Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

Something must have come over Lucía and me because we pushed Señora Daisy — who was trying to hold us back — out of the way, then went one to each side of Perla. It’s all right, Mother, we’re going now, said Lucía. And Perla: It’s clear that you two need to be kept on a tighter rein. We admitted that she was right and in the teeth of Señora Daisy’s shrill explanations of how natural and even healthy our mother’s reaction had been and how this little incident merely confirmed how stimulated our beloved and very special mother was going to feel in this optimal environment, we took Perla by the arms and made our way towards the exit.

We could scarcely contain ourselves, Lucía and I, we had to cover our mouths and stifle the odd snort so that Señora Daisy and the Coveralls didn’t notice our predicament. As soon as we were outside with the door closed behind us, we exploded. We had to let go of Perla so as to double up and laugh properly, long and hard. They would have had her playing nursery games, said Lucía, weeping with laughter. And I said: That Daisy woman had no idea who she was up against. Clutching our stomachs we leaned on each other so as not to fall over, helpless with laughter beneath the recriminatory gaze of Perla who was gradually retreating into a world we didn’t know but about which I, there in the street had begun to have an inkling. I remembered the torrejas . That afternoon on which we had such an overwhelming desire to eat torrejas that we couldn’t wait another second before sinking our teeth into one. Then I, in the same way that I deduced every night the presence of the lion, worked out a formula that we worked on feverishly, perfecting it to a point where Lucía could have a go at making them. The end result looked more like dispirited doughnuts. It was wonderful, all the same. Pointing at the doughnuts we murmured torrejas, torrejas , and laughed so much that Perla, who was just coming home, heard us from the passage and when she came in and saw the doughnuts wanted to get angry but fell about laughing instead.

Now as then, I saw us from the perspective of Perla’s empty gaze, laughing until we couldn’t laugh any more in front of the green door of the Happiness Care Home. And there and then I was sure that I had never stopped knowing the lion. That, in the middle of the night I still conjured his menacing presence and, paralysed with fear and curiosity, I still waited for him to leap.

And I understood that the cruelty of life is precisely that: you never really lose yourself. Although the teeth may soften in your mouth and a mist of forgetfulness and tiredness cloud your understanding, you’re still prey to the same vanity, the same fear, and the same uncontrollable desire to laugh that illuminated the other ages. Even if you have forgotten what you were frightened of, and there is no longer any reason to be vain, and you aren’t sure what the hell it is that’s making you laugh.

The three of us got into the car and set off home. Lucía and I not knowing what we were going to do with Perla, Perla not knowing where she was being driven, all three of us terrified and full of a sense of triumph that was entirely baseless. Absurd, devastated, invincible. Until the end.

All we knew about the comet was that someone had plunged to his death to dodge its arrival, that its tail had luminously sliced across certain nights of the Centenary Year of the Argentine Independence, that, like the Paris Exhibition or the Great War, its path through the world had memorably illuminated the dawn of this century. The man on the wicker chair had spoken of a photograph he had seen, he couldn’t remember where, in which several gentlemen wearing boaters and ladies in plumed hats were staring as if bewitched at a dot in the sky, a dot that unfortunately (he said) did not appear in the photograph. I had recalled an illustration in my fifth-grade reader: a family paralysed by the vision of the comet passing through the skies. In the drawing the family members could be seen sitting at a table, stiffly erect, their eyes full of terror, not daring to turn their heads to the window for fear of seeing it again. (As soon as I said this, I had a feeling that the text referred to a Montgolfier hot-air balloon, but since I didn’t know what a Montgolfier hot-air balloon was — I wasn’t even sure that such a thing existed — and since I found it suggestive that I had attributed the family’s surprise, whatever the real phenomenon might have been, to the arrival of the comet as early as the fifth grade, I didn’t correct my conceivable mistake and everyone, myself included, was left with the impression that the comet was capable of sending people into shock, of leaving them frozen in their seats.)

We had a number of questions. How big did it seem when it was last seen? How big would it seem now? How long did it take to cross the sky? The man next to the table with the lamp suggested that, since it was as fast as a plane, unless one paid close attention the second it went by, snap, one would miss it. The man on the stool said no, that it rose over the river at nightfall and set over the western high-rises at dawn.

‘That’s impossible,’ said the woman leaning against the French door, ‘because then it would seem stationary in the sky. And something that seems stationary can’t leave a trail on the sea or in the sky, anywhere.’ Since this seemed illogical but plausible, several of us agreed with her. What we couldn’t agree on was the size.

‘The size of the moon,’ said the woman in the light-coloured armchair.

‘Of a very small star,’ said the man who was putting on the tape of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik , and he added that it could only be distinguished from the star by its tail. And how long was the tail? The questions never stopped.

‘My grandfather told us he’d seen it,’ said the man smoking a pipe. ‘He was in the courtyard, sitting on a three-legged stool’ (I thought the stool was an aleatory detail and I immediately decided that his testimony was suspect) ‘and the comet went by, neither very slow nor very fast, like a scarf made out of light. No: like a scarf made out of air that was also light, I think he said.’ But, of course, this piece of information was simply too unreliable: given the age of the man with the pipe, his grandfather must have died long ago. Even if he hadn’t made the story up (as the detail of the stool led one to suppose), who could swear that the grandson remembered the words exactly? And would he have been able to tell what was false from what was true? In fact, he had repeated the thing about the stool without lending the superfluous detail the slightest touch of irony.

But why were we to care what that grandfather saw? We had no need for grandfathers; our turn had come at last: it would cross the skies of our time. And we felt fortunate in those unfortunate days just being alive, still able to move around happily, still able to wait happily on the night of the comet.

Actually, that whole year had been the year of the comet, but since the previous week everyone’s hopes had run wild. The newspapers predicted glorious events: this time it would pass closer to the Earth than at the beginning of the century; it would look mainly red; it would look mainly white but would be dragging an orange tail; it would have the apparent size of a small melon, the length of a common snake; it would cover seventy percent of the visible sky. This last possibility intrigued us the most.

‘What do they mean, seventy percent of the sky?’ asked the woman drinking coffee.

‘But then almost the whole sky will be the comet,’ said the man who had come with his girlfriend.