheeks drained in rivulets away, leaving paleness. The intern swabbed pink color off with cotton.

      ‘Here we are!’ called the driver.

      ‘What time is it?’ As the ambulance stopped and the back doors flipped wide, Pietro took the intern’s wrist to peer at the gold watch. ‘Five-thirty! I haven’t much time; they’ll be here!’

      ‘Take it easy, you all right?’ The intern balanced him on the oily street in front of the Manger.

      ‘Fine, fine,’ said Pietro, winking. He pinched the intern’s arm. ‘Thank you.’

      With the ambulance gone, he unlocked the Manger and the warm animal smells mingled around him. Other dogs, all wool, bounded to lick him. The geese waddled in, pecked bitterly at his ankles until he did a dance of pain, waddled out, honking like pressed horn-bulbs.

      He glanced at the empty street. Any minute, yes, any minute. He took the lovebirds from their perches. Outside, in the darkened yard, he called over the fence, ‘Mrs Gutierrez!’ When she loomed in the moonlight, he placed the lovebirds in her fat hands. ‘For you, Mrs Gutierrez!’

      ‘What?’ She squinted at the things in her hands, turning them. ‘What?’

      ‘Take good care of them!’ he said. ‘Feed them and they will sing for you!’

      ‘What can I do with these?’ she wondered, looking at the sky, at him, at the birds. ‘Oh, please.’ She was helpless.

      He patted her arm. ‘I know you will be good to them.’

      The back door to the Manger slammed.

      In the following hour he gave one of the geese to Mr Gomez, one to Felipe Diaz, a third to Mrs Florianna. A parrot he gave to Mr Brown, the grocer up the street. And the dogs, separately, and in sorrow, he put into the hands of passing children.

      At seven-thirty a car cruised around the block twice before stopping. Mr Tiffany finally came to the door and looked in. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I see you’re getting rid of them. Half of them gone, eh? I’ll give you another hour, since you’re cooperating. That’s the boy.’

      ‘No,’ said Mr Pietro, standing there, looking at the empty crates. ‘I will give no more away.’

      ‘Oh, but look here,’ said Tiffany. ‘You don’t want to go to jail for these few remaining. Let my boys take these out for you—’

      ‘Lock me up!’ said Pietro. ‘I am ready!’

      He СКАЧАТЬ