Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

Perla, on the other hand, has no problem lying. Neither in the moral sphere nor in the practical one.

‘I honestly can’t remember at what point I told him the truth,’ she says, putting an end to the question.

. . .

That’s typical of my mother, managing to work herself into the story in a way that reflects well on her and gives her a greater role than the one originally allotted her: that of missing person. But whether she likes it or not, her presence here is incidental and the hunt for her through hospitals and police stations — plus an episode featuring the Happiness Care Home, still to come — is merely the backdrop to this story’s real drama: the missing lion. I could have discovered its absence at any time, but it had to happen on the same day of the other loss, while Lucía was looking for my mother in one direction and I in another, communicating all the while via a complicated system of messages because, to make matters worse, the woman — or guardian angel — who usually helped my mother had gone off to La Plata on some urgent business that meant she couldn’t serve as a bridge between us. It was in the midst of this chaos that I realised I had lost the lion but, what if I had made the discovery on a quieter day? Would I have managed to avoid becoming the creature I was for the next two years (exactly until the morning in March when we visited the Happiness Care Home)? Drained, muddle-headed, incapable of any thought that didn’t somehow rebound back on me and my obvious stupidity? I would reach for a tin of biscuits and some awareness of the banality of that action would detain me halfway, crushed by a suggestion of failure. It didn’t stop me from eating the biscuit after all, but even such a small event held no pleasure for me. It’s an unpleasant sensation, especially for someone who has built her life on the supposition of a certain eccentricity or state of grace. Now I knew that that state, if it had ever existed, was deep in the rock bed of my past and not able to illuminate my present, and that the woman whose hand had reached for the biscuit tin didn’t deserve a jot of sympathy from me.

It may seem extravagant to some that a missing lion had depressed me to this degree but the thing is that, of the three or four formative events that have seemed to shape my life (inconspicuous events which I have nevertheless loaded with significance and allowed to shed light on my every act, however trivial, oh there she is the oddball, reaching out to pinch a biscuit, how crudely her brain grapples with such a simple act, how clearly she sees herself, pathetic, greedy, looking for the one with the most filling; and then, somehow redeemed by my own pitiless gaze, I could calmly savour the biscuit like someone eating consecrated bread), of those three or four episodes, as I was saying, two actually feature lions. In the first of these I’m four or five years old. I’m running in circles around my grandmother’s patio while, in an effort to mitigate my disappointment in the real world, I invent a story of which I am the heroine and in which people I don’t like get their comeuppance while other extraordinary people praise me for my charm and courage. Each time some incident or character doesn’t fit into the picture I have to change it, thus imposing other modifications which in their turn bring new imperfections that I have to remedy. As I get closer (or so I think) to the perfect version of my story, my excitement mounts and I spin around faster and faster. I’m now at a vertiginous point, on the cusp of a time when all difficulties will be over and I’ll be happy. Then, behind me, coming from the kitchen door, and with the same effect as something heavy falling on my head, I hear: ‘She looks like a caged lion.’

The second is not so much an episode as a line of thought, one I follow night after night and which leads mercilessly to the lion. I’m in bed, sensing his presence, and he is behind the dining room table, waiting for the moment to leap on me. All my nights, between the ages of five and eight, are marked by this awareness of the lion. And what I had discovered in Precinct No. 17 of the Federal Police was that the complete memory was there and that I could recount it as often as I liked and pretend to be recounting part of my life, but that for some time now — how long? — I had been telling somebody else’s story.

My actions had been emptied of meaning, something like that. And my punishment was to know it. Perhaps one day my stolidity would reach a point where I could not even recognise that turn of events and I would go through life as a perfect imbecile. For the moment I was a mutant, awaiting my transformation — into someone else? into myself? I still didn’t know from which point I was observing the phenomenon. Like a good mutant, I didn’t have an assigned category.

On the bus or queueing up to pay taxes I surreptitiously studied my fellow men and women. I envied them deeply: they seemed to bear no shadow of worry. I tried a few experiments to speed up the process of transformation. One morning, at the Water Company, I nearly managed it. I was waiting in a crowded area to arrange payment of an outstanding debt which — or so I hoped — would turn me in more than one sense into a good citizen. People were talking all around me. Hearing themselves speak seemed not to bother them. Perhaps they didn’t even hear it. They talked to fill the time and because it was easier to talk than to endure the silence. I decided to join in. First I agreed with a blonde lady that you come to pay your bill and they treat you worse than a criminal, then I made a few contributions to a plan one bald fellow had to get the country booming and vibrant in less than a year. This time no inner laughter distanced me from my companions. I was who I claimed to be, nothing more and they — you could tell a mile off — accepted me without question. I was just beginning to feel comfortable in my role when a voice from nowhere murmured: Art thou, indeed, that woman? Now I see that in a way these words anticipated what I would later discover at the Happiness Care Home. And not because of the question’s meaning: it was typical of the recriminations that regularly interrupted my actions, leaving me speechless, that particular afternoon, in front of my fellow queuers, neither able to speak to them nor to call on the vanity that would have distanced me from them in times past. Not, as I said because of the words’ meaning, but because of that archaic style which reminded me of the question the Sleeping Beauty asks, at the moment she opens her eyes, after sleeping for a hundred years and sees the Prince, who has just woken her with a kiss on the lips. Who art thou Sir, and what dost thou here? a line to which I had returned time and again, trying in vain to penetrate its perfection and wondering if I, woken abruptly after my hundred-year sleep, could have formulated such a rigorous question, condensing — and so politely! — everything that needs to be known in such unwonted circumstances. That flashback should have alerted me, but I was so absorbed by my loss that I didn’t even think about how old-fashioned — or bloody-minded — my subconscious can be left to its own devices. Not to mention Sleeping Beauty. I didn’t let myself think of her, or of the girl spinning in the patio or of the lion. These thoughts felt plundered; they belonged to another person. That girl who knows the lion, with every fibre of her being and can sense him from her bed, not the woman crying for his loss.

Bed is the place for big problems. When Lucía’s asleep, when Perla and El Rubio are sleeping, Mariana can mull over her big problems without anyone coming to scold her for not doing anything. Is thinking not doing anything? In fact that is one of the big problems she can devote herself to considering when nobody’s around to bother her. When she’s not in bed, the only other time she can devote herself to thought is when she’s pretending to be a dog — and she only does that on cold days. On hot days Lucía’s feet don’t get freezing so she doesn’t ask Mariana to come and sit on her like a dog. Lucía feels the cold easily, but not Mariana. She likes to feel an icy wind on her face and she loves frost. What she most likes about frost is the word frost. If she thinks: This morning when I went to school the street was covered in frost, she can believe that she’s in one of those story-book countries where people use sledges to get around. When it’s very cold, her mother says: Today it’s a frosting cold, turning frost into a verb and calling to mind cake decoration, which isn’t nearly as pretty. Her mother comes up with some strange verbs, sometimes. If she’s eaten a lot she says: I’m stiffed. Mariana has never heard other people use either of these words and much less the word musgrevely. It’s a word that features in a very sad song her mother sings that goes: Little Paper Boy they called him and he to see them all musgrevely. So Mariana reckons that musgrevely means demonstrating to others that you are what they think you are. They called him little paper boy and he, without deception, showed that he was one. She even has the impression that he was proud to be musgrevely. But sometimes it seems to her that the song says ‘Little Paper Boy they called him he could see them all most easily.’ Although the day they argue about it Lucía says that neither version is correct. What the song says, according to Lucía, is: Little Paper Boy they called him and he to sea had set out previously. In that case, he had been a sailor before he was a paper boy. The problem is the next bit, says Mariana, who always listens carefully to her mother’s songs. What’s the next bit? asks Lucía, who doesn’t pay them much attention. Mariana sings: Little Paper Boy they called him and he could see them all most easily, when one day on a street corner a mother with no intestines abandoned him to fate. It’s entirely baseless says Lucía, who has read William Saroyan. The two roll around laughing because thinking of that reminds them of the other preposterous lyrics their mother sings, that one about the suicidal lovers, says Lucía breathless with laughter and Mariana sings Goodbye mother, goodbye father, goodbye brothers and sisters, we must go now and we won’t see each other again; if our love on earth was true, in the tomb it will be even greater. Every time they’re about to stop laughing they remember some new example — that one that begins I loved her with the gentle soul of my evidence, says Lucía; entirely baseless , says Mariana — and they’re off again. The trouble is that there are songs they have never heard anyone else sing and the only time they dare to ask their mother if the song about the paper boy is ‘he could see them all most easily’ or ‘to sea he’d set out previously’ she looks at them as though they were completely mad and says: haven’t you two got anything better to talk about? She’s like that, their mother, it’s impossible to get the better of her. She always finds a way to turn things round and walk off cool as a cucumber. She says, ‘I’m stiffed,’ and she says musgrevely and nobody will ever know where she gets these words from. Like sarcirony. Their mother is always using the word sarcirony. She says: Don’t look at me with sarcirony, and she says: He said it with sarcirony. Mariana understands perfectly what sarcirony means. She herself often speaks with sarcirony. And so does Lucía. And El Rubio. They’re a very sarcironic family. But then one day she writes sarcirony in an essay and the teacher crosses it out with a red pencil and says that the word doesn’t exist. She refutes this and even explains the significance. But the teacher makes her look it up in a dictionary and that’s when Mariana discovers that her mother can never be entirely trusted, even when she’s using a beautiful word like sarcirony.