Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

And speaking of El Rubio, why did you have no choice but to lie to him? I asked her eventually, because I was shocked that a girl would think of deceiving the man of her life on the very day she met him. Well it’s simple, said Perla, like someone who’s about to explain the most natural thing in the world: he had obviously asked me when my birthday was because he wanted to give me a present.

Perla had turned twenty-two only a month previously and telling the truth looked like wasting an opportunity. So she took two months off her life and he didn’t disappoint her: on the afternoon of her fake birthday — they were already on their fourth or fifth date — he waited for her at the corner of Pringles and Guardia Vieja with a blue velvet box wrapped in tissue paper: inside, a little Girard-Perregaux watch.

It was that sort of attention to detail that made Perla fall so madly in love with him. Not only was El Rubio the kind of man to give a girl a beautiful bracelet watch, he also danced the tango vals better than anyone and in a café he would pay for everybody, as if he were loaded with money. His friends (Perla said) called him Paganini. One December afternoon, nearly a month after the fake birthday, he even turned up with a new DeSoto. But she didn’t want to get in that day or indeed on their subsequent dates: it’s frowned upon (she told him) for a single girl to get into the car of a single man. It was a shame because after the DeSoto he never had a car again in his life, and she loved cars. She used to imagine herself crossing Buenos Aires next to El Rubio in a gleaming voiturette . He never knew about that at the time. Patiently he would leave the DeSoto outside her house on Pringles Street, then the two of them would take a tram to Lezama Park: Perla adored going to Lezama Park — and singing tangos about dying lovers and having long conversations about her future. If he got sick of all that jacaranda and tuberculosis he didn’t let on: he would never knowingly have slighted anyone. He did accidentally, though. One day during the carnival he arranged to meet Perla at the corner of Corrientes and Maipú and stood her up. Just like that, stranded amidst the streamers and the cheap cologne, in the ecru linen dress she had embroidered herself in cross-stitch.

And then she heard nothing more of him, apart from a photograph, sent months later from Ernesto Castro, For Perla, From the beach . No apologies, no promises, nothing to cling to. It should also be said that the photograph was dreadful: he was sitting on the ground near a kind of shack, in some get-up of shabby pyjamas, fraying hat and espadrilles, looking more like a vagrant than the tango-dancing object of her desire. (Sorting through other photos of El Rubio thirty years later — in Azul, in Olvarría, in General Acha — it struck me that his character was hard to pin down: he could just as easily be pictured as a bather or a gaucho; in an impeccable white suit and panama or in a T-shirt, swilling wine with low-lifers. The only thing we can know for sure is that he loved himself, I said to Lucía, and we couldn’t stop laughing, despite the whispering presence of death. Because he was always taking photographs of himself: in good times and bad. And he even had the nerve to send Perla, who was all willowy elegance and cross-stitch embroidery, that one in which he looked so ugly in the scruffy hat.)

We’ll never know how she came to reconcile the vagrant with the Paganini. She must have been broken-hearted because for five years she continuously sang that tango Be gone! Don’t come here begging me to remember each hour of our tragic romance . But the fact is that she turned twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-six, rejecting one after another, all the suitors who presented themselves to her.

At twenty-seven she went to see a gypsy. (My mother was an odd kind of Jew: she liked priests for their sermonising and gypsies for their fortune-telling, not to mention that every Good Friday she took us to the cinema to weep over the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ.) The gypsy told her that she was going to meet the love of her life soon and give him her left hand. She foresaw a home in which there would be daughters but no money. The money won’t stay, she said; it’s going to come in and go out but never stay. Since she was desperate to be rich, Perla decided not to believe the gypsy’s prophecy. And six days later she was waiting to meet a new suitor in the house of the only one of her sisters to have married a millionaire.

The thing she most liked about that house was the Baccarat crystal chandelier in the dining room and what she most disliked was the deep, bitter line on her brother-in-law’s forehead and the wart beside his nose. Subconsciously she assigned the same line to the suitor who was at that moment making his way to the house. She was wrong. That man was a brick, affable and kind. En route to the house he ran into a friend who had just arrived from Bahía Blanca taking advantage of a free passage given to him by virtue of the Eucharistic Congress that was being held in Buenos Aires. There and then the brick invited his newly arrived friend to share in his good fortune.

‘I’ve been invited round to someone’s house,’ he said. ‘Apparently they’re going to introduce me to a pretty girl. Do you want to come along?’

The friend did want to. It was El Rubio.

Of all that happened in that house the one salient fact is that Perla gave El Rubio her left hand to shake because the right one was bandaged up. Knowing her, it isn’t too far-fetched to suppose that the bandage may have been somehow contrived, because she was always a cheat, which isn’t to say that events didn’t transpire exactly as she told them — that two days earlier she got a nasty burn on her hand and needed to bandage it — because it’s also true that there was always something a bit magical about her.

At any rate, afterwards, when the two men were in the street, barely had his friend ventured a few words on how pretty Perla was (he called her Perla, without compunction) than El Rubio stopped him dead.

‘Be careful what you say,’ he said, ‘because that woman is my fiancée.’

And he must have known what he was saying because eight months later they were married.

. . .

So when did you tell him the truth? I ask, in my parents’ bed, more concerned about the moral problem than about the story itself. And not surprisingly. Why would any child familiar with that tale of the girl who plays next to a pond with a gold ball, accidentally drops it in, then gets in return a toad that finally turns out to be a prince, be much impressed by the story of a man who turns up after a five-year absence at the house of the brother-in-law of the woman who’s been waiting for him? The very least one asks of any story is that there be an element of chance in the plot. The problem of truth, on the other hand, does worry me. Although not in the way it worries Lucía, who believes that one should always tell the truth, regardless of the circumstances, because it’s the right thing to do. The problem of truth worries me because I can’t imagine going through life with the weight of certain lies on your back. A fake birthday, for instance. There are literally millions of things relating to a person’s birthday, so if you are going to lie to one person about your date of birth, in order for that lie never to be discovered, you’re going to have to keep modifying each of those millions of things for the rest of your life, not only for the sake of the person to whom you lied but for all those others to whom the deceived person may speak at some time or other. The complications are infinite, beginning at the moment of the lie and ending only at death. All of which goes to show that lying did not actually constitute a moral problem for me. It was a purely practical question — even if, in front of Lucía, I was prepared to swear that the act of lying was abominable in itself. That was a lie that didn’t frighten me because I considered it a matter of self-defence and because it replaced a hazy concept about good and evil that I felt impinged on me, although I wasn’t able to explain it. Besides, it was a lie that began and ended with Lucía (it was cut to her size), which exempted me from having to apply it to millions of cases.