Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

Today they’ve been walking for hours and there could be no more ecstatic day on earth than this one, the day that Irma discovers Néstor’s hands and finds out what it is like to fall in love for life and decides that nothing else matters, except this crazy boy. Because he is a crazy boy: just a lad. Now night’s falling in San Cristóbal and she knows it more than ever because she has seen a side of him nobody else sees. Out of control: crazy in love. He stops on a corner and, even though people are watching, raises his hands in front of his face, challenging the air. A left hook, a blow to the face; shouting to his laughing girl and shouting into the wind that he holds the whole world between these hands and that he will give it to her.

It makes her heart pound to see him like this. For that reason — because now Irma’s desperate to throw herself at him, to run her hands through his hair — she spontaneously reinvents herself as a wise woman, like the one who said yesterday that all the guys are into that and means to say it again, this time for him. So that he learns. Néstor walks over to her and she laughs; she’s ruffled the big man’s feathers — how funny! She’ll say it now as though mocking his obsession.

‘But what is it with you men nowadays?’ Her observation sounds stern, reproving. Righteous.

All of them; her brother too: mad about football. At home they’d like to wring his neck; get a job, they say. They don’t understand the way boys are. Let him be, she always says; he’ll get over it. And it makes her laugh, her weighty mission to protect the big boys.

She doesn’t know exactly when she stopped laughing. At some point Néstor grabbed her roughly by the arm and in that second she knew the horror of losing everything.

Afterwards, looking for him in dark streets, she thinks that it was the way he looked, not his hand, that made her universe explode.

She learns the reason for his reaction later on. They’re standing beside a wall and looking down at his hands he says that boxing is different. There are people who don’t understand it, right, but they aren’t boxers: they’re just doing sport. This is worthy of something better, Negra, and if I can’t do it, nobody can. I’ve known it since I was a boy: I saw my old man working away with his plastering trowel every day and you wonder where’s the point in a life like that. Not me. I’m going to the top, the very top, and with these, see, with these fists and this body. Because that’s what boxing is: you give it everything you have. You don’t keep anything back. If you get there it’s because you laid your soul on the line. Anything less is Sunday afternoon sports.

She doesn’t understand. But it’s enough to look in his eyes, which are shining and strange, for her to say that she believes him. Later on a night-bound patch of waste ground, lying in Néstor’s arms, she thinks that yes, that world of vertigo and pain that she was so frightened to see in his face a moment ago is one they will share from now on. For the rest of their lives.

. . .

But Rubén said nothing: just shrugged his shoulders again and went out. When he came back with the meat he went straight to his room without even looking at her; the wet prints left by his trainers seemed like a provocation to Irma. Hearing him sneeze behind the door, she was going to shout to him to look after himself but that would be absurd, Weren’t you the one who sent him out in the rain?

‘What’s wrong?’

That was absurd too: Néstor’s question at five o’clock the following morning.

‘Why do you ask?’ she said.

Before leaving, he said:

‘My Negra is getting tired.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said, ‘your Negra doesn’t get tired.’

And nine years earlier it would have been the truth.

. . .

She went to look at the boy as he slept and told herself no: today he won’t go to school. The previous day’s drenching had brought on a cold, she told him later; he should just stay in bed. So she wouldn’t go to work? No, she wouldn’t go; she was going to stay at home and look after him.

‘When I’m older,’ said Rubén, ‘you won’t have to work any more.’

She smiled.

And three days later, on Saturday, sometime before Néstor headed out to the stadium, her back to him while she cleaned a window, she said:

‘My brother’s opening an ice-cream parlour.’

Néstor looked up surprised because a moment ago he had asked, again, what’s wrong.

When Irma turned round, his expression was still questioning, without understanding. He was never going to understand, it was futile; at heart he was still the man he had always been. But there are things that are fine when you’re twenty-one years old, or when Néstor Parini is out wooing his girl. Now he is thirty, the age, or so he told her once, when a boxer is finished. That’s when you have to throw in the towel, see Irma, before you start to look pathetic. And afterwards? Forget it. There was no afterwards you said, and that was frightening. But it’s been like this for nine years. What are we waiting for now?

She saw shock register on Néstor’s face and realised that she had been shouting.

‘Can you tell me what the hell we’re waiting for now? For you to get killed in the ring so you can finally be noticed? Don’t you see that you’re finished? Or will they have to put you to work sweeping the stadium floors so that we have food in the house? Come on, tell me now that you weren’t born to sell ice cream; tell me again that you were born for greater things. To be a laughing stock, that’s why you were born. Jumping rope in front of the mirror while your children die of shame. Castrated in bed so you can satisfy your coach the next morning. Well go on, it’s your big day. Get going or you’ll be late. Show them who’s boss, Néstor Parini. Like the man you are.’

The door closed before Irma finished speaking. Later, a neighbour would remark on how pale Néstor Parini looked as he left the house. Irma, still standing by the window, tried to persuade herself that none of that had really happened: she could never have shouted at him like that; in the street Rubén had to be pulled away from someone who said that news of the outburst was all over town; when Anadelia asked about the match, Irma said there would be no boxing tonight and that it was already time to go to bed, and the girl cried harder than ever; Rubén, when he came in, smiled at his mother and Anadelia wanted to hit him. At half past ten Irma put on the radio and, while waiting to get a signal, had a premonition that something senseless was going to happen and that this event had already been inexorably set in motion. The commentator was saying it isn’t a fight to write home about. Irma heard Néstor Parini and felt calmer because nothing unusual was happening. Anadelia, from her bed, heard Parini and stopped crying. And Néstor Parini, who, one night about twenty years ago, under a lamp post of a small town, had clenched the fists of his gigantic shadow, vowed to raise himself above everyone else and heard a unanimous clamour shouting his name, heard his name again: Néstor Parini.

And he knew how to win.

In the same way that someone can grasp in a moment the actual size of the sun, and never forget it. With the same simplicity that prompts us, after marvelling from the ground at the mystery of vertical men, one morning to raise ourselves on our legs and start walking. In that same way, Néstor Parini knew how to win. Right now, opposite Marcelino Reyes. Tomorrow, when he climbed back into the ring. Yesterday, in every fight he ever contested. And in those faraway, elusive fights, the ones he imagined on sleepless nights. The ones that he would never have.

Irma, who had scarcely been paying attention, had to bring her head closer to the radio. In the fourth round she said thank you God and went to call the children. The neighbours woke up when they began to hear the imperious tone of the broadcaster coming through the wall. ‘Something’s happening at the Parinis’,’ said the neighbour and put on his radio. The commentator declared that in all these years this was Néstor Parini’s first good fight. And Néstor Parini wondered if it was for that, to hear them say that, that he had spent thirteen years punching a sandbag.