The lift door opens. The face of the marble hallway is blank, expressionless. Pilar turns with relief towards her door, opens it quickly despite the trembling of her hands, and closes it firmly behind her. She stays standing and calls the emergency number. She watches as the spinning chrome dial of the phone takes a long time to wheel back to where it started. And then a woman answers, with a kind woman’s voice.
Hearing her, Pilar is undone all over again. She starts to cry, great hiccupping sobs that make speech impossible.
“It’s OK. You’re OK,” the woman’s voice says. “I’m here to help you. Can you tell me your name?”
Such a practical request makes Pilar feel more stable. She can, finally, feel her feet upon her own solid floor. She can even see her swelling ankles. Yes, yes, she can do that: she can give this nice woman her name. And as an afterthought she says: “I’m the portera here.”
“Good. That’s good,” the woman says. “Now, can you tell me where you are calling from, Pilar?”
Pilar blurts out the address, overcome again by the fresh horrors of the sixth-floor apartment. She cannot get Madam Sandra’s marbled flesh out of her mind, or Mr. Alexander’s slumped and bloody form in the bathtub. And the flies: everywhere the fat, triumphant flies.
“You’re doing fine, Pilar. Really fine. Now, just one more question: Can you tell me the nature of the emergency?”
The nature of the emergency. Pilar wants to laugh. Is that what this is? An emergency? Do two dead bodies constitute an emergency? There is hardly any hurry about them now. Pilar stops herself, appalled at her reaction.
She stumbles out an answer: “I’ve just found them. And they’re dead; they’re definitely dead. The smell . . .”
“How many are dead, Pilar? Can you tell me how many?” The woman’s voice has changed. Now it is filled with urgency—a calm urgency, but an urgency nonetheless. In the background, Pilar hears other voices—nothing clear, just murmurations.
“Both of them. Madam Sandra is on the bed, and Mr. Alexander is in the bath. They wouldn’t answer the phone or the door of their apartment, so I had to go in, and there’s blood in—”
“Where are you now, Pilar?” the woman interrupts her, but her voice is kind again.
“Back downstairs in my portería.”
“Good. That’s very good, Pilar. The police are on their way. They will be with you in less than ten minutes. Can you make sure nobody goes into that apartment? Can you do that, Pilar?”
“Yes, of course,” Pilar says. She feels the first faint stirrings of indignation. She is beginning to be irritated by this stranger’s overuse of her Christian name. And she wants to tell this woman that she, Pilar, she, too, knows a thing or two about police procedures. “I’m the only one with a spare key. And I didn’t touch anything,” she says.
“That’s very good. The police should be arriving at any moment. You’ve done very well.”
Suddenly, Pilar wants to be off the phone. She needs to be outside in the hall; she needs to meet any of her residents who might arrive back unexpectedly; she needs to reassert whatever control she can. This is her territory, after all. Abruptly, she ends the call and pulls open the door of the portería.
Now Pilar is worried about what she will say to Juan Pablo and how she can explain to the window men that they are no longer needed. They are sure to be pissed off; cash jobs are rarer than hen’s teeth these days.
What is she supposed to say now to the men with buckets, stepladders, and pockets filled with chamois leather?
She walks out of the portería, locking the door carefully behind her as if the words she has spoken on the telephone might somehow leak out and upset her residents. Pilar has the sensation that she has left all feeling behind her, up there on the top floor. It’s almost as though the scene she has just witnessed has become unreal. The more she distances herself from it, the less probable it is that it has really happened. She already doubts herself, her own eyes. Then she has another thought, one that annoys her hugely on her own account. Never mind the window men: Who’s going to pay her for all that cleaning she did a couple of weeks back? Who is going to do that now?
Somehow, the question, the annoyance, the sense of the floor beneath her feet, all make Pilar inhabit the space around her again. She hopes that some strength will soon come back to her legs, which are now numb. Slowly, she walks towards the front door, where she stands and waits. In her head, she practices what she is going to say to the police.
* * *
They are here, right here, right now: two large, uniformed policemen loom up at her from the street outside. They press the portería bell repeatedly, peering in through the wrought-iron decorations on the door, their hands cupped around their eyes, their caps askew.
Resolutely, Pilar makes her way towards them.
She needs to gather together all the densely patterned fabrics that make up her story; she needs to make the seams straight and tidy inside her head. Pilar must make sure that in the telling of some carefully selected truths, she holds back those words that never should be spoken.
Pilar is ready now: she knows what she is going to tell them.
calista
Extremadura, 1989
* * *
Calista sips at her whiskey. Her hand, she notices, has become a little less steady. Outside her window, the darkness of Extremadura is now total. The moon has disappeared, bruised by cloud.
Alexandros.
His face, that first time Calista saw him. Glowing, filled with an energy that thrummed beneath the surface of his skin. The smile that creased the corners of his olive-green eyes. Hair so dark it sheened blue in the light. How could she ever forget?
* * *
It is a Saturday in April 1966.
The early arrival of summer is made visible by the carpet of cherry blossoms on the lawn: a delicate covering of warm, pink snow. Calista’s mother, María-Luisa, busies herself in the dining room, folding the white linen napkins, moving the crystal a fraction to the right or a fraction to the left. She straightens the cutlery.
When María-Luisa speaks, the irritation in her voice is razor-edged; it makes her accent stronger, her words more clipped than usual. And when she’s like this, she can never remember the difference between “say” and “tell.”
“Maggie, please, I say you two sets: one for the fish course, one for the meat.” Except that she makes it sound like “feesh” and “meat-ah,” with that upswing at the end of the sentence that shows how close she is to exasperation.
Maggie emerges from the kitchen, wiping her anxious hands on a not-very-clean apron. “Yes, madam,” she says, but Calista can see how bewildered she is. She is just two years older than Calista’s seventeen, but the real gap between them has nothing at all to do with age. Maggie is a domestic, una criada, a servant: she hails from Longford, somewhere. Calista is able to find Longford on a map. It’s hours away from Dublin, and she cannot think of anything that might interest her there.
Behind her mother’s back, Calista lifts one of the fish knives, points to its flat blade, mouths the word “feesh,” and sees Maggie bite back a smile with difficulty.
“I’ll do it right away, madam,” the girl says. She moves towards the table, suppressed laughter brightening her cheeks.
“Are you sure you know the difference?” Calista’s mother asks her. Her tone is weary now.
Maggie’s eyes flare with injured innocence. “Of course,” she says with some dignity. She lifts the knife that Calista has been waving at her and holds it out to Madam. “This one, this is for the fish”—except that she makes the word hover somewhere between “fish” and “feesh”—“and this other one is for the meat.”
María-Luisa sighs. “Yes, now please try to remember for the next time. Have you started to make the hollandaise?”
Maggie looks at her employer for one terrifie
d moment and flees. María-Luisa shakes her head, pulls at the cuffs of her beige cashmere cardigan.
Calista says: “Do you always have to be so hard on her?”
María-Luisa looks at her daughter, her eyes sharp as cut stone. “We have standards in this house.” She matches the tip of her middle finger to the tip of her thumb in that classic gesture of Spanish emphasis that always makes Calista flinch. It makes her think back to a teacher’s nails dragging against the blackboard, or the flinty sound of sudden grit in a stick of classroom chalk. María-Luisa moves her hand up and down, up and down, stressing every other word so that her sentences acquire an unpleasant, hypnotic rhythm. “It is one of the ways we show our class,” she says. “That we are people to be respected.” Now she spreads her palms wide in a gesture of helplessness. “How else can your father do business?”
Calista couldn’t care less about how her father does business. She doesn’t even know what business he does: “import and export” sounds dull and vague to her, as dull and vague as Longford, and she doesn’t care to know more.
“Who’s coming today?” she asks.
As an answer, her mother looks at her watch. “A young colleague of your father’s. A Mr. Alexandros Demitriades, from Cyprus. His family are important people in shipping, I believe. Your father thinks it right that we at least invite him for lunch.” She shrugs. “I have no idea what he is like; I must do as your father asks.”
Calista hears the words that have remained unspoken: even if I don’t like it. María-Luisa is good at this. She excels at the subtle put-downs, the sly removal of the self from anything uncomfortable or unsuccessful. “Now,” she says, her tone rising a notch “go and let Felipe know. Make sure both of you are down here in twenty minutes. Mr. Demitriades will be here at one o’clock sharp.”
Calista doesn’t ask her mother how she is so certain of her guest’s punctuality. Instead, she turns on her heel, glad that her tasks of polishing the glasses and the silverware have passed her mother’s severe, appraising eye.
She takes the stairs two at a time and knocks on the door of the bedroom that leads off the first landing. “Philip?” she says. Philip is her twin, so like her in so many ways that he could be her other self. Except in this one thing: Philip is as studious as Calista is indifferent to learning. She does not understand her brother’s passion: all those dry facts and figures, stories about long-dead people, the baffling grammar of languages no longer spoken. Calista never addresses her brother as “Felipe.” He made it clear, even as a seven-year-old, that he hated the strangeness of his foreign name, hated the way it set him apart from others.
Calista, on the other hand, quite likes hers. It is an ancient family name of her mother’s, stretching back into Spain’s past centuries of knights and warriors and all their chivalrous pedigrees. Calista believes that her name links her to the myths and legends of The Lady of the Highlands. Her Spanish grandparents used to regale her with exciting stories about this powerful woman who lived in the mountains of Extremadura. A woman who abandoned her homeland in search of adventure. Calista loved these tales; they were so much better than dull, insipid stories about queens and fairies and frogs turning into princes.
But Philip hates his foreignness. He struggles at school to be the same as everyone else; his Spanish name is an imposition that he resents, bitterly. María-Luisa has, however, insisted: at school, within the family, around the neighborhood, her son is to be called “Felipe.” Calista is the only one who defies her. Maggie has told her yet again recently that in this, she’s on her own. Maggie refuses to risk the certainty of Madam’s steely wrath.
Philip opens the door a fraction. “What?”
Calista can see open books and notepads, a large dictionary, and an even larger atlas strewn about the room. Her brother is buried deep in his studies even on his weekends at home. The school has great hopes for Felipe. He is their rising star, and his teachers can only be illuminated by the trail he blazes.
“Lunch,” Calista says. “In twenty minutes. Mamá says to be sure that you’re ready.”
Philip frowns. “Why?” he demands. “I’m studying. Exams begin in seven weeks’ time.”
Calista doesn’t rise to the bait of the looming examinations. If she does, it will give her twin the opportunity, again, to give her grief over her poor study habits.
“We’re having a guest to lunch,” she says quickly, “Alexandros somebody or other.” And then it strikes her and she laughs out loud: “Alexandros the Greek! Or is it Alexandros the Great?” She makes a face, unsure. “Anyway, doesn’t matter—whoever he is, I think his family does business with Dad.”
“Why do I have to be there?”
Calista shrugs. This is a well-worn conversation between them. She touches the tip of her middle finger against her thumb, moves her hand up and down for emphasis, and says: “Because we have stand-ards in this fam-ily—” She breaks off as soon as she sees Philip’s grin. She knows how closely she resembles her mother—everyone who meets them says so. She has María-Luisa’s height and elegance, her mother’s fine-boned hands, her flashing dark eyes. Calista knows, too, that she is skilled at mimicry. And she likes to make her younger brother laugh. Younger by only fifteen minutes, but still.
Philip mutters, “All right, then, yeah,” and closes his bedroom door.
Calista leaps up the final three steps to the second landing and pushes her way into her room. The light is dim, despite the bright spring bloom outside her window. She believes that her mother has furnished this house as though it belonged in a wealthy Madrid suburb: just like the one in Calle de Alcalá, where Calista’s grandparents still live. They’d moved there sometime in the early 1940s, abandoning their home and their land in Extremadura in the wake of the terrors of the Civil War.
María-Luisa had taken Calista and Felipe to Madrid to visit their grandparents once, when they’d made their First Holy Communion. Calista still remembers the somber atmosphere. Like here, that apartment was stuffed with heavy furniture: dark, brooding wardrobes, sagging drapes at the windows. Perhaps it’s the effect of the sun, shining on the rosewood chest in the corner, but Calista is sure she can catch the faint scent of mothballs even now, coming from the curved, gleaming drawers.
Calista was about nine when she first began to understand how different her family was from all the other families she knew in Dublin. A Spanish mother, when such foreignness was rare, truly exotic. A father who traveled, who brought back gifts from abroad. A large house, one that stood in its own grounds. High-ceilinged rooms filled with treasures; treasures that made Calista imagine the echoing vastness of Africa, of Europe, and of India. Carved wood, silk rugs, the tribal masks that used to terrify and fascinate her when she was a child. It was as though Calista’s family was a shimmer of hot color, a glow of shot silk across the gray and shadowy Irish landscape.
Shortly after Calista’s ninth birthday, she was invited in return to Mary Peters’s party. She didn’t even like Mary Peters all that much, even though they sat close to each other in school. Calista didn’t want to go. She was missing her twin, missing his constant, spiky presence: her other half. She didn’t want to be with girls; she wanted to be with Philip. He had recently been taken away from her and packed off to some boarding school down the country. Calista went to the local primary, just two or three meandering streets away from home. When she’d asked why Philip had had to go so far away, her mother murmured something about the importance of a good education for boys.
On the day of Mary’s party, Calista’s mother insisted on driving her there in her smart new Ford, saying that she would like to meet the birthday girl and her mother. “It is important, always,” María-Luisa told her daughter as she indicated and pulled out carefully from the driveway, although there was no traffic—there never was in those days—“to have manners, to show that you have breeding.”
Calista shifted uncomfortably on the ba
ckseat. Awareness had begun to wash over her, each new wave bringing with it a sense of alarm and foreboding. None of the other mothers drove; none of the other families had cars. This Calista knew for a fact: a fact that she had absorbed, along with many others, such as the darned elbows of so many children’s jumpers, the schoolbooks shared between sisters, the break-time sandwiches that came wrapped in waxy paper, the sort of paper that enfolded what her mother called “shop bread.”
And then there was the milk that the other girls kept in their schoolbags until it was time for big break. It came in jam jars with screw-top lids that when opened released a warm, animal sigh into the classroom air. She remembered all these warning signs now as her mother pulled up at the curb. Three girls with large pink bows in their hair and wearing hand-knitted Fair Isle cardigans were standing at Mary’s door, waiting to go inside. They turned when they heard the car; turned and gaped.
María-Luisa unfolded herself elegantly from the front seat, her mint-green costume and white gloves a beacon of strangeness in the Dublin housing estate—all gray walls and brown front doors. As Calista followed her mother up the path, she felt mortification prickle across the back of her neck, the stiff fabric of her dress making her hot and angry. Go home, she said to her mother silently, her head vibrating with a new and unfamiliar fury. Why don’t you just go home?
She saw Mary’s mother appear suddenly on the step, saw the way she hurriedly whipped off her apron, then ran her hands through her hair. Calista saw how hard she tried to look welcoming, rather than whatever else it was that she was feeling. But then María-Luisa extended her hand, smiled her most winning smile, and said: “Mrs. Peters, I am very glad to meet you. Thank you so much for inviting Calista; you are very kind.”
The Years That Followed Page 3
