Please Talk to Me: Selected Stories

STRATEGIES AGAINST SLEEPING

When the time came to leave, Señora Eloísa still considered herself fortunate to be returning to Azul by car. The travelling salesman — who worked for her daughter’s future father-in-law — had arrived punctually to pick her up at the hotel and seemed very proper; he had shown great care in placing her little crocodile skin suitcase on the back seat and even apologised about the car being so full of merchandise. A pointless apology, in the opinion of Señora Eloísa, who always found the exchange of pleasantries with new acquaintances trying. As the car pulled away, she too felt obliged to make trivial remarks about the suffocating heat, prompting an exchange of opinions on low pressure, the probability of rain and the good that rain would do to the country, this last observation naturally leading to the fields of Señora Eloísa’s own husband, the trials of being a landowner, the highs and lows of life as a travelling salesman and the various attributes of many other occupations. By the time they reached Cañuelas, Señora Eloísa had already spoken — amiably at first, but with a growing reluctance — about the characters of her three children, the eldest one’s impending marriage, assembling a cheese board, good and bad cholesterol and the best kind of diet for a cocker spaniel. She also knew a few details about the man’s life, details which, before their arrival in San Miguel del Monte — and after a blessedly prolonged silence — she could no longer even recall. She was tired. She had lent back against the headrest, closed her eyes and begun to feel herself lulled by the low, soporific hum of the engine, evoking cicadas during scorching afternoon siestas Do you mind if I smoke. The words seemed to reach her through an oily vapour and with an effort she opened her eyes.

‘No, please do.’

She looked sleepily at the man who was driving, whose name she had completely forgotten; was it Señor Ibáñez? Señor Velazco? Mister Magic Bubble? Master Belch?

‘A great driving companion.’

This time her eyes sprang open in alarm. Who? Who was a great companion? Looking around her for clues she found nothing: only the man smoking with his eyes open unnecessarily wide. The cigarette, of course. She made an effort to be lively.

‘Everyone tells me they’re wonderful for clearing the head.’

Nobody had told her any such thing, it had been a mistake not to take the coach back, by now she would have been stretched out in the seat and sleeping peacefully. She half-closed her eyes and thought that she could, up to a point, do the same here. Lean against the headrest and go to sleep. Just like that, how delicious: to fall asleep and not wake up until a godsend. Did she hear him speak? Had the man just said ‘a godsend’? So was he never going to stop talking?

‘… because the truth is that tedium makes you tired.’

A joyful spark ignited within Señora Eloísa.

‘Unbearably tired,’ she agreed. She thought the man would realise now that she needed to sleep.

‘And it’s not only the tedium. Shall I tell you something?’ said the man. ‘Last night I didn’t sleep a wink. Because of the mosquitoes. Did you know there’s been an invasion of mosquitoes?’

Please be quiet, she cried out, silently.

‘It’s because of this heat,’ she said. ‘We need a good storm.’

‘The storm is on its way — look,’ the man nodded towards a dark mass approaching from the south. ‘In a couple of minutes we’re going to have ourselves a proper drenching, I can tell you.’

‘Yes a proper drenching.’

The need to sleep was now a painful sensation against which she had no desire to fight. She let her head loll back again, almost obscenely, her eyelids falling heavily. Little by little she disengaged herself from the heat and the man and surrendered to the monotonous rattle of the car.

But I don’t mind the rain if I’m well rested. She let the words slide over her head, almost without registering them. The thing is that today, for some reason, I feel as if I could drop off at any minute. Was some state of alert functioning within her somnolence? The splattering of the first raindrops seemed to trigger it.

‘Shall I tell you something? Today, if I hadn’t had good company and someone to chat to me, I wouldn’t even have come out.’

She didn’t open her eyes. She said crisply:

‘I don’t know that I am particularly good company.’

Fury had brought her almost fully awake, but she wasn’t about to give this man the pleasure of a conversation: she pretended to be dozing off. Immediately the clatter of rain started up, like a demolition. For a few minutes that was all she heard and gradually she really did begin to fall asleep.

‘Please, talk to me.’

The words burst into her dream like shouting. With difficulty Señora Eloísa opened her eyes.

‘Well just look at this rain,’ she said.

‘Terrible,’ said the man.

Already it was her turn again.

‘Do you like the rain?’ she asked.

‘Not much,’ said the man.

He certainly wasn’t helping. All he wanted was for her to talk and keep him awake. Barely anything.

‘I like it, I like it very much,’ she said, fearing that this avenue of conversation was leading nowhere; quickly she added: ‘but not this kind.’

In a garret, I’d be an artist or a dancer, half-starving, and there’d be a handsome man with a beard, loving me as I had never imagined it was possible to be loved, and rain drumming on a tin roof.

‘Not this kind,’ she repeated vigorously (she needed to give herself time to find another direction for the conversation: the tiredness was leading her into dead ends). On an impulse she said: ‘Once I wrote an essay about the rain.’ She laughed. ‘I mean, how silly I sound, I must have written lots of essays about the rain, it’s hardly an unusual theme.’

She waited. After a few seconds the man said:

‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’

But he didn’t elaborate.

Señora Eloísa applied herself to thinking up new avenues of conversation. She said:

‘I used to like writing essays,’ luckily she was beginning to feel talkative. ‘A teacher once told me I had an artistic temperament. Originality. That essay I was telling you about, it’s odd that I should suddenly remember it. I mean, it’s odd that I should have said “once I wrote an essay on the rain,” don’t you think, when in fact I wrote so many’—the secret was to keep talking without pause—‘and that I shouldn’t have had any idea why I told you that when I did and that now I do. I mean, I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but now I am sure that when I said “once I wrote an essay on the rain,” I meant the beggars’ kind rather than any other.’

She paused, proud of herself: she had brought the conversation to an interesting juncture. She would be willing to bet that now the man was going to ask her: Beggars? That would certainly make her job easier.

But no, apparently the word had not caught the man’s attention. She, on the other hand, had struck a rich seam because now she clearly remembered the entire essay. This was just what she needed: a concrete subject, something to talk on and on about, even while half-asleep. She said:

‘Here’s a curious thing: in that essay I said that rain was like a blessing for beggars. Why would I have thought something like that?’

‘That is curious,’ agreed the man.

Señora Eloísa felt encouraged.

‘I had my own explanation for it, quite a logical one. I said that beggars live under a blazing sun, I mean, I suppose that I imagined it was always summer for them, they were burned by the sun and then, when the rain came, it was like a blessing, a “beggars’ holiday,” I think I called it.’

She leaned back on the headrest as though claiming a prize. Through the rain she read AZUL 170 KM and sighed with relief: she had managed to keep talking for a long stretch, the man must be feeling clearer-headed by now. She closed her eyes and enjoyed her own silence and the water’s soothing litany. Gently she let herself be pulled towards a sleepy hollow.

‘Talk to me.’

He sounded both imperious and desperate. She remembered the man and his tiredness. Could he be as exhausted as her? My God. Without opening her eyes she tried to remember what she had been talking about before falling asleep. The essay. What else was there to say about the essay?

‘You must think that…’—it was a struggle to take up the thread again—‘I mean, the teacher thought that…’—and now she seemed to see another angle to this story. She said firmly: ‘She drew a red circle. The teacher. She circled “blessing” in red and printed beside it a word that I didn’t know at the time: Incoherent’—she frowned at the man. ‘It wasn’t incoherent. Perhaps you think it was incoherent, but it wasn’t.’

‘No, not at all,’ said the man. ‘Why would I think that?’

‘Yes, I’m sure you do, because even I can see that it may seem incoherent, but there are some things…’ Some things, what? She no longer saw as clearly as she had a minute ago why it wasn’t incoherent. Even so she had to keep talking about something or other before the man ordered her to continue. ‘I mean that there are times when heat is worse than…’ Without meaning to, she caught sight of a road sign. That was a mistake: knowing exactly how many kilometres she had to keep talking filled her with despair, as though she were falling into a well. ‘There are times when heat is overwhelming especially if’ she searched for the words with a rising sense of panic — what if she never found anything new to talk about? For a very brief moment she had to suppress a desire to open the door and throw herself onto the road. Abruptly she said: ‘I once saw a beggar’ and her own words surprised her because the image didn’t come from her memory or anywhere else: it had come out of nothing, clear against the suffocating heat of Buenos Aires: a young woman, dishevelled and a little distracted among the cars. ‘I don’t know if she was a beggar, I mean I don’t know if that is the right way to describe her: she was fair, and very young, that I do remember, and if she hadn’t been so unkempt and so thin, with that expression of hopelessness… That was the worst thing, the feeling that she was going to go on, day after day, traipsing among the cars as though nothing in the world mattered to her.’

She paused and looked at the man; he nodded slightly, as though bidding her to continue.

‘There were cars — did I tell you there were cars? A traffic jam or something. I was in Buenos Aires with my husband and my… I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you that it was shockingly hot, if you don’t know about the heat you won’t understand any of this. The car was stuck in traffic and the sun was beating through the windscreen, so I put my head out of the window to get a bit of air. That was when I saw her, watching us all with an indifference that frightened me. My husband didn’t see her, or rather, I don’t know if he saw her because he didn’t mention anything, he doesn’t particularly notice these things. She was well dressed — do you see what I’m saying? A blouse and skirt, very dirty and worn, but you could tell from a mile off that they were good clothes. There she was, among the cars, and she wasn’t even making an effort to beg, that’s why I’m not sure if it’s right to call her a beggar. It was as though one fine day she had walked out of her house dressed in these same clothes and closed the front door on everything that was inside: her husband, her silver service, those stupid functions, everything she hated, do you see what I mean? Not the boy, she had him with her, she saw that in reality she didn’t hate the boy. He was heavy, that was all, especially in that heat. But no, she didn’t hate him. She had brought him with her, after all.’

‘Sorry, I think I got lost,’ the man seemed more awake now. ‘There was a child?’

‘Of course,’ said Señora Eloísa, irritably. ‘I told you there was a child at the start, otherwise what would be so terrible about it? The woman was there, among the cars, with the boy in her arms and looking at us with that expression of—. A baby, big and very fair, fair like the woman and fat, too fat for someone to be carrying in such heat. Do you see what I’m telling you? Don’t tell me that you do, that you understand, I know that however hard you try you can’t understand it. You think you do, that you understand it perfectly, but you have to carry a child when you’re tired and hot to know what that’s like. And I was sitting down, mind you, not like the woman; I was sitting comfortably in the car. But even so I felt the weight on my legs and my skirt sticking to me and then my baby who was crying as if she were being…’ she looked with suspicion at the man who seemed about to say something. She didn’t give him the chance. ‘But the woman wasn’t even sitting down and I think her back must have been aching terribly. She didn’t look like someone in pain, she looked indifferent, but even so I could tell that the child was too heavy for her.’

She fell silent, absorbed by these thoughts. The man was shaking his head. Suddenly he seemed to think of something cheering.

‘Life, eh?’ he said. ‘I bet she’s the one getting married.’

Señora Eloísa stared at him, perplexed.

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘Your daughter, I mean, it just occurred to me, the crying baby you were carrying,’ the man laughed good-naturedly. ‘How time flies, she must be the one who’s going off to get married.’

‘I never said that,’ said Señora Eloísa with violence.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… You said that she was crying and then I thought…’

‘No, you didn’t understand me, she wasn’t crying. I said very clearly that she was heavy and that the woman’s back must have hurt. But I never said that she cried. Admittedly, she may have been about to cry at any moment. I didn’t make that clear, but I admit it now: they all cry. See how desperately they cry when you think they have everything they need and you can’t think what’s wrong with them? That day it was hot, intolerably so. And the sky was painfully blue, the kind of blue one could be happy with if one were alone or beside somebody very’—she turned her head towards the man. She said angrily: ‘If one didn’t have to carry on one’s lap a baby who keeps crying for no reason’—she waved her hand in front of her, as though batting away an insect. ‘The woman didn’t make any kind of gesture, just stood there with an air of abandonment, but I could tell straightaway that she was raging. She wanted to throw the boy, hurl him against something, but not because she hated him. She wanted to throw him off because he was very heavy and it was hot, do you understand? It’s not possible to bear such a heat, and the weight, and the terror that at any moment they will start crying.’

Then she gazed out at the rain as if she had never said anything.

The man shifted in his seat. He cleared his throat.

‘So what happened next?’

She turned back towards him with irritation.

‘What do you mean what happened? That happened — doesn’t it seem like enough? A very tired woman and with those lovely clothes, I don’t know, as if one fine day she had decided that she was tired of everything. Then she grabbed the child, carefully closed the door to her house and off she went. As simple as that. I realize that it’s hard to understand but these things happen. One might be perfectly happy, drawing the curtains or eating a biscuit and suddenly one realizes that one can’t go on. Do you know what it’s like to have a child who cries all day and all night, all day and all night? A child is too heavy for a woman’s body. Afterwards, with the others, one gets used to it or, how shall I put it, one gives in, perhaps. But the first is so exasperating. One resists, believe me, one resists and every morning one tells oneself that all is well, that one has everything a woman might dream of, that how the others must… No, it’s shaming to confess it, but it’s true, one even thinks this: about the others, I mean how the other women must envy one with this husband who is so attentive and such a comfortable house and this nice, fat baby. These are the sorts of things one may think of to calm oneself. But one fine day, I don’t know, something snaps. The baby who won’t stop crying, or the heat, I don’t know, it’s hard to remember everything accurately if afterwards one isn’t allowed to talk about it, don’t you see? They kept saying no, they insisted that they knew what it was best to say, that I was ill at any rate and it wasn’t advisable for me to talk… They put a whole story together, an accident or something like that, I think, but I don’t know if it was for the best. Because the only thing I wanted, the one thing I needed was to tell them that I didn’t hate her, how could I hate her? I loved her with all my heart. Do you at least understand? All I did was dash her against the floor because she kept crying and crying and she was so heavy, you can’t imagine, she was heavier than my whole body could bear.’

Now she was very tired and she thought that she didn’t have the strength, she simply didn’t have the strength to keep talking for the rest of the journey.

‘I want to get out,’ she said.

Without saying anything, the man stopped the car. He must have been in a great hurry to get away because he looked at her only once, standing in the rain on the hard shoulder, then immediately pulled away. He didn’t even tell her that she’d left her crocodile skin suitcase on the back seat. Just as well, that suitcase was too heavy for her.