by Susana Aikin
Wolfgang turned to Marcus. “Fantastisch! Ist dass genau, is this accurate?”
Marcus thought for a beat. “Wouldn’t it be more like, when you’re sleeping with another, you’ll be dreaming of me?”
I considered his choice of words. “Actually, yes, that’s more exact.”
Marcus raised his cup, and the smile I knew so well danced in his pupils. My heart thumped.
“Ach so leidenschaftlich! This is what I find so passionate about you Spaniards,” Wolfgang said in his lame English, and gave me an insinuating nudge. I was ready to move into rejection mode with this moron, when I froze. Helga was looking at me across the table. She had also been listening to the translation, and had interrupted her conversation with Marion about Roma Gypsies. Her eyes, always those aquamarine basins of sweetness, were fraught with a harrowing sorrow. I had never thought she could pale any further, her skin was so translucent and white. But her countenance was drained and withered as if an agent of death had passed through her and robbed her of all freshness. We held each other’s gaze for a long moment. I looked in dismay at her shrunken light, at her pained acquiescence to the truth she had just understood.
“Where can we go dancing after this?” Wolfgang nudged me again, showering his wine-drunk breath all over my face.
I whipped out my cell phone. “Oh my God! I nearly forgot! I have a teleconference with Chicago in thirty minutes. I’m going to have to run home if I want to make it. I’m sorry to leave like this.” I scrambled around for my things before anyone could react, excused myself once more, and ran out of the restaurant into the street.
I was getting into a cab when Marcus walked out with my coat. “Here, you’re forgetting this. Do you have to leave? What’s the rush?”
“Sorry, this is really important. I need to talk to Fitzgerald about the new wind farm project. And oh, please get that guy off my freaking back. Tell him anything you want.”
“It’s not my place.”
“Yes, it is. ’Cause if you don’t, I’m not showing up at the Munich fair.” I jumped in the cab and banged the door shut. We whizzed down the street toward my place.
Once in my apartment, I dropped my coat and bag, and sank to the floor. Helga knew everything. She had fathomed the underlying current that was going on between Marcus and me. Why was it that it didn’t matter how much we tried, however much we sacrificed, we never succeeded in hiding our affection? Everything we were together ended up written on every gesture, every glance, every song, even across the high vault of the skies. And what about collateral damage and innocent victims? Up to this moment I had felt as the outsider looking in on their idyllic marriage and charming fairy-tale family life. Now the tables had turned. There were others out in the cold looking in, possibly more desperate and hopeless than I. She might be sleeping with him every night, but he was still dreaming of me. I felt her pain rolling her thin across her kitchen floor and living room, nailing her at the extreme corners with sharp, pointed tacks. If it came to choosing between my man sleeping with another woman or dreaming about her, I would doubtless choose the first. In a thousand years. For the mingling of shadows is the hardest thing in the world to disembroil.
But would I really choose to just be dreamed of?
* * *
When I open my eyes again the room doesn’t seem dark anymore. I get up and walk to the window, tripping over a few books and soft objects lying on the floor. Constantine has done something to the strap, tied a knot and secured it to the sill, so that now it’s possible to pull the blind up a bit and get some light streaming in through the chinks. If this much can be obtained, then why not go for all? I hold it with both hands and haul it with all my strength. The heavy blind pulls up and before it threatens to fall again, I drag over one of the auxiliary small tables by the desk, and prop it against the window frame.
I lean out of the window and take in the golden hue of the afternoon. It must be well past six o’clock and the thick haze of the midday swelter has lifted from the garden level but still hangs on the distant mountains like a misty veil. I can see the pool from here, its dark waters swaying with green algae and murky scum from its depths. Then I catch sight of her, standing quietly at the corner, removing her sandals and peeling her burgundy dress off her body, hanging it on one of the nearby bushes, together with her mauve bra and lilac panties. I want to rub my eyes. Marion, naked, lowering herself to sit on the stone edge of the pool, her long black hair covering her big, soft breasts, her pubic bush small and fuzzy among the round thighs and pink hips. She, who has always been so modest, so demure, now stands up again, stark nude, and holding the pool rail with one hand, lowers herself down the steps, slowly, into the water.
CHAPTER 17
A sudden gust of cool wind slaps me on the face. I look up and see heavy clouds gathering above where minutes ago the sky was a smooth runway, a clear blue airstrip toward an endless firmament. The amber evening light turns down a few notches, transforming into opaque ochre. The garden shudders. Marion swims toward the center of the pool, her hair floating behind, like a wavy, long trail dress. Her slow movements create concentric ripples in the water that extend to all corners. The darkened light encroaches on the pool, deepening the green color of bushes and trees, shading the white stone around it, blackening the waters. But Marion doesn’t show any signs of wanting out.
A second gust hits me, and then rushes in through the window, sweeping a bunch of papers off the top of the desk. It may be time to close the window. I step down and take hold of the auxiliary table’s legs and pull them away from the window so I can shut it. It seems to be stuck under the weight of the blind. I pull again with both hands, placing a knee on the window frame to lever myself, but there’s nothing doing, the table is caught and will not budge. I try to wriggle it from an angle with both hands, and at the third tug, one of the wooden legs breaks off and I stagger backwards, falling on the floor with a loud thud. The glass cabinet beside the desk crashes beside me, the glass door smashes on the floor, its contents clattering all around. A sharp sting cuts through my thigh, and when I sit up and look, I see a gash like a long claw mark that the jagged edge of the wood has left on my flesh. Or is it one of the shards from the glass cabinet? It bleeds.
“Are you all right?” Julia’s at the door.
“I fell and scratched my thigh.”
She hesitates to come in. There’s her fear of the study, as well as the lingering red cloud of our recent fight.
I pull myself up holding on to the desk and walk to the sofa, dragging my leg. Julia scoots in and helps me sit and lift the leg over the coffee table, onto a pile of books. She kneels beside me and looks at my thigh.
“This looks nasty! What did you cut it with?” She’s holding the flesh around the gash. It is bleeding more now. I feel her strong, slim hands on my thigh. She doesn’t look me in the eye. I know she’s chewing on what she said to me minutes ago.
“It’s nothing. I just need to wash it off,” I say.
“Yeah, like we have clean running water to wash anything off with. If you got hurt with one of the nails, you need to go to hospital for a tetanus shot.”
“You’re kidding! How would you get tetanus inside an office?”
“You can probably get almost anything inside this office.”
I laugh and look around. Even in the dimming evening light the place looks filthy, dust is settled over everything like a mantle, and grime shines in patches on the surface of furniture. And then, all these strange, dark statuettes of carved wood. How did it all get like this?
“I think I’ve seen some rubbing alcohol around,” Julia says.
“You’re not serious! You know how much that hurts?”
“Are you going to be a little girl now, whining about a bit of alcohol on a cut? I might be able to find peroxide. But that’s the best you can hope for. Otherwise, it’s the emergency room.”
“Aren’t you blowing this out of proportion? It’s only a gash,” I say.
“It’s bleeding all right. I’m going to ask Marion to go to the pharmacy for stuff. You’re lucky I just put this in my pocket.” She pulls out a small packet of Kleenex and makes a compress with the tissues, pressing it to the gash. “In the meantime, stay put.” And she leaves the room.
“I’ll come with you,” I start to say, but she’s already disappeared.
I have an uneasy feeling creeping up on me. It’s quiet in the room, in a bizarre sort of way. I wriggle to accommodate my hurt leg by moving it into a different position. The back of my thighs stick uncomfortably to the couch’s leather surface. My whole back is sweating. It’s hot and heavy in the room. I remove the tissues from my thigh and look at the gash. It’s almost stopped bleeding; it doesn’t look very deep. A close inspection of the edges convinces me that it wasn’t made by the wood but by broken glass. The cut is a clean slice, a thin, wry smile upon my thigh. And the blood is dark, a carmine red, and thick, close-knit, as if reluctant to be shed. Like my tears.
I look toward the fallen cabinet. Pieces of jagged glass lie around among scattered objects, dark pieces of sculpture and small statuettes. My first thought is how upset Father would be in the face of this disaster scene. This glass case had always been his treasure cabinet. It was a tall, slim antique mahogany display cabinet with an inlaid-wood, glass-fronted door standing on Queen Anne cabriole legs. The cabinet itself was a piece of art. It always held his most precious possessions in the way of antique objects and small pieces of sculpture. Every time he traveled he visited art auctions, flea markets, and antique dealers, and always returned with something. Something beautiful or interesting that would fascinate him for months on end, that would be displayed in this cabinet close to his desk, within his range of touch and vision. For a long time, the central piece of the cabinet was the marbled head of a Greek goddess he bought in Sotheby’s in one of his trips to New York. The end of the nose and chin were slightly fractured, but the round face and strands of hair pinned around the head were intact. Her beautiful soft features gleamed through the watery reflections beneath the marble surface, and her eyes, smooth and vacant on the outside, smiled inwardly above her parted lips. He also had an ancient Greek kylix, a drinking cup he acquired in Athens from an antiquarian, a black ceramic piece depicting an orangey assembly of gods in a banquet scene on its curved exterior. A fragment of the torso of the satyr Silenius standing on one leg, and a collection of Roman silver coins, were among the other cherished objects kept in the glass case. Those were the years of his craze for Greek and Roman sculpture. He had some books too, a few small, parchment-bound, handwritten medieval treatises on theology and medicine, and an exquisite reproduction of the book of hours of the Duc de Berry, decorated with colorful miniatures and gilded calligraphy. These were the pieces he thought of as his gems, ceremoniously showing them to guests and spending hours talking about their graces.
But at one point all these objects had been removed from the cabinet, and allocated around the house in different places, left to gather dust on bookshelves in corridors, in the library or the living room, on top of the dining room mantelpiece. Dark statuettes and other somber pieces had replaced them behind the glass, all of them coming from his trips to Egypt. A collection of tin-glazed earthenware shabtis, those funerary servant figurines found in tombs, together with green soapstone hieroglyph-inscribed scarabs and a wooden mummy mask, weathered and pockmarked, propped up on a stand, replaced the former items in the glass cabinet. Then other things less defined, like strange pieces of cloth, small scrolls, amulets. At the center of it all, a group of four slender bronze statuettes, all very similar but of different sizes, their elongated heads ending in the tall headdresses of priests and long spade beards. Their slim figures seemed in the act of striding forward, bearing enigmatic gift boxes in their long, thin hands. This was just the glass cabinet, but the room was full of books on the history of Egypt, on the Valley of the Kings and its treasures, and myriad travel books on Cairo, Alexandria, the Egyptian desert, and the Nile. In the last years of his life, Father had become obsessed with Egypt. And because none of us visited him that much by then, it took us a while to recognize how taken he was with anything Egyptian.
Julia walks in quickly with a plastic bottle in her hands and a bag of cotton wool. “You’re going to get it from Delia, she’s on her way,” she says.
“Get it from Delia! Why?”
“You’re not supposed to be here. This room was already done.” Julia unscrews the bottle and throws the bag of cotton wool on the table.
“What is this? She’s become our governess or something?”
“I tried to tell you before. She’s taken over.” Julia grabs my leg and pours alcohol freely over it. It washes over the gash, stinging like a burning trail of gunpowder.
I howl. “Oooow! Stop! What are you doing?”
But Julia is undeterred. “Hold still for a moment! You’re making me spill it all over.” The alcohol is splashing over the coffee table around my leg. I swat Julia’s hand and she steps back, bottle in hand.
“Well, at least I got some of it into the gash,” she says with satisfaction. “Jeez, you’re such a crybaby. For all your brilliant business skills—”
“Shut up! You just wanted to get back at me for the phone,” I say, blowing on my thigh to diffuse the alcohol, which I don’t dare wipe off with my dirty hands. It still burns like hell.
Julia laughs. “We’re even now, plus I’ve saved you from gangrene.”
I try to swat her again from the couch but she jumps back. We’re little girls again, and she’s teasing me to make me cry. Where is her sad, sullen face of a few hours ago? It’s been replaced by that impish, malicious smile Marion and I used to call the red she-devil grin, and beware everyone when it starts dancing on her face. The wicked side of the scrawny girl who used to hide in corners with her pad and colored pencils. She can be up to any amount of mischief. She used to throw all of Marion’s undies out the window into the street when they fought. She used to bury my dolls under bushes or thread pages of my favorite picture book into the blender together with my chocolate milk. She could do anything to me this moment. She could sprinkle the rest of the alcohol on my face, or threaten to burn my hair. Only Nanny can save me now.
“Julia, if you dare . . .”
Heavy footsteps interspersed with a cane thudding on the wooden floor approach the study. Lighter, scurrying sounds trailing down the stairs in the background follow.
Delia enters the room. “Who said you could come in here?” She is thunderous, her face portentous with lifted eyebrows over fierce eyes. “And spilling blood! Didn’t I say no one can go into rooms that have been cleansed until the whole house is finished? What is wrong with you girls?”
“Where can we go? All the rooms are closed by now.” I am amazed at my defensive tone and the fact that I’m actually intimidated by her towering presence.
“I don’t care where you go. Get out of the house! Sit outside! Holy Child of Atocha! Am I ever going to be able to finish this job?” Delia is exasperated; she opens her arms as she talks, even lifts the cane off the floor. “And you,” she roars at Julia, “go help your sister out of the pond.”
“Out of what?” Julia changes her red she-devil grin into her other classical expression of sad-girl-who’s-never-hurt-a-fly-in-her-life.
“The pool! Where else?” Delia is fuming.
Constantine scuttles into the room, breathless. “Calm down, Delia! I’ll take care of this. Why don’t you sit for a minute while I walk her outside?”
“Are you also out of your mind? Don’t you see she’s cut? Now we need to close the wound before she can move.” She stares at Constantine for a moment, takes a deep breath, and then says, in a calmer voice, “What do you have in your medicine bag?”
Constantine studies his sandals. Above them stem his sharp, bony ankles followed by thin, pale, hairy calves. I can’t believe he still hasn’t rolled down his trousers. “As a matter of fact, Delia,” he stammers, “si
nce this wasn’t an up-front healing job . . .”
“Constantine!” Delia stomps her cane on the floor. “How many times have we gone through this! You need to bring everything along at all times!”
“Sorry, Delia.” He looks on the verge of tears.
Delia flashes angry eyes around the room. First at me, then at Constantine and finally at Julia, who’s still at the door listening in, but dashes off under the umbrage of her gaze.
Delia paces around. “What’s the saying? El que se acuesta con ni-ños amanece meado, if you go to bed with children you’ll wake up pissed all over.” Delia turns to the window and stands for a moment looking out. Wind is blowing in. It lifts her black hair in undulating waves, it flaps her white dress against her body and then swells it up around her large shape like a sail. Could there be so much wind coming in through the window? Am I just tired and drifting into dreamy visions?
“That’s the problem with growing old. Everyone around starts feeling like a child.” Delia sounds sad and forlorn. When she turns again toward the room, her anger has vanished.
“Surely, you have something,” she says. “Agrimony, prunella, burdock?” Constantine’s gaze remains lowered, but from my angle I see his strabismic eye roaming around the room with the monocular focusing of a chameleon’s. As if it were doing all the thinking for him.
“No aloe in the garden?” Delia waits, but Constantine is mute. Then, something clicks inside him and he says in a small voice, “I’ve only seen thistles.”
“Blessed thistle? I guess that’s what the Orishas want then. And that’s also the punishment they are bringing your way for not being on top of your duties.”
Constantine lifts one red, mortified eye toward her, while its strabismic partner rolls around the window and finally falls upon my gashed thigh. “Sorry, Delia.”
“Don’t sorry me. Sorry your fingers as you’re picking the blessed thistles. And make sure you come up with a damned good poultice paste.” Delia’s dark liquid eyes sweep the room like a fierce bird of prey and descend once more on Constantine. “And now, move! We’re out of time.”