by Lore Segal
“Quite a way, the other side of town.” Don Indalecio told the chauffeur, in Spanish, to drive by way of the Boulevard Benefactor de la Patria. To me, he said, “I’ve not seen it since it was reopened last month. There, look: all widened, macadamized, planted with noble palms. As splendid a thoroughfare as you’re likely to see, leading to absolutely nothing.”
I laughed appreciatively. Don Indalecio was pointing to the end of the thoroughfare, where two dilapidated huts stood, one closed permanently, the other housing a little ramshackle grocery lit inside with spirit lamps. Beyond lay open country.
“Those buildings on the right are army barracks,” Don Indalecio explained, “and over there you see the lights of the airport.”
“I’ve never been here before,” I said. “I like to see new parts of the town.”
A slight shift in the gentleman’s position alarmed me, but Don Indalecio had merely turned his head and seemed to be studying me. I found myself telling him about myself, that I was Jewish, came from Vienna, that my uncle had a grocery in Santiago, that I had a degree from the University of London and taught English. Don Indalecio listened with a mannerly and benevolent interest, nodding his head and saying, “Very good. Aha!” from time to time, as if confirming what he heard. And it occurred to me that Doña Piri must have told him about me.
“I seem to be teaching mostly diplomats and their families,” I boasted.
“Ah yes, our local foreign corps! Have you noticed what a dogeared lot of humanity they send us out here? Do you happen to know the ambassador of X?”
“Oh, I teach him five mornings a week,” I said.
“Then you know he’s a near moron.”
“You’re so right! He is!”
“And the minister of Y, a good man, who had his insides shot up in the First World War. As for the consul of Z, he might have gone far if he hadn’t married his mistress.”
“What’s wrong with marrying your mistress?” I asked, to show how broadminded I was, and noticed that Don Indalecio looked at me with increased satisfaction.
The car had begun to bump over the baked surface of a mud road. The headlights picked out a cactus hedge with clothes hung out to dry upon it and houses of slats and corrugated iron like the houses where Pastora lived in Santiago. Women with large bellies stood in their black door holes watching the great car go by.
We passed into a new section, slithering and lifting across newly churned land, no longer field and not yet road. On either side stood little, new, modernistic stucco bungalows. On the veranda of one I could see Doña Piri looking out for us.
Doña Piri bustled around me, like a puppydog. “How you like?” she kept asking, as we walked inside the little house. The colors were pastel and harsh; everything looked painfully new. Don Indalecio whispered, “Doesn’t it look like a stage setting? Look at the little window curtains, the sofa, the table set for three.”
It had already occurred to me that Doña Piri had indeed arranged this little scene for Don Indalecio and me, and I laughed, frowned, and shook my head at him. But Don Indalecio continued unabashed. “I feel, my dear Piri, that as soon as the señorita and I have gone, this whole room will be carried away again.”
“Come now,” I whispered, as Doña Piri excused herself and went out to her kitchen, “she means so well.”
“Do you think so?” asked Don Indalecio, turning to look into my face as if for information.
“You know, she only moved into this house a few days ago.”
“Aha! That explains it.” He put out a furtive finger to poke the pink wall. “It looks as if it’s hardly set in its mold.”
“Doesn’t it!” I laughed.
Don Indalecio was tapping the sofa for me to come and sit beside him, and he offered me a cigarette. He sat with one fat leg crossed easily over the other, cigarette held between the fore and middle fingers of his elegant right hand, and entertained me. Don Indalecio was a Spaniard, but he, too, had lived in England; he had read books, even confessed deprecatingly to having written one. He spoke English with wit and grace. I crossed my legs and held my cigarette elegantly between fore and middle finger.
During dinner Don Indalecio continued to give me his attention, to the exclusion of our hostess. His shoulder seemed turned against her, and I kept wanting to redress the balance by turning the conversation toward her. “I think this is going to be a very pretty place once it gets the feeling of being lived in,” I said to her.
“Of course, we don’t know yet,” said Don Indalecio, “whether it’s going to be lived in.”
“You’re not going to stay here?” I asked Doña Piri, puzzled.
She said, “Did you know that I owe this house to Don Indalecio?”
“You do?” I asked. There seemed to be something in the air that I had not understood or had misunderstood.
“As I recall, my dear Piri, this was all your great idea,” Don Indalecio said, with such an edge in his voice that I thought they were quarreling, but as I looked from one to the other, they were both smiling at me.
Doña Piri said, “The señorita has beautiful taste, and she is going to help me arrange the furniture.”
“I don’t know why Doña Piri thinks I know anything about arranging furniture. I live in a hotel room, you know.”
“Some day soon, you shall have a house of your own,” said Don Indalecio, “and not a stage setting!” He smiled meaningfully at me. I frowned at him and glanced at Doña Piri, but her eyes were on me as if to make sure I was enjoying myself.
“Of course,” went on Don Indalecio gaily, “I was speaking only of the décor. The cast,” he said, looking gallantly at me, “is delightful.”
Doña Piri beamed. She suggested that I might enjoy sitting out on the galería, but first I went to the bathroom, where I put on some more lipstick.
When I came outside, Doña Piri and Don Indalecio were sitting on two chairs close together and talking, but stopped politely when I joined them.
I said, “How nice it is to see two old friends in conversation together.” The parallel smiles with which they were looking at me made me blush as if I had said something silly. I shivered and Doña Piri jumped up to fetch me a shawl.
It was a mean little wool shawl. It was a mean little galería, looking across the mutilated earth of the road to the constant blinking of the many-colored airfield lights. There was the untidy clutter of a large unfinished building going up on a rise in the ground at the end of the road. I said I thought I must be going home.
Don Indalecio rose at once and signaled to his chauffeur, whom I saw, as I said good-by to Doña Piri, leaning over the back of the car as if he were adjusting the number plate.
Don Indalecio settled himself beside me in the back seat and said, “I was wondering if you would mind my just stopping off for a moment at a cottage I have near here. I have to pick up some papers.”
“Fine,” I said.
I kept glancing sidewise at the bulk of his shoulder and the expanse of his soft, pendulous cheek, which seemed, in the half darkness, to be very close to my eye. He was breathing in an odd way, with sharp, quick heaves. I wondered if it was asthma, and when he bent forward to speak to the chauffeur and his arm inside his jacket became pressed against mine inside the shawl Doña Piri had insisted on my taking, I would not move away for fear of offending him, but sat rigid, hardly breathing, with every nerve withdrawn from the contact and waiting deep inside myself for the arm to be removed.
The car turned into a side road that soon became nothing more than a thickly wooded mud drive. We stopped. In the darkness outside was a house. Don Indalecio did not immediately get out. “You’ll excuse me, won’t you? I shan’t be a minute. Or would you like to come in and have a drink before we go on? Come and see my bachelor’s retreat.”
I could not think, under the stress of the moment, of a way to refuse the invitation without the immodesty of seeming to presume that this man wanted what he had not even hinted at. And I wanted to be brave about life. I said, “I’d
love to.”
The chauffeur held the car door. There was gravel underfoot. It was dark. Don Indalecio had gone ahead and seemed, by the sound of falling and creaking objects, to be making his way across a cluttered galería, groping for the light switch. The light came on inside what appeared to be a quite small, ramshackle bungalow. Don Indalecio threw open the door, and in the sudden illumination I caught a glimpse of the chauffeur’s face, which appeared to me in that moment horribly, evilly awry, before I realized that he was grinning at me.
I walked into the lion’s den and then refused to sit down in it. “No, thank you. I don’t feel like sitting.”
“Let me take the shawl.”
“Thank you, no. I’m a little chilly,” I said and shivered.
Don Indalecio excused himself and left the room, and I heard the lavatory chain pulled. It seemed to me that during the twenty minutes we were inside the cottage, Don Indalecio went out three times, while I kept walking around with my handbag held over my bosom and my arms wrapped around my handbag, remembering to hold my shoulders straight the way my mother was always telling me.
The room was a crude, simple one, a bachelor’s country quarters. There was a big modern refrigerator right next to the front door, a shabby, comfortable armchair, and a handsome mahogany table cluttered with male objects: a pair of flannels, a gun, an old airmail edition of the New York Times. On the wall over a simple fireplace hung a landscape painted with a fresh, loose stroke. When Don Indalecio came back in, I said, “Who did this? It’s good.”
“You think so?” He came and stood beside me. “It was done by a young friend of mine. Juanita Rivera. She exhibits in the Galería des Bellas Artes. I’m glad to have your opinion of it. I want to buy some more paintings, and I was hoping for your advice. My own taste is quite rudimentary.” He grinned down at his terrible tie.
At that moment I liked him enormously. “Well, this is quite, quite good,” I said. “I like it.”
“I have another one of hers inside that I should like you to see.” Don Indalecio led the way into a smaller room with a bed, from which I averted my eyes, fixing them on the portrait that hung above it. It was Don Indalecio’s profile as I had seen it beside me in the car when he had thought himself unobserved, self-absorbed, with the great cheek relaxed and loose. What the little portrait revealed with the impact of immediate conviction was that Don Indalecio looked like nothing so much as a sad, subtle, indecent old woman.
“It’s very good. A very sensitive portrait, but I think I like the landscape better still,” I said and turned on my heel and marched back out into the front room. “This is somehow a bigger picture. It’s her advice you should get in buying paintings. Compared with her, I’m an amateur.”
“Yes. Well, yes, but that young lady, you see, is a little angry with me. She doesn’t give me her advice any more. Well,” he said, “let’s go.”
Don Indalecio picked up a roll of papers, took me by the elbow and walked me out, locked the door, put out the light, and handed me back into the car, where he sat silently hunched into his corner of the back seat.
“By the way,” I said, “if you’re really interested in pictures, maybe you would like to come up to the hotel where I live.”
Don Indalecio seemed to rally at this.
“There’s a Hungarian painter called Janos Kraus, who’s not bad. I could arrange for you to have dinner with him. Frau Bader’s dinners, as a matter of fact, aren’t bad either.”
“Fine, fine,” said Don Indalecio and jerked his head so sharply away that I looked sidewise to see his profile with lips turned down, the fat, womanish old cheeks drooping sadly.
I kept talking about Janos—that he was talented, though derivative—until we arrived in front of the hotel.
Don Indalecio got out to say good-by. He held my hand a moment. “Perhaps you and I could have dinner sometime. Maybe we can visit the Galería des Bellas Artes together and you can teach me about modern art. Then we could go to the Jaragua, or to your hotel, for dinner.”
“I should like that very much,” I said sincerely.
“You would?” said Don Indalecio, and he looked quite pleased.
By the time I returned from the ambassador’s lesson next morning, the maid, Julia, had a message for me from Doña Piri, who had called on the telephone. She was prevented from coming to her class, but would I have dinner with her and Don Indalecio tonight, or the night after. I wished the good woman would let up and let things take their course. Before I left I said, “Julia, if that lady calls again, tell her I will return her shawl when I see her.”
But as I walked up the Malecon toward the house of Señora Ferrati, my next pupil, it occurred to me that Don Indalecio might have asked Doña Piri to arrange another meeting. He must really have liked me. I began to wonder if I might be more charming than I had any idea of. I began to smile. I smiled at the sleek black diplomatic cars gliding past and at the skinny black children watering the cosseted lawns. Even the Ferratis’ silly, pastel-green castle with its stucco battlements looked engaging in this holiday world, this perpetual summer light.
The Ferratis were refugees, too, but they were Spanish and rich. I was shown up to the señora’s cool, shuttered bedroom, where she was busy with herself in front of the dressing mirror. “Ah, the señorita! Would you mind if we only had half an hour this morning? I have Doctor Levy coming to do my feet. And let’s just have conversation.”
“Then speak English, please.”
“Oh, I forget. I go to canasta (is right?) to Señora Ambassador of X. Is awful bore. This night we go to ’otel Jaragua. Is too much. Makes me nervous.”
The señora did not look at all nervous to me. With her ample body and warm skin color, dressed in a beautiful, elegant suit of white piqué, on the way to some party, Señora Ferrati was living my daydream, except that I had met her husband on the stairs, a dull, dapper little man with a precise military mustache. Yet the señora had about her a look of enjoyment. I used to study her.
“I will ask you a question, and you answer in English. Do you happen to know someone called Indalecio Nuñez Aguirre?”
Señora Ferrati looked up from her nails, which she was painting a hot pink color. “You have new boy friend, is it?”
“No. No, no! He is a gentleman I met at the house of a mutual acquaintance. He is Spanish, too, and I just thought you might have met him. I think he is the president of some big movie distributor.”
Señora Ferrati furrowed her brow and thought she recalled having met such a person once, and she looked at me with such a pleased, nosy expression that I told her all about last night.
“Dear Señorita, he is interested in you,” she kept saying. “He must be immensely rich, and he is interested.”
“But he is an old man,” I said. We had both forgotten about speaking English.
“How old?”
“Fifty, or sixty, maybe.”
“So? How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Oh. Well anyway, then what happened?”
“Nothing. We had dinner. We sat on the veranda. He’s quite a cultured man. He has some good pictures by a girl, a painter called Juanita Rivera, in his cottage in the country.”
“You went inside his cottage?”
“Why not? There were some papers he had to pick up,” I said, and colored.
“Well, then,” asked the señora, “what happened?”
“Then he took me home to the Parisienne.”
“Oh, my dear. Yes. And then?”
“He went home.”
“My dear Señorita, you have made a conquest! Do you know a man like that can make your fortune?”
I shook my head fastidiously, but I saw a house of my own on the Malecon, a salon consisting of all the prettiest and brightest people on the island. In a mental letter to my English friends, I described my husband, a businessman, it was true, but witty and cultured. And all the time I knew that this was not for me.
The señora was
flapping her hands to dry her nails.
“I was saying to my husband only yesterday, I said the Señorita would be one of the best catches in town: She is white, and she is pretty, and she is educated. If the señorita had a fortune she could get anybody.”
I pushed my glasses up on my nose and said, “I am not pretty.”
“I think you are pretty!” the señora said in a sincere tone. “As I said to my husband, the señorita is so spiritual-looking.”
“Oh, that,” I said, and my heart dropped.
“I often wish I looked more spiritual,” said Señora Ferrati, putting a handsome cross on a heavy silver chain around her throat.
“Besides,” I said, remembering the things in the air yesterday that I had not understood, which still vibrated like false notes in my mind, “he might be married for all I know. He looks sort of settled.”
The señora folded a square of hot pink silk between the white of her suit and her olive skin. It gave her a sudden brilliancy. “Oh my dear Señorita! Don’t talk to me about married men!” She rose. The lesson was over. “You know what I shall do at the canasta party?” I thought for a moment that she was about to invite me along, but she said, “There’s sure to be someone there who knows your Don Indalecio. I’m going to find out all about him. I’m going to be your detective.”
On the stairs I met “Doctor” Levy, who would have passed me with a bow, but I stopped to ask him how he did. He thanked me for the recommendation which had introduced him to Señora Ferrati. It was a pleasure, I said. I asked him if he had ever come across a Don Indalecio Nuñez Aguirre. He said, no, the gentleman he had never met, but he did the señora’s feet regularly.
“You mean Señora Aguirre? The wife of Don Indalecio?”
Indeed yes, and sometimes he was called to do the feet of her older, married daughter who had two little girls, and he would be glad to recommend me as an English teacher next time he was there.
The hotel was deserted after lunch. The guests, even Frau Bader herself, had crept into their rooms to hide from the full blast of the midday heat. A turkey screamed in the next yard. Of course I had known all along! Had I not told Señora Ferrati that Don Indalecio was probably married?