Gaudi Afternoon

by Barbara Wilson

  The waiter came over. “Señor?”

  I looked around and realized he was talking to me. I quickly ordered the menu of the day. I began with an ensalada de tomates, followed by a tortilla español and then roast chicken. Afterwards I’d have a flan perhaps, and coffee. I thought I might need all three courses if Frankie didn’t show up soon.

  Even though we were outside, the noise among the tables was deafening. Maybe there was a tour group here enjoying a taste of the real Barcelona. Women in pantsuits with strong midwestern accents and pink and blue hair talked about how they just loved this Gaudy architecture, while their husbands discussed bullfights and how many miles they’d covered that day. Young couples carrying The Rough Guide to Europe or Frommer’s Spain on $40 a Day (hadn’t it once been five dollars a day?) argued about whether they could fit in Seville before Madrid or whether two days in Granada was too much.

  I read a few pages of La Grande but I couldn’t help eavesdropping on the conversation of two college-aged women nearby. They had obviously just met and were trading horror stories about the French.

  “They might as well have put their hands over their ears when I asked them a question. It was that blatant!”

  “You’d think they thought of French as some kind of sacred holy language. It’s just a language, for pete’s sake.”

  “Boy, I never was so glad to get out of a country in my life. I like Barcelona. The Spanish seem really friendly.”

  “Oh, I think so too. I met the cutest guy at my hotel. He wanted to talk English with me.”

  Then a most awkward thing happened.

  “Isn’t that a great novel?”

  I jumped. It was Ben, smiling disarmingly and pointing to the book in my hand.

  I put on my best Irish accent. “Well and it’s certainly a vivid picture of life in South America today. From a woman’s point of view of course.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Ben said, leaning closer. “I mean, we’ve been hearing from Garcia Márquez and Donoso and Vargas Llosa for years. But what about the women?”

  Oh god, he was a feminist type of guy. And he knew about South American writers.

  “May I join you?” he said, convinced that we had a lot in common. “I’m waiting for a friend, but she hasn’t shown up yet. I can’t stand eating by myself, it really makes me lose my appetite, especially in a place like this.”

  Curiosity has always been my downfall. I invited Ben to sit down with a wave of my hand. Frankie would just have to lump it.

  “I’m Hamilton Kincaid,” he said, holding out a firm brown hand. “Originally from New York, but I’ve been living in Barcelona for the last few years.” He had blue eyes and a couple of days’ growth of blond beard.

  If he wanted to bluff it so could I. “Brigid O’Shaughnessy,” I said. “From Dublin.”

  “That name sounds familiar somehow,” he said.

  “I’m a journalist.”

  “I don’t read newspapers much,” he apologized. “I try to keep up with contemporary fiction—Eco, Kundera, the Latin Americans, naturally—but I always feel I’m behind. Of course I try to read literature in the original and that takes a bit longer.”

  “What do you do?” I asked him. Besides try to impress girls like me?

  “Oh, I play a little music. Saxophone.”

  Dilettante. I smiled charmingly. “So you think you’ve been stood up?”

  “She said one and it’s one-thirty. But then my friend is— how shall I put it?—something of a free spirit.”

  Strange that Frankie had said the same about him. Just a couple of free spirits with hidden agendas.

  “Is she Spanish?”

  “No, she’s another American. It’s her first visit to Spain.”

  “Oh dear, and you’ve been cajoled into playing tour guide.”

  “Not exactly,” Ben sighed, and broke off a piece of bread. “I just met her yesterday. I never would have guessed.”

  “Guessed what?”

  “That she was transsexual…. Do you know any transsexuals?”

  Now that you mention it, I guess I did. A dozen details about Frankie flashed through my head and reorganized themselves.

  Ben went on quickly. “Not that I’m judgmental. People are different. I’m gay for instance.”

  He misinterpreted my stunned silence and apologized. “I’m sorry. Being from Ireland, you’re probably not used to talking about homosexuals, much less transsexuals.”

  “You’d be surprised,” I managed with a wan smile. “We Catholics love to dress up.”

  The waiter brought our salads over and I had another surprise. Ben spoke to him in quite credible Catalan. There was something I didn’t understand going on here. If Ben had only recently arrived from San Francisco, how on earth could he have picked up Catalan? Spanish he might have studied at school. But Catalan?

  “So, Brigid,” he said, pouring me a glass of wine from the carafe. “What brings you to Barcelona?”

  I told him that I was doing a piece for the Irish Times on how Barcelona was preparing for the 1992 Olympic Games, while all the time my mind was reeling in confusion.

  If Frankie was a transsexual then Ben could hardly be her ex-husband.

  Unless Ben had married Frankie thinking she was a woman.

  Perhaps Frankie was blackmailing Ben, threatening to tell his family that he’d been married to a transsexual.

  But if Ben were gay why would he have married Frankie in the first place?

  Why had Ben said he only met Frankie yesterday?

  And just where was Frankie anyway?

  Our first course was taken away and our second course and our third course put before us, but still there was no sign of Frankie. It was now two o’clock and Ben was telling me about how he’d come to Barcelona because of the jazz scene. Some of the best musicians in Europe had congregated here, at places like the Harlem Club and the Cova del Drac.

  The more details he gave the more worried I got. It sounded more and more as if he really did live in Barcelona. And if he lived in Barcelona and lived at La Pedrera, then it was likely that High Tops, Delilah and April Schauer were visiting him and not the other way around.

  “I keep thinking you look familiar,” I finally said. “And now I remember where I saw you. Yesterday, at the Parc Güell. You were with two women and a little girl.”

  Ben shot me a rather strange look, as if it had occurred to him for the first time that he had reason to be on guard with a stranger. “Yes,” he said finally. “I usually go there around this time of day. I like to eat my lunch outside. It’s a place I showed to some friends who are visiting. I usually meet them there around this time—”

  He broke off suddenly, and stared at me.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ve just remembered something.”

  He threw down a thousand pesetas and rushed across the square.

  I threw down another thousand and followed him. The thought had probably come to both of us simultaneously that if Frankie wasn’t here, she might well be at the Parc Güell. Only Ben knew why.

  He was nowhere to be seen when I came dashing out of the Plaça Reial onto the Ramblas. I quickly hailed a cab. Would I get there before him, and if so, what would I find?

  Twenty minutes later I arrived at the Parc Güell and rushed breathlessly through the portals, up past the blue lizard fountain to the plaza supported on wide pillars. There was no sign of Frankie, no sign either of High Tops, Delilah and April. I came back down the stairs and looked between the pillars. Nothing.

  It was a warm afternoon and I had gotten myself in a sweat with my haste and alarm. I’d been trying to remember the pronouns April and High Tops had used when talking yesterday. When they’d talked about being worried they’d said “he,” hadn’t they? But when Ben had joined them they’d talked about a “she.” Ben had said “she” in the restaurant.

  I set off along the Passeig de las Palmeras, up the road that wound itself around the hillside. Unlike the Doric columns
that supported the plaza, the columns underneath me now were a forest of wildly tilted trees, encrusted with dusty brown stones. The crazy thing about Gaudí was that his structures were so absolutely sound, perfect parabolas capable of bearing enormous weight, and yet his surfaces were so irregular. They gave the appearance of being natural, of having been part of the planet for millennia, and at the same time looked completely new, completely unlike anything you’d seen before.

  Above the parabolic brown forest the road progressed in a stately, if precipitous, fashion around the curve of the spring green hill. At regular intervals were vast columns that held up nothing but the sky, rocks bleached a pinkish brown, great columns that resembled women marching slowly upwards with gargantuan baskets of fruits and vegetables on their heads, or a religious procession. The Festival of the Cacti, one could almost call it, for from the planters balanced on the columns spewed blades and spears, green-gray, desert-dry.

  There were grandmothers in black with children, resting on the benches set into the railing along the edge of the road, the railing airily pieced together from sharp rocks; there were tourists sweating with cameras and guidebooks, in sturdy shoes and sleeveless shirts. Finally I reached the top of the hill and, turning a corner, saw the three of them. April, High Tops and Delilah were seated on a bench in the shade. Even from a distance I could see that High Tops looked shaken, April serene and Delilah merely apathetic and tired. I was wondering whether to go up to them and say something (could I possibly remind April that she’d once rubbed my soles?), when I heard the sound of running behind me.

  “You!” said Ben, astonished. Then he saw them ahead of us off the road.

  “Hamilton,” said April dramatically. “You’ll never guess what almost happened!”

  “Where have you been, Hamilton?” asked High Tops. “He never would have tried anything if you had been here.”

  Hamilton shook his head irritably.

  “This is Brigid O’Shaughnessy,” he said. “And I think she knows more than she’s let on.”

  “Well, actually,” I said, “I think I’m more in the dark than any of you.”

  “Let’s begin at the beginning,” April said. “I’m April Schauer.”

  “I know,” I said. “You massaged my feet once.”

  “I did?” She seemed pleased. “You remembered me from that?”

  “April,” High Tops said. “This woman’s name is not Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Not unless mine is Sam Spade.”

  “I’m Cassandra Reilly,” I admitted. “And who are you?”

  “Me?” she said, as if surprised I had to ask. “I’m Ben.”

  7

  DELILAH WAS NOT A PARTICULARLY attractive child, but small and spindly, with fair fine hair through which you could see her scalp, as fresh as a melon. Her ears were too large and when she grew up she would probably try to hide them, just as she would most likely adopt bangs to disguise the tall slant of her forehead. She wore her glasses as a child wears glasses, warily and resignedly. At six years old she already had the look of a child who has learned to be adaptable.

  Unlike the young children of my friends in London who sported six earrings in each ear and tee-shirts that said “Save the Rainforest,” Delilah was in a dress and sneakers. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry at all, nor did she have a slogan on her skinny little chest, and you had the feeling that was her idea.

  “What happened, honey?” Hamilton asked her. He crouched down to her level and put his brown hands on her small shoulders.

  She sighed and scuffed her foot in the dry earth. “Frankie came up and told me that if I’d go with her I’d get some ice cream. She said we’d go off and get ice cream for everybody and come back and surprise Ben and April. I said okay and we started to go off but then Ben saw us and started screaming, so Frankie took off.”

  Delilah looked at Ben. “How come Frankie is here in Spain? Did he come to visit us?”

  “Yes, Delilah. He came to visit us,” Ben said. She looked exhausted and worried.

  “Why did you scream at him?”

  “Uhmm, I guess because it looked like you might be going away without telling us where you were going. We didn’t mean to scare him.”

  “Maybe she just wanted to see Delilah,” suggested Hamilton. “After all, she’s her father.”

  “He sees Delilah regularly in San Francisco. There’s no reason he had to follow us on our vacation.”

  I was having some trouble following the pronouns. To Hamilton Frankie was a she, to Ben a he; Delilah used both depending on who she was talking to.

  “And just where do you fit in?” April asked me suddenly. She was as intensely attractive as I remembered her. Her eyelids were dusky violet and her lips a natural rose. Crystal pendants and embroidered cloth bags hung around her neck and down into the brown cleavage visible under her silky blue shirt, and she gave off a scent that conjured up rich dark Biblical words like frankincense and myrrh.

  “Well, I got a call from Frankie in London where I live saying she… he knew a friend of mine and wanted my help finding her… his ex-husband, Ben, and she’d pay my expenses and a fee for finding him… her. Frankie didn’t say anything about a child. Of course he… she didn’t say she was transsexual.” I gave up on the pronouns. “Frankie said Frankie was married, had been married to a gay man named Ben, who was very wealthy and had just left town. The family needed some papers signed. That’s why Frankie was looking for Ben. I thought Hamilton was Ben actually. You have to admit, Ben’s not exactly a common name for a woman.”

  “Short for Bernadette,” she sighed.

  “Well, all I can say is I’m sorry if I’ve made more problems for you.”

  “You’ve lost your Irish accent,” Hamilton noted with a frown.

  “So you were working for Frankie, and he paid you to find me,” said Ben.

  “Frankie paid part of my fee,” I allowed, with the sinking feeling that I was probably never going to see the rest of it. “How was I to know? It sounded plausible, at least at the beginning. I never expected anything like this. I never heard of anything like this. Have I been away from the States too long?”

  April said, “Hamilton, maybe Delilah would like to take a walk.”

  “Yes!” said Delilah.

  They set off back down the slope of Max Ernst pillars, Hamilton with a slight avuncular stoop that suggested he was used to children, Delilah skipping in her dress.

  I turned to Ben. Up close this woman was even more brawnily daunting. Her biceps bulged, her deltoids distended, her pectorals protruded underneath her sleeveless tee-shirt and vest. I supposed that April, as a masseuse, was attracted to such a display of well-defined musculature. It must be of great physiological interest.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “It can’t go on like this. He’s determined to kidnap Delilah, I know he is.”

  The three of us sat down on a stone bench, and Ben took April’s round arm into her lap. She seemed unable to keep her hands off her girlfriend.

  “Do you know any of the background of all this?” Ben asked. “Did Frankie tell you anything?”

  “I’m at a loss,” I admitted. “Are you married to Frankie? Were you married? Is Delilah your child?”

  “She’s my child,” said Ben with some ferocity. “That’s the problem. Frankie’s trying to steal her.”

  April murmured in a placating tone, “Ben, remember that Frankie sees things differently.”

  “I gather you had Delilah… together, then,” I said, searching for the right words. “Before Frankie… umm… changed.”

  “We were pals,” Ben said, squeezing April’s arm sadly. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We knew each other in college, in the theater department. We dreamed of San Francisco, and we moved there right after graduation—we were going to stick together and make it.”

  April tried to remove her arm from Ben’s grasp, but Ben only clung to her more firmly. “Yes, we got married, I got pregnant. What did we know? We were from Io
wa. I had Delilah and then I got a job at Federal Express and Frankie started working as a waiter. I come to find out it’s a bar with female impersonators and that he’s been doing impersonation himself.”

  “It’s a valid art form, Ben,” April said. “It’s as old as civilization.”

  “I’m not naive,” Ben protested. “Okay, so people are different. So why should I be upset when Frankie comes to me and says he’s always felt more like a girl than a boy, that he’s never wanted to be macho. So he was a fag, well, I guess I always knew that. Just like I knew I wasn’t like the girls I knew growing up. But I’m still a goddamned woman!”

  “Ben, Ben,” April said, withdrawing her arm firmly. “You said you were going to work on your attitude. Frankie is still a child of the Goddess.”

  “Oh honey, don’t be mad. I love you so much. But don’t you understand, I’m not against Delilah having a father. I’m not a separatist or anything. But Frankie is fucking trying to usurp my biological role!”

  I tried to get back to the story. “So you and Frankie had a baby and then Frankie had a sex change. You have joint custody of Delilah, right?”

  Ben nodded.

  “I have her during the week and Frankie has her on the weekends. But on the weekends Frankie works at this club, as a cocktail waitress. He makes Delilah sit in the entertainers’ dressing room for hours. Is that any place for a child?”

  I supposed it wasn’t appropriate to say that it sounded more fun than going to bed early Saturday night with your hair in big scratchy rollers, so you could get up at dawn for mass the next morning. That was how I’d spent my childhood.

  “We were arguing all the time,” Ben said. “When I complained about his work he said he’d take Delilah during the week, and I could have her on the weekends. I couldn’t agree to that. Finally I just couldn’t stand him anymore. I had to get away for a while. Take a vacation. But now he’s followed us.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Ben fixed me with her blue Iowa eyes. “Can’t you help, Cassandra? I mean, after all, you have some responsibility. You led Frankie to us. Can’t you persuade him that we’re just here for a vacation? It’s so important for April and me to be together right now.”