Liliana Heker - Please Talk to Me - Selected Stories

Nicolas Broda belonged to that type of people who are cardinally unemotional. It is certain that if, one night, looking up into the sky, he saw two stars about to collide, instead of waiting for the bang he would set out to gather the necessary information. And on the very next morning, after a lot of fiddling with Lagrange’s equations applied to the mechanics of three heavenly bodies, he would have reached the conclusion that yes, a satellite launched in the past thirty-eight days and another only four days ago would create the illusion of a crash if observed at the time and place from which he was now staring at the sky.

On the morning of July 7 he woke up because a saucepan or something metallic had just been dropped in the next room. Every house sounds different , and for a split second he had the intention of asking himself why the word ‘different’ had crossed his mind. I’ve got to get up , he thought, but he didn’t even open his eyes because he vaguely remembered that no, of course, he didn’t have to. He didn’t have to get up because it was Saturday or because the alarm had not yet rung. It’s true that he had to visit the Computer Centre to inspect a routine tryout (he was a Fortran programmer, as well as an advanced-maths student), but it didn’t matter if he went now or later. He stretched luxuriantly and reasoned that this was the great thing about Saturdays: they begin like any other day, and then, suddenly, freedom. Freedom? But he immediately discarded this avenue of thought because it occurred to him that it was asinine to start the day with hairsplitting.

He made a small effort and opened his eyes. The next effort took longer and required a little more will power: he turned his head to see the time. It was 8:30. The alarm had not gone off.

For his third effort — pulling his arm from under the blanket and reaching for the clock — he required nothing at all, because his movement was sparked by real curiosity. He wanted to know whether the alarm was broken or whether he had forgotten to wind up the clock. He immediately realized that he had forgotten to wind it up. He also noticed that the alarm hand, usually fixed at 8, now pointed to 8:30. Whatever did I do last night? He tried to remember. He was now wide awake.

The saucepan made a noise again, something like a light tapping that stopped at once. It came from his parents’ room. He remembered his father, in his dressing gown, standing on the balcony. Suddenly he remembered what he had done last night. He had been in Segismundo Danton’s apartment. They had discussed the complex theory of a binary chain, several women, the novels of Musil and finally the times (long gone) when they used to see Tarzan films at the Medrano Theatre. Nicolas had walked home feeling as light as a bird. He later discovered, to his dismay, that his birdlike condition — the feeling of having the brain of a bird — could be attributed to his having forgotten in Segismundo’s apartment a briefcase full of IBM manuals, a dump at least thirty pages long, a rare collection of Maupassant’s stories, a universal treatise on pre-Pythagorean mathematics, personal documents, a few odd bits and pieces and the keys whose absence — though not so literally weighty as the rest — obliged him to ring the bell for almost ten minutes and then to exchange socio-economic arguments with his brusquely awoken father. And yet, in spite of this incident, he had felt so carefree and elated that it wasn’t strange, he now thought, for him to have forgotten to set the alarm. For the time being he didn’t care to consider the question of why the hands were pointing at 8:30. He felt happy. So he jumped out of bed like a soldier and began to sing ‘Ay Jalisco, no te rajes’ with all his body and soul. ‘Porque es peligroso querer a las mala-aas!’ He held the ‘aas’ until he could hold it no longer, then he opened the door of his room.

An unknown woman in a lace-trimmed dressing gown — fat, with peroxided hair — was coming out of his parents’ bedroom.

‘Will you stop shouting?’ the woman said.

She went into the bathroom and slammed the door shut.

Nicolas interrupted his song as if someone had switched off his current. There’s a limit to surprise , he thought. Over that limit there’s inhibition . He stood in the middle of the hallway, not knowing exactly what to do.

The woman opened the bathroom door and poked her head out.

‘Hey, Alfredo,’ she started to say, but she stopped herself and stared at him with interest. ‘Store’s open,’ she said, pointing at Nicolas’ open fly.

Nicolas rearranged his underwear. He couldn’t help admiring the cool head he was keeping under such extraordinary circumstances. He tried imagining the scene when he would tell all this to Segismundo. ‘And then an old cow came out of the toilet and called me Alfredo.’ ‘Sure, and then you both started to sing the drinking song from Traviata , right?’ ‘Look, I swear, there she was, I could have touched her.’

‘So?’ the woman asked. But something in the way Nicolas was acting must have worried her, because she changed her tone of voice. ‘You feeling sick, baby?’

‘No.’ Nicolas replied. ‘No.’

He realised that the woman was approaching him, her hand stretched out in front of her with the unmistakable maternal purpose of feeling his forehead to see if he was running a fever.

‘No, no,’ Nicolas said again. He arched his body backwards like a soccer player about to hit a ball with his head, turned around, walked away and threw himself into the bathroom with such violence that the woman screamed.

First he looked at himself in the mirror. He needed to think things over, quietly. No, what I need to do is wash my face . He washed his face, his neck. Then he put his whole head under the tap. He reasoned that a rational explanation — based on such limited verifiable data — of something as irrational as what had just taken place would imply that he was somehow accepting the irrational. He was certainly capable of not letting himself be deluded by appearances. He dried himself energetically, ran his fingers through his hair and began to stretch out his hand to reach his toothbrush.

What he saw made him stop his hand before it reached its goal. Five toothbrushes. Though he could never have described the toothbrushes used by his parents and his brother, he could nevertheless confirm three things: a) they were not these; b) there had always been only four toothbrushes in the bathroom; and c) his own, with the rubber tip — highly recommended for the prevention of paradentosis — wasn’t there.

He didn’t try to understand. Instead, he thought of doing something more practical: getting dressed. Being in his underwear added a difficulty that it would be wise to overcome. He combed his hair. Hanging from a nail on the door (he had never before seen a nail there) he found a pair of jeans and a shirt. He accepted the fact that they weren’t his. The end justifies the means , he thought a little incoherently as he was dressing. He noticed that the shirt and the jeans fit him fine.

He came out of the bathroom feeling nervous. He didn’t have a clear idea of how to behave, what to do. Should he call that woman? Above all, what should he call her? She had said to him that his ‘store’ was open. Also, he did have a fever. He sighed and tried not to think about what he was going to do.

‘Mom,’ he said.

After a few seconds the bedroom door opened a crack, and the head of the blonde woman peered through the opening.

Nicolas took a few steps towards her.

‘Lady,’ he said decisively, ‘first let me tell you that you are not my mother. I also want to know the meaning of all this, and where,’ he coughed briefly, ‘where I can find my mother.’