Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

‘Something cold will do fine, Señora,’ said the plumber.

She went off to the kitchen. It was a shrewd move on her part to leave them alone, she felt. The thing was to give them time. If they weren’t professional thieves maybe they would feel remorseful and when she returned with the drinks would say, Here it is; it was in the drain.

‘And?’ she said, returning with the drinks.

The man had taken the little grille out of the plughole in the basin.

‘I can’t see anything there,’ he said.

‘But what a disaster!’ said Señora Brun. ‘Please tell me it hasn’t completely disappeared.’

The plumber looked at her with open hostility.

‘No Señora,’ he said. ‘Nothing can disappear completely in this world.’

‘So it must be somewhere,’ said Señora Brun.

‘Evidently,’ said the plumber; he looked at his watch.

‘Where?’ asked Señora Brun. ‘Where do you think it could be?’

‘Well if it was washed down the drain it could be in the trap.’

‘Oh, and couldn’t you have a look there?’

‘Look where?’ asked the plumber.

‘In the trap.’

The plumber heaved a sigh.

‘It can be done, Señora. But it means removing the whole basin unit.’

‘Never mind,’ said Señora Brun. ‘You can’t imagine how important that little necklace is to me. I would be so grateful.’

‘Señora, let’s get this straight: you don’t have to be grateful to me. I’ll do what you ask and then I’ll charge you for it. It’s my job.’

‘Of course, of course it’s your job. That goes without saying. I’ll keep out of your way. Take out everything that you need to. It’ll probably turn up when you’re least expecting it. I’ll be close by. If you need me, give me a shout.’

And what else could I do, she imagined herself telling her friend Silvina, once things had got to that point — I had to give them one last chance, didn’t I? Besides, the man looked like he wanted to wring my neck… One never knows how these people are going to react.

She paced anxiously between the study and the living room, listening to the banging. She was dying to go into the bathroom, but no: she had to give them time to talk about it together, to reconsider: she had read somewhere that even the worst criminals are capable of some feeling.

When the noise of banging had stopped, she went into the bathroom: her beautiful vanity counter with its marble top was on the floor and there were holes in the tiles.

Señora Brun pressed her palms together, as though in prayer.

‘Please tell me you found it,’ she said.

‘Unfortunately not, Señora,’ said the plumber.

She was furious then; this was going beyond a joke, she thought.

‘But that’s impossible!’ she said severely. ‘I left it here, on this countertop! Look again, carefully — it must be somewhere!’

‘Yes, certainly. It’s got to be somewhere,’ the plumber said calmly.

The man’s perverse, Señora Brun thought that she would tell her friend Silvina; he obviously enjoys tormenting me, but I’m not giving in so easily.

‘So, what would you suggest as a solution?’ she said.

The plumber, now without the slightest dissemblance, fixed Señora Brun with a cold, cruel stare.

‘We can rip up the bathroom until we reach the drain box, if you like, to see in which section of piping your little pendant finally appears.’

He wants to kill me, Señora Brun thought. He looked at me with the eyes of a murderer, she imagined herself telling her friend Silvina, and I realised that if I tried to cross him, he would kill me.

‘Yes, rip it up, rip it up,’ she said. ‘If you can guarantee me that my pendant’s going to turn up.’

‘Yes, Señora, it’s going to turn up,’ said the plumber with a controlled savagery. ‘Sooner or later everything turns up.’

Señora Brun looked at him fearfully.

‘But what if you don’t find it even then?’ she asked in desperation.

The plumber fixed his eyes on her.

‘If we get down to the drain box and still don’t find it, do you know what we can do?’ He paused. Kill you, Señora Brun thought the plumber would say. ‘We can carry on ripping things up until we reach the river. Because, if it isn’t here, it must be in the river, right? The important thing is to find your little pendant.’

‘The river, yes you’re right, the river,’ said Señora Brun, drunk on her own terror. ‘If it’s not here it’s bound to turn up in the river,’ she was surreptitiously edging towards the door. ‘Rip it up, please, go down as far as the river. But quietly, please, very quietly because I’m going to have a nap. Help yourselves to drinks. My husband will pay you when he gets back.’

As she closed her bedroom door the banging started. Señora Brun took a sleeping pill and stretched out on the bed. In the moment she lay down her head she remembered that she had hidden the diamond teardrop there, under the pillow, hurriedly because the plumber had rung the doorbell just as she was taking it out of the jewellery box. It was a fact that, if the teardrop was there, her husband would never understand the need to rip up the bathroom, so she got up, went out onto the balcony, and threw the pendant far enough away that it would never be found. She wondered whether she would tell her friend Silvina this.

The banging was getting louder and louder, so before lying down again, she put in earplugs. Now they could smash things up as much as they wanted. Until they reached the drain box, or until they reached the river, or until nothing remained, not one stone upon another, of the safe and comfortable world Señora Brun had enjoyed.

I was at the police station, sitting between a monobrow and a big girl, dark-skinned, who was breast-feeding her baby, and I felt sticky and verging on terrified after a five-hour peregrination on the most stifling March afternoon in living memory, and I was wondering if that intimation of terror owed more to my mother’s disappearance or to the fact of not knowing what I would find, if I ever did find her, when for no apparent reason, the lion appeared. It wasn’t the first time that had happened to me, that some troubling incident popped into my head out of nowhere, there was that room with the dancing legs, for example, and me watching them from under a chair and then the boy who came headlong through them, a boy with curly hair they called Moishke Copetón. From my vantage point under the chair, I couldn’t grasp the concept of parties (even today I can’t be doing with the crush and the noise) and caught none of the words except those very strange ones: Moishke Copetón. Whenever I remember that sea of legs it’s an unchanging image, and it was the same in Precinct No. 17 of the Federal Police as I waited my turn between the monobrow and the brunette, when the lion burst in. Mostly it’s the lion I see but that afternoon, rather than seeing him only from the vantage point of my bed, as he crouched behind the dining room table, I happened to switch the focus towards my six-year-old self, lying in the bed, sensing the lion. That was when — another blow — I realised that I couldn’t think of him any more.

. . .

It wasn’t that I had forgotten the lion: I could still imagine him (there was ample time to verify this before the police officer called me) crouching behind the dining room table, waiting for the perfect moment to leap onto me, and I could also see myself, fighting off sleep with my eyes stretched wide — because I was more afraid that the lion would catch me unawares than I was of the attack itself — huddled in the dark until it became so unbearable to keep still that I had to get up (to provoke the lion, forcing him to attack once and for all). I could also recall the voice of my father, asking from the other bedroom where I was going, the first time with concern, the second a little exasperated and the third on the brink of eruption (I was careful never to get up more than three times; then, as now, I would rather be mauled by a lion than endure certain tribulations of family life), and the unintelligible murmur of my mother, calming him down or perhaps poking fun at me. My mother never had much faith in people (and still doesn’t now, truth be told). I could re-create the desperation I felt as I listened to Lucía sleeping soundly, a mere two yards from my bed — as though the world were not imperilled — and even reproduce the nightly sequence of thoughts with which I persuaded myself that a lion could indeed be waiting to pounce on me from behind the dining room table. What I couldn’t do was know the lion; it was another sensibility, different to mine, that had been frightened of it. I saw her now, fearing the lion in the same way that I saw the lion — but that was all, for I was no longer that child who lay awake in the silence, eyes wide open, straining to interpret signs. It was as if the thread that connected me to her had weakened or broken. Is that what it means to grow up? There in precinct No. 17 it seemed an inadequate term to describe the passage of my years. Growing up. The concept alarmed me. Was I, in that respect, not so different to my mother? I’m getting old now, Mariúshkale, she had said to me on her eighty-fifth birthday but with a certain ambiguity, as though to say ‘we both know that isn’t so: old age wasn’t made for me, I am invulnerable, my daughters are invulnerable, everything I have brought into the world is perfect and therefore immune to fever, pimples, melancholia, failure and death.’ So all that rigmarole, dashing from pillar to post — was it just to come here and discover I’m like her? Not in a million years, I thought with a violence that made me shudder. The monobrow glanced over at me disapprovingly and a friendly nudge from the breast-feeder informed me that it was my turn.