Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

. . .

But this isn’t the beginning of the beginning either. It is an awareness of the beginning. It is the beginning of an awareness of the beginning. Beyond this awareness, rising from behind strange faces like flashing images are a straw chair on a tiled courtyard, a wrinkled great-grandmother with a black scarf around her head, a madman climbing into a streetcar with a stick and, in the true beginning, a white hood. The white hood is mine. Or it was mine, I don’t know, I don’t understand what’s happening, she has it on her head now. She arrived this morning and ever since she arrived everyone is fawning over her. I’ve been told she’s my little cousin, but she doesn’t look like my cousins because she isn’t bigger than I am. She doesn’t call me her baby, and she doesn’t lift me up in her arms. But they lift her up in their arms, all the time, because she hasn’t yet learnt how to walk, like the little babies in the park. I hate her. It’s night-time already. They say she’s going to leave, and they say it’s cold out there. I run through the rooms. I throw myself against the legs of the grownups. I roll around on a mattress. I don’t care if they scream at me, I’m happy; she’s leaving. I look at her and it’s there. She has my hood on. They say it looks big on her; they say she looks like a little old lady; they laugh. I’ll sink her eyes in, like with a doll; I’ll bite her nose off; I’ll tear my hood away from her. Then it happens. Someone looks at me and says: ‘Won’t you lend your little cousin your hood?’ I don’t know what ‘lend’ means; I know I want to tear her up into small bits. I look at them. All eyes are fixed on me. Then I understand: all I need is a gesture, one single gesture, and the kingdom will be mine once again. They are waiting. They are laughing. I smile at them.

‘Yes,’ I say.

They laugh louder. They pinch my cheek and tell me I’m a darling. I’ve won. It’s the beginning.

Further back, there is nothing. I look carefully for a taste of clementine, for my father’s voice, for a smell of lip ointment. Something clean that will change my beginning. I want a whitewashed beginning for my story. It is useless. Further back, there is nothing. That hood, my first infamy, is for ever the beginning of the beginning.

There was a moment in the afternoon — usually around four o’clock, perhaps five o’clock in the summer — when the old man would lean against the window, his head a little to one side, his hand pressed against the other ear, and say in a mournful voice: ‘what a shame about the music.’ By then we might have been talking for hours about the tangos of Magaldi or Charlo and all to please him because (as Aunt Lucrecia once said) there’s no point coming to see him with a face like a wet weekend — we can make a little sacrifice to see him happy. In fact this little sacrifice was bigger than it seemed because if he was to enjoy his football as God intended (in his words), apparently the old man needed to feel a crowd around him. That meant we all had to stay glued to our seats until midnight because, as he put it, he wasn’t going to sit down and watch even the league table with the other residents in the Home, they were a bunch of old farts, and once a Basque had got so excited about a Chilean goal that he took a great leap backwards, fell on his neck, and now he’s pushing up daisies. So on Sunday nights we settled down in front of the television — Mom, Dad and me, Aunt Lucrecia, Uncle Antonito and even the twins — all grouped around the old man, who sported a knotted handkerchief on his head for the occasion and, in the absence of chuenga , that home-made gum you could buy at 1940s football matches, worked his jaws on a piece of old tire. It was even worse when Boca was playing: then it was the blue and gold shirt he stuffed in his mouth and not even Uncle Antonito, who’s a devoted follower of River, dared crack a joke; the one time he ventured that somebody’s goal had been offside, the old man jumped on him with such ferocity that if the twins hadn’t stepped in — the old man dotes on them, never mind that they wear little hooped earrings and hair down to the waist — Uncle Antonito might have gone to join that codger who cheered the Chilean goal.

In short, other than an inadequate musical accompaniment, the old man really had nothing to complain about. So whenever he started harping on this theme about the music all we did was tell each other he had a screw loose and think no more of it. Until one afternoon Uncle Antonito, who was sick of hearing about the tangos of Corsini — and especially sick of the old man greeting him with the chant You should see our goalie. What a star! — which is how Boca fans celebrated their legendary goalkeeper in the 1920s — lost his patience and as soon as he heard ‘what a shame about the music’ he said ‘What is this music you keep bleating about, Dad? Because the only music I ever hear is you yattering on all the blessed day.’ But the old man stopped him there; he raised his hand in a signal to be quiet and said loftily: ‘I’m not talking about the music I hear, Antonito, I’m talking about the music that’s missing.’

I think if it had been left to the rest of us, the story would have ended there and then. I, for one, confess that I had absolutely no interest in ascertaining what glorious music it was that the old man found lacking in his life. I was beginning to tire of his whims; it isn’t exactly fun for a girl of my age to sit with her grandfather until midnight, screaming like a banshee every time someone scores a goal and all for the sake of making him feel loved. Uncle Antonito put it bluntly: If his problem is that he can’t find some music or other, let him go and look for it up his sister’s fanny. But the twins aren’t the sort to give up so easily. They kept badgering the old man until finally he said: Well what music do you think I mean, boys? The music of Sundays.

Later they told me how they had coaxed out of him what he meant by the music of Sundays, something that had once been everywhere — or so he told them — and that you would have heard as soon as you woke up. They said he compared it to a communion or a symphony that ended only when night fell and the last of the lorries returned. Which lorries? I asked the twins. But I could scarcely make out their explanation with both of them laughing so much as they tried to imitate lorries making music.

The following week they came up with an idea: for the old man’s birthday, their gift would be the music of Sundays. All the people in their building had already agreed to help: all we had to do was persuade my grandfather that this year the celebration was going to be at the twins’ house (they live in a kind of tenement block, in Paternal) and bring the food; they would arrange everything else.

We protested, of course, but it’s hopeless with the twins.

. . .

So on the Sunday of the birthday party there we were with our platters: Mom, Aunt Lucrecia, Uncle Antonito and me, waiting for Dad to arrive with the old man. The twins had instructed Dad to bring him as late as possible, and Dad agreed, but that turned out not to be such a good idea: the old man arrived in a foul mood and didn’t say hello to anyone, merely observing that even the old neighbourhoods were a disgrace these days. He said that there was no communion any more, no harmony, and that nowadays everyone was looking out for themselves. It wasn’t a promising start and things went downhill from there. I spent lunch wondering why I was wasting my whole Sunday in this tenement for the sake of pleasing some miserable old fantasist. By the time coffee arrived I had made myself a firm promise that this would be the last Sunday I sacrificed for the old man (and in fact it was). Perhaps we were all thinking the same thing, because suddenly we all fell silent, as though by design. And in the midst of our silence the sound of a radio came from the window. It was transmitting, rather louder than you’d usually expect, something that sounded to me like the Avellaneda Derby. See, Grandad, we were right, said one of the twins; you can still hear music in the barrios. The simulation had begun.