Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

The phone rang just as I was putting a red nine beneath a black ten. I rushed to answer. Was I expecting the call of the muse or of eternal youth? It was neither of these. In fact it was the Guardian Angel: Señora Ema has just called me. Your mother was supposed to be there at noon but she hasn’t arrived. She left here at twenty to eleven and seemed fine. Do you have any idea what could have happened to her?

No, I don’t have a clue. I’m sitting on the steps of the Faculty of Engineering and I don’t know nor can imagine ever knowing in the rest of my life where Perla may be. I picture her dressed in immaculate white leaving her house to walk the twenty-five blocks to see Ema, Specialist in Beauty Masks (quite some title). Ema applies a mask, beautifies you, smoothes away the fatigue, the fear, the corruption, and sends you out ready to face the day. To understand why Motherpearl — eighty-five years old, husband long dead, skin like parchment, cranium disfigured by osteoporosis, ditto crumbling bones — walked twenty-five blocks every month for a beauty treatment you have to try to picture her hard at work in the tiny apartment that El Rubio (after years travelling around provincial towns looking for a job that didn’t make him miserable) finally managed to rent so that the four of us could have a home; you have to picture her polishing the floors until they shone like mirrors, all the while dreaming of herself wrapped in big, fluffy towels, pampered by expert hands that would send her back into the world looking like a girl from the aristocracy, with her lovely face made even more lovely. What I’m trying to say is that Perla went every month for her beauty treatment simply because now she could and it mattered very little to her that her face was falling to pieces. Wrapped in those big fluffy towels doubtless she felt splendid and charmed, albeit belatedly. And she walked those twenty-five blocks to Ema’s — as well as other routes to various destinations — because three years ago, sitting with Lucía opposite the doctor’s desk as he had calmly predicted the gradual deterioration of her bones she, with the authority of someone who is always sure she’s right, had said: Doctor, the day that I can no longer walk I would rather die. And she said it without a shade of self-pity because the years had made her wise. (Or perhaps she had always been wise and it was just that I, overwhelmed by her determination to protect me from every kind of misfortune, hadn’t seen that at the time but only in the last few years when, drinking maté together in her house and cheerfully tucking into the croissants I had brought, I realised that, being so capricious actually made her a better listener, able to understand anything you might care to tell her.) So she started walking for the simple reason that movement is better than immobility and that if one has legs one should use them as well as possible, secretly knowing that if she ever stopped one day she would never start again. She used to look impeccable from head to foot, all in white, coordinating shoes and a matching bag and would set off on that day’s journey like someone who has all the time in the world because old age had granted her enough serenity to sit down every so often in the window of a cafe to get her breath back and watch the world go by. And she always reached whatever objective she had set herself. Through sheer determination and sheer eccentricity. The only exception being that heavy March afternoon when she didn’t arrive at her destination.

And there I was, sobbing on the steps of the Faculty of Engineering, with not the faintest inkling of where to look for her. I’ve lost my little rooster, taloo talay. The song came back into my mind and now I had time to ask myself where it came from. From Perla, of course, her song for lost things. It was infuriating. Lucía and El Rubio and I would be turning the house upside down in pursuit of the missing object while she hindered our efforts with her singing. For three nights I haven’t slept, taloo talay, thinking of my little rooster taloo talay, I’ve lost it, taloo talay, poor thing taloo talay, last Sunday taloo talay. Where did she find them, for God’s sake, all the pimps, the roosters, the blind girls, the handsome swineherd Jerinaldo, the shepherdess called Flor de Té, the poor old man who, from the tram, de dum de dum saw his daughter go by, a shameless hussy, half-drunk on champagne, there are just too many emotions, sometimes I prefer El Rubio, who has only one song. It’s a very sad song and El Rubio says that when he goes to the South with his brother León, they’re always singing it. It’s strange to think of El Rubio and his brother León, who’s quite ugly, driving along the road at night and singing something with the words little Virgin Mary in God’s name I beg you, don’t be mean to my papa, he gets drunk and often beats me, since we lost my dear mama. And the funny thing is that, the way El Rubio sings it, it’s hard to tell if the song is making him laugh or cry. It seems to be a bit of both, that on one side he’s making fun of it and on the other he feels enormous compassion for that unhappy girl. You can never tell with El Rubio. Perla gets annoyed with him because he sings badly and she wants her loved ones to do everything well, but El Rubio sings whenever he feels like it. Calmly — because he almost never loses his temper — but he always does what he wants. He probably doesn’t even realise that it upsets her. The man’s so absent-minded that every lunchtime when he leaves to go back to work he says Bye lads. As if he had never noticed that it’s only Perla, Lucía and me around the table. Bye lads, just like that, and it’s even worse with the chandeliers.

The chandeliers arrive three years after we move in and it’s quite an occasion. This is the first time that Perla, El Rubio, Lucía, and I have lived in our own house. In truth it’s not a house, it’s a tiny apartment, and it isn’t ours because we rent it, but after twelve years of marriage, it’s the first time that Perla has been able to unpack the tablecloths that she embroidered for her trousseau and a blue china tea service given to them as a wedding present. For a while the only furniture we have is the beds we sleep in, a folding table, and a few benches. Every lunchtime for two years Perla spreads out on the dining room floor the poncho that El Rubio won in a country music competition, then brings the table from the kitchen and opens it out over the poncho. When we’ve finished eating, Perla folds the table and puts it back in the kitchen, covering it with one of the embroidered tablecloths from her trousseau. When it’s prettified like that she can forget that it’s an ugly folding table and be pleased to look at it. As more pieces of furniture start to arrive she surveys these, too, with quiet joy. They are big pieces, polished to a shine and filling up all the empty spaces. Only the chandeliers are missing. In every room there’s still a cable hanging from the ceiling and a bulb hanging at the end of it like an affront. Until one day there’s enough money and Perla goes to buy chandeliers. She tells us that they are splendid and for once it isn’t a lie. One lunchtime I come back from school to find them in place. The one in the dining room is particularly sumptuous: ten lights above a shower of lead crystal teardrops. It hangs over the table and seems to fill the small dining room ceiling entirely. Underneath the glassware, Perla, Lucía and I sit ready for lunch, waiting for El Rubio, bursting with excitement.

His arrival is always a happy occasion. As soon as you hear whistling in the corridor you know that a few seconds later the key is going to turn in the lock and that before coming all the way in, he’s going to peer around the door at us, as though checking that we’re the right family. El Rubio has lovely, flecked eyes somewhere between grey, green and blue; beneath his wry, slightly sad gaze the world falls into precarious order. So, on the day of the chandeliers, the lock turns and he peers at us around the door as usual. The three of us are waiting expectantly as he must have noticed, because he doesn’t come all the way in but studies us, disconcerted, from the doorway. We wait with bated breath. Finally Perla can’t stand the tension and asks him: Haven’t you noticed anything different? El Rubio is one of the kindest people I have ever known. He would never knowingly disappoint anyone. And so, still at the door, with that look he sometimes has of being all at sea, he struggles to identify the change that has us all enrapt. Finally his face lights up. With a complicit smile, happy to make us happy he says You bought bananas — right? That’s El Rubio all over. So absent-minded and unassuming that he dies one summer without ever having told us he was ill.