Gaudi Afternoon

by Barbara Wilson

  “It’s wonderful that my friends are able to stay in such a nice place,” I volunteered. “Especially el Señor Kincaid. How long has he been here now? Two years, three?”

  The portero appeared to nod.

  “Funny, he doesn’t seem like an American,” I murmured.

  “Because he’s not,” said the portero. “He’s from Eastern Europe somewhere. He and his friends.”

  If this guy thought there were women like Ben and April in Krakow or Prague he was sadly mistaken. But why had Hamilton told him such a thing?

  The portero held the elevator door open and I gave him a tip.

  It was a short trip up to the second floor but a trip back in time. The elevator was finished in walnut, with a curved seat and an art nouveau mirror. The elevator opened into a small foyer off which there were only two doors. One of them was open.

  “Cassandra,” April took both my hands and drew me inside. “How good, how really good to see you.”

  I felt my blood tingle slightly. April hadn’t let go of me and her hands, like those of many masseuses, were dry and strong and very much alive. She was wearing a gauzy Moroccan caftan with nothing much underneath. Not that you could see through it, but the shape of her large body was pretty clear and deliciously round and full. Her black hair was newly washed and very frizzy around her full face; it gave off a dizzying odor of soap and fragrant oils. Crystals and rose quartz hung down between her breasts.

  “It’s great to see you too,” I said weakly. “Nice place Hamilton has here.”

  All the apartments in La Pedrera were arranged around two central courtyards, like an egg with a double yolk. When you came into the apartment there was a corridor making a windowed half-circle around the courtyard, and from this corridor rooms of various sizes led off; the large ones gave onto the street, and the smaller ones onto a view of roofs and courtyards. The shape of the apartment was like a pie, and we, in the living room, were at the fluted edge of the crust.

  April gave me a little tour. “I don’t know if you’re interested in architecture, but there’s lots more here than meets the eye. Many people don’t realize that in addition to being a visionary, Gaudí was technically very very sound.” April pointed to the wall between the living and dining rooms. “Gaudí constructed the building with pillars that bear all the weight, so the walls of the rooms can be moved and changed. And look at this stucco decoration,” she pointed to the lintels around the doors and windows. “The wavy patterns are formed by fingers.” I looked up. The ceilings had patterns too, but they looked as if they’d been brushed on; the patterns were the shapes of sand underwater or when the tide has receded.

  “How can Hamilton afford a place like this?”

  “Oh, he’s subletting,” April said vaguely and led me past a back door to show me the kitchen and the rather small bedrooms. “Delilah’s sleeping,” she said, pointing to a closed door. “She had a long day.”

  “Now what can I get you? Tea or a drink of something?”

  “Tea’s fine,” I said. “Subletting from whom?”

  “I’m not really sure,” April said. She looked uncomfortable.

  A wealthy Czech who had fled in 1968 and perhaps gone back, but wanted to keep his investment? The Czechs liked the saxophone, I knew. Hamilton could have a jazz connection.

  April brewed up a pot of mysterious-smelling tea and led me back into one of the main rooms. The blinds were shut against the fierce outside illumination. Much of the interior had been decorated with Modernista furniture and rugs. “I was just studying Spanish when you came,” said April, pointing to some books. “And I pulled this out for you. You might like to borrow it,” she said, handing me a volume with a large foot on the cover. It was Stories the Feet Can Tell by Eunice D. Ingham.

  She pulled me down, not onto the sofa, but onto the floor. April was one of those California types who sit cross-legged a lot. My bones creaked as I joined her, but my stiffness was easy to forget in the warmth of her gorgeous full presence. Close-up I saw she had a tiny spattering of freckles in her cleavage. It wasn’t going to be easy to keep my mind on business.

  In a natural and easy way, she began to remove my sandals as she asked, “Did you get any kind of explanation from Frankie about why she’d come here?”

  “She was obviously worried that you and Ben were taking more than a vacation. She said she found out that Ben quit her job and that the ticket was open-ended.”

  With a practiced air April pulled both my naked feet up on her lap. I felt the warmth of her big soft thighs and her firm hands. “Inhale.” She grasped both soles and pressed a thumb right under the ball. “Now exhale. That’s your solar plexus.” She pinched into the fleshy part of each of my big toes. “Your pituitary reflex… Ben was wanting to quit her job anyway. And she only had a week’s vacation saved up. It’s still a vacation.”

  “But she sublet her apartment for a year, Frankie said.”

  “She did?” Then she laughed. “Oh yes, I forgot. She said she wouldn’t have much money when she went back to San Francisco. She was going to sublet her apartment and live with a friend to build up some savings.”

  That sounded pretty elaborate for a short vacation. And I noticed that April said nothing about going back to San Francisco herself. Not for the first time the thought crossed my mind that things might not be quite right between April and Ben. Along with the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, Frankie had been justified in pursuing Ben to Barcelona.

  April stroked the back of my right calf up to my sole and cupped my foot with both hands. Then, holding my heel in one hand, she gently rotated the toes. She twisted her fist into the bottom of my foot, then wrung the entire foot several times.

  I could feel the weight of her fingers travelling all the way up to my lower back and spine.

  “Your organs all have reflex points at the bottom of your feet,” she said seriously. “That’s why it’s called Reflexology.” She’d told me that, in practically the same tone of voice, dreamy and knowing, the last time she’d massaged my feet after the march in San Francisco, but I’d forgotten it. “Your feet are the part of you furthest from the heart, so, with the natural process of gravity, impurities settle in your feet and calcify, right next to tiny nerve endings. What we’re trying to do is stimulate those deposits so they break up and are carried away.”

  “Can you feel anything is wrong with my organs?” I asked.

  She smiled at me. “This is a massage, not a diagnosis. We’re just sending a little message from your feet to those organs: if there is anything wrong then they need to get a move on healing themselves. We’re just opening up the pathways.”

  The wires must be crossed though, because the main message that was getting through was going directly to a place between my legs.

  I tried to keep my mind on the subject of Frankie. “The sense I got from Frankie was that she wouldn’t have bothered to fly to Barcelona to see Delilah if she hadn’t been frantic with worry about losing her. She really loves the kid and wants her in her life.”

  “It’s so hard to know what’s right,” April murmured. “In the best of all possible worlds, every child would have parents who loved and nurtured her and/or him.”

  “It sounds to me like Delilah does have two parents,” I said. “And you too, of course.” I wondered if there was some rivalry between April and Frankie, if that was the reason April had persuaded Ben to bring Delilah to Barcelona.

  April didn’t respond to that; in fact she seemed hardly to have heard what I said. She had a firm hold of my right foot and was grinding her thumb gently into my organs, I mean my reflex points, with controlled abandon. “Just breathe naturally,” she said, with a seductive look under her violet lids. “You sound a little congested. I’ll work a little on your bronchial tubes.”

  It’s true that my breath was coming in little gasps, but it wasn’t from blocked bronchial tubes. “Don’t stop,” I said. “That one place you were just touching… it was very good… the way y
ou were touching it….”

  “Here?” she inquired in a low voice, and fit the heel of my foot more firmly into her lap as she pressed out those pesky little calcifications from the ball of my foot in steady, rhythmic movements. I moaned aloud.

  “That’s good,” April said, “Don’t keep it inside, let your voice out.”

  I moaned again. Louder. And again.

  The feet are highly underrated, I thought.

  “Hi everybody!” said Hamilton, coming into the room. We hadn’t heard him open the front door.

  “Hi,” said April, shifting my foot unobtrusively from her lap. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. “Cassandra came by to talk about Frankie. I was just giving her a foot massage.” April slapped my foot with brisk professionalism.

  “That’s right,” I said. “My organs have gotten a message and I think it’s a good one.”

  Hamilton stood there in his blue leather ostrich boots and looked at me without any particular friendliness. I had the sense that he hadn’t forgiven me for pretending to be Brigid yesterday.

  “Do you want some tea, Hamilton?” April said, a little nervously.

  He didn’t answer her. “Where’s Delilah? Is she all right?”

  “Of course,” April said. “I put her to sleep after Ben left, around seven. She was exhausted, poor thing.”

  “I’ll just check in on her,” Hamilton said.

  April sighed, and when he’d left, she whispered, “He’s hopelessly in love with Delilah, you know. It’s bringing out all his paternal instincts.”

  “Just who is he, anyway?” I started to ask, but then Hamilton was back. He sank into a leather chair slung low to the ground. His blue eyes regarded me suspiciously.

  “What line of work are you in, Cassandra? Unless you really are a journalist.”

  I didn’t think Hamilton was naturally aggressive, but he lacked humor and those without humor never appreciate having jokes played on them.

  “I’m a translator. As a matter of fact I’m in the process of translating La Grande y su hija. Gregory Rabassa was too busy, so they thought of me.”

  In spite of himself he was impressed. “That’s quite a coup, isn’t it, Cassandra?”

  “To tell you the truth, at this point I think I prefer non-fiction.”

  He nodded. “But surely fiction must be more demanding,” he said. “I mean, non-fiction tells us about the world we live in, but fiction gives us our dreams and visions.”

  “Some fiction perhaps. Some, Hamilton, does not. To be blunt.”

  “I have to say that I was totally engrossed by La Grande y su hija. I thought there were echoes of Garcia Márquez and Allende, as well as Valenzuela and Donoso, but that de los Angeles had forged her own unique style. If anyone she reminds me a little of Nélida Piñon, the Brazilian. The same sort of fabulist, the same sort of prodigious imagination.”

  “Hamilton has a Ph. D. in Spanish and Latin American studies from Columbia,” April said, a little hardness coming into her inky black eyes. I wondered if she was warning me not to make fun of him.

  “Where did you study, Cassandra?” Hamilton asked.

  “Oh, I’ve picked up a little here, a little there.”

  “But where did you get your degree?”

  “La experiencia es la escuela de la vida. Or you might say I studied intensively at the School of Hard Knocks.”

  “I never did anything with my degrees.” Hamilton seemed sad. “I would have rather just played music, but my parents….”

  This time there was no mistaking the warning light in April’s eyes. Only this time it was directed at Hamilton. Why?

  But all she said was, “What’s this Grande novel about, Cassandra?”

  “You mean the plot?” I said. “Do you have two hours?”

  Hamilton laughed. Perhaps there was a little hope for him after all. “It’s really complicated, April, it can’t be summed up easily.” But he tried to give her some of the highlights: jungle, love, river, revolution, motherhood. Then Hamilton turned to me. “I saw La Grande as a political allegory as well as the riveting search for one’s past. I understand that feminists have really responded to it.”

  “They have,” I said gloomily. “I believe they see the obsessive search of María for her mother as a paradigm of the condition of contemporary woman.”

  “Oh, that’s probably true, Cassandra, I hadn’t thought of that.” He sat back in his chair and gave me a look of respect.

  But I was running out of literary clichés, so it was a relief when the front door opened with an unmistakable thump and muscular Ben in Levis, black boots and a motorcycle jacket marched into the living room and threw herself onto one of the gorgeously upholstered settees.

  “Well, Frankie didn’t show,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m surprised or not.”

  “What!” I said. “She was so eager to talk to you.”

  “You don’t know Frankie as well as I do,” Ben said. She ran her thick fingers through her brush cut so that it stood up angrily. “That’s the whole history of my relationship with Frankie. I wait. She doesn’t show. That’s why this joint custody thing didn’t work and will never work.”

  “Maybe something came up,” I said.

  “The only person she knows in Barcelona is you, so how could anything come up?”

  “Did you call her?”

  “I don’t know where she’s staying.”

  With a start I realized I didn’t either. I’d forgotten to ask once again.

  Ben eyed me suspiciously. “Just what did you talk about today?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, the usual. Gender. Motherhood. Architecture. Surely you’re not accusing me of being the reason Frankie didn’t show up?”

  “All I know,” Hamilton jumped in, forgetting the respectful gaze of a few moments back, “is that there’s something odd about you being involved in all this.”

  I was stung. “I’m an innocent bystander, what do you mean? I could be at home translating an important work of South American literature.”

  “You’ve accepted money from Frankie,” Hamilton said.

  “She offered to pay me to find her husband, who then became her ex-husband, who then became her ex-wife. I found Ben, why shouldn’t I be paid? I’m only still involved out of the goodness of my heart.” And feet.

  “What about you?” I counterattacked. “You’ve met with Frankie on your own. What did you talk about? And why does the portero downstairs think you’re all Bulgarians and Hungarians? And where’s your saxophone anyway, Hamilton?”

  There was a pause and I saw Hamilton and April look at each other. At that moment, from somewhere in the apartment, came the sound of a door closing.

  11

  IT WASN’T THE FRONT DOOR, by the elevator, but the back door, by Delilah’s room.

  “Delilah,” Ben shouted and rushed down the corridor with all of us following.

  But Delilah lay in a deep sleep in her little bed, defenseless in pajamas and still clutching her stuffed rabbit.

  On the floor next to her, however, was a silver lighter that all of us recognized.

  “He’s been here, he’s tried to get her again,” Ben said, and dashed for the back door.

  It led to the staircase I’d huffed up with the other tourists a few days earlier.

  “I’ll go down to the street,” April said. “You can check the roof.” She obviously was no more fond of climbing steps than I was, even in an emergency.

  Hamilton hesitated. “I’ll go with you, April.”

  Ben and I were already rushing up the staircase to the roof, but I still had time to wonder which one of the two didn’t trust the other.

  Ben’s muscular legs took her up two steps at a time. Even so, I wasn’t disgracefully far behind her, though my lungs complained violently, when we pelted through the arched corridor of attic space and up to the roof.

  It was spectacular and I wished I had time to really look at it. The sculpted chimneys and airshafts formed even more fan
tastic shapes under the gauzy night sky. There was a slender moon, its light fragmented behind frequent clouds.

  “I see someone,” whispered Ben.

  I saw nothing. The roof was less like the top of a building than a landscape of dream figures, shifting and dancing. The klieg lights didn’t reach into the corners; the illumination from the street served only to make the shadows of the chimneys and vents darker and more twisted.

  “You go left, I’ll go right,” Ben directed with a hand wave.

  Back in Michigan when I was growing up we used to play a game called “Ditchum” in the humid, mosquito-laden summer nights down by the lake. It was a more tortuous form of Hide ’n’ Seek, in which you ran for blocks and stayed put for hours. There wasn’t just one person looking for you, but a whole team of children, methodically combing the backyards, the wood-piles, the garages, the undersides of docks. I had been better at hiding than at seeking. Midway through the hunt I’d get bored, go off and look at the moon, sit on a bench and wonder how many days it would take to fly to outer space. Eventually one of my teammates or even one of the hidden children would find me sitting there. “Cathie! [I was Catherine Frances Reilly then.] You’re supposed to be looking.”

  I crept stealthily up and down the broad shallow steps that undulated over the roof. There were lots of places to hide here, behind chimneys, in corners… Was that a movement? No.

  I couldn’t even see Ben; she was over on the far side, around the second courtyard.

  I prowled further. What was it about Hamilton that bothered me? There had been absolutely no musical equipment in the apartment at all. Not even a boom box. How did April know him? Why had she been so evasive about him?

  Out from behind one of the chimneys a figure stepped slowly and softly. She was wearing a big sweater and she had curly hair. Frankie. I paused with my heart in my throat. If she didn’t see me, if she came this way—I desperately tried to remember some karate moves. At least I could trip her, I could sit on her….

  She saw me and vanished again. Hell. I stopped prowling and rushed headlong after her. Rounding a corner at top speed I careened into Ben, who was also running. We knocked each other over in a good imitation of a Keystone Cops routine. But she was younger and more resilient.