Hearing What You Cannot See

crickets, drunken mice, and a mother cat

I stand on my hotel balcony, in the night, in Salamanca, Spain. I am staying in Salamanca’s old town, sprawled over three low hills above the river Tormes. There is a faint chirp of crickets rolling up the valley, pulsing like the jangles of a shaking tambourine. From the street, women laugh. Their thick heels clatter as they stumble toward each other. Their laughs overlay and interrupt, and they sound like drunken mice. It is maybe around midnight. Every ten minutes or so, I hear the low rumble of a motorcycle, the tear of its engine winding through narrow cobblestone streets, then zipping out into nothingness.

The balcony is on the backside of the hotel, through the glass doors at the end of the lobby. There is a small garden with purple irises and bulbous alliums and a stone staircase leading up to the balcony. At the top, there are round tables and wire chairs and, in the mornings, guests come up to eat their breakfasts, orange juice and coffee with steamed milk and slices of jamón and sweating cheese. It is so dark that I cannot make out the tables or the chairs. I stand at the edge with my stomach pressed against the metal railing, as if I were on the top deck of a cruise ship and the night beneath me was the ocean. I am jetlagged. I brought a book up with me but I realize now that there is not nearly enough light to see the words.

Somewhere, I hear the trickle of a fountain, water pattering from the spout down into the basin, then disappearing inside of it. The crickets’ chirps meld into the trickle until it sounds like baby crickets are swimming, gurgling, through the pool. Elsewhere, I hear the meow of a mother cat. There is a long silence and I think she must have moved along. Then I hear her again, an angry meow, as if someone were peeking at her babies, curled against each other.

It is so dark that if there were another person up on the balcony with me, I would not see them. In my apartment in New York City, I worry sometimes that someone might break in while I am sleeping. I fall asleep while there are still cars outside, with blocky beams cast from their headlights, and college boys shouting things at each other underneath my window. There are flashes of red and orange, ambulances and police cars and delivery drivers who ride bicycles with hazard lights, and if I open my eyes and lift my chin to peer through the crack in my curtains, it looks like a firework show where the fireworks never fall back down.

I lean against the railing, as if to look from the ship down into the ocean, in which I know live billions of silvery small fish, rainbow fish and fish with fanned-out tails and thick gills, so many layers of water and of fish that they meld into what we call a body, a body of water. Somewhere in the valley, a wind weaves through the stone pines, their dense canopies like storm clouds at the tops of their tall trunks. It brushes up against their needles, pushing their green heads to slant like the heads of music notes, each one slurring toward the next. The wind, hollowed by the needles, funnels up the bowl of the valley, and it sounds like the rush of a salty wave onto the sand.

Sound carries in Salamanca as if through a maze, up over the hills and valleys, threaded through the city’s open windows, through the mouths of tourists and the leaves of growing garden shrubs. Unlike in New York City, sound in Salamanca comes from places that are invisible, from crevices in narrow roads lined by sandstone buildings. I hear another meow, low, as if from the back of her throat, and I picture the mother cat and her babies, slits for eyes because they are still too young to open them wide, lying on a doorstep on a street that leads to nowhere. Before me, it is still dark, and I think that the night is birthing more worlds than I will ever know, worlds with creatures that I cannot see, who live only in the dark and talk only in languages that I cannot understand.