When the door opened he came face to face with Mrs. Prat. At first, he feared her presence was a hallucination. The sphinx, on her part, opened her eyes wide with uncharacteristic surprise. There was no doubt she’d recognized him, even though she’d seen him only once several months ago. Making a quick recovery, however, she ordered him to identify himself like any stranger. He glared at her as he stuck the Fidelity card in front of her nose and asked for Violeta.
No sooner had he crossed the doorstep than he realized something was amiss. The French doors were open. Even though two hats hung on the rack, no voices came from the rooms other than Socrates’s twittering. The clock had just struck seven and yet in the parlor the parrot’s cage was already covered with the cloth reserved for night time. The door that had always remained closed let a shaft of light quiver through a crack. Inside, somebody moaned.
The sphinx stretched a hand to point at the half-open door. He walked in cautiously and found himself among a group of people surrounding a bed with a high, finely carved mahogany headboard. Miss Pràxedes’s body heaved with each inhalation as if attempting to levitate, only to descend immediately under the weight of defeat. Blood had deserted her ashen lips to gather in the rest of her face, purple and grotesquely puffy. An oil lamp burnt on the marble top of the nightstand; another lamp cast a dim light from the back of the room. Shadows gnawed at the corners, the ceiling, and the top of the walls.
Violeta looked at him from the opposite side of the bed. Hortènsia, sobbing noisily, flung her arms around his neck as soon as she saw him come in. He extricated himself from her embrace, leading her to a chair a few feet away from the bed. Jaumet’s eyes roamed around the room, sparkling with joyful incandescence and periodically coming to rest on the dying woman. When they rose to look at the other mourners, he smiled. Unfortunately, Maurici didn’t see the person he was most interested in: Dr. Serra.
An unknown woman spoke. “Do you see how fat she is? That had to be a bad sign . . .”
“She isn’t fat,” replied another woman. “She’s swollen up. The doctor had told her a hundred times but she paid no attention . . . Eating candy all the time.”
“If it had only been candy,” Margarita added slyly. “She also smoked cigars when nobody was watching. This room always stank of tobacco smoke.”
Margarita stood between two men, presumably the owners of the hats, holding onto the arm of the one to her right. Maurici surmised he must be the jewel smuggler.
The other man began to moralize. “I’m telling you, you’ll never find another landlady who loves you as much as she did. They don’t make them like her anymore.”
Violeta riveted him with a glance full of scorn.
Hortènsia, on her part, offered a rejoinder: “You can say that again! Miss Pràxedes was a mother superior to us.”
“Shut up, you fool!” Margarita cut in. “Stop talking nonsense.”
The woman who’d spoken before said sententiously, “One day we’re in the world and the next we’re gone.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry, Mercè,” the other one admonished. “Don’t bury her before it’s time. She isn’t dead yet.”
“Just as good as she was, poor thing!”
He’d never felt as uncomfortable as he did in the mournful masquerade, the ghostly dance that circled the brothel’s presidential bed. At the same time, he couldn’t abandon Violeta to play her part in the farcical wake, watching the caricature of a mother struggle for her last breath. The moralizing customer, whose face seemed vaguely familiar, asked, “Has somebody called for the priest?”
“Father Ramon will be here any time now,” answered one of the women who, based on their comments, must have been neighbors.
“Which is your parish, ladies?”
“Our Lady of Mercy.”
“Ah!”
“Since when has she been like this?” the other neighbor asked.
“While she was fixing breakfast she had a coughing fit,” Hortènsia’s words came out punctuated by sobs. “So I rush to her and slap her back real hard, like so, and I give her a couple of them pills. No use. She’s choking, it gets worse and worse. Then Violeta comes out of her room and says we got to call the doctor. Meantime Miss Pràxedes has a seizure and drops on the floor. The three of us had a hard time to lift her up and put her in bed. We didn’t think we could make it.”
“Has the doctor seen her already?”
“This morning,” Margarita answered. “He said she’s got no more than twenty-four hours.”
Maurici wondered if the doctor was Dr. Serra.
“Oh, my God!” Hortènsia, in a flimsy, baby blue negligee, redoubled her cries.
“Go put something on,” Margarita ordered. “Don’t let the priest see you in that getup.”
Five minutes later they heard a bell ringing, followed by two knocks. Hortènsia, in a sailor dress and holding a basinet of murky water against her hip, opened the door.
The priest cast a side glance at the basinet and the blond halo framing the heavily made-up face before he asked for the patient. He held the ritualistic paraphernalia in his hands and was accompanied by an altar boy of about twelve years old who waited in the foyer.
When he came into the room, the circle opened to make room for him by the bed. He set the cup and the host down on the nightstand and took a vial of ointment and a manual of liturgy from under his chasuble. Hortènsia, unburdened of the basinet and still sobbing, trailed in. Mrs. Prat stayed behind, detached from the rest.
The priest uncovered Miss Pràxedes’s body. With mechanical repetition his anointed fingers drew crosses on every stronghold of sin, as he rattled off Latin formulas from the book he held in his other hand. Jaumet followed the proceedings with keen interest and gleaming eyes.
Just when it seemed that the crosses and the mumbo jumbo would go on forever, the celebrant produced a silver crucifix from his pocket and pressed it against the lips—already too stiff to kiss it. Undaunted, he took the cup and pushed the host inside the mouth as far as it would go. Hortènsia, crying all the while, leaned over to tenderly manipulate Miss Pràxedes’s jaw and neck until finally they made the purely vegetative motion to swallow. Margarita followed the priest out of the room, gave him and the altar boy some money, and escorted them out.
The two men picked up their hats. Margarita’s friend whispered something in her ear. The other one, dropping ad hoc exhortations to seek comfort and resignation, fled to his home base and family business uptown, on the other side of the border from the Street of the Three Beds. The neighbors lingered just long enough to reiterate their offers of unconditional assistance. Mrs. Prat had to drag out Jaumet, reluctant to part with the fascination of death, and, looking askance at Maurici, she simply said to the girls, “Let me know when it’s over.”
Mrs. Pràxedes’s lungs kept pumping for no reason. Periodically, the panting crescendoed to a rattle that seemed to be the prelude of the end, but suddenly it would stop to restore the regular, wearisome wheezing. The young women decided to take turns by her bedside all night, if necessary. At Margarita’s suggestion, Violeta would go first. Maurici, realizing his predicament was as absurd as it was inescapable, offered to replace her.
“Don’t you understand that no one can do it for me?” she whispered. “I have to do it myself.”
“I thought you hated her.”
“Sure I hated her. But notice that you said it in the past. What you see lying in this bed isn’t the monster I used to know. She can’t do any more harm, and anything that can’t do harm is pitiful.”
As was often the case, her argument persuaded him. With no further objections, he yielded the only armchair in the room to her and took the chair. Whenever his body cramped up, he went to stretch his legs in the parlor or down the hall. The thought of lighting a cigar—to watch the smoke, if nothing else—tempted him, but even in such unorthodox circumstances he couldn’t forsake certain formalities. The next hours were uneventful. The ticktock of the clock and the brea
thing, as loud as that of a walrus, were the only sounds in the apartment. Time seemed to stand still. A thick silence, heavy with unpronounced words and paralyzed action, clung to the air. At last at midnight, when Violeta began to surrender to sleep, Hortènsia announced the change of guard.
Maurici and Violeta fell fast asleep in her room, to wake up later to an insistent rapping on the door. She got up and walked through the fog of slumber.
“She’s dead,” Margarita stated, as she might have said, “It’s five o’clock in the morning.” The dark circles around her eyes revealed nothing but sleep deprivation.
Hortènsia emerged from the next room clad in an open robe, her curls frizzier than ever, howling hysterically. Somewhat less harshly than usual, Margarita sought to calm her down.
“Why don’t you fix her up a little? Meanwhile, we’ll give notice to the neighbors and the funeral home.”
“Which funeral home are you thinking of?” Violeta, fully awake by now, gathered her hair together.
“The best in Barcelona: Neotafia. She had big notions about a first-class funeral. She was always giving me instructions. God knows she doesn’t deserve it, but I want no debts with a ghost.”
Hortènsia got her cosmetic case and began to make up the dead woman as if for a fancy ball. Rouge replaced the fading purplish tint of the cheeks; the livid lips lit up to a fiery crimson. Then she pinned the woman’s hair up as she had worn it when alive, and rubbed her wrists with a narcotizing perfume. Suddenly, after years of banishment, the black and yellow harlequin twisting in the air emerged from the depths of Maurici’s mind. Margarita quietly followed the motions of the mortuary grooming, while Violeta brewed coffee in the kitchen.
“Who was the woman who opened the door?” he asked.
“The one with the half-wit? A friend of the boss,” Margarita answered indifferently.
“And who’s he?”
“Her brother. I don’t envy her lot. She can’t leave him alone for a minute. He’s as dumb as he’s mean,” and, turning to Hortènsia, “We have to put a cross on her chest, the way she wanted.”
Hortènsia rushed diligently out of the room. Two minutes later she came back with the crucifix that usually hung from the wall in the hallway. It was cast iron and a good ten inches long.
“What are you doing with that? Don’t you see it’s too big?”
Undaunted, Hortènsia walked out and came back shortly with a pair of scissors. Displaying unsuspected ingenuity, she opened the scissors at a right angle and placed them on Miss Pràxedes’s chest, restful at last.
“Look how puffy she is. You’d think she could burst,” she sniveled, smoothing down the dead woman’s clothes.
“A plate of ashes.”
“What’s that?”
“In the town where I was born, we put a plate of ashes on the belly of the dead so that they wouldn’t burst.”
“Oh, so that’s what them Moors and Gypsies do . . .” Hortènsia ventured to speculate.
“Shut up! How many times do I have to tell you that I’m not Moorish, understand? I’m French. Let’s see if you can get it through your thick skull.”
Shortly after, a plate containing a handful of ashes protected Miss Pràxedes’s belly.
It was barely seven in the morning but Socrates had long been heralding the sunrise. Maurici asked for the bathroom, where he undressed and washed himself only to put on the same clothes. As expected, he found a razor, shaving soap, and lotion.
He sipped the coffee Violeta offered, kissing her on her way out. “Remember you said we’d talk about it? The time’s come.”
As he declined to participate in the farce of the funeral and the evening burial, he told her he’d be back the next day.
* * *
That Monday the ladies of the Street of the Three Beds didn’t receive any visitors—in part because they were tired and needed to catch up on their sleep, in part because Margarita summoned them to discuss the future direction of the establishment. The first ruling of the new regime was to claim possession of the house keys that so far had remained in Miss Pràxedes’s power. For different reasons, none of the other two challenged her supremacy. Early in the morning the newly crowned queen uncovered the cage of the parrot, who saluted dawn with a deafening screech. Then she opened the balcony to let the air caress the virgin tiles of the floor. Miss Pràxedes’s bed was stripped; the mattress, shaken up; the French doors and room doors, opened wide. Up and down the corridor flew Socrates’s harmonies and specks of golden dust. The morning breeze blew death out of the corners.
When Maurici arrived earlier than usual in the afternoon, Violeta informed him of Margarita’s promotion. He took her by the shoulders, fixing his eyes on hers.
“This is the moment of truth. If you want, today you’ll be free.”
“There’s still so little I know about you . . . you come from a world so different from mine . . . and you’re doing this for Rita.”
“No. I started doing it for Rita; for a long time now I’ve been doing it for you.”
He made her sit next to him.
“You have a right to know who I am. My name is Maurici Aldabò, my father is a manufacturer of silk stockings. I think at last I know how Rita ended up here.”
“What do you mean?” Her pupils searched his.
“One afternoon we were taking a walk and she told me she was pregnant. We had an argument in the street and she went into a lingerie store called La Perla d’Orient. She never came out. The owner or the manager of the store is Mrs. Prat.”
“How do you know?”
“Because when I got tired of waiting outside I went in to ask for Rita. The woman I talked to was Mrs. Prat, if that’s her real name. Her brother was also there, sitting in the back. They hadn’t counted on me; they must have known Rita had no family and they thought she was alone, so, by some means I haven’t figured out yet, they made her disappear.”
“You mean she didn’t come here of her own will?”
“Right.”
“What did Mrs. Prat say?”
“That no girl like that had come into the store.”
“Are you sure she went in?”
“Positive. I’ve been following Mrs. Prat and her brother ever since, hiding like a criminal so that I wouldn’t be seen. That’s how I found this place on the Street of the Three Beds. They brought me here; not that they know, of course. If you knew how many hours I’ve spent keeping watch in the tavern across the street and hiding under the stairway . . .”
“Who gave you the card you need to get in?”
He took a deep breath, filling his lungs in preparation for the last sprint.
“I’ve got reason to believe this isn’t the end of the line. There’s somebody else behind Mrs. Prat and the woman you’ve just buried. For the time being, I can’t tell you anything else. Will you forgive me and keep trusting me? Later, when I’m sure, I’ll tell you the rest. I don’t think it’ll be long before I find out the whole truth. So far I haven’t talked to anybody about Rita’s disappearance. I’ve carried it stuck inside me like a thorn, feeling it day and night. I won’t have peace or anything to offer you till I can pull it out once and for all. I have to go on to the end. You’re the first, maybe the only one, to know what happened. Maybe nobody else will ever know. If it hadn’t been for you, these past few months I’d have gone mad.”
She looked at him in astonishment, struggling to read him like a book written in code. After a long pause she asked a totally unrelated question, “Where do you spend your day when you’re not here?”
“I work at the factory. I have a law degree but I was a lousy student and have never practiced as a lawyer. My family takes it for granted that I’ll carry the torch when my father retires. They’re wrong.”
“Where’s the factory?”
“In Poble Nou. Do you want to know how many workers there are? How many looms?” he asked, a gleam of irony in his eyes, a hint of amusement in his voice.
“I want to
know exactly what you do.”
“Exactly? Well, I get bored. I’m in charge of the foreign clientele: interviews, telegrams, paperwork, shipments, now and then a trip to France . . .”
“Where have you been in France?”
“Paris, Lyon . . .”
“Is Paris as nice as they say?”
“Nicer. Would you like to go there some time?” He ran his hand over her cheek.
“What school did you go to as a boy?”
“The French Lyceum. I also spent a year in a boarding school in Switzerland.”
She’d been inching closer, with an increasing rustling of silk, until her lips fluttered over his face every time she spoke. When he encircled her with his arm, her waist accommodated it.
“Did you have measles and chicken pox?” she cooed as intimately as if she’d asked if he had an erection.
“I don’t remember, I’m a big boy now.”
He whispered too, his incomplete smile never staying still on his lips. Through the fog of her breath and her perfume, he realized that she was trying to reconstruct his existence out of the most trivial realities.
“What did they teach you in Switzerland?”
“French, more or less.”
“Did you like studying in Switzerland?”
“No.”
“What are your hobbies?” she probed in hypnotic tones, her eyes glazed behind invisible smoke.
“Music and sports.”
“Do you really play the piano?”
“Really. Some day I’ll prove it to you, if you let me.”
“What sports do you play?” Her voice tickled in his ear.
“Squash, and I go horse riding. Violeta . . .”
His body hummed like a bee nest. He didn’t know how long it could endure the diabolical cross-examination.
“What’s your favorite dish?”
The Street of the Three Beds Page 15
