Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

‘You’re twisting everything!’

This is new. For Lucía to butt into the story is totally unexpected. And anyway, she isn’t twisting anything. She’s simply telling her version of the facts.

‘That’s not true. You’re only telling a part of it, which isn’t the same thing. And the part that makes me look like a monster, too. But, who used to play Shopkeeper with you? And who made you fairy bites? And, by the way, this doesn’t count as butting in, it’s self-defence.’

The Shopkeeper thing is undeniably true. In the afternoons when they sat at the table in the little kitchen to have their milk, Lucía used to be the Shopkeeper. How much cheese would you like, Señora? Would you prefer a baguette or a French loaf? Then brandishing the knife she would cut with the firm but generous hand of our local shopkeeper. Mariana loved it when Lucía pretended to be a shopkeeper. Every afternoon, watching Lucía prepare the milk, she waited for those minutes of happiness to arrive.

‘You see? Your subconscious has given you away. I prepared the milk, I cut the cheese, I made the pancakes. You sat and watched.’

She sat and watched. And gave instructions. She knew it all, the theory of everything: how much flour the pancakes needed, what a bain marie is, how to stir the milk so that it doesn’t stick.

‘And what about the torrejas? Bet I’ve got you there.’

She had indeed. Mariana hadn’t the slightest idea how to make torrejas . She knew as little on this subject as Lucía did, worse luck. Because sometimes they both had an unbearable urge to eat torrejas —the word alone sounded like a promise of happiness. They knew they had bread, and perhaps eggs and honey, but they didn’t know how to make them. So they would spend a long time discussing the properties that something with such a beautiful name ought to have, throwing in everything crunchy, everything golden and delightful that is possible on earth. Perhaps it’s for that reason (and also because of the way life’s absurdities could make them laugh and laugh, clutching their sides and weeping helplessly) perhaps it’s for that reason that over the years, and despite their differences — I pretended to be a dog to warm up your feet, and I had to make your hot milk, I had to look after you all the time because you were a bit stupid — despite the roles, never abandoned, of younger and older sister, they still turn to each other when all else fails.

But let’s not get sentimental. These girls have a peculiar relationship — otherwise there’s no pathos.

‘You see, that’s what I mean. You don’t continue with the torrejas theme because all the perverse stories serve your purpose better. I wonder what else you’ve left out?’

The fairy bites, for sure. She promises to come back to the fairy bites, but not right now. She’s losing the flow, her characters are rebelling and she, usually so careful — this event here, the other one further on, avoid sentimental outpourings unless they’re relevant because if all the elements aren’t in the right place there’s no story — so I lock myself at home and don’t come out until someone lends me a little grey hat? Shh — who’s this interrupting now? — she’s starting to realise that this story, which began with a fairly orthodox I —though perhaps it was teetering even then — and the discovery that she’s lost the lion, has cunningly slid towards a she , who far from confronting her loss tiptoes around the edges, as though venturing that nothing serious has happened here, neither pimples, nor failure nor death. A phrase that can’t help but lead back to my supposed similarity to Perla. And that’s not the story. The story is the lion, how I lost it and how I sat petrified in front of the officer who was asking now for the third time: You can’t recall any distinctive characteristics of the missing person?

None, I said; not one. And with a bovine docility I got the rest of the questions over quickly, so that the monobrow would have no cause for complaint and the nursing mother would think, how nice, what a normal mother this lady has, how normal and loving and perfect all the mothers of the world are and this lady too, even if she isn’t a mother, poor thing, how normal she seems.

Conclusion: I left Precinct No. 17 as ignorant of my mother’s whereabouts as I had entered it and with this new problem of not being able to think of the lion. Heat swept over me like an infernal wave.

I looked for a public telephone. From the answering machine in my house, Lucía’s voice dazed and discouraged, outlined the steps she had taken, the ones she would take next and her readiness to die; on the answering machine in her house I recorded my own recent adventures and my own desire not to die without first killing all the old people in the world. I also rang my mother’s house, just to be safe, although I knew that the Guardian Angel could not yet have returned from her business in La Plata. You go to La Plata, I had said to her less than six hours earlier. Lucía and I can manage. What rubbish, Lucía and I can’t manage anything that isn’t The Divine Comedy or torrejas . Or rather the illusory taste of torrejas , because we still haven’t learnt how to make them. You concentrate on your studies, Perla used to say, when the time comes that you need to cook I’m sure you’ll pick it up. Another of her lies: we know our way around a formula for deoxyribonucleic acid or a hendecasyllable but the simple prospect of frying an egg paralyses us. The Guardian Angel would certainly have been able to find Perla, she knows what to do in these situations, she is competent and friendly; at the very least she could have taken me into her lap, I’ve lost my little rooster taloo talay I would have sung, in the words of the nursery rhyme, and she would have wrapped me in her great angel wings and my mother and the lion and all the lost things screeching at that moment in my head would have vanished from the face of the earth. But she wasn’t home, taloo talay. I hung up and walked aimlessly around Las Heras: all I wanted was to sit down in some doorway and sob my heart out. There, on my right, were the steps leading up to the Faculty of Engineering — why not stop there? After all, I didn’t have Perla dogging my every step, making sure I didn’t fall over, or bump into something, or cry, what reason have you got to cry, Mariúshkale, when I’ve given you everything, cod liver oil to make you the strongest, green apples to make you the most intelligent, stories to feed your imagination, little piqué dresses to make you look aristocratic. What more could you need, my darling daughter? The lion, mother, I need the lion and the sad thing is that I should have realised before, this very morning I could have thought of it, instead of staring like an imbecile at the computer screen, all my energy invested in online patience as if existence came down to this, putting a red Queen beneath the black King, a black Jack beneath the red Queen, moving to the right-hand box the Ace of Spades, the two of Spades, the three of Spades, as though the minute movement of the mouse that generated this displacement of cards on the screen were enough to keep me from noticing a fait accompli: that it wasn’t through mere distraction or poetic idleness that I had been momentarily diverted from a path towards greatness . My God, how long had it been since I last spoke that word, and not with coy italics but loud and clear with the head-to-toe conviction that the girl who had invented a lion from her bed could aspire to nothing less. And yes. Perhaps she could. Except that (I could have found this out playing patience if the phone hadn’t rung then) the diversion wasn’t momentary and appeared to have no solution because I was no longer that girl.