Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

How wonderful I was! Georgina feels her eyes glisten. She’s thirteen and the memory enthrals her. She takes one small dance step. The window of her room is open, which makes her behave in a very particular way. She lives on the ground floor, and she is certain that some day a handsome young man will stop without her noticing him. He will fall madly in love with the enigmatic girl who does such beautiful things when she is alone. From the corner of her eye she looks towards the window and something happens: a small bird has just landed on the windowsill. Intermittently it preens its feathers, examines with apparent interest the interior of the room and chirps briefly. He likes me , Georgina thinks. She feels observed; this troubles and delights her. She places her hands on her chest and casts a tragic look on the bird: ‘What has brought you here?’ she asks it. ‘Go away. Are you not aware that my husband has found us out?’ The bird flies away in fright. How very funny. Georgina jumps up and hugs herself for joy. ‘How wonderful I am!’ she says. ‘How wonderful I’ll always be!’ Today is a very important day for her: about three hours ago, she went to the stationery store and bought an exercise book with red covers. She’ll keep a diary, like Maria Bashkirtseff, because there’s something that concerns her. One day she’ll appear in a book such as the Wonderful Lives of Famous Boys and Girls . How will the author know the extraordinary things that happened to her unless she writes everything down very carefully? You see, my child, here are the lives of all the children in the world who one day became famous: this is Pascal, the young enlightened genius, and this is Bidder, the marvellous little mathematician, and this is Metastasio, the infant troubadour of Rome, and this is Georgina Requeni, the girl who … The world collapses around her. She is already almost fourteen years old, and she still doesn’t know what she’s going to be. Her father has promised her that when she turns fifteen she’ll be able to take classes of Elocution and Dramatic Art with the teacher who lives on Santander Street, but that is a long time away. Sometimes she remembers that at the age of seven Mozart dazzled a prince, then she feels like ending it all and throwing herself out of a window. But she lives on the ground floor, she’s out of her mind, she’ll be famous and the world will love her. She looks at herself in the mirror. And I will also be very beautiful . She lifts her hair, lets it fall over one eye, half-lowers her eyelids, sees a pimple on her chin and wrinkles her nose, oh well, she’ll be very beautiful and have lovers, thousands of lovers strewn at her feet. How they’ll suffer because of her! No, dear Sir, don’t do it! Don’t kill yourself for my sake! The man kills himself; she is dancing in front of the mirror. She doesn’t know what is happening to her; what she does know is that no one, ever, was as happy as this. She goes up to her image and gives it a kiss. This makes her laugh out loud. She runs to the window and looks up at the sky. ‘God is blue,’ she whispers. The November air, the smell of leaves, of tides; she wants to hug someone very hard and tell him all about her. No, there’ll be no need to talk; he’ll look her in the eyes and know everything, the tragedies she’s been through, her fears, the incredible things she still must do. My God, life is so wonderful . Then she makes up her mind: today is the day to begin. It’s been almost a year since she bought the exercise book. Since she bought it, she’s been waiting for the perfect moment; she believes that every event should be made up of perfect moments . She goes to the night table, opens the small drawer and takes out the exercise book with the red covers. She sits at her desk, and with coloured crayons, she writes on the first page: The Diary of Georgina Requeni . Then she turns the page, takes her fountain pen and writes, ‘ I’m fourteen years old. No one can know the feelings in my heart. My heart is wild, and on this day, the whole world is like my heart. Yes! I feel as if my life is going to be wonderful. I feel.’ She stops because she doesn’t know how to carry on. She reads what she has written, and she approves.

Now she reads it again as if she were another fourteen-year-old girl reading the words she has written. The other girl can’t believe that, at her same age, someone wrote such beautiful lines and cries over the diary which has become a book with Georgina’s picture on the cover. The whole world is crying. She has died. Hidden among piles of paper, they have found the exercise book with the red covers, the confession of so many thwarted ideals. It doesn’t seem possible that someone like her should die at the dawn of so much promise, she who could have soared so high. Georgina blows her nose, she’s such a fool. She crosses out the last ‘I feel’ and writes ‘I wish.’ ‘I wish to soar very, very high.’

Amazing. She rereads the last sentence, she is truly impressed. For the past two hours she has been trying to get started on what is for her one of the most terrifying jobs in the world: sorting out her papers. She is eighteen and says that sorting out your drawers is like cleaning out your soul. Her soul is full of astounding junk, tatters of stories, but she only needs to rescue whatever is concerned with the relentless destiny she has chosen for herself. She hates being sentimental; she knows that the chosen ones are cold and strong; she has read a lot. The exercise book with the red covers is a real find. She has opened it on the first page and has felt that God is speaking in her ear. The wish to soar very high, amazing; only those who’ve been predestined can write a sentence like that at the age of fourteen. For an instant she can imagine the exercise book, under a glass cover, in the Museum of the Theatre Arts. She turns the pages but nothing. Here, on the very first page, the diary ends. A few lines of verse copied out, the drawing of a large heart with her name and another name pierced by an arrow, some notes taken in class, and no more. How unsettled one was at fourteen, she thinks with adult insight. She smiles. She has remembered the absurd idea she had that day when she thought of starting the diary. Heroic and premature deaths! At eighteen, she has understood that true heroics lie in the act of living. She rolls up the exercise book and throws it into the garbage. It is like a signal. With unaccustomed energy, she spills out the contents of drawers, throws papers away and tears faded photos of once fashionable stars off the wall. She sighs with relief: now everything is in order. Now she can, at last, do what she has been promising herself she will do all afternoon. She takes a huge poster with the portrait of Sarah Bernhardt and fixes it to the wall with four thumbtacks. The two women stare at each other. Now Georgina knows what she wants.

‘You want me,’ he says. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

They are leaning against the riverside wall, waiting for the sun to come up. Georgina sighs with resignation and somewhat loudly, because she’s just realized that Manuel has not understood a single word of what she has been saying. Very carefully she begins to smooth out a green and golden candy wrapper. ‘No,’ she says. Yes, of course she wants him, she loves him, but it’s something else. Theatre, of course. Something else.

‘Why something else?’ Manuel asks, but a ship’s foghorn is heard in the distance.

Georgina has finished smoothing out the wrapper and now rolls it around her index finger. He looks at her hands.

‘What will you do?’ he asks.

Her face brightens.

‘Well,’ she replies, ‘it’s all a bit complicated, I don’t know. I could just tell you that I’m going to be a great actress, but it’s something more, I don’t know how to explain it.’