Gaudi Afternoon

by Barbara Wilson

  “Oh. April. Oh. Delilah. Oh. No.”

  “Cassandra—what happened?”

  “April never showed up so I went back to the hotel where Frankie had been staying and questioned the women at the desk, and they finally said that a woman who said she was Delilah’s mother took her early this morning.”

  Ben dropped the phone and started screaming, “Frankie, you’ve been fucking me over again. You made up the story, Cassandra says. You stole Delilah from yourself!”

  In vain I tried to talk to the dangling receiver, “Ben, no, listen. It was April. April who took Delilah. And April who’s disappeared.”

  Frankie got on the phone. “Cassandra, you’re lying!” she screamed. “You were there with me this morning, you saw how upset I was. Why are you making this up?”

  “Frankie, wait,” I said, but she had dropped the receiver too. I could hear the two of them shouting at each other.

  There was nothing to do but hang up and wait till they called me back.

  Ana had been listening to all this.

  “You mean they’ve lost their little girl again?” she asked.

  “Well, I think April has her now,” I said. “April is the foot masseuse I told you about.”

  Ana shook her head. “All women want children,” she said glumly.

  “Except me and April,” I said. “That’s why I’m worried.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Ana, “If you could find my head this morning you can surely find a little girl.” She took my arm. “Come,” she said. “Look at the new house I’m building.”

  She led me into the workroom where a cluster of amoeba-like shapes lay about.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ana admitted. “But you spending so much time at La Pedrera has made me start thinking about Gaudí again. Everything I’ve been doing has been so representational —I thought I’d like to work with organic form again. To get away from the same old boxes.”

  She picked up one of the shapes. “These are fiberglass. My idea is that they would be lined with some soft material and that they could clip together in some way, possibly Velcro, so that the child could create the house herself. Sometimes it could be small or narrow, sometimes very open and big. It could have many rooms or few rooms. When she travelled she could take a part of it with her perhaps. Or make a doll house from some of it or a little cave where she could curl up and read.”

  She flipped her long braid over her shoulder. “I’m very enthusiastic about it. About the shapes it could take. And how a child might use it.”

  The phone rang again.

  I answered it cautiously. It was Frankie. “Cassandra, I demand an apology.”

  “Look, I never said that you were lying about this morning. All I said was that the two women at the desk maintained that a woman pretending to be Delilah’s mother took her. It must have been someone Delilah knew, therefore I’m guessing it was April. But that’s what I already suspected.”

  “But why hasn’t April brought Delilah back? Why hasn’t she contacted us?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Have you asked Hamilton?”

  “Why would Hamilton know anything about this?”

  “He might know something about April that we don’t.”

  Ben took the phone. “What did you say about Hamilton?”

  “I said, I think there’s more to Hamilton than meets the eye.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Cassandra. He’s been suspicious of you, that’s his only interest in all this.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m suspicious of him.”

  “Look, you’ve got to find Delilah.”

  “Maybe it’s time to call the police.”

  “How the hell would we explain all this in Catalan?”

  She had a point. “Call the American consulate. They can help.”

  “You think they’re going to be more sympathetic to people like us?”

  “Don’t you pay taxes like everyone else?”

  “Well, I pay taxes. Frankie doesn’t.”

  “You’re American citizens who’ve lost their daughter. You have a right to get help.”

  “Cassandra—”

  “Look, I’m not your mother.” The fatal word slipped out.

  “And you don’t have any idea of what it is to be a mother either.”

  Frankie grabbed the phone. “And after all the money I paid you.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said coolly and hung up.

  “That’s good, Cassandra,” Ana said. “It’s their problem. Let them figure it out.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I wondered why I didn’t really trust them to figure anything out, much less do anything about it. They were probably back to shouting blame at each other right now.

  “Ana,” I said. “What do you think, do you want to take a little trip to the Barri Gòtic on your moto?”

  16

  IT WAS ABOUT SEVEN O’CLOCK, a late afternoon hour that rubs up against the edges of the evening—not exactly twilight, with the violet gloom that word conjures up, nor sunset with its frets of rose and gold, but a time of darkening greenery and feverish sweetness, when the stale afternoon air somehow manages to refresh itself and the electric lights going on one by one suggest excitement and splendor beyond their modest wattage.

  Sitting behind Ana on the moto was always an exhilarating, if hair-raising experience. Her intellectual airs vanished and a new persona, fierce and warrior-like, appeared, ready to cut in front of taxis, to narrowly avoid mowing down pedestrians, to roar up onto the sidewalk to escape a traffic jam. We sped down Gràcia in an exuberant roar and winged around the fountains of the Plaça de Catalunya. We should have been wearing helmets, but it felt so good with nothing between us and the fresh green air of spring. Then it was down the Via Laietana, swarming with traffic but with its spectacular views of the old Roman walls and the bell tower of the cathedral rising up behind, fantastically illuminated like something out of a medieval dream, and into the Barri Gòtic where we whizzed like angels on a mission through the Plaça de Sant Jaume. Here Ana only just avoided disemboweling a Japanese tourist and I thought, I never want to leave Barcelona, I always want to be here. The ancient cobbled square was ringed with massive government buildings from the Renaissance, lit from below so they almost seemed to float suspended above the plaza. But before I could tell Ana I’d decided to stay forever, the romantic square had given way to streets of shops and pedestrians who dared us to kill them. Straight down Carrer de Ferran and onto D’Avinyo, deep into the barrio we zoomed, until I pointed—It’s there— then Ana braked sharply and returned to her unruffled calm.

  “It looks closed.”

  “I don’t think it opens until later.”

  I got stiffly off the moto and forced myself back to the business at hand. I banged on the rolling aluminum door. There was no answer.

  “Let’s go around back,” Ana suggested.

  We explored the narrow street behind the jazz club, and found a kitchen entrance. The door was unlocked, and we went in. From somewhere inside came the cool, deliberate riffs of an alto sax, like water cascading in rivulets and droplets over a high precipice.

  We were in a dim cluttered hallway that smelled of stale cigarette smoke and faintly of urine; the walls were a peeling whitewash over which had been plastered old jazz posters and newspaper clippings. It was all quite different from the glossy high-tech club room in front. Hamilton must be practicing up there, and maybe, just maybe, April had told him something that I wanted to know.

  I gestured to Ana to follow me, but she was staring curiously at the news clippings and posters. I could see her acquisitive mind at work, wondering what treasures she could unearth in the back rooms of this old jazz club. She opened a door in the corridor and we found the performers’ lounge with lot of unwashed coffee cups and stained towels lying about. Another door proved to have a toilet and storage space behind it and a third yielded a kitchen.

  In the kitchen,
a wizened old cook was playing a game of cards with a small blond girl.

  “Well. What do you know,” I said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Hi,” Delilah said warily. You could see from her eyes, behind her serious-looking glasses, that she was wondering, What next?

  I said, “Do you remember me, Delilah?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You came to the park.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’m a friend of your mother and your… Frankie.”

  She shot me a look. “Nobody is a friend of both Ben and Frankie.”

  “Let’s just say that first I knew Frankie and then I got to know Ben and April.”

  We introduced each other all round. Ana asked the cook in Catalan where Delilah had come from. He shrugged his shoulder in the direction of the sax.

  “What are they saying?” Delilah asked me.

  “They’re wondering who that lady was who came and got you from the hotel this morning.”

  Delilah smiled with her still-perfect baby teeth. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt that said Yo ♥ Barcelona. Her blond pigtails had been caught up under a Giants baseball cap and she had a smear of chocolate on one cheek.

  “That was no lady,” she said. “It was Hamilton.”

  “Hamilton?” I said. “I thought it was April.”

  Delilah sighed and shook her head violently. “It was Hamilton. He was wearing a dress.”

  “A dress!!”

  “And a wig.” Delilah wrinkled her nose. I knew where she’d gotten that from. “And too much make-up.”

  “Delilah, didn’t you think that Frankie might be worried when you didn’t come back to the room?”

  “Hamilton said he would tell Frankie… didn’t he?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “In fact, neither Ben nor Frankie knows where you are.”

  Delilah stopped shuffling her cards an instant. She sighed, and chewed a little on one of her small fingernails. At six she’d already had to learn to submit to the whimsical universe of adults and to be diplomatic about it. It was a lot of responsibility.

  “Are you going to tell them where I am?” she finally asked, carefully.

  “I will if you want me to,” I said. “I think they’re worried about you. I think they’d like to know you’re safe.”

  I thought back to Frankie and Ben quarrelling furiously at La Pedrera. Blaming each other had been more on their minds than worrying about where Delilah was. I wanted to think that they only quarreled because they loved their daughter.

  “What do you think, Delilah,” I said. “Do you want to stay in Barcelona or go back to San Francisco?”

  “I was in the first grade,” she said. “They just took me out. I liked school. I had friends.”

  “I know your parents just want what’s best for you.”

  “I know three kids that are AIs,” she said. “That’s artificially inseminated. They don’t have fathers, one has two women mothers and the other kids just have one mother. Nobody has what I have.”

  “What do you think about what you have?”

  “Well,” she considered. “I like my mom, except when she’s tired and in a bad mood. Frankie is always in a good mood, but I don’t see her that much. I like her too. They’re my parents, you know.”

  “What about April?”

  Delilah sighed again and devoted herself to the game.

  I repeated, “What about April?”

  “She doesn’t like me, I don’t think.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know… maybe because…” Delilah stopped and looked behind me.

  “Oh hello,” I said, and to Ana, “Another mother.”

  Hamilton came into the kitchen.

  “I thought I heard voices,” he said mildly, not at all embarrassed to have been discovered as a childnapper.

  “How could you?” I said. “You knew how worried Ben would be. And Frankie. And how did you know where Frankie’s hotel was anyway?”

  “I think I’d like to talk about this elsewhere,” he said meaningfully.

  We left Ana to join in on the card game, and Hamilton led the way back to the large room where he’d been practicing among the black lacquer tables piled with chairs.

  “And wearing a dress,” I said. “What put that in your head?”

  “Sit down,” Hamilton said. He himself perched on a table. His sax gleamed dully in a corner of the darkening room. There was still a little light from the windows and he hadn’t put the overhead lamps on yet. He was looking serious and masculine but I could still see traces of pancake make-up on his roundish face and touches of mascara on his lashes.

  “Tell me about your childhood, Cassandra.”

  “What?”

  “Did you have two parents, a brother or sister, a nice home in the suburbs?”

  “I had a widowed mother, a pack of obnoxious siblings, a falling-down house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and what’s it to you?”

  “My family had money,” he said. “But my parents hated each other. They made my childhood hell, always fighting over me, always trying to get me to say I liked Mother better, or that I wanted to stay with Father.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said, fidgeting.

  “We lived in Manhattan. Father lived uptown, Mother lived in the Village. My father was convinced my mother was a slut and a bohemian; my mother thought my father was a dull old fart. I was their only child; eventually Mother remarried but Father stayed a bachelor. I haven’t seen them for years. I can’t forgive them.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Hamilton?”

  “I’m trying to tell you that I know what it’s like to be the child of divorced parents.”

  Hamilton bowed his head so that his receding hairline took on a tender, vulnerable edge.

  “I hated to see Frankie and Ben quarrelling about Delilah. I thought maybe if I took Delilah myself they’d see how foolish they were being.”

  “But how’d you know where Frankie was?”

  “She’s not very smart really,” he said. “She sent a taxi driver with a message that Delilah was okay. I had the portero hold him until I got downstairs, then I gave the driver a large tip and got the name of the hotel.”

  “At least Frankie thought to tell Ben that Delilah was okay.”

  “Ouch.”

  “When did the taxi driver show up?”

  “While you and Ben were at the airport.”

  “So April knew where Frankie was keeping Delilah?”

  “No.” But his eyes slid away.

  “She did know. That’s why she’s hiding from me.”

  “What do you mean she’s hiding?”

  “I mean that April got me to help her slip away from La Pedrera this morning to confess to me that she’d helped Frankie abduct Delilah. Then she said she had something to tell me, and agreed to meet me later for lunch. But when I turned up she wasn’t there. Nobody knows where she is.”

  “She said she had something to tell you?”

  “Probably that you’d taken Delilah, right? You two must have hatched this plan while Ben and I were at the airport last night. She wanted Delilah out of the way and you agreed to help her. Don’t give me all this bull about divorced parents and lonely children.”

  “But it’s true.” Hamilton looked depressed. He got down from the table and walked around the room. “I wonder what April’s up to.”

  “Who cares? The important thing is to get Delilah back to Ben and Frankie. They’re worried sick.”

  “No,” Hamilton said, and looked at me. “Please, Cassandra. Let me talk to them, please. Otherwise you know how it will go. They’ll be at each other’s throats, and Delilah will keep suffering. Let me arrange a meeting with them tomorrow morning. A healthy, calm meeting where we’ll lay all the issues on the table and discuss them like rational adults.”

  “You call them then and tell them that you have Delilah. Right now.”

  Without further argument Hamilton moved
to the phone and dialed. The room was almost completely dark now and Hamilton seemed shadowy and insubstantial, almost pathetic. I needed to remember that he wasn’t just the lonely and fought-over child, but a competent adult, capable of love and music and even great deviousness.

  “Ben,” he said. “It’s me, Hamilton. Look, I don’t want you to worry, but Delilah’s with me. Yes, I know. Yes. Yes. I’m really sorry. It seemed like the best thing. Listen, please, now don’t get upset, Ben. I want to have a meeting with you and Frankie. I think we need to have a talk about the effect all this fighting is having on Delilah. I’m really concerned. Now don’t yell at me. I’m only doing what I think is best, no I’m not going to tell you where she is yet. Is Frankie there? Good. The two of you need to sit down and really talk. I want you to talk, not just call each other names. I’ll call you later, and if you haven’t made any progress tonight I’ll keep Delilah until tomorrow. Don’t yell, Ben.”

  He hung up. “That woman has a loud voice.” He turned on the overhead lamps and the room was flooded with light.

  “But she agreed?”

  “She wasn’t happy about it, but yes, she agreed. I guess she knows that she and Frankie can’t go on like this. That they need an outside mediator.”

  “Didn’t she ask where April was?”

  “Maybe April’s back at La Pedrera.”

  “I don’t know about April,” I shook my head.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, first of all, it’s really hard for me to believe that you and April are old friends. You just don’t seem the type.”

  Hamilton shrugged. “What type is that? We were close as… once. There’s a basic loyalty there.”

  I scrutinized him through narrowed eyes. “Just don’t be fucking me over, Hamilton.”

  “You’re one tough lady, you know that.”

  “Speaking of ladies—”

  “You mean me? Yes, I cross-dress sometimes. I’ve done it all my life and I enjoy it.” He looked at me a bit defiantly. “I find that wearing women’s clothing gives me access to the feminine part of myself, to the softer, gentler aspects of my personality. It’s hard being a man, Cassandra.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “You’d be surprised, Cassandra, at the cues people pick up on to distinguish gender. Cross-dressing throws our rigid dualistic thinking into chaos. It’s very liberating. You should try it sometime.”