Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

‘No,’ he shakes his head. ‘With the candy wrapper. I mean what are you going to do with the candy wrapper? ’

‘Ah,’ she stares at her finger. ‘A little cup. Daddy always used to make one for me. You twist the paper here, then you take out your finger and there: see?’

Manuel pushes the hair away from her face.

‘Georgina,’ he says. ‘Why something else ?’

She lifts her eyebrows with a look of surprise. ‘Theatre, I mean. Why does it have to be something else?’

She laughs and points a finger at him.

‘He’s jealous,’ she says in a singsong. ‘Manuel is jealous.’ She looks at him in the face and becomes serious. ‘Not at all, you fool. It is the same thing. Love, theatre and… I don’t know how to explain, it’s as if I were fated. I mean, as if with everything I do, I’m supposed to rise higher and higher… Who knows? To be in decline must be something terrible. Haven’t you ever thought about that? I’m always thinking about these things, it’s awful.’

Manuel whistles admiringly.

‘It’s true,’ says Georgina. ‘The problem is that you don’t take me seriously, but that’s how it is. What’s more, long before I turn into one of those old actresses who go on living God-knows-why—’ She stops and looks at him with determination. ‘I’ll kill myself,’ she says.

Manuel puts his palms together and mimics a jump into the river.

‘Splash,’ he says.

No, no , Georgina shakes her head desperately. Not in the river, what a philistine, he doesn’t understand a thing . She’s talking to him about a luminous ascent towards the loftiest heights, she means putting an end to all, cleanly, at the very top, and he comes out with something as unaesthetic as drowning oneself. Virginia Woolf, of course, but does he imagine her a few moments before the end, thrashing about and swallowing water and probably retching? And then what? A bloated half-rotten corpse drying out on a slab in the morgue. Lovely posthumous image. No, never, nothing like that. A beautiful death, Georgina means. Like her life.

He has watched her as she speaks. Lightly, he touches the tip of her nose.

‘Do me a favour,’ he says. ‘Don’t ever kill yourself.’

They can’t bear persistence , she thinks from high above a pedestal.

‘But yes, you fool. Don’t you realize?’ she says. ‘They must remember me beautiful. Beautiful for ever and ever.’

As soon as the words are out, she has the disagreeable impression of having said too much. She glares at Manuel and then covers her face with her hands.

‘No, not now, what an idiot you are,’ she says. ‘At six in the morning anyone looks awful,’ as she uncovers her face and places her hands on her hips, aggressively. ‘Anyway, I’m twenty, right? I still have my whole life to get what I want.’

‘Get what?’ he asks.

‘Everything.’

Manuel arches his eyebrows. He sits on the wall. Georgina stands as if waiting for something, and then finally she sits down as well. They sit with their legs dangling towards the river, the sun is about to rise and all is well .

‘See, that’s what I was telling you,’ Georgina says. ‘We come into the world with these things, who knows why. Strange, isn’t it? Imagine: I was only fourteen and already I wrote it down on the very first page of my diary.’

Manuel slaps his forehead with a wide open palm.

‘No!’ he says. ‘Don’t tell me that you also keep a diary!’

Georgina is about to explain something to him. She shrugs.

‘Of course,’ she says.

‘Of course?’ he laughs. ‘Women are out of this world. Okay, tell me.’

‘Tell you what? What have women to do with this?’

‘What you write in your diary, all that stuff. Let’s see if I can finally get to understand you.’

Georgina pulls a face as if she’s bothered: curiosity seems to her an unworthy and irritating sentiment. She can’t imagine Ibsen worrying about what people write in their diaries.

‘Well… I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It makes no sense if you tell it.’

‘Tell what?’

Georgina turns around, her feet on the wall. The sun has started to come out, and the glimmer hurts her eyes. She crumples the green and golden cup, makes it into a ball and throws it into the water. Then she regrets having done it: Manuel mustn’t believe that something has put her in a bad mood. It’s a good thing the sun is coming out: they’ve been on the riverside for an hour now waiting for it to rise. And it does. The sky is blue, red and yellow. That’s good.

She turns and sits as before.

‘I don’t know where to start,’ she says. ‘Because it turned out to be a very long diary. I would write in it every day… And there was always something to write about. I was a terrific adolescent, you know. I mean it, don’t laugh. I mean the theatre and all that. I was always talking about the theatre, and about the actress I was going to become. About my idols and about how I was going to work harder and harder until I’d be even greater than all my idols… Because unless you reach the highest peaks, life has no sense at all… I would also write about that, of course. And my thoughts about life, about fate… I don’t know… that one’s fate isn’t written down anywhere. I mean, there’s no star carrying a sign saying “Georgina Requeni Will Be The Greatest.” That’s it, you make up your own fate; that’s the thing. See my hand? Look! Even the lines of your hand change. You change them, see? Really, a palmreader explained it to me once… So, well, that’s what I wrote about. I felt, I don’t know—’ She stops and looks at him. ‘Happy now?’ she asks.

He is about to speak. She anticipates what he is about to ask.

‘It was a beautiful diary,’ she says. Then, in a mysterious tone, she adds, ‘The ceremony was really impressive.’

‘Ceremony?’ he asks. ‘What ceremony?’

His expression is very funny. Georgina is about to laugh.

‘The ceremony,’ she says. ‘Death. Everything must have its ceremony.’ She laughs like someone who has just remembered something hilarious. ‘You know what I did when I was eighteen?’ she asks.

He shakes his head.

‘I wrote the last page,’ Georgina is glowing. ‘A fabulous page, you should have seen. In my opinion, the best page in the entire diary, I mean it… The days of small gestures were over; one couldn’t help it. Now was the beginning of the real struggle… I didn’t cry or anything like that. I put the diary on a blue tray. A tray with little angels painted on it, I’ll show it to you when you come to the house. I lit a match and pfff . It became a blazing bonfire. I stared at it for as long as it took, and then the ashes… I bet you can’t guess? I threw them to the wind. Don’t laugh… Just a game, I know. But wasn’t it a beautiful ending?’

Manuel looks at her and says nothing. She’s in despair because she can’t figure out whether he’s truly moved (and by what) or whether he’s making fun of her.

‘I mean it,’ she says. ‘Everything must end in the same way it lived. What else could I have done? Thrown it into the garbage?’

Imposter , she thinks. A Hedda Gabler who shoots herself then throws kisses around is an imposter . Doesn’t anyone notice? No one notices. The applause increases, followed by an ovation. Georgina must admit that, speaking in general terms, the public is stupid: they call out the name of the star because they are fans, not because they understand anything about the theatre. The young woman on the proscenium throws one last kiss with an ample movement of the arm. Georgina, back in the wings with the rest of the cast, sees only her back but imagines her starlet’s smile. She looks at the woman’s nape with scorn. Now Doctor Tesman and Councillor Brack advance and stand on both sides of Hedda Gabler. A new wave of applause; the two actors bow their heads slightly. Now: this is the moment when they are all meant to come forward. What for? Hear them clap, no need to take a bow. The applause becomes weaker. What do they expect? A miracle? Georgina would have liked to know how Sarah Bernhardt herself would have managed to make something decent out of the role of Berta. Yes, Madam. It’s morning already, Madam. Councillor Brack is here to see you, Madam . No, she can’t take it any longer. Today she’ll give it all up. She thinks about it hard, as hard as a tombstone, and the clearness of her decision makes her feel better. She’s certain that only a privileged spirit is able to be as inflexible as she is: the spirit of a great artist. She lifts her eyes and smiles haughtily at the public. Dear Lord , she thinks. Grant them a minute of greatness to allow them to understand this smile . The curtain falls for the last time. Georgina heads for the dressing-rooms. She feels that one day, this too will be part of her history. Alone and unknown at the age of twenty-four, making her way through a throng of people who embrace and congratulate one another and ignore her, crossing dark corridors without paying attention to anything, without greeting anyone, without thinking about anything except—