Please Talk to Me: Selected Stories

FAMILY LIFE

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.’

He felt one of his eyelids twitching, which bothered him no end.

The woman took a deep breath (she was certainly very fat), pursed her lips and turned around. She spoke to someone inside the bedroom.

‘So?’ she asked. ‘Now what do you say?’

‘What, what do I say?’ a hoarse voice answered, a man’s voice. ‘I say that I’ve been asking for a cup of tea for over an hour, that’s what I say.’

The woman took another deep breath, let out a sound like hmm and turned again towards Nicolas.

‘Look here,’ she said. ‘Your father’s got his gout again. And you bloody well know he’s got his gout again. And on top of everything you give me this monkey business.’

Nicolas stared at her in astonishment.

‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ he said, with such nerve or subtle humour that he was truly sorry that, here in the hallway, he was the only person capable of appreciating it.

The words seemed to have some effect on the woman. She came out of the bedroom, closed the door and approached Nicolas with the vague attitude of a stage conspirator.

‘It’s terrible, baby,’ she whispered in confidential tones. ‘Really terrible. This and that, the armchairs, I don’t know — everything. This isn’t a life, baby.’ She pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of her dressing gown (now she was wearing a plum-coloured dressing gown) and blew her nose. ‘And then last night. You didn’t hear the fuss?’ She paused but not long enough for Nicolas to answer. ‘Chelita came home at six; she’s a slut your sister, knowing how he flares up. I swear, I thought he’d drop dead then and there. You really didn’t hear a thing?’

Nicolas made an ambiguous movement with his head.

‘Well,’ the woman said. ‘You can imagine. I swear, I really swear, there are times I just want to leave you all and run away. Are you going out?’ she asked, startled.

Nicolas observed that, with no warning whatsoever, the woman had changed her tone of voice, as if her last question belonged to an entirely different scene.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Oh, good,’ the woman said. ‘Thank God. When you come back, bring me a bag of corn flour from the corner store, Brillo pads, two bags of milk and small noodles to put in the soup. Ask the man if the vaseline arrived. He’ll know.’

Just for a second, Nicolas lost his foothold. Then he stepped back on firm ground, like a conqueror. He had determined that, henceforth, he would not lose hold of the situation.

‘Can’t Chelita go?’ he said.

The woman sighed.

‘She went to bed at six or later,’ she said. ‘You think there’s a chance in hell she’ll get up before one?’

Through the closed door they heard the man with the hoarse voice ask for his tea.

‘What did I tell you?’ the woman said. ‘Sometimes I just want to leave the whole lot of you and run away somewhere.’ She pointed at Nicolas’ feet. ‘Put your shoes on,’ she said and went out through the opening that led into the dining room.

As Nicolas entered his room, he noticed that, where the bookcase had always stood, there was now a chest of drawers with shelves in the lower half. He found shoes under the bed. The socks were inside each of the shoes, carefully rolled into balls. Nicolas reasoned that someone who takes such care in stashing away his socks probably always wears clean clothes; he sat on the bed and put on the shoes. He found that they fitted him perfectly.

On the back of a Louis XV — style chair he found a sweater and a coat. Without knowing why, when he saw that they also fitted him, he remembered the story of Goldilocks. In the coat pocket he tucked away two hundred pesos which he had seen on a sort of bedside table, then he left.

It was a grey morning, rather cold. Diaz Velez Street was on his left; Cangallo on his right; the upholstery store right next to the house; the mattress store, La Estrella, just across the road. At the corner Nicolas said hello to the newspaper man, and the newspaper man said hello back. It occurred to him that the best thing to do would be to go home, check that everything was fine and stop all this nonsense. But he immediately abandoned that idea. If everything was indeed fine, the compulsion to return would only have meant that his mental state was abnormal. And if, on the contrary, the woman was there, Nicolas would find himself once again in the middle of a situation with no visible solution, a situation from which he needed to escape. So he carried out his purpose to go to the Computer Centre and caught a 26 bus on Corrientes.

He got off at Uribiru and walked to Paraguay. He crossed the entrance and the large hallway and mechanically walked up to the brown door on the left where, on a golden plaque, was written ‘Computer Centre’.

He pushed the door open and walked in.

It wasn’t the first time he had been aware of this feeling. He had felt it one night, two or three years ago, on his way to the Lorraine cinema. From the moment he had climbed onto the bus he had begun to create and polish, as in a daydream, a program that would allow one to write soap operas through computers. He had gotten off at a stop, which, according to gut feeling, was Parana Street. (His gut had been mistaken; the street was Ayacucho.) He had crossed the road while at the same time going back over his program to see whether he hadn’t fallen into a dead-end loop. Only when he was at the point of entering the cinema had he realised that no cinema was there at all, no bookstore to the right, no theatre across the road. He was in a totally unfamiliar place. For several seconds he had borne the unbearable impression that reality had shifted, that everything he believed in was false, that his points of reference suddenly made no sense.

The same thing happened to him again at the Computer Centre. But this time he had made no mistake. When he left, sixty seconds later, he had found out something of the utmost importance: no Nicolas Broda worked there. No Nicolas Broda had ever worked there.

Another important fact came to him in front of a yellow apartment building. He had gone there to retrieve his briefcase and to confide his tribulations to Segismundo Danton. He had carefully thought out how to explain all of this to Segismundo, but when he reached for the intercom phone to call apartment 10B, he realised that there was no tenth floor nor Bs of any kind. The building was eight stories high and the apartments were numbered from 1 to 27.

He walked for a long while. He had told himself, somewhat compulsively, that his only hope was not to spend the eighty pesos he had left. But shortly after midday it began to drizzle, and Nicolas was forced to admit that, even though the very idea of going back to that house filled him with anxiety, for the time being there was no other place to go. So he picked out six ten-peso coins and took the bus. Just as he was about to reach his destination, he saw through the window, leaning against a doorway, a large, red-faced man who seemed thrilled at seeing the bus. The man whistled, waved his arms wildly, made a circular gesture with his finger in his ear, indicating that Nicolas should phone him, winked an eye and nodded his head. Nicolas felt himself blushing up to the ears. He tore his eyes away from the window. The lady sitting next to him smiled back a tender and happy smile.

As soon as he got off the bus, a problem occurred to him. Should he go into the store and buy the things the blonde woman had asked him to get, or should he ignore her request? He imagined that if he arrived without the parcel and if the woman saw him, not only would she burst into a rage but she’d probably have him go back into the street to fulfil his duties. To save himself the fuss, he decided to buy the things now.

The shopkeeper looked like the same one he had always known, but he couldn’t be certain.

‘Just put it on the bill, would you?’ he asked, a little anxiously, as the man handed him the parcel.

‘No problem, my friend,’ said the shopkeeper.

Before leaving, Nicolas undertook one final task.

‘Has the vaseline come in?’ he asked.

It hadn’t. Nicolas hurried to tell the woman when she opened the door, as she was taking the parcel from his hands. He was worried about the possibility of having to touch her. Large women had always frightened him. He felt great relief — too much relief, he thought — when the woman told him it didn’t matter. ‘It doesn’t matter, Alfredo baby,’ the woman said. ‘Go and sit down to lunch.’

Nicolas went into the dining room and knew them all at a glance. The man at the head of the table, skinny in his striped pyjamas, was the gentleman suffering from gout. To his left was Chelita. To his right was an empty chair in which the blonde woman had been sitting. Next to the blonde woman’s place, the Fifth Toothbrush. And next to Chelita was another empty chair in which he sat himself. They were having soup.

The gentleman with the gout tapped his index finger on the edge of the table and turned towards Nicolas.

‘Would you be kind enough to tell us where you’ve been?’

Nicolas tried to think up an appropriate answer, but didn’t manage to voice it because the Fifth Toothbrush leapt to his defence.

‘Come on, it’s good for him to air himself a bit, Rafael,’ she said. She had the voice Nicolas had expected from someone wearing those little round glasses. She let out a sigh. ‘It’s such a nice day out there.’

She winked tenderly at Nicolas by raising one of her cheeks and bending her neck towards the side of her closed eye.

‘Fine, fine,’ muttered the gentleman with gout. ‘In this house everything’s fine. If someone spits in the shoe polish, that’s fine. If we’re overrun with ants, that’s fine. If that slut over there comes home at six in the morning, that’s also fine. In this house everything’s fine.’

The expression on the Fifth Toothbrush’s face changed from tender to insidious.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I certainly don’t know how come a decent girl doesn’t spend the night under her own roof.’

Nicolas sneaked a look at Chelita and couldn’t help admiring her. She was eating her soup like a princess sitting among pirates. He thought that the image had been conjured up by her hair, long and red. Briefly, he saw himself biting it, lying with her in bed. This is an abomination, he thought. And then he had a shock. He had just realized that what he had found abominable was what he had been on the point of thinking: This is an abomination, she’s my sister.

‘What I don’t know,’ the blonde woman said, ‘is why you don’t stick that tongue of yours up your ass.’

With this, the group became sullen. From time to time, the Fifth Toothbrush would pull out a handkerchief and blow her nose. When she did, the blonde woman would grunt briefly and stare at the gentleman with gout. Finally, it seemed that the gentleman with gout could bear the tension no longer. He told Nicolas to go and turn on the TV. Nicolas understood the role that he (or his other) played in this household.

He undertook a minor experiment: he asked Chelita to pass him the salt. Thanks to a mental effort he had managed (he thought) to recover an ordinary air of ‘ironic and aloof man of science.’ He felt handsome. Discreetly uninterested he waited to see what would happen. He was disappointed: when Chelita turned her head to reach the salt, she didn’t show the slightest recognition of any change in his appearance. All she managed was a quick grimace, as if she were fed up with something. Then she carried on eating. Nicolas felt — never before had he felt anything like it — that Chelita despised him.

After this failure, he refrained from trying to charm anyone. He behaved just as the others expected him to behave, and this spared him any more bother. The truth is that he had very little chance to behave in any way whatsoever, because as soon as he finished his meal he locked himself away in his room. (If it could be called his room, this room without a single book or a single number jotted down on paper; not even the slightest secret cigarette burn that Nicolas could recognize as his own.)

In a grade-four notebook he learnt his full name: Alfredo Walter di Fiore. He also learnt that his teacher had felt certain that, with dedication and effort, he would be able to overcome his present difficulties and come up a winner. The reading material proved to be even less revealing. The only indication of some sort of passion (perhaps simply a question of chance) was a pair of books on accountancy. Nicolas also found My Mountains, poems by Joaquin V. Gonzalez; The Citadel by Cronin; three or four westerns; one Harlequin novel; Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts; a history book by Bartolome Mitre; Don Quixote; several special issues of Fantasy Magazine; a women’s weekly; three issues of The Reader’s Digest; a botanical handbook for high schools; a third-year accountancy primer; Heidi; Everything you ever wanted to know about Accountancy; Everything you ever wanted to know about the Great Ideas of Mankind; Everything you ever wanted to know about Your Digestion; The Thirsty Nymph; and Little Men.

There were no letters anywhere. He found the photograph of a fat, rather plain girl. For Alfredo, Love, Always. He also found a pad of receipts with several pages torn out. On receipt number 43 was written in pencil — the handwriting resembled his own—‘love,’ ‘dove,’ ‘heart,’ ‘dart,’ and a bit further down, ‘Why don’t you all go fuck yourselves.’

By 7:00 he had managed to put the facts into some sort of order: either this was a dream, or this was really happening. If this was a dream, was it possible that, within the dream itself, he was considering the possibility of its being a dream? Yes, of course, things like that do happen in dreams. But do reasonings like this also happen in dreams? By 7:20 he had accepted that this was really happening. He went out for a walk.

At the corner store he asked the man to let him have a packet of cigarettes on credit. The man agreed with a sly conniving smirk. At the entrance to a bookstore, he stopped himself from smiling at a teenager loaded down with parcels and rolls of wallpaper because he was unaccountably afraid that his smile might seem stupid or obscene. He carried on with a vague feeling of guilt. He heard the parcels and the rolls of paper fall to the ground behind his back. Without thinking he turned around, retraced his steps and picked up the teenager’s belongings. ‘Thanks,’ she said. And something happened: she looked at him.

Nicolas had been looked at as Nicolas.

Only then did he smile at the girl. You might take all away from me… And yet… The quotation crossed his mind. He was a student of higher mathematics, lover of Musil’s books, old fan of Tarzan’s films at the Medrano Theatre, and he was smiling at a girl.

She rearranged the parcels and the rolls of paper, thanked him once again, warmly, and went on her way.

Nicolas realized that the stars had come out. He managed to find a couple in the Centaur constellation. You might take all away from me! Everything — the rose, the lyre!… And yet, one thing will still remain! Something in his heart sang out.

It wasn’t as if he were suddenly happy, though. Those he had loved, the things he had shared, that which until yesterday had been his past: where would he look for them now? He felt utterly alone. But he was himself. And not all the blonde women in the world, not all the gentlemen suffering from gout, not all the red-faced men who lean against doorways would ever be able to dispossess him of this feeling (so like a song, like the happiness of someone singing), this feeling of being himself on a clear evening in July.

He decided that there was only one way out and that he would proceed along that way. He would be Alfredo Walter di Fiore, and he would make Alfredo grow vaster and more powerful than all the blonde women and all the men with gout. He would do for Alfredo Walter di Fiore what he might never have done for Nicolas Broda. Because, ever since his Tarzan days, he had waited for a test, for that heroic or herculean act that only he would be able to undertake. And now he would undertake it.

That very night, as soon as he got home, he took the first step. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said to Chelita. ‘I think you never actually knew me.’ The look in her eyes changed from scorn to surprise, and Nicolas knew he would succeed in his brave efforts. He spoke like an idiot who in the end was not an idiot but in fact had a tortured and contradictory soul. Crushed by life itself, crushed by a family who had pampered him since childhood, all of them, she also, yes, don’t start crying now, she also had a part in it — he was fed up and had decided to put an end to all this and start again from scratch. He was letting her know that he was going to study maths. Maths? He, study maths? Yes, maths, he had always dreamt of studying maths, and he was sure that he would make a success of it. He had been secretly preparing himself, he had read many books without letting anyone know, and he was firmly convinced of what he was saying. He was also letting her know that very soon, as soon as he found a new job, he was going to go off and live on his own.

At last she admired him. She felt ashamed and sorry, and wanted to apologize. He didn’t need her apologies but allowed her to kiss him and even give him a little hug. He went off to bed as if he’d been to a party.

It wasn’t until the next morning, when he woke up and thought about everything that had happened, that he was able to peel the wool off his eyes. He realised that he had barely taken one first step. Ahead lay a long and difficult path.

A great uneasiness swept over him. Suddenly he felt that he would not have the strength to continue. No, he said to himself, I mustn’t let myself go to pieces. One by one he repeated the decisions he had made. Slowly and through sheer will power he began to recapture the enthusiasm of the previous night. It occurred to him that enthusiasm is an incomprehensible state of mind when one is not feeling enthusiastic. He recalled that Weininger had said something similar about genius.

He heard a noise and looked up. Someone was opening the door to his room.

Nicolas saw a tall, thin woman walk in, her hair grey and dishevelled. The woman approached the window and lifted the blind. She turned towards Nicolas’ bed.

‘Nine o’clock, Federico,’ she said.

Then she walked up to a sort of desk, drew a finger across its surface and peered at it. ‘Again everything in here is covered with dust,’ she said.

Before leaving the room she looked at him once again and then told him to hurry. She reminded him that last night he had promised to get up early and paint the kitchen ceiling.