The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho

by Anjanette Delgado

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “They were installed so as not to damage the wall. The bookcases, I mean. They’ll be easily removed.”

  “Are you planning to move now . . . now that—?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll do. There’s so much I have to decide now, finances to sort—”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean you had to move. It’s just you said they’d be easily removed and . . .”

  She just nodded and waved her hand, as if saying I needn’t concern myself, that she understood what I meant.

  As she served the tea, I noticed that where the living room, his “little museum,” was tidy with a designated place for everything, the kitchen I could view from the sofa was a mishmash of colors and overflowing pots, pans, and cooking utensils hanging from hooks and crowding counters and windowsills. The kind of kitchen I would’ve had if it weren’t just me, cooking for myself mostly, with the occasional treat for Henry.

  “So, Mariela, tell me. What are they saying?” she asked before taking a sip of tea.

  “What do you mean?” I said, also taking a sip in order to hide my discomfort with the question.

  She looked at me as if to say, “Really? You’ve come up here just to play that game?” and I thought that she was more like Hector than I could’ve ever guessed.

  “This is great tea. Did you grow it yourself ?” I asked to change the subject, even though it really was delicious.

  “No, I order it from Colombia. It’s a mix of leaves from aromatic flowers. But let’s not change the subject. The police were here. Everyone knows it. People talk, right? They gossip. Hector and I, we’ve lived here three, almost four years. I’m wondering what they think. If they care.”

  “Well, of course. Hector was very friendly. He talked to, you know, to everybody about . . . about books. People were used to chatting with him, seeing him at the store. He had become part of the neighborhood in a way.” I rambled, unable to stop sounding as if I were eulogizing him.

  “Unlike me,” she said. “I feel it, you know. You’re all friends, you know each other, you visit. You talk.”

  The thought occurred to me that if she wanted people to talk to her, it would help if she talked to them, said hello even, once in a while.

  “Everyone’s different. I don’t always feel like talking to people either,” I said instead.

  “You’re being kind. But, tell me, is that why you . . . liked him?”

  She knew, I thought again, putting down the cup from which I’d been about to venture taking another sip.

  “Everyone liked him,” I responded cautiously, remembering how my mother always said, “del agua mansa líbreme Dios,” which means pretty much the same as “still waters run deep.”

  She nodded again, then said, “Speaking of apples, did you know they can be poisonous?”

  I didn’t. And we weren’t. Speaking of apples, that is.

  “No. I didn’t know,” I responded, resolving not to take another sip of anything until I had a better idea of where this conversation about apples was heading.

  “Yes, well, they are. Or their seeds are. But then these days you never know. It seems like everything is poisonous, isn’t it?”

  No. Not everything.

  “You can’t even . . . eat an apple,” she said, raising her voice so suddenly and with such feeling that I recoiled in my seat.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said when she saw my reaction. “I was just . . . I needed to tell you . . . there’s something I need to . . . You know? It doesn’t matter. I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m just . . . out of sorts, nervous, a little . . . angry.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ve been trying to be calm, to settle down, to collect myself, but . . .”

  I wondered if I should explain that she had just done the opposite, basically screaming at me. About apples. But I decided against it because if losing the person you’ve shared your life with for decades doesn’t shock you into acting like the very opposite of your usual self, what would?

  “Sometimes I feel it makes me appear threatening, being so quiet. I want to be more talkative, but I don’t always know how, and when I try, I end up scaring people. You seemed so tense, and I’ve made it worse. I’m sorry. I’m terrible at making friends.”

  After dismissing my protests that it was fine, she proceeded to go on and on about tea, about being unpopular in school, about never really feeling at home in Coffee Park despite the progressive sensibility she shared, and that’s when I realized it: She needed me. She was scared of being alone with herself, and she needed me, or someone, to be there. She was trying to be my friend because she didn’t have any and desperately needed one.

  Suddenly, all I wanted was to make her feel better because while all I’d lost was an obnoxious lover, she’d lost the man she loved, and with him, her entire life as she knew it. I decided then that she didn’t know. She couldn’t and still be sitting here, chatting it up with me.

  I was suddenly sure I was reading her right, and the unfamiliar feeling made me notice how ever since the day Hector began pulling away from me, I’d again begun to have episodes of sight, or what felt like sight. Still, I reminded myself, the increased sensation of assurance could just mean that the meditation sessions with my great-great-grandma’s journal in hand were beginning to have an effect, and not necessarily that what I saw or felt was accurate. She could still be a killer, albeit one who was trying to make me feel comfortable and welcome, even serving me her imported tea.

  “My mother always lowered her voice when she was angry,” I said then, wondering where this quirky but sweet, chatty woman had been all these years.

  “Right.” She smiled, pleased. “Anyway, anything can be poison. Did you know a potato can kill you? A potato!”

  I froze again, wishing she’d stop talking about poison so I could finish figuring her out, seal my notion of her and what she did or didn’t know.

  “You know, I’d scare him with it sometimes. I’d get very quiet and ask him if he wanted me to prepare him something nice, like some mashed potatoes, then tell him about their poisonous properties after he’d begun to eat,” she continued, shaking her head a couple of times, as if she couldn’t believe the silly things she’d done once. Then on the last shake, she left her face turned away from me, becoming so quiet, it took me a minute to realize she was crying.

  “I’m going to leave now,” I said after a few minutes. “But if you need anything . . . you can call me,” I said, meaning it this time, relieved that she obviously didn’t know and could cry over the death of her husband in peace, without having to deal with the conflict of simultaneously missing him and hating him for cheating on her. He must have thrown that stupid letter away like I had the other one, thank God.

  But then her lips were trembling again.

  “That night . . . he called me a loca de mierda. What does that mean anyway, to be shit crazy?”

  I’d never wanted to know something less in my life, but I smiled comfortingly and said, “Well, who knows why men say things? And Hector wasn’t one to be careful about words if it was going to get in the way of a clever phrase, was he?”

  I realized my mistake, but it was too late. Olivia seemed taken aback for a second, but then peered at me, obviously recognizing the level of familiarity implied in what I’d just said, her own level of familiarity with me retreating accordingly, just when she’d been about to share something important with me, I was sure.

  “They’re performing the autopsy today. They think there’s a possibility he was murdered. I think they think I murdered him.”

  I just sat there, mentally kicking myself, unable to speak.

  “Anyway,” she continued. “What was I saying again? Oh, yes. Potatoes. You can unwittingly kill someone with potatoes if, and only if, they’ve begun to turn green, and you give them enough of them.”

  I wondered how many would be enough, beginning to believe she really was trying to tell me something.
r />   “I think I should go,” I said again, standing now.

  “Then again, so can betrayal.”

  I sat back down.

  I’d come to find out what she knew, hadn’t I?

  “Marriage is so . . . fragile,” she continued. “One moment you’re wondering if it’s all it will ever be, missing the little thrills of being a single woman, being so angry at him you think you could kill him with your own hands and, then, before you know it, he’s gone. It’s over.”

  She closed her eyes, lips trembling again, and I held my breath, waiting for it, without knowing what “it” was.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying? How we betray ourselves when we marry, putting up with . . .” She remained silent for a moment and then added, “Did you know I couldn’t have children?”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. He’d never told me.

  “That’s how I got into naturopathy and macrobiotics. I come from a family of farmers, and we believe all solutions come from the earth, from plants, from life.”

  “I didn’t know,” I repeated.

  “And did you know he never let me forget it? He made me feel it, my failure, every day for almost twenty-five years. He wouldn’t adopt, but he acted like, he made me feel like he missed it, not having a child, like it was painful to him,” she said, looking very angry now. “So I let him be, you know, him. I betrayed myself trying to make it up to him. I let him turn it all into a big lie,” she said, looking straight at me. “You’re so lucky, Mariela. You’re free. Your life is yours.”

  “Olivia, I really think I should go now.” I stood again.

  It was the first time I’d called her by her name.

  She nodded, sat there for a moment, then held up her finger as if to say “one moment” before walking off toward the bedroom saying, “The police told me not to go anywhere, not to discard anything until they finish the autopsy, but . . .”

  I stood waiting, wincing at the word autopsy.

  “How’s the girl? The boy’s mother? I saw when she fainted, you know,” Olivia called out from what sounded like the bedroom. The one she’d shared with Hector.

  “Abril? I think she’s fine.”

  “I’m glad,” she said, returning with a sheet of yellow legal paper that she placed in my hand.

  My letter. The crumpled, jealous one drenched in irony that Hector took with him that night.

  So she knew.

  And now I knew too.

  I felt a wave of repentance punching me hard on the chest when I took it from her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “He forgot his wallet here when he came in that night. Before he left again in such a hurry, not even taking the time to change or to sit down for a proper dinner. I didn’t read it. I’m not that brave. But I saw the handwriting and recognized it from the notes you post next to the mailbox to warn us of repairs or fumigation.”

  Of course. How hard could it have been? I thought, feeling as stupid as I must’ve seemed to her.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said again, wanting to say I had never meant to hurt her, but knowing I couldn’t say it, because it wasn’t the truth. I hadn’t cared if I hurt her, which was different. I hadn’t even considered her.

  “Take it.” She handed me the piece of paper. “He liked it enough to keep it. It must have meant . . . something to him.”

  I nodded without raising my head, then left in silence, never lifting my eyes away from her gleaming wood floors.

  Chapter 18

  As soon as I got inside my apartment, I leaned against the door to read the letter Hector had seen fit to save from my wrath, to fold and tuck into his wallet, to keep, even after he’d decided he didn’t care to keep me.

  Amor,

  It’s been nice. But since you’re not the love of my life, and I’m not the love of yours, wouldn’t you agree it’s time to stop it? My only problem with this letter is that I wish I could be kinder, write it so you believe I’ll be suffering over you, knowing how your ego will drive you absolutely crazy over being forgotten without a fight.

  Yes, I know that it is YOU who’s been planning to break up with me for days. Weeks? Since we met? I don’t blame you for wanting me to accept that it was your idea. I’ll give you that, even though I must confess I’d been the one waiting for you to do it first, so as not to deny your ego the pleasure.

  But you’re not getting on with it, frankly, and I’m unable to sacrifice any longer. You see, I have trouble being patient with situations that have begun to bore me, when just days before they were, at least, amusing me. I know you’ll understand me, since you can’t stand to be bored one second, hence your chronic infidelity of body and spirit and your occasional habit of ruining romantic moments by complaining about her.

  Of course I’ll miss certain things about you, but it will be so much more fun missing them than living them. As you know, wrapped in nostalgia, even a vulgar sardine acquires all the charm, personality, and dignity of lobster.

  Have a nice life, amor,

  No longer yours, M + E

  I remembered how I’d sat, jealous and hurt that he had rushed his time with me in order to go out with Olivia, searching the Internet for a literary breakup letter to base mine on. I’d searched for Borges because Hector was always quoting him in the most obnoxious way, but instead found inspiration in a letter from Agnes von Kurowsky to Ernest Hemingway, in which she begins by addressing him as “Ernie, dear boy,” continuing to pile on the digs, the sarcasm, and the condescension right until she signs her name: Aggie, and even that, one imagines as the last turn of the screw, a tool designed to hurt.

  I’d done it with the deliberate intention of showing him that even though I didn’t know as much as he did about literature and language, I could still manage to sound as pompous as he when I wanted to. I’d wanted him to know I could inhabit his immovable feast of a world if I put my mind to it. Like Aggie, I’d wanted to hurt him, of course, but I’d wanted to surprise and intrigue him even more.

  I read it through again, imagining his thoughts as he read, his chuckling at my creative pettiness, the possibility that he’d privately conceded the originality of my approach. I compared this to the blandness of the letter I’d given him, the “nice” one, written as he walked over, determined to break up with me.

  Which was a bad idea, because once you start imagining the dead as if they were alive, you can’t help but desperately wish that they were. I wanted to turn back time, not to the time before the breakup, because on some level I understood that had to happen, but definitely to the hours before his death.

  Had I been in love with him? I didn’t think so, but I did know I missed him. I missed his life, and the window it had opened on my own. Seeing things through his experiences had felt so exotic, global, and free, like watching a foreign movie to bask in the locations, and to dream of going wherever “there” happens to be. I missed that window that made everything strange, new, and more exciting: food, books, business, people, music, and thought were, post-Hector, forever synonymous with seduction in my mind.

  And then there was Olivia. Because you didn’t think I bought her story about not reading the letter, did you? And still, she’d given it back to me. And not in a mean way, though I suppose kindness could just be her dignified wife way of shaming me.

  I wondered how she felt when she read it. Had she suspected all along? Had she been surprised beyond anger? Or did she feel a certain triumph about being right? About catching him “in the act” for once? Something told me Hector had been one of those men who subscribe to the strategy of “deny, deny, deny,” no matter how obviously he’s been caught with another woman. What am I saying? He was a man, wasn’t he?

  Still, an affair, even one with the landlord, didn’t seem like the thing someone like her, someone who seemed to know her husband with all his bad and good traits, would kill over at this stage of her life. And what other thing could she have learned about her husband on that very day that would be anywh
ere near as bad?

  Don’t get me wrong—I know there are probably many women who would, and have, killed men over an affair with anyone, let alone one with a woman who lived in the same building. But despite her raw edges, Olivia just didn’t seem like the type.

  Then there was all that stuff about her inability to conceive, and his taking advantage of her feelings of inadequacy over something she couldn’t help, which in itself was horrible. But she’d had plenty of time to kill him over that, and hadn’t.

  No, I was pretty sure it hadn’t been Olivia, probably because I didn’t want it to be. She’d suffered enough. The autopsy would rule out all the crazy possibilities of crime, either petty or as the result of passion, and prove Hector had died from some unknown disease, strange as that might have appeared to me at first.

  And think about it: If Olivia had killed Hector over our affair, she wouldn’t have given me the letter back. She would know the police would eventually find out whatever she’d done through the autopsy, and she’d have kept the letter, used it to incriminate me, to turn any suspicion that might arise away from herself.

  Instead, she’d been kind to me, as if the finality of death had made her wise enough for several lives and she now knew things I still didn’t grasp, like that it was useless to hate me. That whatever he’d given me obviously hadn’t meant all that much to him, whereas she’d been his one and only wife for decades.

  Had I had her all wrong all this time? Had I been seeing her through Hector’s bored eyes, never giving the real Olivia a chance? Oh, that’s right. How could I? I’d been too busy sleeping with her husband.

  I realized I never asked her what she knew about how he died. Not that I’d intended to, just like I hadn’t intended going inside and drinking her tea as if we were the best of friends. The grand extent of my plan had been to give her my condolences. If she said thank you and acted reasonably pleasant, it would’ve meant I was in the clear. If she slammed the door in my face, I’d have had my answer. I’d been so anxious at first, and then so confused by all her talking about poisonous apples and potatoes, that I never mustered the nerve to ask. Now I didn’t know what to think. On the one hand, it was possible she’d been trying to tell me something with all that talk about poison. On the other, she was a macrobiotic nutritionist. Apples, potatoes, and their curative or poisonous properties were probably all she talked about every day of her life.