Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

So one March morning, less hot than that afternoon two years earlier when Perla and the lion were almost lost for good, Lucía sat at the wheel of her car and I came out of my mother’s house on the arm of the shaky and demented old lady who had once been our Motherpearl.

With difficulty we settled her into the back seat. I got in next to Lucía.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Perla, as soon as the car started.

‘We’re going, mother,’ said Lucía. ‘The three of us are going.’

‘What did you say?’ Perla said.

‘That all three of us are going,’ said Lucía, shouting.

‘Which three?’ said Perla.

‘You, Mariana and I,’ shouted Lucía.

‘I?’ said Perla. ‘I what?’

Lucía blew out hard.

‘You’re coming with us,’ she shouted.

‘You’re coming with us?’ said Perla.

‘Not me,’ shouted Lucía, absurdly. ‘ You’re coming with us .’

‘and’

Under her breath Lucía said, ‘You could speak a little bit too, no?’

‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’ I shouted.

Perla seemed uninterested in my observation.

‘I don’t think she can see anything,’ Lucía said.

‘She can see a bit,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think she’s interested.’

‘Where are you going?’ Perla said.

‘To a place I’ve been told is really lovely,’ Lucía shouted.

‘I doubt there’s anything lovely about it,’ I said.

‘I didn’t say it was , I said I’ve been told .’

That’s Lucía. She can be ferocious all right, but she never, ever lies.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Perla.

Lucía murmured something I didn’t hear.

‘It’s strange,’ I said, ‘with such dishonest parents, where did we both learn not to lie?’

‘I taught you,’ said Lucía.

‘Ah yes,’ I said. ‘You taught me everything. If it weren’t for you I’d be an ignorant brute.’

‘Yes,’ said Lucía. ‘You would be an ignorant brute.’

Perhaps she was right. I’ve often thought as much. With such a capricious mother, such a vague father and given my own natural inclination to contemplate my navel, what would have become of me without an older sister to keep goading me onwards? I didn’t say that to her, of course. I gave her a sideways glance: she was driving too cautiously. My worst trait is laziness, I thought, and Lucía’s is wariness. And what about fear? Where did the fear come from?

‘No speeding,’ said Perla.

I glanced outside. To break the speed limit in these conditions would be nothing short of miraculous. We were advancing along Córdoba Avenue (if ‘advancing’ isn’t putting too optimistic a gloss on things) at something slower than a crawl.

‘I’m not speeding, Mother,’ shouted Lucía, but gently.

I waited for an answer; Perla had never accepted that her opinions were not the only valid ones. But there was no retort from the back seat. I turned round to look at her. She was staring into nothing and seemed completely to have forgotten her earlier admonishment. She may even have forgotten that she was in a car with her two children. Or even that she had children.

‘I think that it’s the best option, at any rate,’ I said.

Lucía looked relieved.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Besides, if it’s got everything they say, she’s bound to love it.’

I didn’t believe that she would love it. Rather I thought that it would be the best solution for us. She, all love and French piquet, had raised a couple of perfect incompetents who hated old age, feared illness, and were scared to death of this new circumstance flung up by fate (why hadn’t Perla educated us for such an eventuality?). That was why we were driving, at walking pace, down Córdoba Avenue trying to convince each other that we were doing the right thing for our mother and for the world and that our destination really was a happiness home in which Perla would finally rediscover her gift for singing tango vals and El Rubio would peer around the door to watch her with his enigmatic blue gaze.

We didn’t look back at her. Neither Lucía nor I looked back. We took it as a given (well I did, and I’d swear that Lucía did, too) that our mother was going contentedly towards the unknown. I didn’t even think (I had to make an effort not to think it but I was managing that, out of a devotion to all that is beautiful and true) that to Perla, who had yearned to travel, this journey by car to the Happiness Care Home was probably much the same as looking at the sea, with El Rubio at her side, from the deck of the Giulio Cesare (something she had dreamt of doing so often, without ever managing a more glamorous crossing than the one across the river to Montevideo on the Vapor de la Carrera ), or being taken in a coffin to the city of La Tablada, where he, affable, ironic and ever youthful, had been waiting for her for forty years — but not for this old biddy, please, bring me the one who used to sing tangos, says El Rubio, from his sepia photo, the one in the little linen dress she embroidered herself in cross-stitch, the one who dreamt of being rich but who used to laugh until she cried as if laughing, when all is said and done, were the greatest fortune a person could have — and who could enjoy an anchovy sandwich as though it were a piece of heaven.

. . .

It was during that season, which lasted a whole summer and into the autumn, that the four of us lived crammed into a back room and El Rubio, for the first and only time, seemed settled. It was just after the time we spent living with our grandparents and before we moved to the flat with chandeliers. El Rubio had taken on the lease of a small shop and we slept at the back, me sharing a small bed with Lucía then Perla and El Rubio in the double bed, a yard away. It was wonderful: I could feel my sister’s body next to mine and hear my parents’ breathing, their hushed conversations. I didn’t have nightmares in those days. It was a transition period, a time with no ties in which each person could hope for whatever he or she wanted: El Rubio that at last he would be able to buy the car he and Perla had been dreaming of, that he wouldn’t have to count his pennies any more; Lucía that she was going to live in a real house where she could put together a library. I wasn’t yet expecting anything very much — I wasn’t even aware of being happy. (I learnt an awareness of happiness, I remember, one summer night four years later in the flat with the chandeliers. It must have been at the end of January because a few days later it would be my eighth birthday. We were going to have our first summer holiday and for the first time I was going to see the sea. That night I didn’t need to hope desperately that Lucía would wake up and chase away my fears: she was as awake as I was and both of us were sitting on her bed, talking about the sea, about how each of us dreamt that the sea would be. At dawn we went outside to wait for El Rubio’s friend to bring his car. I had never experienced the street at that time of day or the silence, heavy with people’s hopes, that defines that hour. Lucía and I didn’t argue about anything. Arms around each other, united in our excitement, we walked along the deserted street singing a bolero. That was the moment when I understood what happiness is.) During those back-room months I used to look forward to the hot nights, but I wouldn’t have been able to explain exactly why. El Rubio used to pull down the shutters on the little shop, leaving the door open to let in the vibrant summer air and we would turn off the lights so that we couldn’t be seen from the street and eat anchovy sandwiches made with pumpernickel and lots of butter and drink — beer for the parents, Bilz soda for the children — and chat, and laugh a lot, and nobody thought about death. And even though I couldn’t yet put it into words, years later I knew that I had been happy.