Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

‘Dessert?’

The face turned to her without expression. As if the woman felt herself mercilessly compelled to play out her role until the last.

‘No thank you, I have to go.’

She stood up and collected her things together. The woman very slightly raised her arm.

‘So this doesn’t…?’

She stopped short. Ana’s gaze fell on her hand, fearfully pointing at the forms.

‘This stays as it is,’ Ana said, very quietly.

For an instant the woman recovered the quality that had previously made her glow.

‘Thank you,’ she said, barely audible.

Then, in silence, she led Ana to the door. When Ana said goodbye she didn’t answer or even look at her. She waited for her to leave, then firmly shut the door, turning the key twice.

Perhaps it would be best if I go away for a while, if I stay here I’ll end up getting agitated. Mama and Adelaida do nothing but cry in the room where Juan Luis sleeps (as if that’s going to help my brother in any way) and it’s terrible to see Papa: just now I looked into the living room and he’s still standing at the window, watching the entrance into our road. We’ll know from his face when the ambulance turns in.

It’s odd that I wrote ambulance because, even as I was writing it, I was imagining them arriving by car. A car would be worse, I don’t know why. Actually, I do know. I can’t stop thinking that Juan Luis is going to scream like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire . And they came for Blanche in a car.

. . .

Just now I told Papa that I was thinking of going out for a stroll but he didn’t seem to like the idea. It’s not surprising: Juan Luis could wake up at any moment and if he’s anything like he was last night, Papa won’t be able to manage him alone (and it’s clear that we can’t count on Mama and Adelaida). I wonder how long this nightmare can go on. But we must not give in to despair. Now that they’re taking Juan Luis away, we have to try to forge a new life; we were on the verge of becoming demented ourselves. It seems like centuries since I last felt the sun on my skin.

The first thing we should do is move house. I mooted the idea to Adelaida just now, but she looked at me with a kind of horror. I do understand: our childhood was here. It’s not easy detaching yourself from a place. We used to play in this room, when it was the family room, while the adults took a siesta on Sundays. She would be Aleta and Queen Guinevere; I was the wizard Merlin; Juan Luis, Prince Valiant. That crack over there served for tempering the Singing Sword. And in the summer we used to run around in the sun until our heads hurt. But this is precisely what we need to avoid: sentimentality. It’s as if everything here is somehow tainted by Juan Luis. Full of his memory, I mean. If we stay in this house, we’ll never be able to make a fresh start. Every morning, when Mama waters the azaleas, she’ll say the same thing: ‘To think this is the flower bed Juan Luis made for me after he sold his first painting, my poor son.’ And if anyone points out the cobwebs in the birdbath in the courtyard, Adelaida will say: ‘This is where Sebastian tried to give Juan Luis a bath, when Juan Luis was three years old.’ And she’ll look at her mother and they’ll both cry. Only yesterday afternoon, Mama was searching for an X-ray or something and she found that photograph from when Juan Luis won the drawing competition. ‘Do you remember how handsome he was?’ she said. ‘When he came out on the stage everybody cheered. Do you remember how proud I was?’ She held the photograph against her heart. ‘How old was he?’ she asked. ‘Ten?’ ‘No, eleven,’ said Adelaida. ‘Don’t you remember that Sebastian wore long trousers for the first time that day?’ Mama sighed deeply and I realised that she was crying. ‘How happy we might have been,’ she said. Then, hearing a noise, she glanced up. When she saw me watching from the door she quickly dried her eyes with the back of her hand; she doesn’t like anyone to see her crying. I sat down beside her to comfort her, but she started stroking my head like a ninny and murmuring my darling boy. She’s very nervy, poor Mama, and she ended up making me nervous too. Or, I don’t know, perhaps it’s the result of living with this tension for so long. The touch of her hand must have acted as a catalyst, taking me back to another time — I can’t have been more than four years old because Juan Luis was still sleeping in a cot in Mama and Papa’s room — and I had been dreaming of dogs (or imagining them). That’s all it was. A terrifying number of black and hairy dogs, ugly dogs, in a pile, tearing at each other’s ears with their teeth. I didn’t want to shout for fear of waking my little brother in the room next door. That was the first night, I remember, that I ever heard my heart beating. I was about to cover my ears with my hands and then I felt her come in. Is something wrong, darling boy? I heard her say, above my head. She was stroking my forehead and then she sat down on the bed. And it was as if all the peace in the world settled on my bed, with her.

I suppose that this kind of experience stays fixed in the subconscious, waiting for the right stimulus to reactivate it. Anyway it was a big mistake to lose my nerve just at the moment when I most needed to keep calm. As soon as I opened my eyes and saw Mama’s face I regretted my weakness. It can’t be helped, these things find a way to burst out. I think we could all have ended up going mad if Papa hadn’t made a clean break.

Papa came in just now, as I was writing his name. Or rather, he peered around the door into the room, saw me writing and went out again without saying a word. It’s incredible, the degree to which people in an extreme situation can lose consciousness of their own acts; Papa must think that what he has done is the most normal thing in the world. But I don’t want to mock him; at the end of the day he has borne the brunt of this situation. It can’t have been easy to call the hospital. Speaking for myself, I don’t know if I could have done it. Especially not in the way he did: I confess that I was amazed by his sangfroid. Last night he tried to kill his brother —I heard him clearly. I don’t know, I suppose that was the most direct way to convey the gravity of the situation but it sounded very stark all the same. I was lying in bed, and the words sent a jolt through me.

No; the worst is still to come. I mean we’ll have to talk to the doctors. They’ll want to know when we noticed the first symptoms, what his relationship with me was like, what could have led him to do what he did. And why should I be the one tasked with explaining everything? For two reasons. First: because I have to spare Papa and Mama (and also Adelaida) the trauma of talking about this. Second: because I don’t think they would be able to contribute much given that they have pretended for so long that everything Juan Luis did was normal. It’s a natural function of their neurosis. Or a survival mechanism. (They did know, however. I remember one particularly significant incident. The five of us were having dinner. A music programme had just ended on the radio. The presenter was reading Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla . At the point in the story where it starts to become clear what illness the protagonist is suffering from, Adelaida stood up and switched off the radio. A silent gesture, but charged with meaning. I waited for Mama or Papa to do or say something fitting to the parent of a girl who — without asking us — had just interrupted the broadcast of a story to which we were all listening. Nothing happened. The silence that followed was so dense that for a few seconds I feared Juan Luis might pick up the radio and hurl it at someone’s head.)