Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

Georgina laughs, ecstatic. It’s been a while since she’s felt so joyful. The young men laugh with her. One of them fills her glass again; this promises to be a night of great rejoicing. Guitar music, young poets, meat rolls and gallons of wine. The noise doesn’t allow one to listen very carefully, can you hear? As if one were God and forced to do everything. The hand, look, even the lines of the hand can be changed. Through sheer will. Will to be beautiful, will to be great. Because nothing is written, don’t you realise, destiny isn’t written on a star, and where, where does it say that Georgina Requeni will be a great actress, will be beautiful?

Joy! Joy! There’s much laughter here, many young voices. Another samba , they say. I love you. More wine. Have you noticed? Have you noticed there’s always an old bag getting pissed at these parties? But Georgina can’t make out the voices very clearly and goes on laughing, drinking wine, talking. Because there’s no Santiago, there’s no one to tell her to shut up, to tell her everything’s fine, to tell her she’s fumbling over the words and is about to fall down. ‘Never fall, never ever fall,’ she says. Because a woman grown old is a monster. And before reaching that stage, Georgina will kill herself.

Now they’re no longer laughing. ‘It’s pathetic,’ they’re saying. And also that life is cruel.

And Georgina Requeni, who is still holding her hand in front of her and has just shouted something, even though she can’t remember what, looks around, terrified, as if her own cry had woken her and sees, as one sees the end of a dream, that all the faces are strange and are staring at her. And that the hand stretched out in front of her is the hand of an old woman.

Then she says ‘Goodnight,’ and leaves.

She walks away unsteadily. Every so often she holds on to the sides of houses so as not to fall down. Then the houses come to an end, but all the same she crosses Libertador, heading towards the riverside. Wavering but on her own two feet, she reaches the wall. She thinks that at six o’clock in the morning, the colour of the river is somewhat depressing. They were laughing. Now Georgina can remember it distinctly. She looks down, almost tenderly. Tomorrow they’ll read about it in the papers. It’s so easy: all you need is a little push and then allow the body to fall all on its own, through its own weight. Splash. The word comes unbidden to her head, like a small explosion. She brushes the hair away from her face. Santiago had joined his palms over his breast and was clowning around. Georgina leans over the wall and vomits into the river. Now she feels better. The important thing is to live.

In front of her, the sky is turning red. She reckons that in just a few minutes the sun will come out. It’s going to be a beautiful morning.

In the beginning (but not in the beginning of the beginning) a horse is going up in the lift. I know he is brown, but what I don’t know is how he got there or what he is going to do when the lift comes to a stop. As far as that is concerned, the horse is quite different from the lion. And not only because the lion climbs the stairs in a reasonable manner, but also because, above all, the appearance of the lion has a logical explanation. I say to myself: there are lions in Africa. I say to myself: lions walk. I ask myself: if they walk, why don’t they ever leave Africa? I answer myself: because lions don’t have a particular destination in mind; sometimes they walk this way and sometimes that, and therefore, just going and coming, they never leave Africa. But that deduction doesn’t deceive me of course. Even if they don’t have a particular destination, at least one of the lions, unintentionally, might walk always in the same direction. He might walk by day, sleep by night, and in the morning, not aware of what he’s doing, he might walk again in the same direction, then sleep again by night, and in the morning, not aware of what he’s doing… I say to myself: Africa ends somewhere, and a lion walking always in the same direction will one day walk straight out of Africa and into another country. I say to myself: Argentina is another country, therefore that lion might come to Argentina. If he came at night, no one would see him because at night there are no people out in the street. He would climb the stairs up to my apartment, break the door without making a sound (lions break doors without making a sound because their skin is so thick and smooth), cross the hallway and sit down behind the dining room table.

I’m in bed; I know he is there, waiting; my blood throbs inside my head. It’s very unsettling to know that there is a lion in the dining room and that he hasn’t stirred. I get up. I leave my room and cross the dining room: on this side of the table, not on the lion’s side. Before going into the kitchen I stop for a moment, turning my back on him. The lion doesn’t jump on me, but that doesn’t mean anything; he might jump when I come back. I go into the kitchen and drink a glass of water. I come out again, without stopping. This time the lion doesn’t jump either, but that doesn’t mean anything. I go to bed and wait warily. The lion isn’t moving, but I know he’s also waiting. I get up and go again into the kitchen. It is almost morning. On my way back, I glance sideways at the door. It hasn’t been broken. But therein lies the real danger. The lion is still on his way; he will arrive tonight. As long as he isn’t here, one lion will be like a thousand lions waiting for me, night after night, behind the dining room table.

In spite of all this, the lion isn’t as bad as the horse. I know all about the lion: how he came, what he is thinking every time I go for a drink of water; I know that he knows why he doesn’t jump every time he doesn’t jump, that one night, when I decide to meet him face to face, all I’ll have to do is walk into the dining room on that other side of the table. About the horse, on the other hand, I know nothing. He also arrives at night, but I don’t understand why he has gone into the lift, nor how he manages to operate the sliding doors, nor how he presses the buttons. The horse has no history: all he does is go up in the lift. He counts the floors: first, second, third, fourth. The lift stops. My heart freezes as I wait. I know the end will be horrible, but I don’t know how it will happen. And this is the beginning. Horror of the unexplainable, or the cult of Descartes, is the beginning.

. . .

But it’s not the beginning of the beginning. It is the end of the beginning. The time has come when the little people inside the radio are soon to die, and God will also die, sitting cross-legged on top of the Heavens with his long mane and a gaucho’s poncho. Because throughout the whole beginning, the world was made so that God and the dead could sit and walk on top of the Heavens; that is to say, the Universe is a hollow sphere cut by a horizontal plane; moving on that plane are we, the living, and this is called the Earth. From the Earth, looking upwards, you can see the inner surface of the upper hemisphere, and that is called the Heavens. Or the floor of the Heavens as seen from below. If you go through it, you can see the real floor of the Heavens, Heaven itself, on which the good dead walk and where God is sitting; to us, this seems difficult, because the floor of the Heavens is rounded, but the dead can hold themselves upright on a Heaven like that, and so can God, because He’s God. Underneath our floor, inside the lower hemisphere, is the burning Hell, where little red devils float around together with the evil dead.

Now, before the end of the spherical universe, and before the lions and the horse, in the very heart of the beginning, are four cups of chocolate on a yellow plastic tablecloth. I’m four years old, and it’s my birthday. But there are no guests, no cake with candles on it, no presents. The three of them are there, of course, sitting around the table; but in the beginning they don’t count, because the three of them have always been there, and a birthday hasn’t. I am alone in front of four cups of chocolate and a yellow plastic tablecloth. I’m moved to tears. This must be what it’s like to be poor, and I’m supposed to feel terribly sad. The roof of the kitchen is made out of straw and the walls are of mud and my body is covered in rags; wind and snow seep through the cracks of my poor hut. I’m dying of cold and hunger while, in the palace, the spoilt little princess celebrates her fourth birthday with a ball: coaches at the door, dolls with real hair and a monkey that dances for the princess alone. I drink my chocolate. I weep inside my cup. And this really is the beginning. The trick of stories — the trick of the power of the imagination — lies in the beginning.