Gaudi Afternoon

by Barbara Wilson

  “Just call me señor.”

  We went back into the kitchen where Ana and Delilah were getting on splendidly, drawing pictures of dinosaurs on butcher paper. Hamilton sat down with them and picked up a brown crayon. “I can draw a pretty good stegosaurus, want to see?”

  “Yes!” said Delilah happily.

  I guessed I didn’t need to worry about her for the time being.

  “Is there a phone here I can use?”

  The cook pointed to the hallway.

  I reached Carmen at the salon, and asked her the Spanish equivalent of “What’s shakin’, baby?”

  “Cassandra! My mother had to go back to Granada suddenly. One of our relatives is ill.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” I said, wondering why she was telling me. “Do you want to cancel our date?”

  “Cancel?” she said, affronted, and was silent.

  Oh why was my Carmen such a moody, mysterious woman? Then it suddenly hit me.

  “Do you mean I can come over to your house?”

  “Sí.”

  “Do you mean your mother won’t be there?”

  “Sí.”

  “Do you mean what I think you mean?”

  “We’ll see.”

  I was so excited that I didn’t take the time to explain clearly to Ana what was going on.

  She told me later that I came back from the phone in a state of high excitement and rushed out the door, muttering something about an illness in the family. If I had told Ana that I might be staying the night with Carmen she would have known where to find me when the shit hit the fan early next morning.

  But it was left to the answering machine, once again, to be the bearer of bad news. How casually I turned it on when I came home the next morning from a blissful and unexpected night with Carmen, how dreamily I thought, It’s Hamilton….

  In a voice of hysteria too frightened to be fake, he said that somebody had taken Delilah.

  17

  THE MORNING HAD DAWNED HOT and already I had lost the reckless desire of the night before. I stood there in the sunny, empty entryway by the answering machine, calling Ana’s name and listening to the echo. I felt disoriented, as if I’d forgotten something essential or been gone for a very long time. Then I tried Hamilton’s number at La Pedrera.

  I let the phone ring a few minutes, imagining the sound beating like a heart in the fluid shapes of the Gaudí rooms.

  The likeliest possibility was that Ben had decided she didn’t want to wait to have a discussion with Hamilton about her parenting skills and had nipped over to the jazz club’s kitchen and taken Delilah off once again. After all, she hadn’t stolen her daughter yet; she’d probably been feeling left out. The reason that no one was answering at La Pedrera was that this time Delilah really was on her way out of the country, with her biological mother.

  Of course Frankie could have been the one to steal Delilah again. Or maybe April and Hamilton had plotted something together. Maybe Hamilton’s message on Ana’s machine was just a bluff.

  I tried to calm my mind. Whatever had happened I expected that I would know about it soon enough. There was nothing I could do anyway.

  Accordingly I set myself to translation.

  I had reached a chapter where past and present mingled, where María had finally managed to locate her mother and to arrange a meeting with her:

  In her old age Cristobel lived in the shabby mansion that Raoul had left her. Whatever he had carried in his black bag from village to village had made him wealthy but most of that wealth had been poured into right-wing political campaigns or leached away by his evil habits. With the passing of Raoul a whole generation of men also began to pass away, as if the strange potion, the tincture, the aphrodisiac with which he had infected them was losing its power. Almost to a one the elderly men of the country, statesmen and peasants alike, began to lose their manhood. As they moved into old age they grew breasts and their voices softened; their potency decreased rapidly. Some said that was the common fate of old men, to become old women, but in the eyes of the men themselves, their potency had been due to Raoul and contents of his black bag. Without that secret ingredient (something from the rainforest that now no longer existed?) they were doomed to ignominious femininity and then death.

  I was making good progress and again entertaining fantasies of finishing the translation sooner than I had hoped, when around noon there was a determined ringing at the street door.

  “Sí?” I called over the intercom.

  “Cassandra, we know she’s there, let us in!”

  I buzzed them in without joy. At some point I really was going to have to put my foot down.

  Frankie gave me a big hug. “Hi, sweetie! I don’t really suspect you, it’s just that we have to make sure.” She swept inside. “Well, isn’t this fascinating. What is it, a museum?”

  Ben was grim and stand-offish. “I’m sure she’s here.”

  “Do you mean April or Delilah?”

  “Delilah. Though I wouldn’t put it past you to have April tucked away too.”

  “Ben, Ben, Ben,” I sighed. “You keep suspecting me, but I’m telling you, I don’t even particularly like kids.”

  “You don’t have to like a kid to steal a kid,” Ben said. She was back in her sleeveless tee-shirt and vest, with a red kerchief knotted around her neck. Her short blond hair had gel in it and stuck up like needles in a pincushion.

  “To be honest, I thought you had Delilah,” I said, leading the way to the living room. “I thought you wouldn’t have wanted to wait until Hamilton brought her back, that you would have figured out she was at the jazz club.”

  “I figured it out,” said Frankie. “But to tell you the truth, I decided that Hamilton had a point, and I’ve said this to Ben before. All this ruckus and fighting isn’t good for Delilah. Ben and I have to make peace with each other, Ben has to make peace with me. So I persuaded Ben to stay home and spend the evening discussing things. Though I think she also wanted to be there in case the errant April returned.”

  Ben was ignoring us, swinging open closets, throwing herself on the floor to peek under couches, tossing aside drapes. If she was planning to really search this apartment she would be here forever. Even Ana’s weekly housekeeper had areas she had long ago given up on.

  My former employer lit a Camel and fluffed her curly wig.

  “So what do you think happened to Delilah?” I asked Frankie.

  “It’s obvious. April alone or April with Hamilton has got her. I have no idea why, but I can tell you that when I get my hands on April, fur is going to fly.”

  Ben was in the bedrooms, pathetically calling, “Delilah? Delilah?”

  “Why aren’t you out looking for April then?”

  “Because,” Frankie struck a resigned attitude, “Ben refuses to believe that April is involved. We spent the whole morning at the consulate. You can imagine how wearing that was.”

  “I suppose Hamilton told you he dressed up as a woman to get Delilah out of the hotel yesterday morning?”

  “Am I supposed to be shocked? Yes, he told us.” Frankie paused and smiled. “Ben was shocked.”

  We followed the sound of Ben’s footsteps through the apartment. She was in my room, under the eye of the figurehead, pawing through the pages of my translation. “You won’t find any clues there, Bernadette; even Gloria de los Angeles couldn’t have invented this plot.”

  Ben abruptly sat down on the edge of my bed and began to cry. “Oh, you can laugh,” she said. “You and Frankie can make fun of me all you want. It’s not your daughter.”

  “She is my daughter,” said Frankie patiently. “And I told you she wouldn’t be here with Cassandra.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know any more who’s telling me the truth,” Ben wailed.

  Frankie sat down on the side of the bed and put an arm around Ben. I was struck by how practiced the gesture was, and how very tender.

  “Look Ben,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I think you have to face
the fact that April probably has Delilah.”

  “You’re just saying that,” she sobbed into Frankie’s sweater.

  Frankie rolled her eyes at me.

  “You also have to face the fact that April and Hamilton have something going on,” I continued. “I don’t know what but there’s something.”

  “Hamilton says he hasn’t seen April since the night I took Delilah,” Frankie said.

  “Lies, lies, lies,” Ben broke down completely.

  I hated to see a woman go pieces like that, especially one who looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Maybe it was time for me to offer to help again.

  Besides, I still had April’s book, Stories the Feet Can Tell. And I thought she might be wanting it.

  It was about one o’clock, and the heat was building steadily. I left Ben and Frankie at La Pedrera with strict instructions to rest a little, and promised to call them if and when I came up with anything. Then I walked up to the Diagonal metro station and got on the green line going north.

  If I started from the premise that April, who didn’t like children much, had indeed taken Delilah last night, what would she be doing with her today? She certainly wouldn’t be inside playing cards. She might, in fact, be at the most obvious place of all.

  When I found April she was sitting on the serpentine bench that wriggled around the elevated plaza at the Parc Güell. The bright fragments of mosaics glittered in the sun, a tile kaleidoscope of Mozarabic hexagons and romantic fleurs de lis, of diamond shapes and spirals, blues, yellows, oranges, discarded slivers from the tile factory pieced lovingly together again. Rumor had it that Gaudí had formed the curvatures of the benches by asking workmen to sit bare-assed on the wet cement, and something of that erotic request remained in the shape of the seats.

  April was in pale yellow rayon, like a luscious jonquil. Her black hair coiled and curled over the ample shoulders of her tunic and her broad legs were softly encased down to her buttery socks and ever-present Birkenstock sandals. She looked like spring, except for the expression on her face, which was infinitely melancholy. She was reading deeply in a book entitled, in large letters, STRUGGLE FOR INTIMACY.

  There was no sign of Delilah playing with the other children.

  I slid into a warm mosaic seat next to her.

  “April,” I said. “Where have you been? All my life, I mean?”

  “Oh Cassandra,” she said, right on cue. “I was hoping to see you before my plane left.”

  “What do you mean, before your plane leaves?”

  Her big black eyes were like blackberries, wet with a hint of purple.

  “I have a flight to London tonight. Then I’ll be flying back to San Francisco.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” she sighed. “Don’t try to. Just accept.”

  “But Ben? And what about Delilah?”

  “It wasn’t working out. However much Ben wanted it to, we couldn’t manage it. I need to be careful of women who want to sweep me off my feet. I’m an Adult Child,” she confided.

  I looked at her book. It was well-thumbed.

  “You too?” she said.

  “If you mean was my dad a sweet old Irish lush before his heart attack, yes; I am the grown-up child of this man. But I have good memories of him.”

  “You have intimacy problems, don’t you Cassandra?”

  This conversation wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. “My life is a series of one-night stands and that’s the way I like it,” I said. “Now back to you, Miss Schauer. You’re obviously not into casual sex, you’re into commitment. So why are you really leaving your lover and her little girl?”

  “Because Ben’s true relationship is with Frankie, not me.”

  “Don’t be daft. They’re always fighting.”

  “They fight because they care a lot about each other. They always have.” April stroked the cover of her book. “Frankie and Ben share a child. They both love her very much.”

  “They’ve got some funny ways of showing it.”

  “I did my best to find a place for myself in Ben’s life. But I couldn’t get along with Delilah. I don’t like Delilah. And I was jealous of the relationship that Frankie and Ben had.”

  “Is that why you kidnapped Delilah? To punish them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t give me that, April. Delilah disappeared from the jazz club last night. Ben and Frankie didn’t know she was there. You’re the only one who could have known.”

  “But, but… No! I didn’t know! I mean, I knew Hamilton knew that Frankie had taken her to that hotel and I guessed that he kidnapped her the next morning. But I didn’t know… oh my god. Where could she be?”

  “Let me see your plane ticket.”

  She pulled out her straw bag and fumbled through it. It was a single one-way fare to San Francisco by way of London.

  And it occurred to me that April would have the same problem absconding with Delilah that Frankie would have had. Delilah was on Ben’s passport, and April knew that.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s leave Delilah aside for the moment. Tell me about Hamilton.”

  Her dark eyes blinked. “What about him?”

  “How did you meet him? The real story.”

  April paused. “He’s my stepbrother.”

  “Your father was the one who married his mother? The mother in the Village?”

  “Yes.” April paused. “My mother and father met in Barcelona in the ’30s. My mother was Czech, my father German. Jews. They thought Spain was safe, they bought an apartment—”

  “In La Pedrera!”

  April nodded. “But in 1942 they got out again. To New York. I was born a few years later, the only child. My mother died. My father married Nerissa Kincaid, Hamilton’s mother. She’s an alcoholic. It… it bound us together.”

  “He said you met in high school. Why didn’t he just say that you were his stepsister? Why haven’t you said anything before? Why doesn’t Ben know?”

  April stared at her book. “Hamilton and I both have a problem around telling people about certain things. We have Shame Issues.”

  “He told me about the struggle between his parents for custody. But he never mentioned you.”

  “I… we… what I’m saying is that we were close in adolescence, but we lost touch. He stayed in New York and went to school while I moved out to San Francisco and… came out. That’s when we got in contact again. But he wanted to live abroad. So I sublet him the apartment.”

  “The apartment is actually yours then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh April, April, you’ve made things so complicated,” I said. “Yesterday you said you had something to tell me. Was this it? About Hamilton?”

  She looked out at the sea. “Yes and no. Today I’ve realized that nothing is as important as we make it. You might understand, but you might not. Let’s just cherish the time we’ve had together and thank the Goddess that we’re still alive to struggle and change.”

  I took out Stories the Feet Can Tell. “Well, anyway, thanks for loaning this to me. I picked up a couple of useful tips.”

  I stood up, a little disappointed, but not really. In my profession you meet a lot of people. You can have them for a little while, but not forever.

  “I’m sure we’ll run into each other again, April,” I said. “I don’t mean in another life. But maybe at a march sometime.”

  “You have a good aura, Cassandra,” April said, clutching her book. “Blessed be.”

  I always associate the end of the siesta in Spain with the sound of aluminum shop doors being rolled up again and fastened. The traffic picks up and people who have been sitting on benches along the streets or in cafés reading the newspapers reluctantly get up and go back to work.

  I headed back to Ana’s apartment, but she still wasn’t there. On the answering machine were messages from Ben saying they hadn’t found Delilah, from Frankie saying they hadn’t found Delilah and from Hamilton saying he’d li
ke to talk to me. I wondered when April was planning to tell them all she was leaving. To be on the safe side, I thought, at least one of us should be at the airport.

  I was tired but reluctant to lie down after my nightmare the day before. I wandered into Ana’s workroom to take another look at her progress with the houses, especially her amoeba shapes. I saw that she had lined one of them with velvet and experimented with joining them together. I bent down to investigate further and saw a bright blue sock and a white sneaker protruding from the fiberglass shape.

  There was a small girl coiled in one of the ovular forms, like a mollusk in a shell. She had thin blond hair and glasses and was quite asleep.

  18

  I HEARD ANA COME IN the front door.

  “You have some explaining to do,” I told her when she appeared in the workroom.

  “It was just for a little while,” Ana said nervously.

  “That’s what they’ve all said.”

  “Well, you disappeared so quickly yesterday and I thought of the poor kid sitting in the kitchen playing cards all night… And I wanted very much to show her my houses and—”

  “But why is she still here? Why didn’t you contact her mothers?”

  “She asked me not to.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  Ana grew defensive. “She did. She said she didn’t want to go back to everybody fighting over her. So I took her around Barcelona today, we went up to Poble Espanyol and took the funicular and then rowed a boat on the little lake in Ciutadella. You know, they hadn’t really taken her anywhere, those mothers, they’d been too busy with their own affairs. And it was nice for me too, so nice being with a child.”

  I saw the white sneaker moving slightly.

  “Are you awake, Delilah?”

  “Uh-hmm,” the mollusk answered.

  I went over and looked at her. She wasn’t a pretty child, but she had a sense of herself that I liked.

  “Well, I don’t need to tell you that everybody has been looking like crazy for you.”