by Susana Aikin
It was as if the night sang through his guitar. On the horizon, a single streak of crimson lingered over the mountain peaks, loath to dissolve into the dark. Fireflies, like tiny swaying lanterns, shimmied in the air, as garden lights reflected on faces, inside pupils; while the fragrance of the night garden, heavy with honeysuckle and jasmine, invaded throats and lungs, pulsed into the bloodstream, intoxicating, like the lullaby flowing from Manuel’s guitar.
It’s a strange feeling when a beautiful setting is the scenery of a tragic moment. One tends to think of drama in the midst of storms, foul unsettling nights, or ugly scenarios. But when things happen within the perfect symmetry of beauty, there is an increased sense of pain. Maybe because it’s unexpected. Maybe because, like a blade cutting flesh engorged with pleasure, it slashes to the quick, drawing heftier amounts of blood; while the mind, confused, is thrown deeper into frenzy.
I only saw Father’s lunge from the corner of my eye. Then I heard the sound of glass smashing on the ceramic surface of the terrace, followed by the screeching of shards scattering around. The guitar stopped. A couple of women gasped. Marion screamed. I rushed over toward them. On the tiles, among the broken glass, a small pool of blood. Father’s cocktail glass had cut Fernando’s arm above the wrist. It was bleeding. Someone held it up in the air. A girl from Father’s office brought out a scarf from her bag and tied it above his elbow in tourniquet fashion.
Father was being held back by Montes and Lopez. His eyes were bloodshot. “If you as much as touch her, I swear I will kill you!” he slurred, over and over.
But all of this was blurred by Marion’s wails. She clung to Fernando’s arm, hands smeared with blood. Montes and Lopez succeeded in walking Father away from the scene, while I pushed through the crowd toward Marion. But as I reached her side, she swooned before I could catch her, falling to the ground in a heap.
At that moment, everything turned to chaos. Arms, hands, and heads hovered over Marion, flitted over her senseless body, over Fernando’s hemorrhaging arm, wavered about the broken glass. Muddled discussions started on how to proceed.
“All right,” I said, standing up. “Please, let me take care of this. Please.”
Julia joined in. “Thank you, everyone, it’s best you all leave now. She’ll be fine. But I think we should call it a night.” People backed off slowly, and I asked Manuel to help me take Marion up to her room. I followed behind his small wiry body as he carried her up the stairs and laid her on her bed. Fernando came into the room holding his arm; it looked like the tourniquet had worked and he had stopped bleeding.
“I’ll get you a bandage in a moment,” I said, covering Marion’s body with a sheet.
“It’s nothing,” he said, “just one of those veins that bleeds a lot.”
“Are you kidding? It’s your main hand with the capote,” Manuel said. “I’m taking you to the hospital for stitches. Meet me downstairs, I’ll just fetch the guitar.” He got up and left the room. “Your father is worse than a fucking Moor,” he murmured as he passed me by, and I was taken aback by the hatred in his voice.
Fernando sat on the edge of the bed and took Marion’s limp hand. “This can’t go on. I’m hurting you more than anything.”
Nanny hurried into the room. She’d just returned from her day off. “Go now,” she said to Fernando, “and don’t return until you’re ready to make her your bride. Go!”
Fernando put Marion’s hand to his lips one last time. I watched his haggard, ashen face as he walked out.
I ran downstairs to the terrace, a broom in hand. Most of the guests were already gone. Two waiters collected the remnants of drinks and tapas. I walked up to the disc jockey, who was wheeling his set away on top of a bulky dolly.
“Do you know where my father is?” I asked.
“He’s in the library, with Olga and the other two guys. Sorry for how all this turned out,” he said, and then added, “but thanks for the gig, anyway,” and he disappeared into the passage that led to the street gate.
I turned to the terrace. All was silent. On second inspection, it had only been one broken glass and a few drops of blood. Strange, how my perception had magnified these elements just minutes before.
* * *
The table is strewn with remnants of lunch. Lamb ribs piled on plates, empty wine glasses, chicken sandwiches picked brashly apart. I’m still hungry and wonder if I might seek Julia and team up to go for more food. But maybe a strong cup of coffee will do the trick until the evening. I assemble some of the dirty chinaware and step into the kitchen. Constantine stands at the sink with a pile of plates on the side. He is putting on the flowery apron I had seen Delia cooking in.
“Is washing dishes also one of your duties as a sorcerer’s apprentice?” I ask with a grin, as I dump my uneaten chicken into the garbage and pile my plate on top of the others.
“Not really.” He chuckles. “It’s just that poor Delia is kind of old to be doing this sort of thing on the job. She also needs to take her nap before we can go on.”
“Pretty impressive attitude for a male attendant! By the way, how did you get into all of this to begin with?” I ask, while I poke around for the coffee pot among the clutter on the counter.
Constantine laughs again. “It’s a long story, but in a nutshell, I was always one of those kids who doesn’t fit in anywhere, the type who doesn’t even drop out of school just because he really never went to school. I mean my mind was so absent, it didn’t follow my body into the classroom. So one day someone gave me a set of old tarot cards and I was so stupid, I didn’t even know what to do with them. But once, while my mother was hanging the washing, I was flipping the cards and all of a sudden . . .”
I look at him in amazement as he chortles away, splashing immoderate quantities of water and soap over the dishes. I hadn’t realized how chatty he could be, hadn’t even noticed how badly he stammered when speaking more than two words in a row.
I’m beginning to regret having asked about the launching of his career, when I hear my cell phone vibrate in my handbag a few feet away, and signal Constantine to hold on to his story until I return.
I step out into the patio. “Hello?”
“I need to ask you a big favor.” Marcus’s voice speaks in that hushed, urgent tone he always uses to coerce me into immediate business action. “I need you to drop everything and take care of an emergency. I know it’s Saturday, I know you’re supposed to go soon on vacation—”
“Hey, hey, slow down! Where are you, first of all?”
“I’m driving toward Düsseldorf. I left Helga and the kids at my in-laws. I just got this call, and I need to make it back. I’m hoping to reach the airport in a couple of hours and catch the next plane to Cádiz. But meanwhile, I need you to step in.”
“What’s in Cádiz?”
“There’s a Liebherr tower crane stuck in customs. For some reason they don’t have all the paperwork and they’re threatening to ship it back tonight. If you show up in the next hours and vouch for it—”
“Wait! Marcus, I can’t do anything today.”
“Anna, this is major. It’s a new client and I can’t fail them. I really need your help.”
“Sorry, Marcus. Not today. I’m also doing something important that can’t wait.”
There’s a beat of silence.
Then he says, “I’m going into a tunnel.”
CHAPTER 8
I snap my phone shut and throw it on the table. It slides among wine glasses and dirty napkins. I think of going back into the kitchen to make coffee, but the thought of engaging again with Constantine’s unending tale puts me off.
I need to be alone, let my vexation wind down. I can’t stand being harassed with urgent requests, expected to ride the winds in order to solve the problems of the world. Marcus is a virtuoso at this kind of appeal.
I walk away from the patio toward the pool. The midday sun refracts on the surface of the water, shooting blinding rays into my eyes. I walk up to the French window
s facing the mountains. The old discolored awning has been extended over the terrace, and the crank handle is still dangling, dangerously close to the windowpane. Julia must have just lowered it and forgotten to put it away. But I can’t be bothered right now. It’s too hot to even step under the canopy of torn green fabric. I’m desperate to reach the seating area under the willow tree, far away from the house.
My mind returns to the tower crane in Cádiz, and Marcus’s plea that I step into the situation. I know he’ll convince me, if I let him. Do I ever say no to him? I know he’ll call me again and again. It would be best to not pick up the phone at all. He’ll just have to make different arrangements. He’s got other people who can step in and give him a hand. Not easy to get hold of on a Saturday in August, granted, but hey, it just depends on how big of a compensation offer you make. And, if anything, he has the dough. So, let him deal . . . It all makes perfect sense, and yet why am I still loath to resist his request? On the surface we’re the perfect business partners, but in the undertow of things, he always manages to place his priorities on top of the pile. Is it just him, though? Or is it my obstinate tendency to overindulge a partner who comes with a high maintenance cost? It’s been years now since I’ve been pushing away that recurrent little voice whispering in my ear, You don’t really need him, do you? Wouldn’t your end of things be easier, not to mention more profitable, without him?
As I reach the willow tree, I see that the chaise lounge onto which I was hoping to flop is already occupied by Delia. She lies recumbent on her left side, one arm encircled around her head acting as a supportive pillow. Her eyes are closed; face placid with sleep. The long branches from the willow tree flounce from above, brushing lightly over her white-clad body. Frazzled, I sit on one of the chairs across from her.
The thick insistent buzzing of a bluebottle fly, one of those mos-cas “cojoneras,” or fucker flies as they call them here, distracts me for a bit as I jump up and swat it away with both hands. I settle again into my chair, surprised to feel all of a sudden relieved from my bad mood. Amazing, what a wrestling round with a fucker fly can achieve! For the first time I reflect that this limpieza might not be as crazy an idea as I thought in the beginning. Maybe we need to loosen up around here. Maybe I need more than anyone else to be delivered from my mental clutter, from all those rigid layers I’ve accumulated through the years. No one better than I knows of the deep cavities that lie underneath the façade of the energetic, efficient, down-to-earth Miss Anna Hurt. Has the time come to open them up and examine them in the light?
I turn my eyes to Delia. There’s something so serene in the abandonment with which she embraces her rest. Her face, dappled by the long fingery branches hanging over, has the innocent, vacant beauty of the sleeping or the dead. The hand that’s not nestled around her head is pressed to her chest. The rest of her body lies stretched over the chaise like a beluga whale. It reminds me of some of the pieces in an exhibit of ancient goddesses I saw in Basel a few years ago, a collection of round, curvy shapes of puckered stone. Most of them had no faces or no heads. But that didn’t matter, because the fascination of the exhibit was about ancient, large, pear-shaped female bodies. The body female as a giver of life, with sacred orifices cut wide into the stone, large slits under the folds of gigantic abdomens; fearful gateways between the worlds. And here lies Delia, grossly voluptuous like all those Venuses of Willendorf or Hohle Fels. She only lacks the mammoth breasts and the fertility of a younger woman. But she probably has another kind of fecundity. That of the holy crone who no longer gives birth to single units of life, but whose body becomes a flesh sanctuary laid out for the reparation of human grief.
The holy crone! How small and insignificant my own body feels in comparison. I’m younger, my breasts are taut, my abdomen flat, the flesh in my legs and arms still full and fresh. But when it comes to my fertility? All my wasted female eggs have not yet produced as much as a child; what’s worse, my modestly voluptuous curves cannot even boast a real lover these days. And it’s not just me. The same can be said of Marion and Julia. I think of their beautiful eyes, smiling glances over joy-choked laughter filling rooms when we horsed around as girls. Where did our youth go? What happened to the Hurt sisters? Those gorgeous, sophisticated, clever girls everyone wanted at dinners and parties? Like our house that’s seen other houses, less handsome, less spacious, with no mountain views, being sold, so have we seen all our friends and acquaintances, less dazzling, less passionate, get paired up, settled into marriages and good partnerships, while we were left behind with crushed hearts and broken stories. And it wasn’t that we didn’t have suitors, those were never lacking. But the best of life never seemed to curdle around us. It’s not just about love either. What about our talents, our dreams of becoming great architects, painters, and actresses? Where did all that go? Why did a house like ours—full of music, of books and poetry, of beautiful art objects—not produce blossoming artists?
* * *
The days and weeks that followed the party were a jumble of nightmarish scenes. That night, long after everyone had left and the house had settled into silence, I heard Marion’s bare feet walking toward my bed and felt her cold hand on my arm. As I opened my eyes, she hovered over me wearing the thin white nightgown Nanny had changed her into hours before.
“Anna, I heard noises in the garden, please walk down with me, I know he’s here. He’s come to get me.” She pulled my sleep-drunk body out of the bed and made me follow her downstairs.
Like two ghosts we searched the garden. Marion pulled me along by the hand as we covered every inch of the grounds, her body in a state of high alert, scrutinizing the dark ahead. I remember thinking how still the night was, how the silent grass seemed to cling to my bare feet, tiny tentacles adhering to my soles like anemones, as if protecting me from moving forward.
“Look, someone’s clothes ended up in the pool,” Marion whispered. The moment I squinted to look down, a dull gleam of daylight shot through the dark, giving away the silhouette of a body in the water’s depths. Marion’s hands gripped my arms like tongs before she started screaming. I disengaged from her and jumped in. The chlorine burned my eyes as I opened them underwater. Before me drifted the amorphous shape of a man, his white shirt floating around his chest, his right arm slashed above the wrist.
The rest is somehow history. The exact cause of Fernando’s death was never determined. First, there was a case opened against Father, since he had threatened and attacked him with a cocktail glass at the party. But the little evidence that could be drawn together was dispelled by Olga Morris’s deposition in which, as we found later, she swore she spent the night with Father after the party, and had been in his company every single minute until the discovery of the body. When Father protested against her statement, she simply reminded him how drunk he was, to the point he’d been carried to his room by herself and Montes.
The whereabouts of Fernando between the time he left the house and the time he was found in the pool were also a mystery. Manuel, who had taken him to the emergency room, left him at the door while he parked the car; and when he returned shortly he found that Fernando had disappeared from the waiting room before being admitted into the triage office. The autopsy revealed high levels of alcohol in his blood, something that according to the pathologist could have seriously compromised his ability to control drowsiness when mixed with the strong antibiotics he was taking for the wound on the thigh that was still infected.
Then there was the conversation I’d heard outside the library window between Father’s engineers. “Mister Hoooort”—that was how Montes and most Spanish people pronounced our “Hurt” family name—“those boys are just gitanos, Gypsies, all they need is a little talk from older men like us,” Montes said, pointing at himself and Lopez and winking an eye at Father, who was slumped in a chair, besotted with unaccustomed drinking. “You just have to say, Montes, give him a little talk, if you know what I mean, and tell him to get the hell away from my daughter.” B
ut both men had been able to prove their whereabouts during Fernando’s missing hours.
In the end, nothing came to anything. The forensic opinion of alcohol mixed with medication as the probable cause of a fatal fall pervaded. Fernando’s body was sent back to his mother in Cordoba, to be buried. The investigation was closed and the whole affair declared to have been an unfortunate accident.
Meanwhile, Marion had a nervous breakdown. She lay in bed, collapsed for weeks, and all she could do was grab me, or Julia, whenever we were near, repeating over and over again, “Tell me it’s not true, tell me he’s all right.” And she cried all day long. Nanny’s abrupt dismissal didn’t help either.
After dozens of Valiums and other similar pills, our family physician, Doctor Martinez, a gloomy man with a sallow face, recommended she be checked into the Clinica López Ibor, a trendy psychiatric clinic in the outskirts of Madrid. She stayed there for a couple of weeks, but when she returned home she went back to crying nonstop, until it was decided she would travel to London and stay with Aunt Kay, Father’s sister, for a while.
Aunt Kay came to fetch her. We’d met her once, when we were very young and she had come to visit for a few days after Mother died. She was the only family member Father kept in touch with, and then not all that much. She was a tall, lean woman with translucent skin and pale blue, watercolor eyes. All the clothes she wore were in variations of peacock blue. She couldn’t stand the heat, or the smell of Spanish food. She didn’t want to leave the house or visit Madrid at all. There was only one thing she agreed to do, go to the Prado Museum to admire the horses in Velázquez’s paintings. She was crazy about horses.
