“Have you ever been in love, Mariela?”
“What do you mean? I mean . . . I guess, maybe,” I said, unsure of where she was going.
“You meet a man. A wonderful god of a man. He makes you laugh, he makes you think, he makes everything fascinating, exuberant, and wonderful. You’re in love and you’re loved and nothing else matters. And then, something terrible happens. You can’t give him the one thing he says he wants the most: a child. And you watch this man be sad, so sad, that you offer to let him go, to go about his life without you, to find happiness somewhere else even though you know that the minute he’s gone, your life will become as small and dark and airless as a crowded coat closet.”
She’d started trembling like she did the day she’d given me tea and returned my breakup letter, so I took the bowl she still held in her hands away from her and set it on the night table. Then I sat on the edge of the bed, took her hands in mine, and closing my eyes, I listened.
“But he wouldn’t leave me. Can you imagine the sacrifice? He said I was his wife and we’d stay together. And then he kept his word: When there was trouble at the university with the economic crisis and my parents wouldn’t help us, he didn’t hesitate. He decided to come here, and he worked hard, and we bought the house, and later the bookstore. Then, just a bit before the whole mortgage mess a few years ago, he took charge again. He said, ‘Olivia, you’re my home, and I am your home. We don’t need these walls, this roof.’ So we sold it and paid off the mortgage on the bookstore, which he placed in my name. He’d joke I could leave him penniless if I ever wanted to. But he knew I wouldn’t. Never. No matter what.”
Her hands moved violently within mine, like those flashing vibrating gizmos they give you at franchise restaurants to alert you when your table is ready, but I held on.
“That was Hector on a good day,” she said, a lone tear rolling down her sunken left cheek and landing on my hand.
“And on bad ones?”
“On bad ones he’d be hurtful. Couldn’t help making me feel inadequate, ugly, a silly hen. He’d tell me all my suspicions of infidelity were my own inferiority complex making me crazy. He’d say I needed professional help. Sometimes, I’d be reading or gardening in the balcony or cooking in the kitchen, and in he’d come and ask me how much we had saved up, and when I’d tell him, he’d say the amount wouldn’t even begin to cover my psychiatric hospital costs the way I was going.”
I listened, knowing both Hectors were true Hectors.
“About a year ago, I told him about you.”
“About me?”
“I told him I knew all about you. I told him I didn’t know if he was sleeping with you, but that if he hadn’t, he would, and I promised him I’d leave him when he did. The next day he brought me a Spanish-language copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Told me to read it and decide if that was the life I wanted, because I sounded just like the crazy, suicidal woman in those pages. That I saw women everywhere, that I was delusional. He said that he didn’t mind carrying one burden, but that my torturing him was just too much. Sometimes, he’d even convince me, make me apologize.”
I hugged her then, letting her cry on my shoulder, knowing, absolutely knowing, that she wasn’t telling me everything, that things had been worse than she was sharing.
Someone else, someone not a woman, might ask why she hadn’t just left him. But I knew the truth of us: If we could, we’d leave them all—the chronic bad boys, the frauds, the violent abusers, the unreliable, the lazy, the egotistical, the bad in bed, even the ones who pose as “good men” but have the relentless ability to turn every single happy moment into a day trip to the nearest latrine. We hang on, looking and feeling, and taking notes right on our hearts, until we manage to be able to breathe, to stand, to tell ourselves we’re not crazy. That what we are is strong. And then, we leave.
Or we kill them. Was that the way it had happened? I still couldn’t see Olivia poisoning Hector.
She was pushing me away now, dabbing at her eyes as she got up and walked to the bathroom, raising her shift to her waist with the door open, not caring that I could see her drop her panties and sit down to pee, still crying.
I busied myself propping up her sweaty pillows, until she came back and sat on the chair, right on top of the change of clothes someone—she, I assumed—had laid out.
“So I put together the remedy. When the belladonna tincture was ready, I called the boy’s mother. She’d given me her number about a dozen times, always when she saw me with Hector. I’d always thought she was just friendly, if a bit irritating. Now I know it was her way of threatening him with telling me about the boy. But that day, I just told her what I was doing and asked her if Henry was allergic to anything.”
“Oh, God,” I gasped, seeing everything as she spoke, like watching a movie trailer after the movie has premiered, my clairvoyance no better than an old DVD when it came to Hector’s mess.
“She said, ‘Do you know your husband is a son of a bitch?’ I told her I knew no such thing. That calling her had been a bad idea. Because I knew. I knew what she was about to tell me, and I didn’t want to hear about another betrayal. I even remember thinking I didn’t want her to tell me because I’d have to move. And I didn’t want to move again. Now, isn’t that silly?” she said, smiling a forlorn half smile.
“And that’s when she told you?”
“How Hector had seduced her and then refused to do anything but give her money for an abortion. How she’d been too scared and alone to know what to do. How she had planned to be proud, to call him when her son was president of the United States, only to hear him weep with remorse.”
That certainly felt like Abril.
“What changed her mind?” I asked.
“Her family, I think. They were asking questions, telling her she was being a bad mother. That a child needed to know who his father was. So she came back prepared to do God knows what. But we’d moved, sold the house.”
“You moved here.”
“Yes, and so did she when she found him, which didn’t take long. There was, of course, the bookstore, which I’d all but stopped tending or even visiting as I got more involved with my work at the nature center. She told me the plan had been to let him see how wonderful Henry was, how smart, how much like him. She thought he’d change his mind without having to take him to court. But he didn’t. Instead, she says, he pressured her to sleep with him. She told me he’d taunt her, telling her I would never leave him. That he had nothing, which is true because by then all we had was in my name, and that all she’d get would be a handout dictated by a court.”
“Well, he was wrong,” I told her. “The only way that would have been true is if you had been divorced. Otherwise, your assets were still half his assets.”
“That was Hector. Always thinking he was smarter than everybody else. That no one was smart enough to get him. Anyway, she told me she’d tried giving up, going about her life, dating the man downstairs . . . Gonzalo?”
“Gustavo.”
“Yes, Gustavo. She said Hector was very jealous. She said he told her he could see her future, bearing many sons of different fathers, all different colors like test-tube aberrations.”
“My God,” was all I could say. Could Hector really have said such horrible things?
“She said, ‘You want to know how much of a son of a bitch your husband is, lady?’ I just held on to the phone, not saying a word. But she kept on screaming at me, said he promised her that if she broke up with Gustavo and slept with him one last time, he’d tell me about Henry.”
I thought, knowing Hector, that “one last time” had not been the extent of his plan, until he tired of her being more likely.
“She said she’d sue us both, assured me she’d already been to see a lawyer. She told me he’d pay for what he was doing to her son, that he wouldn’t get away with it.”
“But she didn’t see a lawyer,” I said. The threats had been about getting Hector to spend time with Henry, sure as any mother wo
uld be, that once he did, he’d love their son as much as she. It had been a good plan. But she’d completely miscalculated Hector’s narcissism or his apparent lack of fatherly genes.
“Then she said something about how he was going to have to wait the entire night at the park because she was through playing his game,” said Olivia.
“The park!” I gasped, wondering if I’d been mistaken, if we’d all been mistaken: Hector, me, even the police in thinking it was the belladonna that had killed him instead of the furious mother of a child scorned too long.
“Yes. She told me that she’d agreed to see him in the park at eleven that night, but only because all she wanted was for her son to know himself loved by his father,” said Olivia, confirming my suspicions about Abril’s motives. “But that now—hearing me ‘condescendingly’ ask about her son’s allergies as if I were asking about his diseases, as she put it, which I’m sure I did not do—she’d changed her mind. She said she was glad I knew it all now because if I stayed with him, I’d know who I was staying with and we could both rot in hell. How was her sleeping with my husband my fault, Mariela, tell me that?”
It wasn’t. Abril had just exploded after years of impotence. Plus, I was sure Olivia underestimated how condescending she could sound. She didn’t realize how her own shyness made her out to be the superior witch we’d all imagined.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I sat here like a stupid woman, remembering all the times he’d told me he would’ve given anything for a child of his own, and I knew: He never did. He never did, Mariela. All he really wanted to do was torture me. Bring me down. Manipulate me into turning a blind eye to his, to his women!” she said, looking at me, no doubt wanting to call Hector’s women by another name, but remembering I’d been one of them and catching herself.
“It was all a game to him,” she continued. “By the time he came in that night from being with you, or with her, or whoever, I was consumed with rage. I couldn’t think, or breathe, or even look at him.”
She looked consumed with rage now: Her eyes were stretched wide, as if struggling to free themselves of their sockets, her temples pulsing.
“He made fun of me, asked me what I was doing sitting in the dark with my mess all over the kitchen. He started picking at food, talking and talking, not noticing anything. Not noticing me. And I felt the hate of decades. Do you know what that is? Do you know what that feels like? My life, Mariela. He’d made it miserable for nothing. He didn’t want a child. He didn’t love me. He loved and wanted nothing but himself.”
“Olivia, please calm down. You don’t look well.” I walked over to her, a little afraid I admit, and tried to get her to leave the chair where she’d sat, to come over to the bed.
“And then he saunters over to the counter and just rambles on, looks at the cutting table, at the leaves and lemons and the honey I had there to add in case a thicker consistency were needed, and says, ‘I’m going out again,’ and then as if I were completely stupid, ‘Meeting with some bookstore people. Don’t wait up.’ And I looked at him and I saw it: the boy. I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it, but there had been something about his face that had always seemed familiar to me. And that was it. For the first time, I wanted him gone. Away from me, from her, from all women. Away where he couldn’t hurt anyone, and I . . .”
She looked at me for a few seconds, then turned away.
“You what,” I pressed.
Still, she was silent for a few long minutes.
“Sometime after the first decade of marriage, when you know him like you know your own face, you feel it, the bulk of the debris that has been accumulating, making a lump there, against your side. It’s just as possible for you to love him as it is to hate him, the line between the two varying first from year to year, then from season to season, month to month, week to week, and finally, it happens frequently, quickly, scaring you.”
“What did you do, Olivia?” I whispered.
“I let it happen,” she choked out.
I didn’t understand, but I waited.
“He kept tasting everything, making an even bigger mess, and I knew he’d stick his fingers into the belladonna resin I’d prepped in such a way as to maintain its effectiveness, bringing out the power of the alkaloids, its curative compounds, but also its most poisonous properties if ingested. I knew he would and I did nothing. Knowing he smoked, knowing he had respiratory issues.”
“What did that matter?”
“It’s belladonna’s insurance policy. It may or may not kill a person who swallows it. Many people are only able to get high on it. But it will almost certainly kill a smoker, or an asthmatic, if ingested. The alkaloids—”
“Oh my God. What did you do?”
“Nothing. I stood there, looking at him, hating him, watching him put his fingers into everything, watching him lie to me, again. After a few minutes, he turned a little pale, and I almost said something, but I couldn’t speak. Even after he walked out, I wanted to run after him, but I couldn’t move. I killed him. I killed him for me. I killed him for the little boy. I killed him. I killed him. I killed him . . .”
She kept repeating it as if she’d had all those “I killed him’s” inside of her and needed to vomit them. Then she cried for a long time. I sat there with her until she dropped back onto the pillows from pure exhaustion and fell into a shaky, tortured sleep.
Then I got to work. I found her cleaning supplies. And I cleaned her apartment, wiping everything, trying to get rid of all her pain. It had been a second of hate, born of years of love. She hadn’t planned it. And she was paying for it, wasn’t she? Doing something about it was not my business, and it wouldn’t bring Hector back, not that he wanted me to do something about it, quite the contrary, I reminded myself, my decision strengthening inside me.
I cleaned and thought and cleaned and thought, realizing he had loved her in his own way, and she’d loved him, and yet, this is how it ended.
I wondered how many marriages were that one hateful second away from a precipice they wouldn’t be able to back away from. And here I’d thought my marriages had been dangerous. Well, I’d had no idea how bad they could’ve been, I thought.
A couple of hours later, I heard a noise and went in to check on her, finding her fully dressed with the clothes that had been on the chair.
“Where’re you going? You’re not strong enough.”
“Turning myself in.”
“Please don’t.”
“I have to. I can’t live like this, knowing—”
Had he known she was going to do this? He’d thought she was going to hurt herself, commit suicide. This was different. Should I let her turn herself in? But before I knew it, my heart spoke for me.
“You can’t do it because Hector doesn’t want you to.”
“What?”
“I . . . had a dream.”
“You had a dream?”
“Yes.” I swallowed.
“Please, don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not, I swear. I actually came up to help you . . . to tell you something . . . you know, when I came up.”
She sat down on the bed then, and I decided to waste no time saying what I had to say.
“Olivia, last night, I had a dream,” I said, because who was to say it hadn’t been a dream? “And I . . . in the dream, I spoke to Hector. He said he understood, that he forgives you. He said he loves you and wants you to live.”
She smirked.
“Did you even know Hector? He would never say that.”
“Well, he did. He said, asked me to tell you that, that you were his Olivia. That you’d always be his olive tree, that he wants—”
“What did you say?”
I knew what had made her eyes widen, what she needed me to repeat.
“That you are his olive tree.”
“Shut up! Stop it!” she said, seizing me by the shoulders and shaking me.
I assumed she meant talking, so I did
, and after a few minutes of looking at every inch of my face, she let go of me.
“I’m telling you the truth,” I ventured.
Her eyes still trained on me, she sat on the chair again.
“Then tell me. The dream,” she said then.
So I told her, combining the good bits of Hector I’d been lucky to receive over the past two weeks into one dream, editing it in my mind, trying to give her a gift.
Because if Hector had given me gifts of passion, excitement, and culture while we’d been together, Olivia had given me a mirror in which to see myself and my life. And maybe she’d never be my friend. But she was, I decided that day, my sister. She had not intended his death. She’d made a mistake that she’d have to work her whole life to forgive herself for. But Hector was gone, while I could still save her.
In fact, the more I looked at her face alternately cry and light up as I told her some of the funny details of my weeks-long “dream,” the sharing of memory a reprieve for how desperately she must have been missing him all those weeks, I knew that she was worth saving. That I’d convince her, somehow, not to turn herself in, and that I would keep her secret.
Chapter 30
The black-and-white sign commissioned for placement at the entrance to Jorge’s new restaurant almost got made spelling MARIELA’S in big bold letters, and beneath that, in smaller, cursive letters, a bohemian community eatery. Instead, high above the cement portico with the wooden beams rests a more appropriate sign, reading simply, Sí, which means “yes” in Spanish, but sounds like the word see in English. I didn’t come up with it. Jorge did, and I love it. I love that it’s about seeing, about saying yes to seeing, about seeing all that’s around you and being aware, the awareness making you happier than you ever thought possible. I love how clearly he must see me to have come up with it. Lately, I’ve begun to see how much we really do love each other.
I look at the big plate in front of me. The small, round, dark gray cement tabletop has old tile pieces embedded here and there. The plate is made of white porcelain, but of an irregular round shape, somewhere between stone and glass.
The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho Page 24