“What was that?” Lydia asked me after Pablo left with a gift-wrapped copy of Annemarie Heinrich’s book of nudes, which cost a fortune.
“Must be a gift for someone important,” I said.
“Don’t play stupid,” Lydia responded.
But I couldn’t answer.
* * *
That weekend Pablo invited me to his house again. It had been two months since that first weekend visit. This time his kids weren’t home, and he had planned a dinner with a few couples he hadn’t seen in a while. It all seemed too fast for me—only six months ago these people had lost their friend. But Pablo didn’t hear my objections. I helped him cook a curry with a mountain of ingredients that we had to chop and sort on the counter before even starting; we also delicately laid out a cheese plate with an attention to detail bordering on obsession. Everything had to be perfect, and, as the hour approached, he kept finding more and more indispensable little chores we had to do—all of it making me more and more nervous.
I had heard the names of his friends very often and knew so much about them that the predicament they were in was immeasurable. They asked me a bunch of questions, but sometimes gave each other looks, or talked about things I didn’t understand. Pablo was even worse, and it seemed that they were all looking down on me, as if I were a prized pet. As the night wore on, however, and with the help of bottle after bottle of wine that Pablo opened, they started warming up to me, and at nearly two in the morning one of the women, Delia, asked me to join her on the patio for a cigarette. As soon as we sat down she began swinging on the white iron chairs and talked about Pablo’s dead wife. It wasn’t what I was expecting. She told me how beautiful the woman was.
“Traffic would stop to stare at her.”
And then she dove into a story which I had trouble following at first. The setting was in the country, summertime. Pablo’s wife was dressed in white pants.
“Perfectly white pants, tight, super-tight, so tight there was no part of her left to the imagination,” Delia said in a slow, bogged-down voice.
Pablo was flying to New York the next day; his wife, knowing he had lovers in some of the cities he traveled to, didn’t want him to go.
“She was drunk,” Delia said, raising her own glass. “No pain. There were four or five men in my house that weekend. They hovered around her like bumblebees.
“Pablo’s wife was playing backgammon with the men. She’d already beaten two of them. And then it started raining. A torrential rain. Like the sky itself was dropping. The daughter came in, but the little boy, still practically a baby, stayed out in the rain. And there she was, in the middle of the scene: radiant, gorgeous, the men eating out of her hand. Pablo was sick with jealousy. You don’t know what this woman was like. How brazen she was. Her daughter was right next to her and she didn’t even look at her. I didn’t do anything, it wasn’t my place, but finally I had to go and look for the little boy. He was sitting in the middle of the garden, soaking wet, and if I hadn’t gone out he would have stayed there in the rain because all she cared about was that Pablo was going to New York and she would have her revenge.”
Delia finished her champagne. From the house we heard the laughter of the men, of Pablo. Delia made a gesture of contempt and said, “You’re very young to be playing with Pablo. Why are you with him? Did he ever introduce you to Esther?”
I wanted her to tell me more, everything she knew. The dew had dropped against my cold skin, shimmering against the white iron of the armrests, beading on the glass of the tabletop.
“Pour me more champagne,” Delia said.
And in the blink of an eye, she cut the curiosity that tethered me to her.
The world can synchronize sometimes, things develop on their own, and then bump into each other, synthesize. Considered with some perspective, everything always points to its own completion. Would something have changed if I had asked Pablo questions that night? He probably would have lied to me, and I would heave trod that same path, slowly approaching the inevitable. I decided to look at only one side of things, take the most convenient path. Delia was an unattractive woman. She saw the world through her own ugliness. What motivated her was a sick jealousy for the dead woman, developed over years of envy, years of looking at something totally out of her reach. She exaggerated and, because she’d never been looked at like that, pointed her finger at her dead friend. She, too, had been blinded by Pablo and his wife, by the intensity that drove them, indifferent to anything that didn’t reflect back on themselves. What would happen later doesn’t erase this partial truth.
That weekend felt like a fruit ripening in the sun. Pablo and I spent all morning in bed, and in the afternoon we walked around the neighborhood. On Melián Street we took photos of the Tipuanas under the free light of their huge tops; we toured around, snapping photos of sculptures of stone faces in front of houses, starting with the one over the entrance to the bookstore. We walked hand in hand, inhaling the scents of the local gardens, trying to remember the names of the flowers and trees. Approaching the central plaza, we stopped under orange trees growing over the wall of the Hirsch Palace, and Pablo pulled off a blossom. I buried my nose in the palm of his hand to smell. From the plaza came the sound of drums.
“Carnival,” Pablo said.
We entered into the crowds, even dancing a little. Happiness. To really feel it, everybody else has to be out of the picture. I’ve always been good at making that happen.
* * *
I could say that what really set everything off was Esther herself. But it’s not that simple. One Monday before we were closing up at the bookstore, the nurse forgot her wallet, or maybe purposefully left it behind. Lydia found it.
“Your nurse’s name is Esther Villar,” Lydia told me, showing me the open wallet. It felt like a wave of violence was approaching, but I could only see it out of the corner of my eye.
I called the number that I found on a card in the wallet, stuck behind a plastic window. Esther asked me to stop by, and I told her I would. I crossed the street. Entered the building. Took the elevator. Found the door open and heard Esther yell for me to come in.
“Be with you in a second,” she called from a room at the end of the hall to the left of the front door.
I stood there. A small library, some strange glass bookcase with an old globe on top of it. On the first shelf, as if it were waiting there for me, sticking out almost obscenely, was the Annemarie Heinrich book of nudes. I left the wallet right next to it on the shelf and I walked back out the door.
* * *
I waited an hour at the train station for Pablo. The train doors opened and the people streamed out, passing right by me, talking on their phones, carrying their suitcases, their backpacks, tall people, short people, good people, bad people, whole lives, people in a rush, people with the night awaiting them, with empty houses or full houses, with their lovers or their fears or their loneliness waiting for them. Men. Some of them looked at me. Others didn’t. None of them were Pablo. The trains weren’t spitting out Pablo. Yet I knew what train he was arriving on. I knew it before I even saw him walking toward me amongst the throng of people, before he smiled, before my face erased that smile. I jumped back when he tried to hug me.
“Who’s Esther?”
I shouldn’t have taken even another step with him. But I wanted to know. All I wanted was to know. I wanted to see with clear eyes. If I was going to walk away, I wanted to know what I was walking away from. This is what I told myself. I don’t know if it was the truth.
* * *
Esther opened the door to her apartment as if she had been waiting for us, and we entered without a word. Pablo’s anger reminded me of the conversation with his wife I had overheard on the way to the theater. Esther seemed just as angry. They acted as if I wasn’t even there.
“This wasn’t part of the deal,” Pablo had to say three times before she could bring herself to respond, though it became clear that neither of them had respected whatever the deal was.<
br />
The deal. The first part of which, as I understood it, was to kill his wife. They didn’t exactly say that. Instead they used the word accelerate. Accelerate her death. The second part of the deal, according to Esther, was tacit. According to Pablo, it was only ever in her imagination. According to Pablo, this second part of the deal had never existed.
“What was it?” Esther asked. “Was I not refined enough for you? Or is it because she’s younger? I could tell the police, you know.”
They continued to speak without looking at me. I hadn’t left when I had the chance, but I could still leave. I knew what I had come to find out. But I didn’t move because I couldn’t. Pablo put his arm around Esther and pulled her toward him; at the same time, with his other hand, he grabbed me by the wrist. I could have gotten away. Both of us could have gotten away. But then he kissed her, and then he kissed me, and he pushed us together and Esther buried her face in my neck and Pablo had his hand on the small of my back and then he moved it between my legs and Esther licked my neck. Desire overtook me. I wanted to kiss him, but even though he was close, his body pushed up against the both of us, he had pulled his head back to look at us, and his mouth was too far away. He seemed angry. The anger was like another presence, a fourth person, the tie that bound Esther and me together. Esther moaned; Pablo let go of me and grabbed her neck. I could have screamed, I could have pushed him away. I don’t even know what I could have done. But instead I stayed, dazzled. Esther glanced at me, and then at Pablo. I can’t say if it was a look of surprise or if she’d had a revelation. She seemed to surrender; she was as dazzled as I was.
Pablo followed her body as it fell to the floor, not releasing his grip on her neck. Finally, he let go. I kneeled down. Pablo took my hand and put it against Esther’s still-warm skin. There, on my knees, like an acolyte, I looked into his eyes. There was no anger left in them. And then, yes, he kissed me.
Crochet
by Inés Fernández Moreno
Parque Chas
Translated by M. Cristina Lambert
After searching for almost two years and weathering several financial crises, we finally found the right house for our budget. It was in Parque Chas, at the corner of Constantinopla and Bucarest. A big, run-down house, but with the romantic air of a small abandoned castle. It had two floors and was surrounded by an overgrown yard presided over by two cypress trees.
“It’s a chalet like the ones the English constructed when they came to build the railroads,” Andrés explained.
“The yard doesn’t look very English,” I said, looking downheartedly at the invasion of weeds and the remains of a chicken coop where three pygmy hens were still pecking and shitting.
“But it surrounds the whole house; you can’t compare that to the pathetic idea of a garden we have now. Take lots of photos, please!”
Like a thoughtful copilot, I kept a thorough record of all our forays with my new cell phone camera.
But inside the house we continued to disagree. Where I saw the drawing room as an Etruscan grave, he saw large windows where light would stream in; where I saw a dilapidated kitchen, a creaking floor, and narrow corridors that led to dungeon-like rooms, he saw walls to knock down, a floor full of possibilities, and excellent ventilation.
And he was the architect, so I trusted his ideas. And we bought it.
The previous owner’s name was Adriana Costa, and she was probably around twenty-five years old, although she was pale and withdrawn which made her look older. According to what she told us, she had lived there with her divorced mother, her grandmother, and a maiden aunt who had been a veterinarian. Unhappy women who, perhaps as a final act of dejection, had all died before their time. As they disappeared, she had limited herself to closing off their rooms, without touching a thing. Since she shared a room with her mother, she decided after her death to move to the drawing room, and she lived there amid the chaos, with clothes and shoes piled up in the corners, books and papers on the floor, and the company of three old and odoriferous dogs left by Clarisa, the veterinarian aunt who’d had up to a dozen dogs at one time. I would leave those encounters sneezing and quite depressed, but Andrés’s constructive optimism was unalterable.
A few days before the agreed-upon date for the closing, we stopped by the house and found Adriana disheveled, in a bathrobe, removing buttons from a pile of old clothes.
“I haven’t taken everything away yet,” she told us. “I’m going to need a few more days . . .”
Since we were in a hurry and planned to do a complete renovation, we offered to help her.
“I still have to do the lower level,” she told us, “especially my aunt’s office; it’s crammed with useless things. And the little hens . . .”
We assured her we would throw everything out. And take care of the hens.
She accepted with relief, and a few days later we began the work in earnest.
As we pulled down the dark wood paneling covering the walls and opened large windows that would face the future garden, the house began to transform itself, as if by a miracle, into what Andrés had imagined. I documented each change for our renovation scrapbook.
Six months later, we had little money left, and the completion of the work was delayed, but since most of the house was now inhabitable we decided to move in anyway.
With the excitement of the changes, we quickly got used to living in a house with two areas: the new one, bright and cheerful, and the one from the past with the veterinarian’s office, the ruined laundry room, and the gloomy yard where several small brick structures stood at irregular intervals.
“They’re dog graves,” Pedro, the work foreman, had said. He had been told so by a neighbor, the same one who had delightedly accepted the three pygmy hens.
But the gloomiest part of the house was the veterinary office, which had a shelf with a row of animal skulls of various sizes and a basket filled with bones. Scattered about were pieces of wood, washbowls, an armchair without a seat, a collection of veterinary magazines, and several loose drawers with a random miscellany of objects.
The built-in closet in the back wasn’t any better. When Andrés managed to open it with a hard pull, a frightening object fell from the top. A huge spider? An embalmed cat? I kicked it, and then cautiously approached until I saw it was an old wig, with moth-eaten hair. It made me nauseous so we decided to leave the rest of the task for another time. After that, we called the place the little room of horrors.
* * *
It was not easy to get to Constantinopla and Bucarest. I had to take the subway downtown and get off at Los Incas, the last station on the B line. Then I had to walk about ten blocks—briefly going deep into those circular little streets named after European cities—Berlin, Dublin, Londres—like someone getting lost in a dream. One corner would end in an unexpected turn, a tiny little square, or in a point converging with itself, like the corner of Bauness and Bauness.
Like in any suburban neighborhood, there were low houses with their identical little front yards and their tender details: welcome signs, ceramic ducks or dwarves, flower beds protected by a small nylon cover. But peculiarity also flourished: neighbors occupying up to half the sidewalk with their own flowerpots; a newspaper vendor who also sold eggs; a newsstand guarded by a dog; a pharmacist who read tarot cards; a greengrocer on Torrent Street who sang the praises of any vegetable or fruit one asked him for.
One afternoon when I was coming home—tired, but more open than ever to the neighborhood spirit, as I had just been granted two months of freelance work at the magazine—I stopped on Ginebra Street in front of a window lined with geraniums and crocheted curtains. Against the glass, there was a picture of Saint Expeditus and underneath, a sign offering Crochet and Costume Jewelry Lessons. I took several photos of it and remembered with tenderness that my grandmother used to crochet. I had never had the patience to learn. Perhaps my life in Parque Chas would now allow that deliberate and relaxing activity.
The next morning at breakfast,
I told Andrés about my explorations in the neighborhood and the idea of taking crochet lessons with a neighbor. He was also making his own discoveries. He talked about the auto mechanic on Barzana Street where he’d had some spark plugs changed: his name was Giacomo and he had been a baritone.
“Now he no longer sings, but he talks nonstop. He told me he knew the Costa family well—and especially the veterinarian aunt. Apparently, she was a beautiful woman. He’d heard some stories because, besides being an old neighbor, he was the ex–police captain Padeletti’s partner.”
“But at some point the beauty started collecting bones,” I said, remembering the basket of bones and the skulls in her office. “We should empty out that place once and for all, don’t you think?”
So when Pedro came to install the missing baseboards, we asked him to start with the yard that same week, and to help us empty out the little room of horrors.
Pedro, with his calmness and his gentle accent, said we would have to burn incense afterward. His wife recommended doing that to cleanse the place. “One must especially safeguard from the envy of the dead, she says, which is the worst poison.”
Later, while having coffee in the kitchen, he told me his nephew Eladio was studying veterinary medicine, and that perhaps he might be interested in the magazines, and even the ominous dog skulls and bones. He would take them, he decided. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” he declared.
I left him working in the yard and decided to go over to the place offering crochet lessons. I went down Cádiz, and after several wrong turns came out on Ginebra, where I immediately recognized the window with the geraniums. On the stone front of the house, next to the door, was a bronze plaque that said, Eduardo Brunner. Osteopath. I rang the bell.
The woman who opened the door must have been over seventy but did not look at all like a knitting grandma. She was tall and robust and had high cheekbones and fiery eyes that she attempted to control. She shook my hand right away and told me her name was Franca. She led me to a living room, quite spacious, but with huge, dark furniture, around which she moved with impressive agility. Crocheted handicrafts sprouted like tumors everywhere: cushions, armrest covers, table runners, and even some flowerpots with knit covers.
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