Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

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What are his distinguishing features, asked the officer, disregarding the fact that this missing person — as I had just informed him — was called Perla and was my mother. Female, I answered. Sniggers at my back (I guessed from the monobrow) alerted me to the mistake. I was just so tired. I had endured so many grillings in police stations and hospital emergency departments, had tripped up so many times on the slippery police patter that even if I were to give a less vague answer than ‘female’ or ‘white skin’ I doubted it would spark any understanding in the face of my questioner — of course, of course I knew what he was after, but what was I supposed to say: lying in bed with her throat slit, officer? Lost an eye? A drooling stuttering wreck? And anyway, a few minutes earlier I had discovered something with such disheartening consequences for my future that nobody had any business expecting rational answers from me. Features, not sex, said the officer. I could feel the monobrow’s raspy breath on my neck: he didn’t like time-wasters. I said nothing. Distinguishing features — characteristics, prompted the officer. I wanted to tell him that my mother was, from top to toe, a distinguishing characteristic. I suffered, officer, how I suffered as a child because I longed to have a mother like all the other mothers; a longing she must have inculcated herself with her songs. The mothers in them, when they weren’t blindly abandoning their children, in which case they were called heartless — which is to say unmotherly, given that the heart is the quintessential maternal organ, as can be deduced from that poem (often recited by my mother) in which the son, at the request of his cruel lover, stole his mother’s heart as she slept (probably dreaming of him), and as he reached the dark threshold of his lover’s house he stumbled and the heart called out ‘Are you hurt, my son?’—when they had a heart, as I was saying, they were saints who prayed alone for the nation to bestow five medals on their five heroes or selfless old ladies washing clothes in the kitchen sink, welcoming home with open arms the disoriented son who had been seduced by some other world and swept by the dangerous new passions vice had taught him into a deep, churning sea. Mother! the delirious boy would cry on his return, I’ve been consumed by sorrow, bereft without your love. And she goes: Come here, scallywag, a kiss will make it better. That was how mothers were, according to the songs my mother sang. But not her. She neither cruelly abandoned me nor devoted herself to solitary prayer. And she did the washing, yes, but grumbling all the while, because she thought herself destined for something greater than the laundry. She must have had a heart, but it was arbitrary and deceitful. For instance, on the very day she first met El Rubio she had no option but to lie to him. How could she have had no option, I thought, lying in my parents’ bed. It must have been a Sunday morning, because Sunday mornings in the marital bed were reserved for story-telling. The stories were always different. Sometimes they were nothing more than a detailed account of the previous evening’s movie. (On Saturday nights Perla and El Rubio went to the cinema; he in a wide-brimmed hat and white silk scarf; she with a grosgrain rose pinned to her lapel and a hat that transformed her — Perla looked radiant beneath her hats as though these delicate creations of feathers, tulle or straw had the power to banish the little disappointments of her daily life.) That kind of story was told only once and presented no greater complexity than the plot of the movie itself, which was no small thing because Perla recounted every detail and even (as I found out in time) embellished a few so that, each Sunday as I pressed against the soft body that seemed to promise a safe harbour even as the voice filled me with fear, I would hear about one man’s heinous scheme to convince his wife that she was going mad, or the dead woman in league with a housekeeper to torment her widower’s new, young wife, or the deaf-blind girl savagely raped by a brutal man. What is ‘raped,’ I asked, intuiting some menace behind the word. It’s the worst thing that can happen to a woman, said Perla, firmly, creating one of those pockets of darkness that I would struggle to elucidate on my journey towards the uncomfortable adulthood I occupied now, as I sat dumbstruck before the officer of Precinct No. 17, trying not to ask myself at which moment the thread had weakened or broken, if there ever had been anything like a thread, anyway. The films in themselves weren’t necessarily disturbing because they always had a beginning and an end and no ramifications. The real-life stories, on the other hand, sometimes linked to stories from other Sundays, but they were unreliable links. And the story could get lost in the details. Or be nothing but details, as tended to happen with clothes. Clothes came as part of a story but then were described with so much theatre that they ended up becoming the story itself, like that party dress in lemon-yellow crepe, covered from top to bottom in rolled-up feathers that Perla called aigrettes , a diamante nestling at the centre of every single one. I had to make an effort not to picture my mother as a bird-woman, gigantic and malign with the face of a sparrowhawk and a feathery body, an image that returned to trouble me at night, like all the others, and which I had seen once in a book; I let myself be swept along by the words— aigrette , lemon-yellow, diamante: words whose significance I didn’t always know but which submerged me in a beautiful haze that had no need of illustration because what was sketched by the words was, for me, better than any picture. When it came to the clothes, however, the process was complicated, not least because it meant believing Perla (how can a dress covered in feathers not be monstrous? Is it possible to distinguish a diamante in the centre of a rolled feather? Early on I suspected that Perla was exaggerating or changing things as she saw fit) but because it also forced on me the appreciation of a beauty that was alien to me. A holm oak, a pitcher, a wagon, these things appealed to my own notion of beauty, but lemon-yellow crepe transported me to a world I could only covet through Perla’s own covetousness.

It was even worse with the accessories, which conferred on an outfit its crowning splendour. Perla, who had carefully drawn a design and saved her pennies to pay for the fabric and the making up and followed with a critical eye the work of the local seamstress until the dress of her dreams was finally a reality, had also given careful thought to the accessories. If even one was missing she would rather shut herself away in the house and never show off her new dress. And given that most of them were generally missing and she never had enough money to buy them she had to spend a long time working on the consciences of her five sisters (who were almost as selfish and quarrelsome as she was) until each one lent her what she needed. Only then, when everything was in its place, the grey beret picking up the collar of the little suit, the crocodile clutch bag in exactly the same colour as the shoes, the gloves no shorter or longer than they should be, would she puff up like a peacock and go wherever she had been invited. I was so beautiful (she would say, finishing her story in bed) that when I came in everyone said I looked like a girl from the aristocracy .

I didn’t have a very clear idea of what the aristocracy was, but I knew that it was a state highly fancied by my mother. What confused me was that, in her songs, aristocrats were dreadful people who invariably thwarted the desires of Perla’s heroes and heroines (consumptive worker-girls, dying orphans and starving poets). Hearing about these tragic lives, to which Perla gave somewhat cheerful expression, singing in the style of a chanteuse as she cleaned the house, I often wept for the world’s wretches. But whenever we went out, all of us, even El Rubio, had to look like members of the aristocracy.