Then I went on to tell them how we all noticed Mrs. Teldi flirting with her brother-in-law. But adultery was no big deal back then in Argentina. It was almost par for the course, and nobody made much of a fuss about it: we certainly didn’t, and neither did her husband or anyone really . . . except, of course, the betrayed sister. “Because one fateful day, my dears,” I told my rapt audience, “she found them together in one of the upstairs rooms, where nobody went as a rule, since those rooms were no longer in use . . .”
You should have seen them gape and stare as I told them all this. Isn’t it funny, Antonio, how people go on being fascinated by stories of adultery, even the young ones today, with their busy sex lives and all sorts of affairs: straight, gay, even incestuous sometimes. And yet there is something irresistible about love stories from another era and another world, the kind that reek of mothballs and secrets. I should say too that I was particularly inspired that afternoon, for instance in the way I explained in evocative detail how, a few hours later, we found Mrs. Teldi’s younger sister dead, “lying crushed on the paving stones of the back patio, as if the poor thing had quietly, ever so quietly, let herself drop from that upstairs room, the scene of her defeat.” Then I added: “Her face was destroyed by the impact, and yet, as we stood there looking at her, we could still see clearly the pain in those eyes, which had witnessed something intolerable. Relationships between siblings are always complicated—I don’t know if you have brothers or sisters, but it’s not like any other relationship. There’s so much unfinished business: ‘It’s mine . . . you always try to take it from me . . . no, it never belonged to you . . .’ The strong sibling versus the weak one, the same thing over and over, until one comes out on top . . . Anyway, in this story the strong sister obviously ends up with a guilty secret on her conscience. That brief affair, one silly fling among so many others, would never have mattered in the least if her sister hadn’t opened the door of the upstairs room. But death can blow even a little indiscretion like that right out of proportion. And ever since that day, the brother-in-law and the surviving sister had to live with the image of those accusing eyes looking up at them from the patio below, her skull broken on the paving stones and her skirt riding up obscenely, exposing a pair of innocent white legs that never should have climbed the stairs to the top floor.”
But what am I doing rambling on? This isn’t what I meant to tell you. You know the story from start to finish, Antonio, so it isn’t going to have any effect on you, but you should have seen those kids when I came to the end. They were impressed, I tell you. Carlos kept staring at me, Karel was speechless, while Chloe was hungry for more details: “And what was the name of the sister who died? Maybe she suspected they’d been shagging for ages, since before she married him, eh, Nestor? And what about the other husband? Sounds like he didn’t give a shit. All this going on under his nose—maybe they both had their bits on the side, like my own dear olds.”
“That’ll do, Miss Trias,” I had to tell her. “Enough chattering for today.” She pulled a face. On anyone else you’d hardly even have noticed a frown like that, but you see Chloe has these two metal rings, one in her lower lip and one in her tongue, which you can see when she smiles (they say it’s the fashion, I think it’s disgusting), so the result was really quite frightening. “It’s just an old story that doesn’t matter to anyone anymore,” I said. “I was only telling it to fill in time.” She didn’t answer, and just stared at my little notebook, as if it concealed a wonderful treasure. She’s an odd one, that girl, and if I actually were writing a book about people’s shameful secrets, I’d have to put her in it. Not that I think she’s done something truly shameful, she’s too young, but over the years I’ve developed a sense of what destiny has in store for certain people . . . Anyway, I’d better not drone on and on, this letter’s becoming an epic. If I had time and could be bothered, I’d tell you what I know about Chloe Trias, but it’s hardly worth it. She’s a typical poor-little-rich-girl-turned-rebel, I’m sure you know the type. This one’s a punk with an apathetic attitude and a Czech bodybuilder for a boyfriend, nothing very original really, and besides, what do we care about other people’s private lives? We’ve had enough of that over the years . . . So let’s get back to business, shall we? Here’s something I know you’ll love, my little trick number 3, for making chocolate mousse. Something just occurred to me, though: don’t you think some people are rather like desserts? I admit it’s incongruous, but if someone asked me to describe Chloe, I’d say she’s the human equivalent of a mint-flavored chocolate mousse, made with very bitter chocolate and slightly too much tangy mint. There’s an observation for my little notebook—spot on, if I say so myself.
THE SECOND DAY
KAREL AND CHLOE
“IT’S GOTTA BE straight on the edges. Look, I’ll show you. Give me the razor. Hey, watch it! Don’t move, I could slash your jugular. And don’t even think about looking in the mirror, okay? I feel like I’m shearing a sheep here. You’re gonna look so cool. Gimme a break, will you?”
Karel Pligh leaned his head back against the chair and tried to concentrate on counting the number of times Chloe said cool in the course of the conversation, to keep his mind off the supersharp razor blade scraping at the skin under his lower lip. He had already learned something that day: the transformation of a common or garden beard such as he had been sporting since his arrival from Prague into a minimalist goatee is a delicate and time-consuming operation. In the twenty-five minutes it had taken so far, he had counted seventy-three cools, thirty wickeds, not to mention a good deal of fucking-this and fucking-that. It’s a good thing the vocabulary is so limited here, thought Karel Pligh before replying with a “cool” to one or another of Chloe’s questions. At this rate, he thought with a certain self-satisfaction, I’ll be speaking like a native in two or three months.
And so he was. Thanks to his girlfriend, Chloe Trias, and his undying passion for Latin music, a few months after his arrival in Spain, Karel could express himself fluently in a curious modern Spanish that blended the coolest hip talk with quaint turns of phrase from old boleros and congas.
He had more difficulty, however, mastering the secret code of Western love. Chloe was not the first Spanish girl to have burst into his life like a meteorite, catching him off guard. The situation wasn’t totally unfamiliar (this had happened with Czech girls too): before he could ask what was going on, there she was, making herself at home. And the preliminaries were pretty much the same as back home: you go to a disco, you go up to a girl, ask her to dance, she offers to buy you a drink, you let her, and before you know it, you’re in a strange bed full of soft toys or little pink pillows with YOU HAVE TO KISS A LOT OF FROGS BEFORE YOU FIND A PRINCE CHARMING written on them, while Brad Pitt or some other capitalist movie star watches your every move from a poster on the wall, to make sure you’re acquitting yourself like a man. That much was familiar, but there were other things about Western love, other points of etiquette, that were harder for a recent immigrant to understand. For instance, the kind of kiss that signals the difference between a bit of fun and true love.
“Now, don’t even think about moving, K, ’cause this little Michael Douglas dimple you have here is very sexy and all, but it’s a bitch to shave, so hold still for a bit, will you?”
Chloe had started calling him K the first time she had given him a true-love kiss, and Karel had been touched by this apparent homage to one of his most famous compatriots. Quite a few weeks went by before he discovered that Chloe didn’t associate K with Kafka but with a brand of shoe polish that bore a vague resemblance to his first name. By that stage, however, they were in love. They had met a few months before, and rushed through the early stages, the exquisite exploration of each other’s bodies, without their lips meeting once, for, as Karel had been rather stupefied to discover, in the West, you can touch countless bodies, lick and kiss them from top to bottom and penetrate various orifices in between without even imagining a kiss on the lips.
And perhaps that explains why it was only after working their way right through the Kama Sutra that Chloe said to Karel, “Kiss me, K.”
“JESUS, CAREFUL! THIS razor’s really sharp, you know . . . what if my hand slipped?”
Chloe’s hand was steady enough, but one night she literally lost control of her tongue. Karel often thought about that night. Since they’d met one morning in a supermarket—Nestor had sent him out in an emergency for nutmeg, and she was buying a bag of cheese-flavored chips and two bottles of Coke for breakfast—she had told him many things about her life, all of which had turned out to be true: that she and two Moroccan friends had been subletting an attic room without electricity for two weeks, that she liked Led Zeppelin and Pearl Jam, and AC/DC sort of (pity she had such eclectic tastes), that she hated her parents, didn’t care about money, and had never been on a motorcycle. But one unforgettable night, when Karel had already befriended Chloe’s roommates, Anwar and Hassem, who were observing Ramadan, he would make some disconcerting discoveries about his new girlfriend. All because of Ramadan and a kiss.
“Let’s get out of here,” Chloe said to him that afternoon in her attic. “The guys are really boring when they’re on this fasting-and-praying trip.”
And that’s how Karel found out about the other side of Chloe’s life. She insisted that they take a taxi, even though he had his motorcycle parked outside. It was getting dark when they pulled up in front of the sort of house Karel had seen only in old Hollywood movies. Before they could knock on the door, a servant appeared and took care of the taxi fare while Chloe asked him, over her shoulder, if the olds were in.
The olds must be her aged parents, thought Karel. And that’s what he went on thinking until the day he actually met the olds: she was forty-something and looked like Kim Basinger, while he could have been the Marlboro Man. So there’s something else I’ve learned about the ways of the West, thought Karel: rich, rebellious girls have walking ads for parents.
Why Chloe, who had a house bigger than the Sportovni Skola in Prague, chose to live in a dirty attic with a floating population of cockroaches, newspapers for carpet, and lebdas of dubious cleanliness laid out several times a day in the direction of Mecca, why she lived on chips and Coke: these were no doubt to be numbered among the inscrutable mysteries of the capitalist world. But that first night he spent with Chloe at the olds’ house, a far more troubling ordeal awaited him: the first, long-delayed, this-is-serious kiss. Months later, forced to sit still by his girlfriend, who was determined to make him look presentable (“Gotta get rid of this prehistoric growth. Just sit down there and I’ll fix you up. You’re gonna look so cool, I promise”), Karel looked in the mirror, but instead of scrutinizing the tailored remnant of his beard or the very long, thin sideburns Chloe was beginning to shape on his jaws, he remembered that momentous kiss.
First the moist, yielding feel of her mouth, and then a metallic taste, a mixture of copper and tin perhaps. Am I up to this? he wondered. And then: Here goes, pushing his tongue so far in he thought for a moment it would tickle her tonsils. But he stopped himself just in time and opted instead to explore Chloe’s perfect teeth with the tip of his tongue: molars, canines, incisors. Excessively clinical, he thought: meticulous and unromantically precise. But how the hell are you supposed to kiss a girl with one ring in her tongue and another in her lower lip?
Unsurprisingly, Chloe’s bed was full of teddy bears. No pillow with instructions for kissing frogs, though, and instead of Brad Pitt, all three members of Nirvana on the wall, casting a critical eye on Karel’s performance at this crucial moment.
The door shut behind them. They had sneaked into Chloe’s parents’ house and, for the first time, Chloe had given him a true-love kiss. “I love you, K,” she said to him. “I want us to be together forever and ever. I don’t ever want to come back to this awful house, not even to visit. You’re all I have in the world. Can I come and live with you? Could I get a job where you work? I can cook. I can wait on tables, too. I’d do it for free. I don’t care about money. I just want to be with you. Your boss at Mulberry and Mistletoe, do you think he’d take me on? Please say yes. Listen, to prove I really love you, I’m going to show you something. This is a secret; I’ve never told anyone,” she continued breathlessly, diving into her backpack to find that small, red, rather battered case. But she must have had a sudden change of heart, because all she pulled out was a pair of Pearl Jam CDs.
“What’s the fucking point,” she said.
Karel was curious to know what she had almost shown him. Perhaps a photo of a former lover; girls always keep pictures of what they love most, even when it’s dead and gone. But in the end, he didn’t dare ask. Nor, while she was still wielding the razor, did he dare ask her if she really thought it looked so cool, what was left of his poor beard: a little doormat of fur under his lower lip and sideburns like ants marching single file. Had Karel known the old proverb about what to do when in Rome, this would have been a good time to remember it. Instead, what he thought was: I’ve still got a long way to go before I understand how things work in the West. But in the meantime, he was determined to help Chloe however he could. If she was prepared to work at Mulberry & Mistletoe without pay, it wouldn’t be hard to persuade his boss to take her on. He could say he needed help with the deliveries, and there’d be no cost to the business. Nestor wouldn’t mind, he was a good sort.
“Do you know how to ride a motorcycle, Chloe?”
“You know what you can do with your fucking motorcycle,” Chloe shot back. But then, switching abruptly, as she often did, from anger to tenderness, she added: “Kiss me, K. Kiss me again.”
And he did, not just because her words reminded him of a bolero, but also because by then he had grown accustomed to the sweet taste of her mouth.
THE THIRD DAY
LITTLE INDISCRETIONS
PART TWO: DESSERTS MADE WITH EGGS
You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
(Popular saying)
(A note for my dear friend Antonio Reig, to be sent with the recipes.)
I’m very tired tonight, Antonio. I haven’t made much progress. It’s late and I don’t feel like writing. What happened was I went to see a fortune-teller—God knows what got into me—and though I don’t believe in that nonsense, I have to admit she’s got me spooked. Do you think it’s possible to read a man’s destiny and see how he’ll die just by looking at his face? I know it sounds crazy, but . . . Anyway, to get my mind off all that superstitious stuff, I’m going to send you a recipe, just one this time. It’s an idea that came to me while I was observing Madame Longstaffe’s clients, or rather one in particular. (Madame Longstaffe, as you will have guessed, is the name of the fortune-teller I went to see.) It’s a delicacy I thought I’d call Oeufs Intacts. What do you think? Rather paradoxical, of course, but then it’s meant to be. There’s a lot of it about, you see: people dying for an omelette but too scared to break an egg. But enough private jokes; here’s the recipe:
Oeufs Intacts
Take two very fresh eggs and . . .
OEUFS INTACTS, OR SERAFIN TOUS BUYS A PIANO
THAT DAY, AFTER leaving Madame Longstaffe’s house, Serafin Tous decided to walk home. It was six in the evening, still early. He could have called a friend to see if they had plans for dinner, a close friend, so he wouldn’t have to
be good company, or even polite, someone who wouldn’t mind if he dispensed with the customary questions about their health: he didn’t feel like making an effort. He knew that Ernesto and Adela Teldi were in town. He didn’t like Ernesto, but he’d known Adela for ages, and over the years they had shared a good many secrets. He could have been alone with her—that would have been the perfect balm for his agitated state of mind. He could have called her; there was no danger. She wouldn’t have probed him about anything he didn’t want to reveal. His cell phone was in his pocket; all he had to do was choose a number from the memory, the third one, to be precise, and . . . “Just wondering if you were free tonight to put up with one of my silent moods.” But instead of calling Adela or anyone else, Serafin switched his phone off as if making a resolution: Put up with it yourself, like a man, he thought, and kept walking down the street.
At the first corner he came to, he turned, leaving the Plaza Celenque, where Madame Longstaffe lived, and took the Calle del Arenal, heading west toward the Palacio Real, all this without any idea where his steps and his thoughts might be leading him. Recently, steps and thoughts alike seemed to have a mind of their own: disquieting, to say the least. A few weeks ago, they had led him to the door of Freshman’s, and now, in the same unconscious way, they had taken him to Madame Longstaffe’s house, although this time he did not regret it.
“We have come,” he had said to the witch, as if speaking on behalf of himself, his steps, and his thoughts, “to ask you for help, madame.” And he went on to tell her about his unsettling visit to the club, ending with a plea: “There must be a way. There has to be some way of turning me back into the sensible person I was before my wife died. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Why should I suddenly start feeling those, um . . . inclinations again? It must be an illusion, mustn’t it? It probably happens all the time, no? You come across a photograph of a boy, say, who looks just like someone you remember from years ago and it stirs up all these . . . inappropriate emotions. But that’s all in the past, I swear to God, madame. All that is gone and forgotten. I mean, it’s nothing, is it? This feverish feeling I’ve had since the day I visited that horrible club, it won’t last, will it? Tell me it won’t. You must have something that will turn me back into the sort of man Nora wanted me to be. Nora was my wife, did I tell you? She died just a few months ago, a terrible loss . . .”
Little Indiscretions Page 9