Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

He felt one of his eyelids twitching, which bothered him no end.

The woman took a deep breath (she was certainly very fat), pursed her lips and turned around. She spoke to someone inside the bedroom.

‘So?’ she asked. ‘Now what do you say?’

‘What, what do I say?’ a hoarse voice answered, a man’s voice. ‘I say that I’ve been asking for a cup of tea for over an hour, that’s what I say.’

The woman took another deep breath, let out a sound like hmm and turned again towards Nicolas.

‘Look here,’ she said. ‘Your father’s got his gout again. And you bloody well know he’s got his gout again. And on top of everything you give me this monkey business.’

Nicolas stared at her in astonishment.

‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ he said, with such nerve or subtle humour that he was truly sorry that, here in the hallway, he was the only person capable of appreciating it.

The words seemed to have some effect on the woman. She came out of the bedroom, closed the door and approached Nicolas with the vague attitude of a stage conspirator.

‘It’s terrible, baby,’ she whispered in confidential tones. ‘Really terrible. This and that, the armchairs, I don’t know — everything. This isn’t a life, baby.’ She pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of her dressing gown (now she was wearing a plum-coloured dressing gown) and blew her nose. ‘And then last night. You didn’t hear the fuss?’ She paused but not long enough for Nicolas to answer. ‘Chelita came home at six; she’s a slut your sister, knowing how he flares up. I swear, I thought he’d drop dead then and there. You really didn’t hear a thing?’

Nicolas made an ambiguous movement with his head.

‘Well,’ the woman said. ‘You can imagine. I swear, I really swear, there are times I just want to leave you all and run away. Are you going out?’ she asked, startled.

Nicolas observed that, with no warning whatsoever, the woman had changed her tone of voice, as if her last question belonged to an entirely different scene.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Oh, good,’ the woman said. ‘Thank God. When you come back, bring me a bag of corn flour from the corner store, Brillo pads, two bags of milk and small noodles to put in the soup. Ask the man if the vaseline arrived. He’ll know.’

Just for a second, Nicolas lost his foothold. Then he stepped back on firm ground, like a conqueror. He had determined that, henceforth, he would not lose hold of the situation.

‘Can’t Chelita go?’ he said.

The woman sighed.

‘She went to bed at six or later,’ she said. ‘You think there’s a chance in hell she’ll get up before one?’

Through the closed door they heard the man with the hoarse voice ask for his tea.

‘What did I tell you?’ the woman said. ‘Sometimes I just want to leave the whole lot of you and run away somewhere.’ She pointed at Nicolas’ feet. ‘Put your shoes on,’ she said and went out through the opening that led into the dining room.

As Nicolas entered his room, he noticed that, where the bookcase had always stood, there was now a chest of drawers with shelves in the lower half. He found shoes under the bed. The socks were inside each of the shoes, carefully rolled into balls. Nicolas reasoned that someone who takes such care in stashing away his socks probably always wears clean clothes; he sat on the bed and put on the shoes. He found that they fitted him perfectly.

On the back of a Louis XV — style chair he found a sweater and a coat. Without knowing why, when he saw that they also fitted him, he remembered the story of Goldilocks. In the coat pocket he tucked away two hundred pesos which he had seen on a sort of bedside table, then he left.

It was a grey morning, rather cold. Diaz Velez Street was on his left; Cangallo on his right; the upholstery store right next to the house; the mattress store, La Estrella, just across the road. At the corner Nicolas said hello to the newspaper man, and the newspaper man said hello back. It occurred to him that the best thing to do would be to go home, check that everything was fine and stop all this nonsense. But he immediately abandoned that idea. If everything was indeed fine, the compulsion to return would only have meant that his mental state was abnormal. And if, on the contrary, the woman was there, Nicolas would find himself once again in the middle of a situation with no visible solution, a situation from which he needed to escape. So he carried out his purpose to go to the Computer Centre and caught a 26 bus on Corrientes.

He got off at Uribiru and walked to Paraguay. He crossed the entrance and the large hallway and mechanically walked up to the brown door on the left where, on a golden plaque, was written ‘Computer Centre’.

He pushed the door open and walked in.

It wasn’t the first time he had been aware of this feeling. He had felt it one night, two or three years ago, on his way to the Lorraine cinema. From the moment he had climbed onto the bus he had begun to create and polish, as in a daydream, a program that would allow one to write soap operas through computers. He had gotten off at a stop, which, according to gut feeling, was Parana Street. (His gut had been mistaken; the street was Ayacucho.) He had crossed the road while at the same time going back over his program to see whether he hadn’t fallen into a dead-end loop. Only when he was at the point of entering the cinema had he realised that no cinema was there at all, no bookstore to the right, no theatre across the road. He was in a totally unfamiliar place . For several seconds he had borne the unbearable impression that reality had shifted, that everything he believed in was false, that his points of reference suddenly made no sense.

The same thing happened to him again at the Computer Centre. But this time he had made no mistake. When he left, sixty seconds later, he had found out something of the utmost importance: no Nicolas Broda worked there. No Nicolas Broda had ever worked there.

Another important fact came to him in front of a yellow apartment building. He had gone there to retrieve his briefcase and to confide his tribulations to Segismundo Danton. He had carefully thought out how to explain all of this to Segismundo, but when he reached for the intercom phone to call apartment 10B, he realised that there was no tenth floor nor Bs of any kind. The building was eight stories high and the apartments were numbered from 1 to 27.

He walked for a long while. He had told himself, somewhat compulsively, that his only hope was not to spend the eighty pesos he had left. But shortly after midday it began to drizzle, and Nicolas was forced to admit that, even though the very idea of going back to that house filled him with anxiety, for the time being there was no other place to go. So he picked out six ten-peso coins and took the bus. Just as he was about to reach his destination, he saw through the window, leaning against a doorway, a large, red-faced man who seemed thrilled at seeing the bus. The man whistled, waved his arms wildly, made a circular gesture with his finger in his ear, indicating that Nicolas should phone him, winked an eye and nodded his head. Nicolas felt himself blushing up to the ears. He tore his eyes away from the window. The lady sitting next to him smiled back a tender and happy smile.

As soon as he got off the bus, a problem occurred to him. Should he go into the store and buy the things the blonde woman had asked him to get, or should he ignore her request? He imagined that if he arrived without the parcel and if the woman saw him, not only would she burst into a rage but she’d probably have him go back into the street to fulfil his duties. To save himself the fuss, he decided to buy the things now.