Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

Lucía, on the other hand, does know how all the words should be because she reads the dictionary. She takes it with her into the bathroom and spends hours locked in there where nobody can bother her. The dictionary is a bit battered and has a story that predates Mariana’s birth. Stories from before her birth give her a hollow feeling in the heart. Not the ones from the time her mother and father first met, because those are so old they’re practically fables. The ones about her mother and aunts when they were children even more so. There were six Malamud sisters (not counting the boys) and all of them were wild, but the wildest must have been her mother, because now they’re all old ladies and she’s still wild. Mariana loves the stories about the Malamud sisters because they were very poor and very prankish and laughed at everything, and because they lived next door to a family of cheerful and friendly Italians who ended up being Mafia chiefs. By contrast, the stories in which Lucía features but isn’t yet born give her that sense of emptiness because they show that her mother, father and Lucía lived happily without her and had no need of her existence. She hates that — but nothing is as infuriating as the dead girl. The dead girl appears in some of these stories from the past. Lucía and her mother talk about this child and about how they waited for her and some of the things that happened while they were waiting, but they never mention the thing that causes her the most fear — and not any kind of fear but a peculiar, retrospective kind. They never say that she would not be in the world had this child not been born dead, and that nobody would be any the wiser. Mariana hates this child and is tremendously happy that she’s good and dead. But that also frightens her, since the worst thing you can do in life is take pleasure in the death of another person, especially a sister, so she can’t tell anyone about this and it’s the most terrible secret she keeps. That dictionary dates from the time of the dead girl. It was given to Lucía before the child was born, because nobody knew that she would be born dead, so they were happy and brought round presents. Apparently it came on a little shelf, with six story books, three on either side of the dictionary. Mariana’s never seen a mini-bookcase: she believes that it has been her lot to live in a time in which there aren’t such beautiful objects. She enquires about the storybooks that came with the dictionary. Nobody knows anything, nobody remembers anything, they have disappeared without a trace; vainly she tries to imagine the splendour of those books which will never again be possible on earth. It’s unfair that all that is left of such a splendid collection is the dictionary. She hates dictionaries and that whole business of the words being listed alphabetically. In fact she despises alphabetic order, the ABC strikes her as the most boring system in the world — there’s no way to learn it because there’s no reason in it. If something can’t be rationalised, it can’t be learnt. She used to think that the letters came in an order of familiarity so that you would simply need to decide which was the better known of two letters, the N and the R, for example, and that way work out the position of each letter, but — what was the K doing before the M? And the S after the Q? With the alphabet the only option is to learn it parrot-fashion and it’s a shame to see the words arranged that way, with some very boring definition underneath them, it makes them ugly; she likes to see a word in the middle of other words so that, even if you’ve never heard it before in your life, you work out what it means and it’s like a game. But Lucía loves the dictionary and spends hours locked in the bathroom reading it so as not to be disturbed. Or perhaps it just seems like hours to Mariana because she’s on the other side of the door waiting for her sister to come out so that they can play together. When her sister’s in the bathroom, Mariana imagines that if she comes out and they play she’ll be happy, but when Lucía does emerge it’s hard to believe that happiness can ever be attained: Lucía gets furious because, even though Mariana said — and repeated — that Lucía can stay in there forever, for all she cares, that she’ll never ask her to come out, ultimately she hasn’t been able to bear the wait and has ended up calling her, which (as she already guessed would happen) seems bound to have unhappy repercussions. Not on one occasion, though. That time her dream comes true because Lucía, after her confinement with the dictionary, comes out of the bathroom looking for her: she wants Mariana to listen to a song she composed in the bath about her yearning for an encyclopedia. Mariana knows what that is because, a few days ago, when her sister mentioned wanting one for the first time, she asked: Luci, what is an encyclopedia? And Lucía gazed into the distance and said: It’s a book that has all knowledge in it. She had to make a great effort to imagine that totality of knowledge and another, even greater, to imagine a book big enough to contain it. Was this really the way things were? That Lucía locked herself away to read a dictionary but really wanted an encyclopedia? That she longed for her sister to come out of the bathroom only to regret it and feel even more wretched than before? That perfection was impossible in this world? At any rate, the afternoon that Lucía seeks her out to sing the song she composed in the bath comes pretty close to perfection.

The song tells of Lucía’s longing for an encyclopedia, about the money that would be necessary to buy one, and ends abruptly: And since I haven’t got it I’ll just have to wait . Straight to the point, the way Lucía likes her poetry. What is poetry? You’re asking me? Poetry is you . They say what they want to say, no messing around. But things are rarely so simple. That business with Amado Nervo, for instance — Mariana can’t even bear to remember that ill-fated afternoon, with Lucía lying in bed reading Nervo’s The Immovable Beloved and her being a dog, never happier. She doesn’t even like the title of Nervo’s book, imagining a paralysed woman in a wheelchair whom she can’t imagine anyone loving, let alone writing poems for but, to be on the safe side, she’s never told Lucía that. And then her sister says: Listen to this poem. Lucía always reads her things she really likes and Mariana loves it, especially when she reads her the funny bits out of novels, because she can understand them and they both roll around laughing. But this time she puts on that tone she uses when she’s going to read something sublime so, with trepidation, Mariana prepares to hear the world’s most beautiful poem. It’s called Cowardice , her sister says, and that reassures her, because Mariana knows very well what cowardice is: it’s the worst thing after treachery and no hero ever forgives it. But in the poem Lucía’s reading nobody flees the battle or quakes in the presence of the enemy. The beloved woman walks past with her mother — whose presence in a love poem is already questionable — and has hair the colour of flaxen wheat. Mariana doesn’t know what flaxen wheat is but can’t help picturing the beloved wearing a kind of bush on her head. To make things worse, all the wounds the poet has on his body — we don’t know how he came by them but there seem to be an awful lot — start opening up and bleeding in front of the beloved and the beloved’s mother. The poet says very sadly that he let them walk past without calling out to them, but Mariana can’t help feeling that this was for the best, since he’s gushing blood. Things are no clearer by the end of the poem. Did you like it? Lucía asks. Yes, Luci, she says. Then Lucía, who has a mean streak, says: Explain it to me. It’s the most awful moment of her life. She can only think of the wounds all opening up at once and the scene seems revolting to her but it’s too late to say that. Is she a coward? Undoubtedly. Why did you say you like it if you didn’t understand a single thing? Lucía says. She’s unyielding and merciless, and when she’s with her, Mariana doesn’t know which is worse, to get things wrong about art or to tell a lie. It’s not like with God, who can look into her head and so knows why she lies when she does and knows that she doesn’t do it to hurt other people but rather to benefit herself — and God’s fine with that. It’s so reassuring to have someone really know how you are and not to have to keep giving explanations. Besides he’s happy with her because she talks to him like a normal person, unlike the others who are always sucking up to him. God finds her approach to life refreshing. Every night, when the light goes off, she puts her hands together as she’s seen people do in the illustrations of books, and she asks him for things she wants. She can’t kneel beside the bed because Lucía would notice, but God doesn’t mind about things like that. He knows perfectly well that she can’t kneel because she’s Jewish. She doesn’t fully understand what it means to be Jewish, it’s annoying that she can’t take communion and that, at school, instead of studying Religion, which is so lovely with all those lives of the saints, she has to take Moral Philosophy which seems to be the opposite of Religion, though she doesn’t entirely understand what it’s about and neither, it seems to her, does the teacher. In one class she makes them write an extremely dull essay on thrift, in another she reads them The Brave Little Tailor and in another she recites a poem about a peach that must not be allowed to stain the immaculate whiteness of the dress belonging to the little girl eating it, because the stain will never come out. At the end there’s something about wicked deeds but it’s the least interesting part of the poem and Mariana can’t help thinking that if the author wanted to talk about wicked deeds he should have put them up at the start. The only thing she learns from the poem is that, of all the things that may stain a dress, a peach is the worst and from then on, although her clothes are quite messy and often have ink marks or chocolate and other kinds of stain on them, every time she eats a peach she takes extra precautions because, thanks to that poem, she’s convinced that if peach juice falls on her dress she may as well throw it out — the stain won’t ever come out. But this doesn’t help her to understand fully what it means to be Jewish. Her mother will say of a person who fasts on the Day of Atonement that he or she is ‘very Jewish’ as if that were rather admirable, but she makes no great effort herself to be very Jewish: on the Day of Atonement she simply eats little. Going without food makes me feel listless, her mother says, and she seems sure that that’s an incontestable reason not to fast. Mind you, I don’t eat very much, she says. Mariana thinks that her mother is not very Jewish and her father even less so than her mother, because he eats the same as usual on the Day of Atonement, and Lucía least of all because if she’s told she has to go to the synagogue to see her grandparents on the Day of Atonement, she vomits and falls ill. Clearly as a family they are scarcely Jewish at all, but she still can’t kneel beside her bed or say Little Jesus I Love Thee, because that’s what the goy do. It’s quite complicated: she can not do the things Jews do but can’t do the things the goy do, so instead of saying Little Jesus I Love Thee, she says Little God I Love Thee. And she prays to him with her hands together every night, when nobody can see. As for asking, she does that one thing at a time because God may know what she’s like, but he has no reason to know all the things she wants. There are things she wants just once and things she wants all the time: she asks God for those every night. One of the things she asks for every night is that, in six and a half years, when she’s the same age as Lucía is now, she’ll know as much as Lucía. And a little bit more. The trouble is that Lucía wants her to know everything now, because otherwise she’s an idiot. Who wrote The Iliad? asks Lucía when they’re playing Questions and Answers one day. Homer, she replies. Who wrote Don Quixote of La Mancha? Miguel de Cervantes, she says. Who wrote The Divine Comedy? Lucía asks. (Sometimes, when they aren’t playing, Mariana likes to imagine that they are playing Questions and Answers and that Lucía asks her a question that is so difficult she never would have imagined such a young girl being able to answer it. And she answers brilliantly! But imagination doesn’t get you far with Lucía. Who wrote The Divine Comedy , is what she asked.) Since Mariana hasn’t the faintest idea who wrote The Divine Comedy , she can’t even invent an answer to cover her ignorance. So she opts for the moral high ground. Valiant, honourable, true to the last, she lifts her gaze and says, I don’t know, Lucía. But her sister, impervious to this moment of moral high standing, tells Mariana she’s a moron anyway. You moron, she says, how can someone of six years old not know who wrote The Divine Comedy? And the game ends there.