Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

Perla, on the other hand, hasn’t an unassuming hair on her head. Not for her an unheralded death. It’s more her style to disappear off the face of the earth en route to a beauty session. Sitting on the steps of the Engineering Faculty, I can’t think where else to look for her. I keep singing I’ve lost my little rooster taloo talay and the worst thing is that I may not be singing it for Perla but for the lion. And for all the things that once were and will never be on the earth again. But especially for the distraught woman who doesn’t know where to look for her elderly mother.

Grudgingly I got to my feet and went to look for a public telephone. There were no new messages at my house. I rang Lucía’s house and listened to her voice on the Ansaphone but decided there was no point leaving her another message when I had no news to report. I rang my mother’s house in hopes that the Guardian Angel had returned. The phone rang five times. Just as I was about to cut the line someone picked up. There were muffled noises, as though of someone struggling with the receiver. Then came the unmistakable voice of the chanteuse. She didn’t say hello. Sounding bossy and a bit cross, like someone who has decided that, whoever is on the other end of the line must be the cause of her recent troubles, she asked,

‘Who is this?’

‘Mariana,’ I said.

‘Who?’ she shouted. I forgot to mention that she was quite deaf so, as a precaution, I held the receiver away from my ear.

‘Mariana,’ I shouted, attracting glances from a few passers-by.

‘Who?’ she shouted again.

I sighed.

‘Mariana, your daughter,’ I yelled.

‘Which daughter?’ she said, as though she had a dozen. Then I knew for sure that, just as I had been fearing all afternoon, I had got my mother back.

. . .

That night Perla explains that at some point on the way to Ema’s house she felt tired and hailed a taxi. That she gave the taxi driver her address but that when they arrived her house wasn’t there and she didn’t recognise the surroundings. That neither she nor the driver, who was very nice, knew how to resolve such a strange predicament so eventually the driver, poor man, drove off and she was left alone, looking for her house and not finding it. Then a very nice girl noticed her wandering around in a state of bewilderment. She asked Perla where she lived, called a taxi and gave the address to the driver. The driver, who was very nice, brought her home and there she was.

The following day she recounts the episode again. This time the inclusion of a new detail, in direct speech, reveals that Perla didn’t in fact direct the first taxi driver to the intersection on the corner of which she lives but to another formed by the street where she lives now and the one of the little apartment where she used to sing tangos and where she closed her husband’s eyes for the last time. I draw her attention to this, but she doesn’t understand. Only when I’m explaining it for the fourth time does a glimmer of panic light in her face and she asks: How could this have happened to me? What’s alarming isn’t her difficulty in understanding something so simple; nor is that the two taxi rides couldn’t have lasted more than half an hour altogether and she was gone for nearly seven. What’s alarming is that Perla isn’t the slightest bit concerned about this hole in her life. She seems not even to have fully registered it. How could this have happened to me? is all that she’ll say every time she comes to the end of her story, and she’s referring to the mistake made with the first taxi driver, not the seven missing hours. One afternoon, for the first time, she doesn’t tell the story; just poses the question like an unresolved problem or a reminiscence. How could this have happened to me? We’re in the living room in her flat; between us, the croissants that I brought and the maté I’ve just prepared, as though continuing with these rituals were a way to disguise some changes in the real world. How could this have happened to me? she asks out of the blue. This time I tell the story: her setting off on the walk, the tiredness, the first taxi, the mistake, the searching, the second taxi, the homecoming. Every so often I smuggle in a question. Perhaps if I catch her off-guard she’ll end up remembering at which point she got lost, if she was frightened, if, like me, she sat down to cry on some steps. To no avail. Once I’ve embarked on the story, she seems to hear it merely as a kind of familiar music, an accompaniment to the maté and croissants. She only intervenes, now and then, to ask, How could this have happened to me? I’ve already told you a hundred times, Mother, I say eventually, because I’m sick and tired of going over the same ground. She doesn’t acknowledge my exasperation. There is a long silence, then she asks again: How could this have happened to me? Then one day she stops asking; she seems to have completely forgotten the mix-up with the streets. The episode itself slips into oblivion. Along with the croissants. One afternoon, having realised that I can’t stand watching her eat, I stop taking them; Perla eating is an intimate activity that only the Guardian Angel should have to witness, I decide. She never asks about the croissants. Nor about the maté. One day I stop making it for her but she doesn’t seem to notice. Now, when I go to visit her, all I do is sit down opposite her and think of the lion. Its loss is an incontrovertible fact. I’m a suffocated woman with a decrepit mother. And my conversations with Lucía aren’t about The Divine Comedy any more but about Perla’s latest catastrophe.

I confess that Lucía and I were both too slow to accept that the repetitive woman we each visited twice a week and telephoned every day was not the same as the one who used to sing, in the style of a tango vals, the ten verses of Nocturne for Rosario . Perla always had a gift for persistence: if we were ever sad or unwell she, who considered such lapses a personal failing, would harp on so much about the neglectful habits that had brought us to such a state, constantly reminding us about her own infallible methods for restoring good health, that we ended up getting better just so we wouldn’t have to listen to her any more. We were forever shouting at her to back off, because her overwhelming desire for our happiness was so trying, her love so selfish and prodigious that she turned into a kind of mother bear, determined to keep us away from all evil. She was insufferable, but a bit magical too. And we had taken it for granted that she would always be that way, so when her conversations gradually dwindled to the same few phrases, Lucía and I shouted desperately at her to stop, not to keep saying the same things over and over, that we had already understood, and we didn’t even notice that one day Perla had stopped letting the Guardian Angel dress or groom her and that the person we sat opposite every time we went to visit was a dishevelled old lady with white hair, invariably wearing a nightie, who never asked about her grandchildren, didn’t remember El Rubio and had absolutely no interest in how happy Lucía and I were.

It was the Guardian Angel who opened our eyes. One day she folded away her great wings and told us that she couldn’t cope with Perla any more. Lucía and I looked at each other with terror. It was that terror that led us to the Happiness Care Home.

According to a second cousin Lucía providentially ran into during those anxious days, the Happiness Care Home was exactly the place we were looking for. All we had to do was ring a lady called Daisy to arrange an interview. She would take care of everything else. That was just what we needed: someone to shelter us in her bosom and take charge. I called Daisy. Her sunny voice promised the ideal environment to experience the last stage of life as a veritable paradise. Bring granny and her most important bits and bobs, she said, and while we sort out the details, she’ll be looked after by staff who are so capable and kind that of her own accord she’ll beg to stay.