Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

But I don’t mind the rain if I’m well rested. She let the words slide over her head, almost without registering them. The thing is that today, for some reason, I feel as if I could drop off at any minute. Was some state of alert functioning within her somnolence? The splattering of the first raindrops seemed to trigger it.

‘Shall I tell you something? Today, if I hadn’t had good company and someone to chat to me, I wouldn’t even have come out.’

She didn’t open her eyes. She said crisply:

‘I don’t know that I am particularly good company.’

Fury had brought her almost fully awake, but she wasn’t about to give this man the pleasure of a conversation: she pretended to be dozing off. Immediately the clatter of rain started up, like a demolition. For a few minutes that was all she heard and gradually she really did begin to fall asleep.

‘Please, talk to me.’

The words burst into her dream like shouting. With difficulty Señora Eloísa opened her eyes.

‘Well just look at this rain,’ she said.

‘Terrible,’ said the man.

Already it was her turn again.

‘Do you like the rain?’ she asked.

‘Not much,’ said the man.

He certainly wasn’t helping. All he wanted was for her to talk and keep him awake. Barely anything.

‘I like it, I like it very much,’ she said, fearing that this avenue of conversation was leading nowhere; quickly she added: ‘but not this kind.’

In a garret, I’d be an artist or a dancer, half-starving, and there’d be a handsome man with a beard, loving me as I had never imagined it was possible to be loved, and rain drumming on a tin roof.

‘Not this kind,’ she repeated vigorously (she needed to give herself time to find another direction for the conversation: the tiredness was leading her into dead ends). On an impulse she said: ‘Once I wrote an essay about the rain.’ She laughed. ‘I mean, how silly I sound, I must have written lots of essays about the rain, it’s hardly an unusual theme.’

She waited. After a few seconds the man said:

‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’

But he didn’t elaborate.

Señora Eloísa applied herself to thinking up new avenues of conversation. She said:

‘I used to like writing essays,’ luckily she was beginning to feel talkative. ‘A teacher once told me I had an artistic temperament. Originality. That essay I was telling you about, it’s odd that I should suddenly remember it. I mean, it’s odd that I should have said “once I wrote an essay on the rain,” don’t you think, when in fact I wrote so many’—the secret was to keep talking without pause—‘and that I shouldn’t have had any idea why I told you that when I did and that now I do. I mean, I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but now I am sure that when I said “once I wrote an essay on the rain,” I meant the beggars’ kind rather than any other.’

She paused, proud of herself: she had brought the conversation to an interesting juncture. She would be willing to bet that now the man was going to ask her: Beggars? That would certainly make her job easier.

But no, apparently the word had not caught the man’s attention. She, on the other hand, had struck a rich seam because now she clearly remembered the entire essay. This was just what she needed: a concrete subject, something to talk on and on about, even while half-asleep. She said:

‘Here’s a curious thing: in that essay I said that rain was like a blessing for beggars. Why would I have thought something like that?’

‘That is curious,’ agreed the man.

Señora Eloísa felt encouraged.

‘I had my own explanation for it, quite a logical one. I said that beggars live under a blazing sun, I mean, I suppose that I imagined it was always summer for them, they were burned by the sun and then, when the rain came, it was like a blessing, a “beggars’ holiday,” I think I called it.’

She leaned back on the headrest as though claiming a prize. Through the rain she read AZUL 170 KM and sighed with relief: she had managed to keep talking for a long stretch, the man must be feeling clearer-headed by now. She closed her eyes and enjoyed her own silence and the water’s soothing litany. Gently she let herself be pulled towards a sleepy hollow.

‘Talk to me.’

He sounded both imperious and desperate. She remembered the man and his tiredness. Could he be as exhausted as her? My God. Without opening her eyes she tried to remember what she had been talking about before falling asleep. The essay. What else was there to say about the essay?

‘You must think that…’—it was a struggle to take up the thread again—‘I mean, the teacher thought that…’—and now she seemed to see another angle to this story. She said firmly: ‘She drew a red circle. The teacher. She circled “blessing” in red and printed beside it a word that I didn’t know at the time: Incoherent’—she frowned at the man. ‘It wasn’t incoherent. Perhaps you think it was incoherent, but it wasn’t.’

‘No, not at all,’ said the man. ‘Why would I think that?’

‘Yes, I’m sure you do, because even I can see that it may seem incoherent, but there are some things…’ Some things, what? She no longer saw as clearly as she had a minute ago why it wasn’t incoherent. Even so she had to keep talking about something or other before the man ordered her to continue. ‘I mean that there are times when heat is worse than…’ Without meaning to, she caught sight of a road sign. That was a mistake: knowing exactly how many kilometres she had to keep talking filled her with despair, as though she were falling into a well. ‘There are times when heat is overwhelming especially if’ she searched for the words with a rising sense of panic — what if she never found anything new to talk about? For a very brief moment she had to suppress a desire to open the door and throw herself onto the road. Abruptly she said: ‘I once saw a beggar’ and her own words surprised her because the image didn’t come from her memory or anywhere else: it had come out of nothing, clear against the suffocating heat of Buenos Aires: a young woman, dishevelled and a little distracted among the cars. ‘I don’t know if she was a beggar, I mean I don’t know if that is the right way to describe her: she was fair, and very young, that I do remember, and if she hadn’t been so unkempt and so thin, with that expression of hopelessness… That was the worst thing, the feeling that she was going to go on, day after day, traipsing among the cars as though nothing in the world mattered to her.’

She paused and looked at the man; he nodded slightly, as though bidding her to continue.

‘There were cars — did I tell you there were cars? A traffic jam or something. I was in Buenos Aires with my husband and my… I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you that it was shockingly hot, if you don’t know about the heat you won’t understand any of this. The car was stuck in traffic and the sun was beating through the windscreen, so I put my head out of the window to get a bit of air. That was when I saw her, watching us all with an indifference that frightened me. My husband didn’t see her, or rather, I don’t know if he saw her because he didn’t mention anything, he doesn’t particularly notice these things. She was well dressed — do you see what I’m saying? A blouse and skirt, very dirty and worn, but you could tell from a mile off that they were good clothes. There she was, among the cars, and she wasn’t even making an effort to beg, that’s why I’m not sure if it’s right to call her a beggar. It was as though one fine day she had walked out of her house dressed in these same clothes and closed the front door on everything that was inside: her husband, her silver service, those stupid functions, everything she hated, do you see what I mean? Not the boy, she had him with her, she saw that in reality she didn’t hate the boy. He was heavy, that was all, especially in that heat. But no, she didn’t hate him. She had brought him with her, after all.’