Gaudi Afternoon

by Barbara Wilson

  “I saw her. Did you see her?” She stood up and pointed in the direction I’d come.

  I nodded weakly, still winded.

  Ben took off in that direction, while I contemplated my adventurous life and the moon. There was nothing like a nighttime run for getting the blood going.

  From somewhere to the right I heard the sounds of a struggle, and shouting.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” That was Ben.

  “Get your hands off me!”

  “Not till you tell me what you were doing in our apartment with Delilah.”

  Grunts and groans.

  I approached cautiously.

  Ben had Frankie in a modified half Nelson. I guessed you got pretty strong working for Federal Express. All those packages.

  “Cassandra, over here,” Ben said.

  But just at that moment Frankie broke away and dashed in the direction of the stairs.

  “Never mind,” said Ben. “Hamilton and April will be waiting for him.”

  But when we got down to the foyer there was no sign of any of them. The portero had gone off duty and the small door at the side of the iron gate was wide open.

  “If they let him get away…” Ben muttered.

  We went through the door and out onto the brightly lit street. Behind us La Pedrera reared up on its elephantine pillars.

  I’d forgotten how early it was, probably only about nine o’clock in the evening. The streets were crowded and traffic poured up and down the Passeig de Gràcia.

  “Maybe they’re all having an espresso in the bar,” I said. “Maybe they’re over at the music store buying saxophone tapes.”

  Ben glared at me. “This isn’t funny, Cassandra.”

  We wandered around the street for a little bit and looked in the windows of the bar. Finally we saw April crossing the street toward us. She looked worried.

  “Where’s Frankie? Is Hamilton chasing him?” Ben demanded.

  “I think so,” said April. “We were each supposed to be at one of the doors. I was standing at the main door and nothing was happening, so I went over to the Provença door, but Hamilton wasn’t there anymore. I guess Frankie came out that way and Hamilton went after her. She wasn’t up on the roof?”

  “He was,” Ben said. “But he got away.”

  We saw Hamilton coming around the corner of Provença.

  “Didn’t you catch him?” Ben demanded.

  “Catch Frankie? I was looking for April. She wasn’t at the main door when I went to look.”

  “I was too,” said April indignantly. “You were the one who was gone. I thought you’d gone after Frankie.”

  Their Keystone Cop routine was as bad as mine and Ben’s had been on the roof.

  “Well, the important thing,” I said, to quiet their animosity, “is that Delilah’s safe.”

  All of them looked at each other, then Ben rushed back in the door with Hamilton and April close behind her. I followed more slowly. This stampeding around was not good for my heart, I was convinced.

  When I got back to the apartment by way of the back stairs I found them all shouting at each other.

  Delilah, it appeared, was no longer asleep in bed.

  A confused ten minutes followed. There was a great deal of shouting, name-calling and general accusation and recrimination.

  Why hadn’t someone stayed in the apartment?

  Why didn’t you stay at your door?

  Why didn’t you?

  How had Frankie gotten away from Ben up on the roof?

  How had Frankie gotten in to La Pedrera in the first place?

  What was Cassandra’s role in all this?

  At which point I decided I’d had enough.

  “I’m going home,” I announced. “There’s a good tv program on the EEC monetary policy that I’m just dying to see.”

  “No!” Ben panicked. “You’re our only link with him. Where would Frankie have taken Delilah?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The airport?”

  The three of them had been so busy accusing and defending that they hadn’t gotten any further.

  “The airport?” Ben was aghast. “Did he tell you he planned to take Delilah back to California?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Frankie never told me the truth about anything if she could help it. But it’s one possibility. Why would Frankie want to keep Delilah hidden in Barcelona?”

  Ben was the kind of woman who moved quickly. They must miss her at Federal Express. She grabbed my arm and started towards the back door again. “Oh god, I hope we’re not too late.”

  “I’ll stay here,” April said. “In case Frankie calls or something.”

  Hamilton looked at her strangely. “I’ll stay too,” he said. “You don’t need us at the airport if you have Cassandra to translate.”

  What was going on between April and Hamilton?

  But Ben had me halfway down the stairs before I could protest. I barely had time to grab my leather briefcase with Gloria de los Angeles’s prodigiously imagined opus.

  In the taxi Ben clenched and unclenched her fists as we sped recklessly through the brilliant arterials of the city. At first all she could say was, “I’ll kill him,” but clearly she had other feelings, other doubts.

  “I’m not a bad mother,” she said.

  “No one said you were.”

  “I had to get away from Frankie. Maybe I should have moved someplace like Eugene or Portland, someplace that would have been close, but that would have put an end to those weekends with Delilah.”

  “Barcelona is a little extreme.”

  “How was I to know he’d follow us here? How was I to know he’d have the… guts to take Delilah?” Ben clenched her hands and bent her head. The taxi threw her heavily against the door, and me heavily against her.

  “Cuidado,” I advised the driver, pulling away from Ben and righting myself. Her scent was a combination of fresh leather and sour sweat.

  “Why did you choose Barcelona?” I said.

  “April had a friend here. Hamilton’s an old friend of hers.”

  “He makes his living as a musician, isn’t that right?”

  “I’m not sure if he makes his living that way,” Ben said. “He’s got money, family money.” She added, half in pride, half in envy, “April does too.”

  “April?” Hamilton I could figure for a rich boy, but April?

  “Well, she gets money from somewhere,” Ben amended. “Some bank sends her money.”

  What I couldn’t give to know a bank that would send me money too.

  “April’s a very… spiritual woman,” I said.

  “Yeah,” sighed Ben. “The first time I met her, something just melted inside me. Those big dark eyes, those hands—god, those hands.”

  We reminisced separately for a moment and a desperate tone came into Ben’s voice.

  “I love April so much. I just feel I couldn’t live without her. I met her at the New Age Bodywork Center when I went there for a pulled muscle in my leg. From the moment I saw her I knew she was the one for me.” Ben’s voice grew soft. “At first she wasn’t particularly interested, but I pursued her. I sent her flowers, I wrote her notes, I found out her phone number and called her. I courted her. Finally she gave in.”

  I remembered the ambivalence in April’s tone when she talked about Ben. Perhaps April hadn’t given in all the way.

  “She must love you a lot to have followed you to Barcelona.”

  Ben stared at me as the taxi screamed to a halt in front of the airport. “Yes,” she said fiercely as she threw herself out of the cab. “She really loves me.”

  The driver accepted my tip with thanks. “I guess he’s in a hurry, isn’t he, señora?”

  “Yes,” I nodded. I was back to womanhood, but only because the world thinks in dyads and Ben was more of a man than me.

  I found her at the departure board. “There was a flight to New York at nine, but he couldn’t have gotten here in time. And there’s nothi
ng more to the States tonight.”

  Now that we were out of the taxi my mind cleared and a dozen other possibilities presented themselves to me. There was no reason for Frankie to have flown immediately back to San Francisco. She could have flown or be about to fly anywhere; there were flights listed to Rome, to Athens, to London and to Paris. There was even a possibility that she wasn’t flying, but taking a train or a bus out of the country or even to another part of Spain.

  Some of these possibilities were occurring to Ben herself. After twenty minutes of stalking nervously around the airport, scouring the restrooms and the waiting room, she subsided into a muscular slump of black leather and despair in a molded chair.

  “I’m not a bad mother,” she said. “I haven’t neglected Delilah. Not really. I don’t deserve this.”

  It sounded as if she were more concerned with being thought neglectful than with actually worrying about Delilah.

  “If Delilah’s with Frankie,” I tried to reassure her, “she’s probably not in any real danger. I’m sure Frankie will be contacting you.”

  “You don’t know Frankie. He’s completely unreliable. He could be anywhere with my daughter right now.” She suddenly stood up and pulled me up with her. “Why did we come to the airport? They’re probably at the train station. That’s where we should have gone.”

  So far I’d mainly seen Ben in motion, stomping about and flinging herself from place to place, but back in another taxi she grew contemplative, staring out at the bright lights of a city she hardly knew.

  “Sometimes I think of my own childhood and how I grew up and my parents and everything and how I could ever explain any of this to them,” she said as we travelled back through the outskirts of Barcelona. “I mean, my parents went to college, but it was an agricultural college. I grew up on the farm until they just couldn’t make it anymore. If we hadn’t moved to the city I would probably still be in Iowa, running the farm. Going to Cedar Rapids changed my life—I know it doesn’t seem like a big place to you…”

  “It is smaller than Kalamazoo.”

  “… but there were movies and shopping centers and a university with a drama department.”

  “So you really wanted to be in theater?”

  “Both of us did, but Frankie more than me. I was into set construction.” Ben stared at her hands. “It’s funny thinking back, but one of the things I liked best about Frankie in those days was his imagination. He was the person who taught me that you didn’t have to live the life your parents had planned for you, that you didn’t have to be who they expected, that you could change….”

  She paused uncomfortably.

  “I guess you feel that Frankie changed too much.”

  Ben didn’t say anything for a minute. “Maybe it’s hypocritical. Maybe it’s hypocritical for me to say that I like to wear jeans and a crew cut and have biceps and that being mistaken for a man and called sir doesn’t bother me. But I don’t want to be a man. I’m a woman. And a mother.”

  “Did you ever think that there’s no middle ground for men? They can’t wake up in the morning and say, Oh I feel kind of like wearing my red satin dress and three inch pumps today.”

  “Transsexualism isn’t about a middle ground. Transsexuals think they’re born into the wrong body. They don’t want the world to change, they just want to change their bodies.”

  “Why do you hate her so much?”

  “I don’t hate Frankie,” Ben muttered. We were drawing near to Estació de Sants, the main train station. “I mean, maybe I do hate Frankie. But not for the reasons you think.”

  “It is because you’re jealous?”

  She looked grim about the mouth, but also as if she could almost weep. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Nobody understands. I didn’t lose a husband or a father when Frankie did what he did. I lost, I lost… I lost a pal.”

  The taxi stopped and this time I restrained Ben from jumping out. “You’re paying,” I said.

  We stood in the cavernous station, ten times more bustling and confusing than the airport, and now Ben did begin to weep.

  “Come on, come on,” I said. “A big strong girl like you, come on, come on.” I led her to a bar and asked for cognacs and coffee for us both.

  “I don’t drink,” she said. “I don’t do caffeine either.”

  “Oh for godssakes,” I said. “This isn’t California.” Nevertheless I ordered her a mineral water.

  “Look,” I said. “It’s late, it’s very late. We can hang around here all night in the hope that Frankie will turn up with Delilah and that somehow, somehow in all this mass of humanity we’ll be able to spot them. If they haven’t been through here already and left on a train to Timbuktu. If Frankie is even planning to take Delilah out of the country. Or we can go home sensibly and wait to hear from Frankie.”

  “You’ve never been a mother,” she said. “You can’t know how it feels.”

  “And I thank god for it every day,” I said.

  “I want to trust you, Cassandra,” she said. “But I can’t. I don’t know how you’re involved in all this.”

  That stung me. “You’d better ask yourself how April and Hamilton are involved.”

  “April? Hamilton?”

  “One of them let Frankie escape.”

  “That’s not true!”

  I drank my cognac down to the bottom, and maintained a stubborn silence.

  “You’re just trying to alienate me from April, Cassandra. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you’ve had your eye on her. I’m not the jealous type, thank goodness, but if I thought you were trying to steal my girlfriend, I’d have to do something about it.”

  “You’re paranoid,” I said, all too aware of her well-developed forearms.

  Ben put down her glass of mineral water and started to walk away. “I keep forgetting Frankie paid you to find me.”

  I took out Frankie’s check from my bag and deliberately wadded it up. I’d never be able to cash it anyway.

  “And now,” I said. “I really am going home to sleep.”

  12

  WHO WOULD SHE BE [María wondered], this woman in whose womb I had been conceived, through whose loins I had passed into the light of day? Since the disappearing plague I had been looking for this mysterious woman, searching the faces of every female that I passed in the street, imagining in every touch of womanly hands the hands of my mother. I had given Cristobel supernatural powers, a face like Rita Hayworth and a body with a scent like that of a warm, fragrant loaf of bread.

  And I imagined that my mother thought of me as well, saying to herself as she passed children in the street, “Now she is six, now she is eight, now she is bleeding, now she is in love, now she is married, now she has children of her own.”

  My story is two stories, that of my own life and that of my mother Cristobel, whom many times I am sure I have invented. I made her large because I am small, I made her Eduardo’s lover because I have no lover, strong where I am weak, wise where I am foolish. She abandoned me and I could not find her, though over and over I discovered her traces. I imagined that she was searching for me too, but whenever I arrived at the place where she had been, she was gone. Sometimes there were fragments, remnants, signs: a scent of jasmine, a faded orchid, a stone dropped from a ring. There were tales of her youth, her loves, her illnesses and her triumphs. But they were told by people who also had not known her, who had, like me, only heard of her, and who had forgotten most of the story.

  I was getting near the end of La Grande and Gloria was beginning to wind things up. Raoul had turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer and Eduardo had died in Cristobel’s arms after a desperate guerilla action. María was closing in on her mother’s whereabouts. But still no one knew what had been in Raoul’s black bag.

  It was the morning after my escapades with the Ben and Frankie family and I was deep into Gloria’s romance when Ana came in with a cup of freshly steamed café con leche for me and sat down on the bed beside my desk.

  S
he was wearing her usual white shirt and blue jeans and her hair was neatly braided down the back.

  “You came in earlier than usual last night,” she said. “Carmen teasing you again?”

  “Carmen never does anything else,” I said. “No, I was with my Americans. A podiatric encounter with the gypsy April, then a little quick sightseeing on the roof of La Pedrera, enlivened by wrestling displays, and then a madcap dash first to the airport and then to the train station where I heard another version of the classic story of American loss of innocence. First, the abandonment of the farm, then the corruptions of the big city, leading to the blurring of gender roles. Once you get away from the soil, basically, you’re in trouble.”

  “What?”

  I explained in more detail.

  “Well of course Ben is worried. Losing her little girl like that.”

  “At least we know that Frankie has her.”

  Ana shook her head. “How did you get involved with these people? That is, more involved?”

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “I keep feeling responsible in different ways. First I found out where Ben and April and Delilah were staying for Frankie, then I almost got Delilah snatched at the Parc Güell because I’d told Frankie they’d be there, and finally I was getting a foot massage from April when Frankie first got in to kidnap Delilah.”

  “It must have been a pretty heavy foot massage,” said Ana.

  “It was,” I sighed. “It obviously interfered with my hearing.”

  Ana was thoughtful. “Have you figured out how Frankie got into the apartment?”

  “There are two doors, front and back. One or both could have been unlocked. April could have done it, or Hamilton. Or they could have given Frankie a key. Or—Hamilton and Frankie could have come in together. He just appeared in the living room—and started going on about Gloria de los Angeles, probably to distract me. Or—I forgot about this—when he came in he went immediately to Delilah’s room. He could have unlocked the door then.”

  “Why would Hamilton want to help Frankie steal Delilah? Money?”