Please Talk to Me: Selected Stories

THEY HAD SEEN THE BURNING BUSH

‘That’s the way it is,’ Néstor Parini had said. ‘Life’s like that.’

The observation was for Irma (she still had black hair in those days and he used to call her his Negra) but on that occasion she paid no attention to the words; it was his eyes that held her. They were like the eyes of a man possessed.

Nine years later, those eyes were also what Anadelia liked best about her father, although she didn’t exactly mind that he was a boxer, either. She had seen boxers on the television and been taken once to the place where they train, but that wasn’t the reason why: in fact it had frightened her, the way they hit each other, and the faces they pulled. Mom had explained that Dad didn’t have anything against the other man: boxing is like a game, she said. Anadelia didn’t believe her, but she still liked thinking that she had touched his gloves and knowing that some Saturday nights he was on the radio and that if she really listened she might pick up the odd word from the bedroom, another formidable left hook, this is no longer a fight, my friends, and would be able to infer that all this was being said about her father, although it was much better before when she hadn’t had to infer anything because she hadn’t had to listen to the radio from her bed in the other room.

It was different before. On the Saturdays that Néstor had a fight on, they would talk of nothing else and in the evening the three of them — Irma, Rubén and Anadelia — would sit down to listen to the radio together; Irma used to bite on her handkerchief and cuff them if they made a noise. Occasionally she cried. Any neighbours who were still awake in the small hours would sometimes hear shouting. If nothing else, Anadelia used to say, having a father as a boxer was a great way to scare your friends. You’d better, or my dad will get you.

That wasn’t an opinion shared by her brother, Rubén. One Sunday morning he had stopped asking what happened the night before, and it was just as well, Irma told herself, because she’d rather get the silent treatment than have to keep trotting out the same explanations: Dad wasn’t feeling well last night — he shouldn’t even have been there or Best fight of his life, but they fixed it for the other guy or He was up against a new kid, you know Rubén, sometimes it’s not so important to win, while Néstor would be yelling why give the boy so many explanations? He must have been listening, for Christ’s sake. But the boy’s silence wasn’t healthy. On the days after a match he never wanted to go out, even to run an errand.

‘Looks like they stuck it to your old man again.’

And it was true: he had lost. Perhaps people thought that in boxing only winning counts, or that being someone’s dad means you have no right to lose, ever. At any rate, Rubén didn’t want to go out any more: he spent all day Sunday at home, kicking anything in his path, and swearing at people.

Néstor also stayed indoors on Sundays. Apart from one time when he went out slamming the door behind him and didn’t come home for two days. Before leaving he had punched right through the window and hurt Anadelia, who was standing watching: he came back on Tuesday, drunk and shaking. That was the only time he ever went out. He spent Sundays at home, sleeping all over the place, naked to the waist and glistening with green oil. It was strange how they had finally got used to that pungent smell of mint and alcohol. There was a time when Irma would laugh about it. Let this be the last time — she laughed as she rubbed it in — that you come to me all beaten and bruised; otherwise some other Negra can go looking for it down in Riachuelo, he thinks his perfume works wonders on me. That was all long ago, though. These days Sundays still smelled the same — they didn’t even notice it unless they were coming back in from outside — but Irma wasn’t laughing any more.

The worst thing about Sundays isn’t the smell, Irma thought: it’s the football. And not because of the shouting that sometimes reached them through the window but because of the boy shouting indoors. Excessively. Deliberately. Avenging himself, with every goal he cheered, of a year-old grievance: his father’s great hand tearing the picture of his football team off the wall. It’s so that you learn, he had said, and to start with Rubén had watched him, fearfully. A son of mine should be prepared to tear his own heart out to get to where he wants, like I did at your age. I got by just with these (and he looked at his own hands as if they belonged to someone else) because you have to know how to stand up to everyone, you alone against them, to show what you’re made of. Put everything on the line. And you come to me with eleven poofs — film actors by the look of them — as interchangeable as football cards and who fall about crying if anyone so much as puts a finger on them.

It was like growing up in an instant: the scales fell from Rubén’s eyes. He stood facing Néstor, who had ripped down his poster with one swipe and was now calling him queer, and saw everything differently. Who was this man to lay down the law, to him, someone who had to hide indoors the day after a fight? Because you can say yes he lost, so what, once. But not over and over. One day someone or other’s going to ask, and not without reason: ‘what exactly makes your old man a boxer?’ And the insults will come next. That’s why Rubén thinks who am I afraid of? and holds his gaze steady. And keeps watching him, even when Irma slaps him across the face, to teach you to grin when your father’s talking to you. And Néstor Parini has to withstand his son’s gaze.

‘That boy’s gone wrong,’ he said that night.

Irma said he hadn’t: he was a bit rebellious, but incapable of malice. And it occurred to Anadelia that her mother was lying. Rubén hated his father, she could have sworn as much, she who knew her father better than anyone because one Sunday morning, when she had moved closer to watch him sleeping, he had woken up. That gave her a shock because Mom said he mustn’t be disturbed when he’s asleep, but her father had squeezed her against his chest, which was big and hard, and asked her who he was, What in God’s name am I? was the question, and Anadelia had answered that he was the best in the world because he was a boxer. Dad had cried and so had she. Nobody else knew what he was like, least of all Rubén.

Finally Irma had to acknowledge this, too. It was a Tuesday night, four days before the last fight. She had just told Rubén to go down to the store to get the meat. The boy slowly — scornfully? — turned his head and looked at the window. Cold had misted up the glass panes; rain beat against them.

‘Well you have to go anyway,’ said Irma. ‘He’s got training tomorrow.’

And she saw in her son’s eyes, which were now fixed on her, that there was something fraudulent about these words. They didn’t sound like the ones that, nine years earlier, on another night — one that had such a new smell of spring as gave her a wild desire to be with Néstor until dawn — had made Irma understand that wouldn’t be possible. He’s got training tomorrow. She’ll have to go back home early and on her own, and without protestations. Because there’s one thing his Negra has to understand if she really loves him as she says she does: he’s going to be a champion, whatever it takes; life’s not worth living otherwise.

Rubén shrugged his shoulders and Irma intuited two things: that perhaps it was true that her son didn’t love his father, and that there was something grotesque about all this. Grotesque that Néstor Parini had to eat a juicy steak at six o’clock in the morning and that she had to get up at five o’clock to have everything ready and that her son had to go out in a storm to get meat for the next morning. Why go to such lengths?

‘Because he’s got training, idiot,’ she yelled.

And for a few seconds she was frightened that Rubén would say something back. She had a chaotic presentiment of words that were going to be cruel, wounding and irrefutable. Words that, once out of Rubén’s mouth, would bring the world down around them. Or at least her part of the strange, vertiginous world that Irma Parini didn’t comprehend but which she had lived in since the age of eighteen, when she had entered it as one enters a dream, love-struck, falling into the madness of others, of men who burn while they wait, bound by an obsession that will either lift them to the highest reaches or eat them alive.

. . .

‘With these,’ Néstor said, looking at his fists, and she believed him.

It’s an evening in Barracas. They’ve been strolling in Patricios Park, the sun is setting and Irma is happy. He’s just told her that he’s a boxer. Irma pretends to be amazed, though she already knew this. When they first told her (it was a friend who found out because Irma, ever since she laid eyes on him, speaks of nothing else) she laughed the easy laughter of a woman who knows about such things. All the guys are into that nowadays, she said, and she meant that they should stop spouting nonsense and tell her something serious about the boy with the eyes.

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.

Irma brought out nuts. Patiently she opened them for her children, who were sitting on the floor in their nightclothes. She had put on every light in the house. The three of them sat together around the radio, on tenterhooks, not wanting to miss a single word. Rubén explained to Anadelia what a cross was.

‘Dad’s winning and you’re crying,’ he said to his mother. ‘What is it with women?’ And he asked her not to wake him too late the following morning. Because he’s got something to do tomorrow. Out in the street. Irma thought how beautiful life can be, how beautiful life is when your husband starts to become somebody.

And Néstor Parini asked himself again if it was all for this. For what was left to him: to win his next four matches against four poor bastards who hardly know how to stand up and to hear Irma celebrating him as if he had accomplished a feat; to hear her in ten years’ time telling some neighbour that her husband had been a boxer in his youth. And to know that nobody, not even the dogs, will ever remember Néstor Parini. If it was for that that he had torn his heart out. And wrecked her life. And made my own son hate me.

The commentator said that perhaps this lad Parini could still retrieve his form and give us a few more good matches.

And Néstor remembered his vast shadow and grew to the size of his own shadow, lifted himself to the heights from which there’s no return and said, no. Not for that. And he landed a formidable blow right in Marcelino Reyes’ liver. Not for that. And he punched him in the kidneys. Not for that. And his fist described a cold parabola, then smashed into Marcelino Reyes’ testicles.

The spectators roared their indignation, the commentator gave shrill explanations, Irma put the children to bed, the neighbours told one another that Néstor Parini had gone mad. And Néstor Parini kept hitting, right up until the moment when the referee ended the match.

Two hours later, while a hundred thousand people were still trying to find a motive for this extraordinary behaviour, an ambulance travelled across Buenos Aires. And sometime later, when Irma had finally struck on the most beautiful way to ask her husband’s forgiveness, a police officer came to inform her of the death of Néstor Parini. He said that he had thrown himself under a train for reasons still unknown.