Design of the non

by David Odell

  I said nothing, I didn't ask and I still haven't asked, the more time passes the more unlikely and difficult it will become for me to do so. You let one day go by without saying anything, and then two days and then a week, and the months pile up without your even noticing, and any manifestation of the suspicion is deferred if the latter hasn't grown meanwhile, perhaps you're just waiting for that too to become part of the past, to become something venial or ingenuous, something that will perhaps make us smile. For some days afterwards, before going to bed, I used to look out of my study window down at the corner below; but Custardoy wasn't there on any subsequent night and the next time I saw him was upstairs in my own apartment, just for a moment. My father had arrived around half past eight to have a drink with Luisa and myself before going to some supper or other to which Custardoy had invited him, and that's why Custardoy the Younger came to pick him up around ten o'clock. He sat down for a few moments, had a quick beer, and I didn't notice anything, no new familiarity, however minimal, between Custardoy and Luisa; apart from through my father, they'd met each other through him during my absence and my father had always been present on those few occasions, that was all, or so it seemed to me. There was much more familiarity between Ranz and Luisa, they'd often met each other alone, my father had accompanied her on shopping expeditions to buy things for our new home, he'd taken her out to lunch and supper, he'd given her advice (he was a man of taste, an art expert), they clearly liked each other, amused each other. My father talked about Cuba during that visit, but there was nothing unusual in that, indeed, it was a country about which he often spoke, he'd had a lot of contact with it, from his marriage to the two daughters of a Cuban mother to a few unusual transactions which I already knew about. He'd gone there in the December of 1958, just weeks before the fall of Batista: foreseeing what was about to happen (as did the land-owning classes), he'd acquired a lot of jewellery and valuable pictures - at bargain prices - from families who were preparing to flee. Some (a few) he'd kept, others had been sold to Baltimore, Boston or Malibu, or had been auctioned in Europe (the jewels had perhaps been removed from their settings by jewellers in Madrid and some given away as presents). It was something he was proud of and his one regret was that he hadn't had such foresight again when it came to revolutions and their subsequent crop of wealthy exiles. "When rich people leave the field of battle, they don't want to leave anything behind for their enemies/' he used to say, that mocking smile playing on his feminine lips. "They'd rather burn or destroy their possessions than leave anything in the hands of their enemies, but the rich know that selling is always a better option." If he'd gone to Cuba then, you'd imagine that he had contacts and even friends there and that he'd been there before, but his visits to that continent were all jumbled up, the different visits became confused when he talked about them (he himself confused them) — he'd made so many trips there to act as a valuer for one of his respectable North American museums or to one of his fraudulent South American banks - and of all the possible trips he'd made to Cuba, the only one that remained clear to me was the one he made just before the revolution. (On the other hand, you do tend to tell your children things in a disorderly fashion, little by little and not in any particular sequence, according to how old or how interested they are, and for children the past life of their progenitors is, at best, chaotic.) Whatever the truth of the matter, he would have lost touch with any friends in Cuba after 1959 and the much-vaunted end to all privilege, although, oddly enough, I can't remember him ever having had any dealings with Cuban exiles in Spain. Or perhaps he just hadn't brought them home with him and so I would never have been introduced to them. He hadn't been back since and so when Ranz spoke of Cuba now, he didn't do so as a person in the know.

  But on that occasion the way he spoke was out of the ordinary, different, as if Luisa's presence had already acquired such weight that the tone he used and the solicitude he doubtless displayed when they were alone together prevailed over the usual, more ironic tone, which he'd always used with me both in childhood and in adulthood. And when Luisa left the room for a moment to answer the phone, my father's way of commenting and talking changed or, rather, was interrupted. As if realizing for the first time that I was there, he began asking me questions about New York, questions he'd asked me upon my return (we'd had lunch together at La Ancha three days after I got back), questions he knew the answers to and was no longer interested in. I was there in front of him, but it was Luisa he was talking to, and the moment she returned, his remarks regained that unusual liveliness, although Ranz has always been a very lively person. Maybe Luisa's laughter was somehow opportune, maybe she laughed in all the right places (that is, when he intended her to), maybe she listened to him the way he wanted to be listened to or made appropriate comments and asked suitable questions, or maybe she was someone to whom he wanted to tell everything, someone new to whom he could tell his story in sequence and in the proper order, because she was interested from the outset and there was no need to wait for her to grow up. My father told us several anecdotes I'd never heard before, like the one about the Venetian forger of Romanesque virgins carved in ivory which, once he'd added the final skilful touches, he would place in his wife's capacious bra; the (abundant) secretions from her breasts and the (pungent) sweat from her armpits lent the statuettes a perfect patina. Or the one about the director of a bank in Buenos Aires, who was very keen on art and who refused to believe Ranz was telling the truth and bought a work by Custardoy the Elder from him, a work Ranz had taken there on the orders of a miserly but immensely rich family who'd wanted a good copy of a much- admired Ingres; before Ranz delivered it, the director of the bank saw it in its unframed state in his hotel room (the Plaza in Buenos Aires), he was so taken with it that he wouldn't even hear of its being a copy; my father explained its origin and its intended owners time and again, he also explained that the original was in Montauban, but the banker was convinced that he was trying to deceive him and that he had, rather disloyally, acquired the masterpiece for other clients and that the painting in Montauban was false. "In that case," my father had said, still unable to convince him, "if you buy it from me as authentic then you'll have to pay me the authentic price." Those words, intended to dissuade, were proof to the banker that he was right. "It was the most money Custardoy ever earned from a single painting," said my father. "It was a shame for us that there weren't more obsessive directors of banks and museums like him. It was a shame that, in general, people always trusted me and that we therefore couldn't use it as a method." And he added, delighted, laughing along with Luisa: "I never heard from him again, I felt it was better that way. I just hope no one ever accused him of misappropriation of funds." My father was enjoying himself, as was Luisa, although not as much as he was, the thought occurred to me that she'd be able to get him to tell her anything she wanted and that thought didn't occur to me by chance, I was thinking too about what she wanted to find out from him and what I, or so I believe, did not, which is not to say that I'd stopped thinking about it, that is to say, that what might be termed a suspicion had been dispelled, I shouldn't think you could live with several at the same time, which is why you sometimes dismiss a few of them - the most improbable or perhaps the most probable ones; those which haven't yet been relegated to the past, those on which we might still be obliged to act and which might yet make us afraid and cause us trouble and might change the concrete future — and they feed other suspicions, those which, were the facts to be confirmed, would seem irremediable, and would change only the past and the abstract future. I think I dismissed any suspicions I had about Luisa, but had to feed some as yet unformulated ones about my father, or else it was Luisa who, that same evening, just before Custardoy rang the doorbell, took it upon herself to remind me of them by mentioning them out loud, for in the midst of all the smiles and laughter and the anecdotes that were new to me, she said to Ranz in an admiring tone, addressing him formally as "Usted" as she's always preferred to do:

  "It do
esn't surprise me in the least that you've been married so often, simply because you're such an inexhaustible source of barely credible stories and, therefore, an inexhaustible source of entertainment." And she added at once, as if to give him the chance to reply to the second part of her statement and not, if he preferred, to make any reference at all to the first part, to what she'd said up until then (it was a sign of respect). "A lot of men think that women just need to feel loved and flattered, even spoilt, when what we want most is to be entertained, that is, we want you to stop us thinking about ourselves too much. It's one of the reasons we tend to want children. But I'm sure you know that, why else would they have loved you so much?"

  I didn't assume she was referring to me, on the contrary. I told Luisa a lot of barely credible stories, although up until then I'd said nothing to her about "Bill" and Berta, which she would have found most entertaining; but that story was mine as well, which was perhaps why I didn't say anything. I'd said nothing about Guillermo and Miriam either until Luisa mentioned it and I realized that the story belonged to her too, and the day we met, in interpreting the words of the two leaders, I'd omitted or changed some of the things they said (in particular the things said by the Spanish leader) and which had seemed to me misguided or unsuitable or reprehensible. On that occasion, however, my censorship hadn't affected Luisa, who understood as much if not more than I did in both languages; she was the "net". Keeping silent and speaking are ways of intervening in the future. It seemed to me that the virtue Luisa was attributing to my father was shared by Custardoy the Younger: when he was in the right mood, he'd amuse my father by telling him incredible stories, during my childhood and adolescence he'd told me innumerable stories, more recently one about Ranz and my Aunt Teresa and another woman to whom I'm not related, a story, in a way, about myself (perhaps that story was mine too; perhaps Luisa would like to hear Custardoy the Younger tell it).

  Ranz's laughter didn't freeze on his lips, he merely laughed for rather longer than was necessary or natural, as if to gain time and to decide which part of Luisa's words he would reply to and how (or whether he would reply to it all or to none of it).

  He laughed when there was no longer any reason to, even the untranslatable and the uncensorable have their limits, indeed perhaps their meaning lies somewhere between those limits.

  "They didn't love me that much," he said at last, in a very different tone to his usual one, as if he were still uncertain. If it had been my words he was replying to, he wouldn't have hesitated or prolonged his laughter for a second (both things were a sign of respect, respect for Luisa). "When they did, I didn't deserve it," he added and the phrase wasn't said in the least coquettishly: I knew him too well not to be able to tell the difference.

  Luisa was brave enough to insist, a little less respectfully (or perhaps it was her way of warning me that her investigation was now underway and that nothing would stop it now, whatever my thoughts on the subject: if I didn't take charge, the story could become hers, as Ranz had already begun to be. Perhaps it was another sign of respect, respect for me, to have waited for me to be present in order to begin her enquiries, as if she were warning me: "From now on I'll take no notice of your views on this particular subject").

  "But according to what 1've heard, apart from the woman who would have been my mother-in-law, you were married to her sister too. That can't be easy, to be loved by two sisters. And how many other women loved you before that I wonder."

  Luisa's tone was light, jokey and mocking, the tone you often use with old people when you want to cheer them up and raise their spirits, a teasing, affectionate tone, which Ranz himself used, with others and about himself, perhaps in order to raise his own spirits. However, for a moment the tone of his reply wasn't like that. He shot me a fervent glance, as if to confirm that the information received by Luisa had come from me and must therefore be the same information. There was nothing strange about that, it was only natural: on the shared pillow you tell everything about everyone else. But I didn't react. Then he said:

  "Don't you believe it, little sisters often take a fancy to whatever their older sister has. I'm not saying that was how it was in my case, but there's nothing very unusual about it, on the contrary."

  "And before?" Luisa asked again, and it was clear that she wasn't expecting him to tell her anything just then, at least nothing substantial, Ranz was about to go out to supper, it was more as if she were preparing the ground and forewarning him of something that would take place in the concrete or indeed the immediate future. I was surprised as much by her own insistence as by my father's reaction. I could remember the day when he almost threw me out of a restaurant for asking him about the past ("I want to eat-in peace and today, not on a day that took place forty years ago"), a less distant past than the one Luisa was asking him about. Ranz looked at me again, as if doubting that I was the source of that information, not even sure that there was one. Again I gave no sign. He recovered his usual tone of voice and replied, making an exaggerated gesture with the hand holding his cigarette:

  "Before? 'Before' happened so very long ago, I can't even remember it."

  That was when the doorbell rang and while Luisa was getting up to go and answer it, while she was walking to the door to greet Custardoy the Younger ("It'll be Custardoy," my father said while she walked down the corridor, out of sight), she still had the time or presence of mind to say: "Well, think back, because I'll ask you about it again some other day and then you can tell me, one day when we're on our own."

  Custardoy simply drank his beer and seemed unusually laconic during the short time he was in our apartment, like me perhaps or perhaps like someone in love. His metal-tipped shoes made hardly any noise, doubtless like the shoes "Bill" wore, whose feminine sound I'd heard on the marble floor at the post office but not on the asphalt outside in Berta's street when he came out and got into his taxi, as if his shoes had also agreed to keep his secrets.

  How many things are left unsaid in the course of a lifetime or a story, sometimes without our meaning or choosing to do so? I'd kept silent not only about all the things I've mentioned above, but about the feelings of unease and the presentiments of disaster that have afflicted me ever since I got married, over a year ago. They're not so strong now and perhaps, one day, they'll disappear altogether, for a time. I hadn't mentioned those feelings to Luisa, to Berta or to my father, and certainly not at work or, needless to say, to Custardoy. People in love often choose to keep silent, even people who are infatuated. The people who keep silent are those who've found something that they might lose, not those who've lost something or are about to get it. Berta had talked endlessly about "Bill", for example, and about "Jack" and "Nick", whilst they had no physical reality, no face, and while she still hadn't got them (we talk about promises, not about the present but about the future, both concrete and abstract; also about losses, as long as they're not too recent). But then she fell silent. After my four long hours of wandering about, of shopping and anxiety and waiting, I found her in her dressing gown, still up and not in her room. She was alone again, but I noticed that she was still disguising her limp, that is, she hadn't yet settled back into her customary solitude, nor into the trust she felt towards me, not so easily, not so soon. I didn't switch on the light that she'd switched off only minutes before as a signal to me to say "Come up" because it wasn't necessary: she was lying on the sofa in front of the television, the light from which was bright enough, she was replaying "Bill's" brief video, now that she could complete the image with her newborn memory of him, now that she at last knew what went with the triangle of pale blue bathrobe, above and below. When I came into the room without switching on the light, the voice that resembled that of a preacher or a crooner, that saw-like voice, was saying again in English from the screen: "You women care about faces. Eyes. That's what you say. Men care about the face and the body. Or the body and the face. That's how it is." Berta stopped the video when she saw me. She got up and kissed me. "I'm sorry," she said, "y
ou've had to wait ages."

  "It doesn't matter," I said. "I bought some milk, we'd run out, I'll put it straight in the fridge." I went to the fridge and took the milk out of the bag as well as all the other things I'd bought, the Japanese book, the newspaper, the soundtrack from The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, I always do that, just as, when I get back from a trip, the first thing I do is unpack my suitcase and put everything away in its proper place and the suitcase away in its cupboard, in order to forget that I've been away, to forget everything about the trip, as quickly as possible, so that peace appears to be restored. I threw the bag in the rubbish bin, in order to forget about my purchases and my wanderings. I went back into the sitting room with my booty in my hand, Berta wasn't there, but the television was still on, a programme full of canned laughter that had replaced the video once it had finished. I heard her moving about in her bedroom, she'd be airing it, making the bed or changing the sheets, given my prompt return, she wouldn't have had time to do so. But that wasn't what she was doing, not changing the sheets anyway, because when she came out she wasn't carrying a pile of bed-linen in her arms, instead she had her hands in the pockets of her dressing gown, a salmon-pink silk dressing gown, with nothing on underneath I think, perhaps she preferred to sleep with the smell of "Bill" still on the sheets; when you want to hold on to certain smells they always seem to evaporate too quickly. She no longer smelt of Trussardi, when she walked past me, she smelt of Guerlain, I saw the bottle (the opened box) on the table where we usually left the mail and on which I had left my newspaper, my book and my record: the bottle whose purchase I had witnessed. It was the only physical trace of "Bill" in the apartment. "How did it go?" I asked, I couldn't not ask, everything was more or less in order, although there are always things that need tidying up. "Fine. How about you? What have you been doing all this time? You must be exhausted, you poor thing." I gave her a quick rundown of my wanderings, but said nothing of my fears, I showed her my purchases, but didn't talk to her about my long wait. I didn't know whether I should ask her any more questions, she seemed to have acquired a modesty she hadn't had in the previous weeks or that same evening when she'd asked if I had any condoms (I'd seen them amongst the rubbish, two of them, when I threw away the plastic bag, which had covered them up, they'd no longer be visible on my next visit, the speed with which forgetting takes place, sometimes you don't have to do anything to speed it up, the new covers the old in exactly the same way as happens in a rubbish bin, each new minute not only substitutes those that have passed, it negates them). My supper with her friends, with Julia, seemed so long ago, and Berta seemed to have forgotten all about it, she didn't even ask me about them and I didn't feel inclined to mention them in the brief chat that we could and usually did have before going to bed, however late it was. It was very late and even though it was a Saturday, it was time we went to bed, to sleep, to forget everything in dreams, or, in Berta's case, to cling on to her memory. But I wanted to know at least something, this was both my story and not my story (I had the right to know and I risked nothing). I'd spent hours wandering about beneath the invisible sky above the avenues and the reddish sky above the streets, on three occasions I'd waited on the marble floor of Kenmore Station, I'd followed his metallic footsteps as far as the Plaza, I'd let him see me, I'd made a video, I did perhaps deserve to know something without having to wait for time to pass. "Come on then, tell me about it," I said. "There's nothing to tell," she said. She was barefoot and yet she wasn't limping, her eyes looked dreamy or perhaps just sleepy. She seemed calm, like someone engaged in an unhurried meditation and upon whom that meditation weighs but lightly. Her smile was hesitant, foolish, the smile of someone remembering things in a vague, indulgent way. "But he is Spanish, isn't he?" I said. "Yes, he is Spanish," she replied, "we knew that."