Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

The shopkeeper looked like the same one he had always known, but he couldn’t be certain.

‘Just put it on the bill, would you?’ he asked, a little anxiously, as the man handed him the parcel.

‘No problem, my friend,’ said the shopkeeper.

Before leaving, Nicolas undertook one final task.

‘Has the vaseline come in?’ he asked.

It hadn’t. Nicolas hurried to tell the woman when she opened the door, as she was taking the parcel from his hands. He was worried about the possibility of having to touch her. Large women had always frightened him. He felt great relief — too much relief, he thought — when the woman told him it didn’t matter. ‘It doesn’t matter, Alfredo baby,’ the woman said. ‘Go and sit down to lunch.’

Nicolas went into the dining room and knew them all at a glance. The man at the head of the table, skinny in his striped pyjamas, was the gentleman suffering from gout. To his left was Chelita. To his right was an empty chair in which the blonde woman had been sitting. Next to the blonde woman’s place, the Fifth Toothbrush. And next to Chelita was another empty chair in which he sat himself. They were having soup.

The gentleman with the gout tapped his index finger on the edge of the table and turned towards Nicolas.

‘Would you be kind enough to tell us where you’ve been?’

Nicolas tried to think up an appropriate answer, but didn’t manage to voice it because the Fifth Toothbrush leapt to his defence.

‘Come on, it’s good for him to air himself a bit, Rafael,’ she said. She had the voice Nicolas had expected from someone wearing those little round glasses. She let out a sigh. ‘It’s such a nice day out there.’

She winked tenderly at Nicolas by raising one of her cheeks and bending her neck towards the side of her closed eye.

‘Fine, fine,’ muttered the gentleman with gout. ‘In this house everything’s fine. If someone spits in the shoe polish, that’s fine. If we’re overrun with ants, that’s fine. If that slut over there comes home at six in the morning, that’s also fine. In this house everything’s fine.’

The expression on the Fifth Toothbrush’s face changed from tender to insidious.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I certainly don’t know how come a decent girl doesn’t spend the night under her own roof.’

Nicolas sneaked a look at Chelita and couldn’t help admiring her. She was eating her soup like a princess sitting among pirates. He thought that the image had been conjured up by her hair, long and red. Briefly, he saw himself biting it, lying with her in bed. This is an abomination , he thought. And then he had a shock. He had just realized that what he had found abominable was what he had been on the point of thinking: This is an abomination, she’s my sister .

‘What I don’t know,’ the blonde woman said, ‘is why you don’t stick that tongue of yours up your ass.’

With this, the group became sullen. From time to time, the Fifth Toothbrush would pull out a handkerchief and blow her nose. When she did, the blonde woman would grunt briefly and stare at the gentleman with gout. Finally, it seemed that the gentleman with gout could bear the tension no longer. He told Nicolas to go and turn on the TV. Nicolas understood the role that he (or his other) played in this household.

He undertook a minor experiment: he asked Chelita to pass him the salt. Thanks to a mental effort he had managed (he thought) to recover an ordinary air of ‘ironic and aloof man of science.’ He felt handsome. Discreetly uninterested he waited to see what would happen. He was disappointed: when Chelita turned her head to reach the salt, she didn’t show the slightest recognition of any change in his appearance. All she managed was a quick grimace, as if she were fed up with something. Then she carried on eating. Nicolas felt — never before had he felt anything like it — that Chelita despised him.

After this failure, he refrained from trying to charm anyone. He behaved just as the others expected him to behave, and this spared him any more bother. The truth is that he had very little chance to behave in any way whatsoever, because as soon as he finished his meal he locked himself away in his room. (If it could be called his room, this room without a single book or a single number jotted down on paper; not even the slightest secret cigarette burn that Nicolas could recognize as his own.)

In a grade-four notebook he learnt his full name: Alfredo Walter di Fiore. He also learnt that his teacher had felt certain that, with dedication and effort, he would be able to overcome his present difficulties and come up a winner. The reading material proved to be even less revealing. The only indication of some sort of passion (perhaps simply a question of chance) was a pair of books on accountancy. Nicolas also found My Mountains , poems by Joaquin V. Gonzalez; The Citadel by Cronin; three or four westerns; one Harlequin novel; Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts ; a history book by Bartolome Mitre; Don Quixote ; several special issues of Fantasy Magazine ; a women’s weekly; three issues of The Reader’s Digest ; a botanical handbook for high schools; a third-year accountancy primer; Heidi; Everything you ever wanted to know about Accountancy; Everything you ever wanted to know about the Great Ideas of Mankind; Everything you ever wanted to know about Your Digestion; The Thirsty Nymph ; and Little Men .

There were no letters anywhere. He found the photograph of a fat, rather plain girl. For Alfredo, Love, Always . He also found a pad of receipts with several pages torn out. On receipt number 43 was written in pencil — the handwriting resembled his own—‘love,’ ‘dove,’ ‘heart,’ ‘dart,’ and a bit further down, ‘Why don’t you all go fuck yourselves.’

By 7:00 he had managed to put the facts into some sort of order: either this was a dream, or this was really happening. If this was a dream, was it possible that, within the dream itself, he was considering the possibility of its being a dream? Yes, of course, things like that do happen in dreams. But do reasonings like this also happen in dreams? By 7:20 he had accepted that this was really happening . He went out for a walk.

At the corner store he asked the man to let him have a packet of cigarettes on credit. The man agreed with a sly conniving smirk. At the entrance to a bookstore, he stopped himself from smiling at a teenager loaded down with parcels and rolls of wallpaper because he was unaccountably afraid that his smile might seem stupid or obscene. He carried on with a vague feeling of guilt. He heard the parcels and the rolls of paper fall to the ground behind his back. Without thinking he turned around, retraced his steps and picked up the teenager’s belongings. ‘Thanks,’ she said. And something happened: she looked at him.

Nicolas had been looked at as Nicolas.

Only then did he smile at the girl. You might take all away from me… And yet … The quotation crossed his mind. He was a student of higher mathematics, lover of Musil’s books, old fan of Tarzan’s films at the Medrano Theatre, and he was smiling at a girl.

She rearranged the parcels and the rolls of paper, thanked him once again, warmly, and went on her way.

Nicolas realized that the stars had come out. He managed to find a couple in the Centaur constellation. You might take all away from me! Everything — the rose, the lyre!… And yet, one thing will still remain! Something in his heart sang out.

It wasn’t as if he were suddenly happy, though. Those he had loved, the things he had shared, that which until yesterday had been his past: where would he look for them now? He felt utterly alone. But he was himself . And not all the blonde women in the world, not all the gentlemen suffering from gout, not all the red-faced men who lean against doorways would ever be able to dispossess him of this feeling (so like a song, like the happiness of someone singing), this feeling of being himself on a clear evening in July.