The building’s lobby was dark, but not so dark that Eduardo couldn’t see his attacker’s face. It was the guy in the djellaba. He tried to say something, but his words were stopped by another blow, hard and clean, to the mouth. Ibrahim had struck him with something metallic—a ring, or keys maybe. Eduardo felt all his teeth shift, and a second later the taste of blood filled his mouth. Next came a knee to the solar plexus, and Eduardo collapsed in a heap. Crumpled on the floor, he felt Ibrahim’s forearm holding his head down as his other hand felt around, moved beneath his shirt, finally found his wallet, and yanked it out. Eduardo’s wallet in one hand, Ibrahim stood up. He was panting slightly and his hair was out of place, but he could easily have kept dishing it out for some time before tiring himself out.
“You work for the Armenian?” he asked Eduardo, pointing his national ID card at him, which he’d just extracted from Eduardo’s wallet.
From the floor, Eduardo raised a hand to request a truce. He had to answer fast or the guy might kill him on the spot.
“I don’t know what Armenian you’re talking about. My name is Eduardo Quintana, and I’m a portrait artist—a painter.”
His reply took Ibrahim off-guard. He crouched down to look closer at Eduardo; his face was swelling quickly. He certainly didn’t look like one of the Armenian’s goons. Ibrahim nodded toward the still-dark space beneath the stairs. Eduardo’s anguished face followed his glance. Arthur Fernández’s silhouette emerged from among the shadows.
“Who the fuck are you?” His voice was commanding, but imminent threat no longer filled the air. Eduardo would have to improvise. He certainly couldn’t tell the truth. That would ruin everything. His brain rattled inside his skull like an off-balance washing machine.
“I’m a portrait artist. That’s how I earn my living. I just wanted to use some of your features, make a sketch without you realizing.” With this, Eduardo bought a few precious seconds, and managed to lean his back against the wall and struggle up, with great difficulty.
Arthur examined Eduardo, from head to toe, as though he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. He shook his head a few times and then looked back at him.
“Are you kidding me?”
At that moment, the lights came on in the hallway. A few seconds later, an elderly woman appeared in a robe, shuffling along in house slippers. Seeing the blood on Eduardo’s face she let out a tiny rat-like cry and rushed back the way she’d come.
“We better get out of here. It won’t be long before that old lady calls the cops. I think it would be best if they don’t find you here, given the circumstances—and it wouldn’t look good for me, either,” Ibrahim said calmly, massaging the hand he’d used to hit Eduardo.
Arthur hesitated for an instant. He knew his friend was right.
“You shouldn’t be out spying on people like a psycho,” he warned Eduardo, clearly too late to do him any good. Eduardo nodded sluggishly. His whole body ached. He felt like he might vomit.
Ibrahim handed his wallet back.
“I know who you are now,” he said, smiling darkly, pocketing Eduardo’s ID. “It’s good to know things about other people. You never know when you might need to use them. If I were you, I’d wait for the cops and request an ambulance. You might have a broken bone, and that lip doesn’t look good.” He stood on the threshold for a moment, doorknob in his hand, scanning the street outside like a hunter, and after insuring there was no threat, the two of them left.
* * *
—
The police arrived minutes later. Eduardo, too, would have preferred not to be there when they arrived, but as soon as he tried to make it to the door he realized he wasn’t going to get very far. His knee was swollen, and every time he took a breath he felt a sharp pain in his right side. He thought he probably had a broken rib, so all he could do was sit on a step and wait for the cops, and then the ambulance, to get there. He didn’t tell the police the truth, or at least not the whole truth: he gave an accurate account of what happened, but rather than describe Ibrahim and Arthur he provided a much more generic and unidentifiable description.
Nor did he tell Graciela the truth when he called and asked her to come pick him up at the emergency room—where an X-ray had shown that his rib was cracked but not broken. Aside from his bruises, there was nothing a few days’ rest wouldn’t fix. So with a prescription for painkillers and three staples in his lip, he sat down to wait for his landlady to arrive.
“He was just a regular guy, what can I say? He took me by surprise and forced me into the doorway. I presume he wanted to steal my watch and wallet.”
Graciela shot him a dubious look.
“Your watch is on your wrist, and your wallet’s in your hand.”
Eduardo stroked his swollen cheek. Ibrahim could really hit like a jackhammer.
“A woman came out of her apartment when she heard them beating me up. I assume they got scared and ran off.”
“And they did all this just to try to get your watch and wallet?”
Eduardo recalled Ibrahim’s ironic expression, the veiled threat his words contained.
“The world is full of evil people…Would you mind taking me home? I need a spare pair of glasses.”
“What you need is a good dinner and a little company. Lately you’re spending too much time alone and I think the solitude is consuming you,” Graciela said blatantly.
Eduardo didn’t have the energy to protest.
* * *
—
Sara was bent over a round formica table. Like all left-handed people, she set her notebook at an angle to draw, and her forearm was stained with ink, smearing the page. She wore pajamas with green elephants holding colored balloons—children’s pajamas that any other girl her age would have flat-out refused to wear. But Sara wasn’t like other girls. On a bookcase close to her hand sat her lucky cat.
“Hello there, Sara.”
The girl glanced up and broke into a smile when she recognized Eduardo. She got up and squeezed his belly with her strong arms. Her hair rubbed his chin; she smelled of lemony shampoo.
“How are you feeling today?”
“The doctor monitoring her case says she’s improving for now; we’re convinced that if we’re really disciplined with her meds she’ll get better really soon, aren’t we, sweetheart?” Graciela replied for her, using an exaggeratedly optimistic tone.
Sara nodded energetically, as though trying to physically shake off the unmistakable doubt showing in her eyes. It would take other children of the same age far longer to realize that things were not as they’d been told—and with those lies would their innocence be lost—but Sara had learned to lie to herself, and learned it a long time ago.
“The doctor says I think a lot; she says there are some thoughts I can’t process right because I’m still too young. And I try not to think, but the thoughts think for me and I don’t know how to stop them.”
Eduardo stroked her forehead. Sara was from another world, lived in a place all her own; only when the meds knocked her out sufficiently could her brain slow down and visit this other reality, temporarily leaving behind her own promised land. She was like a ghost, a soul divided, and only a quarter of her was accessible to others.
“But doctors don’t know everything, do they?”
The girl laughed complicitly.
“No, they don’t. The things I tell Maneki, nobody else can know. But you I can tell, if you stay for dinner.” Maneki was her lucky cat.
“That’s a tempting offer, so I don’t see how I could turn it down,” he granted.
It was a pleasant evening. Plenty of wine, and Sara—sitting beside him—as well as Graciela, who was funny and casual, kept Eduardo from thinking for a few hours about the pummeling Ibrahim had given him. He told stories about his childhood, about his father and his records, the trips he’d take up north, to where his roots were. He
wasn’t trying to impress Graciela—or at least not consciously—but judging by the way her eyes shone and the way she hung on his words—enthralled, elbow on the table and cheek in her palm—she was anyway.
Suddenly, Sara got up and went to a dresser full of drawers.
“Where do you have the old pictures, Mamá?” Sara rummaged around in a cupboard until finally emerging with the family album.
Graciela would have preferred she hadn’t found it, preferred that her daughter hadn’t sat at the table, with a triumphal air, and opened it up, with Eduardo looking on curiously. But there was no way to stop her.
“Look, this is my mother when she was a girl, in her hometown.”
The portrait was of a girl teetering on the precipice of a modern invention called adolescence. Despite her bushy unwaxed brows, her ratty, torn black shirt and big, dirty skirt, she looked ready to make the leap. Graciela’s hesitant smile—not quite daring to be happy—was testament to a time gone by. She looked shocked by the sudden glare of the flash, nervous and uncomfortable at the photographer ordering her to pose by an old farmhouse with its zinc roof, the barn door ajar. A girl whose expression had not yet lost its glow, not earned the right to show weakness.
“I was only ten then. My God, the rain that’s fallen since that time,” Graciela nodded, taking the photo carefully, as though afraid she might tear it. Her words were really intended for Eduardo. While showing him photos, she conveniently brushed against his forearm, let herself get worked up by the intoxicating heat caused by the touch of his body.
Eduardo sat stiffly, his smile increasingly fake. Sometimes from his apartment he could hear Graciela singing Luis Miguel boleros. It was nice, Graciela had a good voice. The songs told stories of romantic trysts, star-crossed lovers, overflowing passion. But life was no bolero. There was nothing else he wanted to know about Graciela, he had no desire to get close to her; he didn’t want to walk through that door, the one that she and her daughter had opened and were now trying to push him through—gently, amicably, but a push nonetheless.
“That doesn’t even look like you.”
“Pictures just reflect an image—and over time, that image dies,” she murmured.
Eduardo watched Graciela like a dog watching the moon: it was something far off, something that glowed, true, but something he knew nothing about, had no curiosity about.
She gazed at him, her eyes glimmering in a way that foreshadowed tears. Yet they continued looking at photos. Sara was in charge of turning the pages, hardly giving them time to see the pictures at all, much less note any details. Life went by as quickly from snapshot to snapshot as it did in her feverishly bubbling head. Graciela and Eduardo let her, smiling in weary resignation. Sara was her own little whirlwind, capable of draining anyone’s energy. She rushed on, announcing what they were going to see in each picture before showing it. Sometimes she made up stories about the photos, things she invented based on a single captured instant. For instance, that she and her mother had traveled through Africa all the way to the Lower Nile, where a direct descendant of Cleopatra had personally given Sara the solid-gold bracelet she was wearing in the picture taken at the 2000 Carnaval celebrations. And to make sure that Eduardo believed her, she raced off to her room and returned with the bracelet so he could hold it in his own hand.
“Solid gold, it sure is,” he declared feigning curiosity.
Sara continued her dizzying tour through the pages until, on one of them, something attracted Eduardo’s attention.
“Who’s that girl?”
Graciela stroked the profile of a pregnant young woman, her belly huge beneath a strappy indigo-colored dress with a full billowy skirt. She took a sip of wine, leaving a scarlet lipstick imprint on the rim. Then she held the glass, spinning it between her fingers, staring lovingly down at the photo.
“My mother. Her name was Esperanza. When she was in a good mood, I remember, she’d sing me children’s songs. Sometimes, as night fell, we’d sit, tired but happy, on a bench in the plaza outside our little apartment in Leganés. Then she’d tell me about all the things she’d seen as a girl, at the movie theater in her hometown, in the summertime: the enormous buildings of a city projected onto the screen; the sound of convertible Fords, their horns honking; teeming streetcars. Her eyes shining, she’d describe the actresses’ dresses, their hairdos and make-up, their long legs and slender waists, the elegant way they moved, and spoke, and smoked. Once she even told me, trying to hide her wistfulness beneath a smile, about a famous photographer who wanted to take her picture as if she were a world-famous starlet. But her father—my grandfather—said no.”
* * *
—
They’d run out of cigarettes and the wine was gone. Sara was dozing in the armchair with a blanket draped over her, arms around the lucky cat that was now her inseparable companion. Graciela closed the photo album slowly and put it back in the cupboard. She bent over Sara and brushed her bangs from her eyes. The girl squirmed fitfully.
“She’s obsessed with that animal. Sometimes, outside, she’ll look at real cats, trying to find one like this, and then declare proudly that none of them look like hers. She thinks Maneki understands what she tells him.”
“Your daughter has an extraordinary imagination,” Eduardo said quietly.
Graciela nodded. The condition she’d been diagnosed with was irreversible and she knew it, but she couldn’t help getting her hopes up whenever the symptoms abated and she seemed—for a time—capable of carrying on with a normal life. But then it would all get worse again.
“I ask myself over and over, why it is that some people get to have a little happiness and then waste it, while others never even get a taste.”
Eduardo looked away, at what was left of dinner, still on the table. He wasn’t the right person to answer that question.
“I’ll clear the table,” he offered.
Graciela let him, and stood watching. She knew what Eduardo was thinking, she always knew what the men she fell in love with were thinking, but there were some defeats she wasn’t willing to accept. She went to him and stroked his hair as if he were a little boy. Then she leaned in and kissed him on the lips. Her lips were cracked and cold. Eduardo’s recoiled from her contact. Graciela stepped back, a little ashamed.
“I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t, don’t worry,” he whispered, mollifying her.
Graciela regarded him with an exhausted expression.
“I know almost nothing about you, only the part you’ve been willing to show, and I don’t know if that’s a lot or a little. But for me, it’s enough, Eduardo. You have a way forward with us, if you want. A new start. I’m not foolish enough to think you love me. Not yet. And that doesn’t matter, I can wait.”
Eduardo had rolled up his shirtsleeves and was rinsing a glass. For a split second he stopped, the soap bubbles dripping off the glass and onto the counter. Instinctively, he turned his head to the right. Sara was still sleeping.
“I don’t think you and your daughter deserve to be saddled with a corpse like me.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’re not dead. Even if you want to be, the fact is that you’re still here. You must have some hope. Besides, neither my daughter nor I are going to replace your family; we’re not going to cover up a hole, Eduardo. What I’m offering you is an opportunity, for all three of us.”
Eduardo found a clean cloth and dried a plate patiently, spinning it like a steering wheel.
Would Graciela know the real meaning of the French word charme? Elena had it. It’s not something you can acquire, or even learn. It’s a talent, an air that certain things have, certain people have, from the time they’re born. It’s something that makes them different, regardless of what they do; it’s in the way they behave, walk, look at you, breathe, hold out a hand or sing a song. They’re immortal; little stray angels who
lost their wings in the original Fall, who now wander among humans looking for a way back home. If any of them had ever crossed her path, deigned to rest their gaze upon Graciela and smile, she might understand; if not, anything he might tell her about Elena would be in vain.
“It’s late. Thank you for dinner, and for the company, but I’ve got to be up early tomorrow. I should go.”
“Yes, I guess that’s probably for the best,” Graciela accepted stiffly, like a mannequin being removed from a shop window. Without realizing, she’d smeared her lipstick, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth.
Eduardo went to the door. Graciela didn’t move from her place at the table, where she sat smoking, with a lost look, gazing vacantly at an empty wineglass. Eduardo turned the doorknob and opened the door, but held it there and looked back over his shoulder.
“I killed a man, Graciela. Shot him in the head. And his wife. And I would have killed his son, too, if I hadn’t been stopped. That’s the person you say you want to have sleeping in your bed at night, curled up against your back.”
He walked out without waiting to see his landlady’s reaction.
* * *
—
The afternoon smelled of mimosas. A heartbreaking afternoon, too beautiful to be real—a foretaste of nostalgia, of a perfect moment that could be ruined at any second.
“You’ve got a visitor.”
Andrea frowned slightly, displeased at the nurse’s interruption.
“I don’t want to see anyone,” she murmured.
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