“Thank you, sweetie, you’re a gem,” Berta managed to say through her tears. “The awful thing is I didn’t come to talk to you about work. It’s something even worse.”
Gaby was taken aback. Her boss didn’t usually share her personal problems with her. Their relationship was more like that between a niece and a favorite aunt who never forgets to say happy birthday or send a Christmas present. Berta was a protective, maternal person whom you could talk to about your problems but would never tell anyone about hers.
“Has something happened to Asunción?” Gaby worried, because she knew how close the two women were. If Berta had a personal problem, she would have gone to her best friend first.
“No. Asunción is fine, the poor thing, but I can’t ruin her day with this. It’s about María.”
“María?”
Berta took a large gulp of her wine to steel herself. Then she launched into the story of how she had caught María in the arms of another man four months ago, on Three Kings morning, to be exact, and how María had later justified her infidelity by saying that she felt trapped in a mundane, unhappy marriage.
“But she promised she would end the affair soon,” Berta said, screwing her face up. “She swore that the man meant nothing, emotionally speaking, it was only a bit of fun that would last a few days, maybe a month, but afterward she’d go back to her normal life with Bernabé and the kids, just like the character from The Bridges of Madison County, those were her words, as if her life was a film.”
Gaby said nothing. She squeezed Berta’s arm. Sometimes it’s better just to listen.
“And today I saw her with the same man again. Four bloody months have gone by, Gaby, and she’s still with him.”
“Do you know who he is?”
How strange, thought Berta. No, she didn’t know who he was. She had never actually seen his face and it had never occurred to her to ask María his name. She had simply believed what the adulteress said: He’s no one, he doesn’t have a name, he doesn’t have an identity; he’s a brief fling, not a real person.
“No.”
“Are you going to talk to her again?”
“Why? So she can lie to me again and tell me I’m seeing things? That what I saw isn’t what it looks like and her marriage is back on track?”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Well, nothing, love, what can we do . . .”
The two of them drank in silence. Women, unlike men, are capable of talking about a problem for hours without trying to find a solution. Not planning the next move, merely talking until their mouths go dry, and their tears stop, and their eyes sting, and the time comes to go home. But they leave with only half the weight of the problem on their shoulders.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Berta told Gaby when they said goodbye at the door. “Let’s see what happens. Maybe we’ll all be unemployed in a few days anyway, and this mess of María’s won’t be our business anymore.” It was then that Franklin arrived, carrying a bunch of orange tulips.
“Where’s my princess?” they heard him shout up the stairwell.
CHAPTER 25
Gaby had never made a mistake in the six years that she had been designing pages for Librarte, but for a few days now she had been totally off her game. Exactly the same few days that had passed since her boss turned up at her house and told her about María’s affair.
Asunción had noticed immediately that something had upset the normally levelheaded Gaby. Berta had to have words with Gaby several times, sometimes for silly mistakes like forgetting to send the bar code to the printers, rookie errors, and Asunción had caught her off guard, staring at María while she worked away obliviously. A couple of times, María had lifted her head to find Gaby staring at her. “What?” she had asked. “Nothing,” Gaby had replied.
On the other hand, Berta, who didn’t usually take any notice of what went on outside her office door, now seemed to want to scrutinize everything. She left her door open and craned her neck over her computer, put on her glasses, and frowned. Sometimes she cleared her throat, as if trying to warn Gaby that she was watching her, and to tell her not to get distracted, to get back to her work if she didn’t want to stay in at recess. She really did seem like a primary-school teacher.
Asunción watched Gaby, Gaby watched María, Berta watched all of them, and María watched no one. Some secret or other was hovering over the office, and Asunción, astute though she was, came to the wrong conclusion.
The following Monday, after spending the weekend feeling like her heart was melting, she arrived at the office with a small present wrapped in tissue paper.
“Congratulations, Gaby!” she said to her colleague in a shaky voice.
Berta tried to avert disaster by jumping up from her chair with the same agility a real primary-school teacher would have demonstrated had she felt the prick of a thumbtack on her bottom. But her effort was in vain. Gaby had taken the gift, was opening it, had already seen the soft ears of the teddy, the first bib, the first pacifier. She had already let it fall to the floor—if it had been porcelain it would have broken into a thousand pieces—and had already locked herself in the bathroom to cry. “But she wasn’t even due yet,” said María, who had no idea what was going on, and the damage was already done. Asunción wanted to die of shame.
CHAPTER 26
According to Murphy’s law, of all the women of childbearing age in the world, the one who most longs to be a mother will be the one who has the most trouble getting pregnant. If there had been one of those University of Wisconsin studies on the level of maternal desire, then Gaby would have come out on top, scoring much higher than the rest of the women interviewed, including a woman from Maryland who kidnapped a baby with the sole intention of raising it as her own and who would never repent for her actions even if she spent half her life in prison.
The worst thing was that there was no medical explanation for Gaby’s infertility. Apparently, both she and Franklin were fully capable of conceiving numerous healthy babies. At least that’s what the exhaustive medical tests to which they had both been subjected in recent years had shown.
Gaby knew the ceiling in her gynecologist’s consulting room like the back of her hand. The doctor, with the good intention of distracting her patients during examinations, had decorated it with photos of the hundreds of babies she had helped bring into the world. As Gaby lay naked from the waist down with her legs akimbo, waiting anxiously for the results of her latest test, she was scrutinized by Natalia with the chubby cheeks, the twins Rodrigo and Javier, Monica with the stick-up hair, little round Jorge with his fists clenched, Rosita with the big eyes, red-haired Pedrito, and fifty other pudgy little babies whom Gaby had seen so many times that she would instantly recognize them if she saw them on the street. But instead of calming her down, the portfolio of newborns made her feel incredibly, inexpressibly upset. Whenever she lay on the exam table, her heart raced, her muscles tensed, her eyes welled up with tears. She preferred to close her eyes and hum a song to distract herself.
“I can’t believe you’re still scared of examinations,” said the gynecologist, mistaking all those symptoms for fear of medical instruments.
“I don’t mind external ultrasounds,” Gaby confessed, “but I can’t stand the internal ones, Doctor, with that contraption that looks like curling irons.”
“Open your vagina.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Come now, Gaby, relax, there’s no way we can do this if you don’t relax.”
And in the end, she always reached the same conclusion: “Everything’s fine. You’ve got a model uterus, sweetheart. Good enough to put on show, it’s in such good shape.”
“Right. What a pity.”
“But it’s lovely, really lovely,” said the gynecologist. “Your tubes aren’t blocked, you don’t have endometriosis, your periods are regular, your vaginal mucus—”
“Enough, enough.” Gaby usually cut her off when she couldn’t bear to hear any
more. “So why can’t I get pregnant?”
• • •
Franklin Livingstone, on the other hand, would have been perfectly happy without children. For him, nothing compared to the happiness of being with Gaby, but he understood that his wife would never find peace until she had a baby in her arms. He had helped her to paint their future children’s room and choose strollers, high chairs, pacifiers, and diapers from endless catalogs. He had sat next to her plenty of times while she waited for the negative results of the pregnancy tests she took when her period was more than twenty-four hours late, and had learned to console her with cups of hot chocolate and spoonfuls of ice cream. And he had managed to convince her that he was every bit as upset as she was, and reassure her that the baby would come in good time, like everyone said.
Out of love for Gaby, he had undergone hundreds of medical tests—some of them pretty unpleasant—and had learned to calculate the days in each cycle that Gaby was fertile, to rush home and love her completely, despite the fact that, sometimes, she forgot to love him back.
“Franklin,” Gaby told him with the utmost urgency one Tuesday at eleven a.m. “Come home quick, I’m ovulating.”
And he raced home, ran up the stairs two at a time, stripped off in the hallway, and found her waiting for him in bed, legs open wide, music on. She asked him to go slowly, to concentrate on the baby, because she had read that conception was a conscious act of willpower, and then she stayed very still, lying on her back for an hour, the way her doctor had recommended, while he got dressed, said goodbye with one last kiss, and returned to the trompe l’oeil he had left half finished in his studio.
Sometimes he let himself think that Gaby had made a mistake marrying him, and this got him down. He hadn’t managed to become the well-known artist in whose success she so believed, nor was he the fiery, dreamy lover she had met in Paris, capable of moving mountains, revolutionizing the art world, and achieving world fame.
“We’ll be like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo,” he used to say to her between kisses on the banks of the Seine.
“I hope not,” she replied. “Frida lost her baby and could never have children. And Diego cheated on her.”
“But they loved each other.”
“I suppose so, in their own way,” she conceded.
“I’ll never be unfaithful to you,” Franklin assured her.
“And I’ll wax my mustache,” Gaby promised.
Years had gone by. They had loved each other much more deeply than Diego and Frida could ever have dreamed and, all the same, thanks to some cruel twist of fate, they had been unable to conceive a child. No fame, no fortune, no family. In the end, his mother would be proved right: Franklin Livingstone was nothing but a worthless failure. He was no good to anyone, let alone sweet, loving Gaby. Maybe the best thing would be to leave her before it was too late. Open the door of the golden cage, set her free so that she would fly into another man’s arms—someone compatible with her genetic code, the acidity of her uterus, or whatever it was that was stopping them from having children together. That he hadn’t left yet was because deep down Franklin knew that breaking up with Gaby and taking his own life were, essentially, the same terrifying decision.
CHAPTER 27
One December morning, Moira Craftsman woke up with a start. She had dreamed that a tribe of cannibals had taken her son Atticus prisoner, lowered him into a pot of boiling water, and were planning on eating him like a prawn, cooked and pink, while the boy screamed, “At least toss a few tea bags in the stew, you pack of savages!”
As a devoted disciple of Freud, Moira was a compulsive reader of The Interpretation of Dreams and was in the habit of asking her friends to let her analyze their dreams, from which she drew the most unexpected conclusions. It was obvious to her that guests at the house in Kent often dreamed of running water, streams, and waterfalls because the copper pipes made a tremendous noise when the boiler was on. If it was cold, they tended to dream of polar animals or white objects. If it was hot, they dreamed about airplanes not taking off. If they experienced a dizzying sense of speed—scenes that changed constantly, fast thoughts, races, flights, et cetera—she would lay the blame on an empty stomach.
Moira was more cautious when it came to erotic dreams. Desires, fears, and inhibitions were all tied up with an individual’s private matters, she said, or his or her sexual history.
“We were making love in front of my stepmother.”
“You lack intimacy.”
“I was sleeping with an elephant.”
“You lack affection.”
“Our dreams expose what is missing from our everyday lives,” she would explain to her rapt audience, “but they also respond to external stimuli, noises, changes in temperature, or recent experiences. For example, following a traumatic experience, or after eating a lot, one is very likely to have nightmares.”
As for the predictive power of dreams, Moira was of the belief that, like all premonitions, only the ones that the dreamer really believed in would come true.
“I dream that I’m falling. The next day there’s snow on the ground, and it’s icy. I slip. I fall,” she would explain. “Does that mean that my dream has come true, or would I have fallen anyway?”
Moira Craftsman was a sensible woman. But that morning, after dreaming that her son was being cooked alive in a cauldron of tea, she pushed aside all her years of rationality.
“Wake up, Marlow, we’re going to Spain!”
It was three weeks until Christmas and they hadn’t heard from Atticus since August. However hard Marlow tried to convince her that all was well, that the boy was busy resolving a terribly complicated situation in Madrid and would be home soon enough, Moira suspected that her husband was hiding something from her. Marlow wasn’t much of a talker, but the silence to which he had subjected her of late was going beyond a joke. He had even stopped saying good morning to her. He had been getting up in a hurry, jumping in the shower, grumbling something incomprehensible from the bathroom, and racing out to the office without drinking his usual cup of coffee.
He had spent most weekends hunting in Scotland, in the Highlands, as he liked to call those impassable hills upon which roe deer, dogs, pheasants, geese, and men all ran amok: some fleeing from others, and others fleeing from their wives and from explanations they didn’t want to have to give.
It crossed Moira’s mind at one point that Marlow might be having an affair. She soon dismissed such a stupid notion.
No. Any other vice but women. Marlow preferred his club, his brandy, his games of bridge, and his hunts. He didn’t have the time, or the motivation, to get caught up in an affair at this late stage of the game. Nor did he have any chance to, really. At work, Atticus kept an eye on him; elsewhere, his friends, mother, wife, and the headaches caused by his elder son Holden kept him busy.
But the silence . . .
“Atticus is in danger,” she said that morning, trying to get Marlow to understand. They were still in bed, her hair was a mess, and he was in his flannel pajamas. “We have to go to Madrid and bring him home as soon as possible.”
“What’s got into you, darling?” he managed to stammer, having just woken up from a dream in which he had taken a long run up before jumping and taking off heavily and clumsily, like a goose.
“A mother knows when her child needs help,” Moira said, cutting him off, “and I can sense that Atticus is in real trouble, Marlow. We have to go and rescue him.”
Marlow sat up against the pillows. He scratched his head. He took his wife’s hand.
“I tried to tell you a few days ago, Mo, but you were too tired. You’re right, we must go to Spain. There’s no other option.”
• • •
Moira Craftsman immediately sprang into action. She consulted her huge black planner, in which she kept track of all her engagements, and decided there was no way they could go and save Atticus before December 15. That was ten days away but, unfortunately, back in April she had accepted a dinner invi
tation from Lord Norfolk for that very Tuesday. What’s more, on Thursday they had front-row tickets for La Bohème, bought seven months ago, before they sold out—after all, one has to be prepared. Then, on Sunday, the rector of All Saints College was coming to tea. They couldn’t cancel a visit like that at such short notice. It was Monday, only six days until Sunday, and if they changed their plans now, the rector would crucify them for being so bad-mannered, and he would be entirely justified. And the following Wednesday, Moira had an appointment at the hairdresser’s. Religiously, once every two months, she dyed her hair mahogany; otherwise the gray started to show. What’s more, canceling would mean that the hairdresser would have to reorganize her entire schedule, and Moira didn’t want to be responsible for such chaos.
She also needed to talk to the housekeeper, organize the pantry, pay the suppliers, prepare guest rooms, hire the help for New Year’s Eve, sort out the menus, the Christmas tree, and the Christmas pudding, and many other things besides.
All told, the earliest they could leave was the fifteenth. And they would have to be back on the twentieth at the very latest because, if not, Christmas would be a complete disaster.
“Marlow and I have to go on an unexpected and urgent trip,” she explained over the phone to Victoria Bestman. “It’s about Atticus. We’re worried that something might have happened to him. We haven’t heard anything from him since August.”
“Dear God!”
“I’m telling you because I don’t think I’ll be able to play bridge on the sixteenth. You’ll have to find another partner.”
“The sixteenth! That’s less than ten days away!”
“I know. It’s all happened terribly suddenly, Victoria. I’m awfully sorry, but as I said, it’s very urgent. It’s about Atticus.”
“Oh, Moira, you poor thing! You must be so worried. I’d come and give you a hug, but as it happens, back in August, I promised I’d help with the fund-raising auction for the rectory today . . .”
The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman Page 10