That’s when I thought I saw Frankie again. Across the smoky room, her brown hair tied back in a ponytail, dressed in a suit but looking like a man rather than a woman, I thought I saw her triangular face and bright hazel eyes, her hands lifted, clapping. But it was so cloudy in that room, so crowded, so hectic that I couldn’t be sure. I thought our eyes met, I took a step towards her, and then I lost her again.
“What is it, Cassandra?” Carmen said, catching me as I stumbled. “Are you trying to dance?”
I was drunker than I should have been, or more confused. For a second I had lost the sense of who I was—what sex, what gender, what age, what city and what country. In the instant I saw the man or woman who may or may not have been Frankie I had one of those odd, powerful, and probably alcohol-induced revelations that seem to last forever and wind backwards and forwards into history and infinity.
Afterwards I could never say what it was I experienced just then. But it was as if I were at a masquerade ball and everyone, at the very same moment, lifted their masks, and I saw gender for what it was, something that stood between us and our true selves. Something that we could take off and put on at will. Something that was, strangely, like a game.
Behind me I heard Carmen and Ana conferring worriedly.
“Is she sick, is she going to be sick?”
I wanted to reassure them that I was fine, but I couldn’t remember what language we’d been speaking and which one they understood.
“We’d better get her out of here,” they decided and dragged me away from my epiphany, and from the person who I later decided could never have been Frankie.
The taxi dropped us off at three in the morning, at a time when the streets were still ablaze but there was little traffic and only a few people walking along the enormous boulevards. There was a message on the answering machine.
“It’s for you,” said Ana, and we ran it through again.
“Sorry about the misunderstanding, Cassandra,” said Frankie in that cheerful, throaty voice. “I can explain everything tomorrow. Meet me at that big Gaudí cathedral around one o’clock.”
9
THERE WAS NOT MUCH POINT in going to sleep so I spent the morning taking aspirin and working on the translation, as a kind of expiation for my sins.
The plot of La Grande y su hija was not as complicated as one would think at first from the narrative style of dashing and drifting back and forth in time between María’s own life (what she knew she had experienced) and Cristobel’s life (most of it imagined by María). The plot was rather simple actually, in spite of the extraordinary number of coincidences and mysterious circumstances, starting with the disappearing plague in the first chapter. María’s life began at the moment she knew her mother had vanished, but Cristobel’s life had begun some twenty-five years before, and it was that life which was the primary subject of La Grande.
So far María had traced her mother’s story back to the time when Cristobel was six and had first appeared floating down a vast river in a barrel. She was plucked to safety by the captain of a barge, who was unable to get from her the story of the barrel, but who took her home to his childless wife. The woman, Pilar, of course hated little Cristobel on sight and kept her ignorant and half-starved for years, until she finally married her off, a few weeks after the kindly barge captain disappeared into the river (I suspected his eventual reappearance), to a suspicious salesman named Raoul. But here perhaps I should let María imagine Raoul.
No one knew for sure what it was that Raoul sold from his shabby black leather bag. He kept it locked and the key on a chain next to his heart, so that when he forced himself on his young wife, which in the beginning was as often as six or eight times a day, she saw the key, shiny as the blade of a knife, dangling above her, untouchable, like a prisoner’s vision of freedom.
Raoul was a travelling salesman and by rights he should have left Cristobel at home when he set off on a sales trip, but because he knew that she would bolt as soon as he took his eyes off her, he was compelled to take her with him. It was in this way that Cristobel visited every inhabited corner of her country, every river village, every mountain hamlet, every mining town, every isolated outpost on the pampas. And yet, even after months of following Raoul, she still did not know what it was he sold.
When they came to a village or a farmhouse, Raoul would gather the men of the place together in a room by themselves and lock the door. Outside the women of the village or ranch would stand anxiously, listening to their men laugh and snort and gasp, and they would pelt Cristobel with questions: what was in that bag, what had he come to sell, her husband?
But Cristobel did not know.
And, as a matter of fact, I did not know either, not having come to Gloria’s explanation. I suspected something to do with sex, something rather nasty and small (because he could travel long distances without replenishing his bag). Aphrodisiacs or vials of something that would ensure potency.
But back to the plot, which continued with Raoul’s death, perhaps at the hands of Cristobel, or perhaps Eduardo. I had come to suspect that Raoul was attached to a right-wing paramilitary organization led by former German Nazis, and that Eduardo first seduced Cristobel in order to spy on Raoul, but I wasn’t sure.
María was the daughter of Eduardo and Cristobel, but the disappearing plague had forced Cristobel to give María up as a baby. María had been raised by a kindly woman named Raquel who had told María stories about her mother and her two men. When María was seventeen Raquel died and María set off to find her mother. The narrative was both the story of her search and her imaginary reconstruction of her mother’s life, which took María all over the the nameless Caribbean country in the grip of cataclysmic events. Yet Cristobel, witness to so much history and madness, was essentially passive. She spent most of her time waiting for Eduardo to turn up and when he did he would say things like, “My love, you’ll never understand. Let’s not talk politics,” before fleeing back into the jungle.
And there were far too many passages like this:
Theirs was a love that had existed for centuries in the genes of those who had come before, the exiled Spanish grandee first casting eyes on the Indian servant girl, reading mystery in her eyes, the mystery of a new continent….
I worked until twelve-thirty when I took some more aspirin and set off to meet Frankie.
The unfinished cathedral of Sagrada Família was Gaudí’s masterpiece and the building to which he’d dedicated the better part of his life; still, it always gave me an uneasy feeling. Sometimes it looked like a giant hand had been playing on the beach and had dropped wet sand, layer after layer, to form a series of towers that began lumpishly and ended in filigreed elegance. Sometimes it looked like a mud-brown excrescence worming its way out of the earth into all sorts of elongated gothic excesses.
Sagrada Família was dedicated to St. Joseph and the Holy Family, and was meant to symbolize the stability and order of family life. Perhaps that was what gave me such a queasy sensation when I looked at the cathedral; it was monumentally, phenomenally bizarre, like the Christian notion of family itself, a combination of organic and tortured form.
I found Frankie at one of the main entrances, the façade of the Nativity, which was dripping with figures of angels, animals and of course the Holy Family itself. She was in white and pink today, fresh and virginal in a big candy-striped shirt over a mini-skirt, and accessorized with white sandals, a dozen bangles and the usual enormous handbag the size of a small refrigerator. She had her auburn curls back and they looked more festive than ever; her skin shone and her lipstick was a fun pink. She appeared far too healthy and well-rested to have spent the evening in the Barri Xines. Unlike me—a walking spectacle of over-indulgent remorse.
I realized that I didn’t know whether to think of her as a “she” or a “he” now. She looked the same to me as she had the last time I saw her, but now that I “knew” she had been born a male, I could see that she still resembled a man in slight ways. A c
ertain boniness around the chin, larger hands and feet, perhaps the muscularity of her legs. Still, I’d met plenty of women who were bigger, stronger, bonier and more muscular than Frankie.
In what did her masculinity reside then? Her voice was low, but I’d thought that came from smoking. She had breasts and hips and the gestures and movements of a woman. She was more feminine than I or many of my women friends. It wasn’t only surgery that had changed her sex, or hormones, it was a conscious choice to embrace femaleness, whatever femaleness is.
Frankie’s reaction to my hesitation was to sweep me up in a cloud of L’Air du Temps perfume and to kiss my cheek. “Don’t think I’ll ever forget what you’ve done for me, Cassandra. Leading me to my little daughter who I missed so terribly.” And she held out a check for $2500. “Now don’t say no to the bonus. Just something to make up for my having had to mislead you a tiny bit.”
I suppressed the suspicion that by the time I deposited the check in my bank account in London it would have been cancelled or would bounce. After all, we’d never said cash. “I’d say you misled me more than a tiny bit,” I said mildly. “In the first place you never mentioned a child, and in the second place ‘Bernadette’ is hardly your ex-husband, much less your husband.”
Frankie started. “Oh, I see you’ve talked to Ben then?”
“I raced Hamilton to the park and found out you’d just tried to kidnap Delilah.”
She ignored that. “Well, if you’ve talked to Ben you can understand why I think of her that way, as an ex-husband.” Frankie waved her hand airily. “She’s so butch. She’s always been so much more of a man than me. How could I have told you the real story, about my baby Delilah? You’d never have come with me then.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. “But I don’t understand why you had to come to Barcelona at all. According to Ben they’re just here for a vacation.”
“You don’t quit your job just to go on a vacation,” said Frankie. “Do you? You don’t sublet your apartment in San Francisco for a year, do you? You don’t buy an open-ended ticket, do you?”
Frankie fixed me with an accusing look, as if I had personally arranged for Ben’s flight.
“You’re sure about all that?”
“Of course I’m sure. When Ben didn’t bring Delilah over to my apartment Saturday morning two weeks ago I wasn’t too worried. It was the kind of thing she’d done before, gone out of town suddenly without giving me the courtesy of a call. But on Monday when I called Federal Express they said she no longer worked there. Her home phone number was disconnected and no one answered the door. It took me days to find out that she’d sublet to a friend of a friend who wouldn’t tell me anything. I called every travel agent in the Bay Area to find the agent who’d issued the tickets; when I found out it was Barcelona I got really worried. So I called the phone company and said some calls to Barcelona had been charged to my phone and could they tell me the phone number. They did, and that’s when I decided I needed to come over here. And that I needed help.”
“And Lucy?”
“It’s true what I told you about Lucy, more or less. I ran into her on the street and told her I was thinking of going to Spain and did she know anyone who lived there. She said no, but after we’d talked awhile she mentioned you in London, and I said I’d like to give you a call when I passed through London. She says hi, by the way.”
“Oh, thanks,” I said.
Frankie and I began walking around the cathedral, which towered over us like a frozen dream.
“Don’t be too hard on me, Cassandra,” Frankie said. “I’m so alone here. It took a lot of courage to come.”
In spite of myself I unbent a little. “Can’t you talk to Ben about all this?”
“If I could get her alone I’d love to talk with her. But April’s always with her, and I can’t stand April. Not that I really know her, but she seems like one of those smug spiritual types who thinks having been born a woman means she has a direct link with the cosmos. As if it weren’t completely accidental what sort of bodies we were born into. I mean, look at Ben. Ben has lots more male energy than I have! It’s so ironic that just because she has a real uterus she was able to have our baby and not me!”
Frankie’s voice had risen and a small group of young American tourists who had been listening to a lecture on Gaudí’s “freer approach to the design of supporting structure and consequently of the building’s ultimate shape,” stared at us uneasily.
“It sounded to me as if the issue was also about what you did with Delilah on the weekends.”
“But I’m a perfect mother,” said Frankie. “I take her to the zoo and McDonalds, to the Exploratorium and Fishermen’s Wharf.”
“What about at night?”
“I don’t judge Ben for how she earns her living. As an actress I have to be free for auditions and rehearsals. What does she expect? Just because she gave up her dreams of the theater doesn’t mean I have to.” She sighed. “Besides, women don’t make very much money.”
We walked around in silence for a while, occasionally crossing paths with the American tourists and their guide, who was praising Gaudí’s “encyclopedic taste,” and pointing out how Gaudí loved to show quite openly the process of construction and assembly. After many years of neglect during the Franco years, Sagrada Família was again in the process of construction, and there were piles of stones everywhere and tall cranes beside the towers.
“So how does Hamilton fit into the picture?” I asked.
“He doesn’t really. He’s a friend of April’s, I think from high school or something.”
“I know you met him that day I followed April and Ben to the park. What did you talk about?”
Again Frankie hesitated. “I explained myself as best I could, told him what had happened, that I only wanted to see Ben and Delilah and talk to them. He said he’d discuss it with Ben and then meet me for lunch the next day.”
“But instead of meeting him—and me—you went to Parc Güell and tried to kidnap Delilah.”
“That’s a total misconstruction of what happened. Yes, I went to the park. I admit I wanted to see my daughter. Is that a crime?” Frankie stopped and looked at me defiantly. “Is that a crime?”
“It’s not a crime,” I said, “but—”
“Do you have any understanding of what it is to love a child and not be able to see that child except on the weekends for a few hours? To not be able to participate in that child’s life, to hear how her day at school went and what she dreams and thinks about? To know that every minute you don’t spend with that child she’s hearing lies and falsehoods about you—about your work, your sexuality, your very being? And then to have that child taken away from you? To have that child simply disappear and realize that you may never see her again?”
We had circled the construction site and were back in front of the Nativity façade. The angels trumpeted above us.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I have a few nieces and nephews but—”
“Of course I said hello to Delilah,” Frankie interrupted. “Isn’t a parent allowed to speak to her child? And then Ben saw me and started screaming bloody murder. Of course I left. I hate scenes.”
“What are you planning next?”
“I thought that maybe you could talk to Ben,” Frankie said.
“Forget it. My job is over. I’m on my way back to London and then I’m going to Bucharest.”
“But Cassandra, I don’t have anybody else here.”
“What about Hamilton?”
“Hamilton’s not really a friend.”
“I don’t know,” I shook my head. “First Ben wants me to talk to you and then you want me to talk to Ben. I think you need to talk to each other.”
“April’s always around. Ben won’t do anything without April.”
“What if I keep April occupied?” I said, with only a slight ulterior motive. “While you meet with Ben.”
“Do you mean today?”
“I’ll
go over there this evening,” I promised.
“Then I’ll call Ben and arrange to meet her.”
Frankie and I shook hands under the scene of the Holy Family. She had a strong grip.
10
WHEN I CALLED THE APARTMENT at La Pedrera later that afternoon April answered, warm and a bit breathy.
“Yes, Frankie called. They’re going out for a drink in a little while.”
“That’s great,” I said encouragingly. “I’m sure they’ll work something out.”
“I don’t know,” murmured April. “It’s often hard to know what the right thing to do is.”
“I’m sure it’s a difficult situation for you.” I was sympathetic, pretending the idea had just struck me. “Look, why don’t I come over while Ben is gone? I’m right in the neighborhood. We could talk.”
April appeared to hesitate.
“I’m right in the neighborhood,” I repeated, and then, more daringly, “You know, I’ve never forgotten that foot massage you gave me. It was one of the great sensual experiences of my life.”
I couldn’t be any bolder than that without risking humiliation.
But April seemed to like it. “Well,” she purred throatily. “I don’t see why you couldn’t come by. Around seven-thirty? Ben is meeting Frankie at seven. And we can talk.”
The bank that now owned La Pedrera was experimenting with all-night illumination. Huge klieg lights shone onto the wavy façade. It looked like a giant seashell stranded in a pool of phosphorescence. How could anyone inside sleep at night?
The portero in the Provença entry was still on duty. I gave him my name and he called up to the apartment for permission to let me ascend.
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