Gaudi Afternoon

by Barbara Wilson

  “She’s been sleeping in a different room,” Ben said painfully. “We don’t sleep together.”

  But that admission must have been too much for her. Because right after she made it she ran back the way she’d come to the Passeig de Gràcia and jumped into a passing cab.

  “Come on,” Frankie said, taking my arm, “Talk to me.”

  We sat down at April’s and my old seats at the outdoor table, and ordered cafés con leche.

  “Do you really think April has Delilah then?” Frankie said anxiously, lighting up a Camel.

  “I hope so.”

  Frankie sighed. “Ben and her girlfriends! And she says I’m unstable.” She crossed her legs and struck a wounded pose. “She talks about my lying! I’m an amateur next to her. Can you believe we’re all here in Barcelona because Ben has a crush on someone?”

  I had to smile. “So what did you say to April yesterday afternoon to persuade her to help you?”

  Frankie put a finger to her red lips. “I have my ways.”

  “Did you offer her money? Did you blackmail her?”

  “Did I threaten to expose her as practicing Reflexology under false pretenses? No, I simply suggested that I could take Delilah off her hands for a while. You see, even in San Francisco I’d noticed that April was never very happy to see Delilah when I dropped her off after a weekend.”

  The waitress crossed the street from the bar on the corner with our coffee.

  Frankie was already wired. She kept talking. “To hear Ben go on you’d think it was totally her idea to have Delilah and totally her responsibility. But it was my idea. I was the one who wanted a child.”

  “Ben said you met in college.”

  “We did, we were inseparable. We were roommates for two years and then we got married. You couldn’t pry us apart.”

  “How could she have not known about you? How could you have not known about each other?”

  “I said we were close. I didn’t say we ever talked. For christssake, we were eighteen when we met, twenty-one when we had Delilah. I didn’t have a clue who I was. Yes, I had these feelings but I thought they’d go away. They didn’t and I’m happy they didn’t. I’m just starting my life in some ways and it’s exciting. I’m living my life finally as I want to live it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a right to be a mother. I am a parent. I have a child. And nobody can take her away from me.”

  “Frankie, you and Ben have to work this stuff out. It isn’t good for Delilah.”

  “Ben and her girlfriends aren’t good for Delilah,” she said stubbornly. “Delilah and I are fine together.”

  “What about you, don’t you have a relationship?”

  “Not at the moment,” she said. “Someday I’ll find the right man. I’m not like Ben. When I get attached, I stay attached.”

  Speaking of attachments…

  The head was coming down the street on two blue-jeaned legs. She was still smiling implacably.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and pelted across the street. It wasn’t my physical prowess but luck and caffeine that enabled me to grab the teenage boy. Plus the fact that he wasn’t running.

  “Where do you think you’re going, ladrón?” I shouted.

  But he wasn’t really a pickpocket, just a university student who’d been having second thoughts.

  “I thought it might look good in my room,” he apologized. “I’m really very sorry. I wanted to bring it back to where I took it from.”

  He handed it over to me with a sheepish look and I hadn’t the heart to scold him.

  “Mom’s back!” I turned to call to Frankie, but she was no longer there.

  The Mercat Sant Josep was a nineteenth-century enclosed marketplace of glass and wrought iron, of the train-station school of architecture. A little city of comestibles: houses built of oranges and bananas; monuments of dried apricots and peaches; parks of leafy greens and browns. The cheese sellers stood behind cases of fresh white queso de Burgos and hard yellowish chunks from the Pyrenees; they would thinly slice you a hundred grams, if you asked, of salty Serrano ham, or cut you off a chunk of sausage or sell you a whole strand of fatty rust-red chorizo. I always avoided the meat displays with their plucked chickens dangling from the top of the stand like traitors on a gibbet, but I often was drawn, as if by undersea currents, to the icy stands of fish, where the fishmongers looked as pale as their catch from long years of sunless filleting and wrapping.

  In the restaurant inside the market I took a seat that faced the window and ordered a three-course lunch of salad, braised lamb with fried potatoes and crema catalana for dessert. There was no sign of April.

  I took a long time to eat. I had a small carafe of wine and then coffee. I watched the vegetable sellers outside the restaurant strip the soiled outer leaves from a boxful of lettuce, build a barricade of potatoes against an encroachment of rocket-shaped parsnips, fling limp carrots with seaweed-like hair back into the bin. After a while I noticed someone standing outside the restaurant and staring in. He was wearing a turtleneck sweater and a suede jacket; his hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he had on very dark Italian shades. He smoked with the cigarette held between his thumb and forefinger.

  I’d seen him somewhere… and a shiver went up my spine. Maybe he was the man who’d followed me through the Barri Gòtic. A professional thief—or someone Frankie or Ben or even April had hired to stake me out and kill me.

  For he was definitely staking someone out. I glanced covertly around the restaurant. Was there anyone here I’d missed? The small room was packed and the waiters dashed expertly back and forth from the kitchen with plates of food and bottles of wine.

  Then I saw that the tough didn’t have his eye on me, but on an elderly woman seated at the bar in front of the restaurant. I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t noticed her before. In her black head scarf, black dress and black shawl she looked like a widow who’d wandered in from the countryside to see a big-city relative. She was perched on a stool at the bar eating a sandwich and drinking mineral water, with her head down and her eyes moving restlessly.

  There was something peculiar about those eyes.

  They were blue.

  In my surprise I knocked over my water carafe, and when I looked up again, she was gone. So was the tough guy in the suede jacket. I hastily paid my bill and ran out of the restaurant in search of them.

  It was two o’clock, siesta time, and some of the stands were closed, while others had been left in the care of a son or a daughter. There were a couple of men pushing brooms around and not many customers.

  There she was, the little old lady in black. But how oddly she walked, not as if she were old, and not as if she were a lady either. Was she Hamilton in drag? I flattened myself against a stand with its metal door rolled down and let the señora cross the aisle perpendicular to mine. A few seconds later the man in the dark glasses slid past, smooth and soundless as a fish in an aquarium. He had a leather bag over one shoulder. Yes, it was him—the man with the threatening sack who’d followed me through the Barri Gòtic from the Ramblas and scared the wits out of me.

  I squeezed into a tiny space between two stands and waited till he’d passed by.

  The afternoon light filtered in through the dusty windows overhead and an eerie quiet seemed to blanket the great hall. A sensation of dread spread through my limbs and my heart pounded. I had the distinct impression that I was going to witness something awful.

  A scream cut the air.

  I rounded the corner at a bound to see the widow and the tough locked in a death grip, rolling on the floor on a rapidly flattening cushion of bananas which they must have knocked over when they began to grapple.

  “Stop it, stop it,” a teenage girl in a green apron was crying. She told me and the others who converged upon the stand, “They just started fighting, I don’t know why.”

  “Mira, it’s two men,” someone said, trying to tear them apart.

  “No, son dos mujeres,” someone else said.

&nb
sp; The widow’s black scarf had fallen away, revealing a blond brush cut, and the tough’s dark glasses had smashed in pieces. The two struggling bodies were smeared with banana mush; that suede jacket would never be the same.

  “Son maridos,” I explained. Married. And some of the crowd, at least, seemed to understand. “Well actually,” I admitted. “They’re divorced.”

  Ben was the first to recover. “You said April would be here with Delilah,” she accused me.

  “I guess I was wrong.”

  Frankie undid her ponytail and lit a cigarette. “You look totally ridiculous, Ben. Even before I had my operation I could do a better job of passing than that.”

  Ben angrily tore off her shawl. Her biceps strained at the thin fabric over her shoulders.

  “What have I done to you, Frankie, that you should be following me like this?”

  “You thought you could just come to the restaurant and take Delilah off with you.”

  “Well, isn’t that what you thought?”

  “Frankie, Ben,” I pleaded. “Your daughter’s missing. What’s it going to take for you to be seriously worried?”

  “You shut up, Cassandra,” Ben said, and she flung her shawl over her shoulder as she stomped off down the aisle. “What do you know about anything? You’ve never even been a mother.”

  What a rejoinder. I was dumbstruck.

  “Wait, Ben,” Frankie called. “I’m coming with you, like it or not.”

  “I take it I’m definitely fired then?” I shouted after Frankie.

  But neither of them bothered to reply.

  15

  NOW, THERE WAS ALWAYS THE possibility that April had been run over by a moving vehicle while deep in thought as poor Mr. Gaudí had been by the tram, and that she was lying in a hospital somewhere without her identification or her wits. There was the possibility that she had fallen asleep on a park bench, or broken the law and been carted off to jail, or even that someone in our small circle had done away with her.

  But I thought the likeliest thing was that April had simply tricked me and I had fallen for it. Why bother to hide anything when you can simply hide?

  I retraced a path to the Hotel Palacio and went back up the grimy stairs to the lobby. One of the sisters was sitting motionless behind the counter. At first I thought she had fallen asleep and simply forgotten to close her eyes, but she snorted out a hostile “Sí, señor?” to let me know I wasn’t going to get away with anything here.

  I disregarded the señor and asked politely if she’d been working here this morning when the little girl had gone missing.

  “I didn’t see anything,” she said. She was one of those old women who wither rather than softly expand, and on her cheek she had a big black mole with long gray hairs.

  I flipped open my wallet to show my London tube pass. “INTERPOL,” I said briefly. “We’re working on a tip from the Guardia Civil. A six-year-old Irish girl was abducted from her home in Dublin yesterday by either the IRA or the UDA. She’s the daughter of the prime minister. We’ve traced her to this hotel.”

  The señora’s eyes didn’t blink. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Do you know the penalty for lying to an INTERPOL agent?”

  “No vi nada,” she repeated.

  Stronger action was required. I took out my wallet again and put a thousand-peseta note on the counter. She looked at it. I placed another on top. She reached for them.

  “Not so fast, señora. Do you know the penalty for accepting a bribe?”

  She put on a crafty senile expression and began to babble incoherently—something about mothers, I thought, but it was in Catalan, so I couldn’t tell. Her sister, who had an identical mole, only on her forehead, came out of a back room and demanded to know what was going on.

  I forewent the INTERPOL story and simply pointed to the pesetas on the counter. “Who took the little girl this morning?”

  “A woman who said she was her mother,” the sister said.

  If it was Ben I’d kill her. But we already knew that Ben would have a hard time passing as female.

  “Was she a large woman?”

  The two sisters looked at each other. They nodded.

  Well at least I knew now it was April.

  “Did she say where she was taking the little girl?”

  As one they shook their tiny shrunken heads.

  Considering the first sister had addressed me as señor I didn’t put much stock in their answer, but I asked it anyway. “You’re sure the lady was a woman?”

  “Sí, sí, madres son mujeres, claro,” the second sister said firmly, as if I were an idiot.

  I guessed she had a point. Mothers were women. At least they used to be.

  In the back of my mind I’d been harboring a suspicion of Hamilton. How much more convenient it would be if he were involved. But the señora’s answer left me in no doubt: April had come to the hotel this morning and taken Delilah.

  The question was, what had she done with her? Another hotel seemed likeliest. But where?

  The hot spring sun beat down on me and suddenly I felt rather faint. It’s hard work looking for people and that’s why I’d never been good at Ditchum. I hate hard work.

  I noticed a shoeshine stand next door to the Hotel Palacio and went inside.

  “Señor.” He showed me a seat with a flourish.

  I sighed and told him to give my boots a good shine. I wondered if this was how Frankie had felt when, as a boy who firmly believed he was a girl, everyone had treated him as a boy.

  The limpiabotas was an old guy of about seventy who must have seen a lot from this shoeshine stand over the years. The civil war, the Franco years, the change to social democracy. I wondered if he’d seen April and Delilah this morning.

  “How early do you open?” I asked.

  “Temprano. It’s the best time for me early in the morning when people are going to work.”

  “Did you happen to see a fat woman and a little girl, a blond-haired girl about six, come out of the hotel this morning?”

  He thought about it. “I saw a little boy and his mother come out of the hotel, but the señora was not fat.”

  “You’re sure it was a little boy?”

  “Sí, sí.”

  It was one thing to call me sir but to mistake Delilah with her pigtails and dresses for a boy, no, that was impossible. Plus, April was a big woman. The sisters had noticed it.

  “Thanks anyway,” I said, giving him a tip, and walked back to the Ramblas.

  It was about three, mid-siesta, and I suddenly felt too tired to think. I took the metro from Liceu to Diagonal and went straight to my room at Ana’s and lay down in bed. There I fell into a deep sleep.

  I dreamed that I was floating along the river in the jungle on a small raft and that the lianas embraced over me, shutting out most of the sun. It was cool and dark emerald green. Blood red parrots chattered overhead, in a language I could almost understand, Catalan perhaps. At first it was pleasant to lie there, floating along, but after a while I began to be anxious. I remembered I was supposed to be looking for someone. From time to time I would pass a hut or something that looked like a hut, but the jungle was dense and the river carried me along quickly; when I cried out no one answered.

  Finally, just as twilight deepened the gloom of the jungle even more, just as I began to be really worried, I came in sight of a settlement. As I floated past it I yelled in Spanish, “I am Cristobel’s daughter,” and immediately people began to come out of the huts, to get into their canoes. Five or six of them paddled towards me. I kept saying, “I’m Cristobel’s long-lost daughter,” until I realized they couldn’t understand me and that, in fact, they were probably going to have me for dinner or worse.

  They weren’t women and they weren’t men, these villagers. As they grabbed my raft and secured it with ropes to their canoes, I asked stupidly (considering I believed my life in danger), “Has your village ever been featured in National Geographic? Somehow I don’t remember it.�
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  “Uga-muga,” they said.

  They had breasts, but they had penises too; their lank brown hair was long and they had bones in their flat noses. Their eyes were uncivilized and hostile. I hope they don’t try any hanky-panky with me, I worried as they dragged me back to their camp.

  The settlement was lit by bonfires and a huge old person was waiting for me with an expression of great disbelief. This person instructed the villagers to undress me. I resisted, less out of modesty than because I had a feeling they were probably going to eat me at some point during the evening, but they prevailed. I was forced to sit in front of this enormous hermaphrodite. Meanwhile the villagers were making rude noises and pointing at my missing appendage.

  I tried to explain that María had made me take this journey and that I was looking for my mother, I mean my daughter, but I realized that being both sexes as they were they might not understand the intensely proprietorial relationship between mothers and daughters. I didn’t, in fact, see any children about. The hermaphrodite silenced me with a wave of a torch he/she had been handed. Oh god, now the torture was going to start, I knew it. The huge being took one of my feet in her/his hands and began to stroke my sole with fire.

  “It’s funny,” I said. “That doesn’t feel so bad,” but the fire got hotter and hotter, the hermaphrodite’s eyes burned into me, there was something wrong here….

  “Cassandra,” said Ana. “Telephone.”

  “Thank god you woke me up,” I said, shaking my head dazedly. “I was in a jungle, they were going to eat me, they didn’t understand Spanish, they were doing something to my feet.”

  Ana shook my shoulder, “Wake up, Cassandra. Ben is on the telephone.”

  I staggered out to the living room. I was never going to consume a big lunch and take a siesta again. Who were those people, what was it all about?

  As if she hadn’t stomped away from me in a fury not two hours ago Ben asked, “Did you find April?”

  I still hadn’t quite gotten out of the jungle and back to Barcelona. “April?”

  “Did April turn up at the market with Delilah?”