Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

‘Sorry, I think I got lost,’ the man seemed more awake now. ‘There was a child?’

‘Of course,’ said Señora Eloísa, irritably. ‘I told you there was a child at the start, otherwise what would be so terrible about it? The woman was there, among the cars, with the boy in her arms and looking at us with that expression of—. A baby, big and very fair, fair like the woman and fat, too fat for someone to be carrying in such heat. Do you see what I’m telling you? Don’t tell me that you do, that you understand, I know that however hard you try you can’t understand it. You think you do, that you understand it perfectly, but you have to carry a child when you’re tired and hot to know what that’s like. And I was sitting down, mind you, not like the woman; I was sitting comfortably in the car. But even so I felt the weight on my legs and my skirt sticking to me and then my baby who was crying as if she were being…’ she looked with suspicion at the man who seemed about to say something. She didn’t give him the chance. ‘But the woman wasn’t even sitting down and I think her back must have been aching terribly. She didn’t look like someone in pain, she looked indifferent, but even so I could tell that the child was too heavy for her.’

She fell silent, absorbed by these thoughts. The man was shaking his head. Suddenly he seemed to think of something cheering.

‘Life, eh?’ he said. ‘I bet she’s the one getting married.’

Señora Eloísa stared at him, perplexed.

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘Your daughter, I mean, it just occurred to me, the crying baby you were carrying,’ the man laughed good-naturedly. ‘How time flies, she must be the one who’s going off to get married.’

‘I never said that,’ said Señora Eloísa with violence.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… You said that she was crying and then I thought…’

‘No, you didn’t understand me, she wasn’t crying. I said very clearly that she was heavy and that the woman’s back must have hurt. But I never said that she cried. Admittedly, she may have been about to cry at any moment. I didn’t make that clear, but I admit it now: they all cry. See how desperately they cry when you think they have everything they need and you can’t think what’s wrong with them? That day it was hot, intolerably so. And the sky was painfully blue, the kind of blue one could be happy with if one were alone or beside somebody very’—she turned her head towards the man. She said angrily: ‘If one didn’t have to carry on one’s lap a baby who keeps crying for no reason’—she waved her hand in front of her, as though batting away an insect. ‘The woman didn’t make any kind of gesture, just stood there with an air of abandonment, but I could tell straightaway that she was raging. She wanted to throw the boy, hurl him against something, but not because she hated him. She wanted to throw him off because he was very heavy and it was hot, do you understand? It’s not possible to bear such a heat, and the weight, and the terror that at any moment they will start crying.’

Then she gazed out at the rain as if she had never said anything.

The man shifted in his seat. He cleared his throat.

‘So what happened next?’

She turned back towards him with irritation.

‘What do you mean what happened? That happened — doesn’t it seem like enough? A very tired woman and with those lovely clothes, I don’t know, as if one fine day she had decided that she was tired of everything. Then she grabbed the child, carefully closed the door to her house and off she went. As simple as that. I realize that it’s hard to understand but these things happen. One might be perfectly happy, drawing the curtains or eating a biscuit and suddenly one realizes that one can’t go on. Do you know what it’s like to have a child who cries all day and all night, all day and all night? A child is too heavy for a woman’s body. Afterwards, with the others, one gets used to it or, how shall I put it, one gives in, perhaps. But the first is so exasperating. One resists, believe me, one resists and every morning one tells oneself that all is well, that one has everything a woman might dream of, that how the others must… No, it’s shaming to confess it, but it’s true, one even thinks this: about the others, I mean how the other women must envy one with this husband who is so attentive and such a comfortable house and this nice, fat baby. These are the sorts of things one may think of to calm oneself. But one fine day, I don’t know, something snaps. The baby who won’t stop crying, or the heat, I don’t know, it’s hard to remember everything accurately if afterwards one isn’t allowed to talk about it, don’t you see? They kept saying no, they insisted that they knew what it was best to say, that I was ill at any rate and it wasn’t advisable for me to talk… They put a whole story together, an accident or something like that, I think, but I don’t know if it was for the best. Because the only thing I wanted, the one thing I needed was to tell them that I didn’t hate her, how could I hate her? I loved her with all my heart. Do you at least understand? All I did was dash her against the floor because she kept crying and crying and she was so heavy, you can’t imagine, she was heavier than my whole body could bear.’

Now she was very tired and she thought that she didn’t have the strength, she simply didn’t have the strength to keep talking for the rest of the journey.

‘I want to get out,’ she said.

Without saying anything, the man stopped the car. He must have been in a great hurry to get away because he looked at her only once, standing in the rain on the hard shoulder, then immediately pulled away. He didn’t even tell her that she’d left her crocodile skin suitcase on the back seat. Just as well, that suitcase was too heavy for her.

A coach drawn by four white horses is turning the corner. The decorated gentleman inside, astonished at the sight of a six-year-old girl walking alone and not afraid along a dark street, leans out of the window, and with a dry monosyllable, orders the coachman to stop.

‘Who are you, beautiful child?’

‘I’m Georgina Requeni, Sir.’

‘And I? Do you know who I am?’

Georgina doesn’t know. The gentleman is the President of the Republic, the most important person in the entire country. When the President tells her this, Georgina isn’t taken aback and looks him straight in the eye. That is when the President realizes he’s facing the most extraordinary child in the world and takes her to live with him in a palace surrounded by gardens. He gives her French dolls and real ponies as big as a big dog, and allows her to wear frilly dresses inside the house. From that day, Georgina appears in all the papers and newsreels. She always travels in a crystal carriage. People greet her with deep bows.

‘She looks like a bear in the zoo,’ she hears someone say behind her.

Then she wants to die. She, who at that very moment is smiling to her subjects from the window of her carriage, appears to others a rather stupid girl smiling to herself as she turns and turns in the empty patio. From that day on, her mother and her grandmother entertain visitors with stories of how Georgina walks back and forth across the patio like a bear in its cage. When they find her swirling round and round, they call her to ask why she won’t play like the other six-year-old girls. I do play , Georgina says to herself, I play in my head . And then one day she’s avenged by the President of the Republic, who orders that her entire family be sent to the dungeon.