The Years That Followed
Page 8
The fists, the blood, the brawl—these are now tokens of Alexandros’s enduring love, of his protection, precious talismans of his devotion. Timidly, Calista reaches out and touches his hand. “I love you, too.”
Alexandros turns and looks at her, but his eyes don’t seem to know who she is, or where she comes from.
Then he nods. “Remember,” he says. “You belong to me.”
* * *
Alexandros drives them both back to his flat. His driving is too fast, erratic; he wavers all over the road. Calista prays that there are no cyclists about for him to run over.
When they reach the bedroom, he doesn’t even wait for her to undress. His kisses are almost savage; she feels that he is trying to devour her. But his endearments are passionate and poetic, even if she doesn’t understand everything he says. Mine, she hears over and over. My. Alexandros does not take his usual care that night. Instead, he lies on top of her for a long time after he is finished.
Calista is anxious to go, to get home before her parents discover her absence. Finally, Alexandros seems to understand the urgency and pulls on his trousers, a careless sweater. He hardly speaks.
“Are you angry with me?” Calista asks. She hates the question, hates whatever the smallness is that she can hear in her own voice, but she cannot stop herself from asking it.
Alexandros smiles. “No, no,” he says, softly this time. “Not with you. But we must do something to make our situation more . . . appropriate.”
Calista doesn’t ask what he means, not then; she needs to go, now, before her parents get home.
* * *
Maggie is waiting. Her expression is a mixture of fear and fury. “Where have you been?” she hisses, dragging Calista into the hall. Her eyes fall on the blood on Calista’s dress, the smudgy black traces of tears on her face.
“Jesus Christ of Almighty,” she whispers. Her eyes search Calista’s.
“It’s not what you think,” Calista rushes to say. “There was a fight—it wasn’t Alexandros’s fault. I’m not hurt; this is not my blood.”
Maggie grips her wrist. “Go upstairs,” she says. “Change your clothes, have a bath, and wash your hair. I’ll cover for you when they get here.”
* * *
Calista is discovered when María-Luisa runs into Sylvie at the tennis club. Sylvie is French; her daughter, Mireille, is in Calista’s class. The humiliation, María-Luisa almost spits at her daughter, of finding out that you were not at the beach, or the library, or shopping with Mireille. You barely know Mireille; you have never once called to her house.
“Where have you going?” María-Luisa screams, her rage making her ungrammatical again.
Calista says nothing. She watches as Maggie begins to walk backwards towards the kitchen, her face white and anxious, suddenly smaller. Calista understands that Maggie is frightened that Madam’s fury will soon be directed against her.
María-Luisa is shouting now. She turns to glare at Maggie. “Did you know about this—about the lies, the deceptions of my daughter?”
Calista’s eyes caution Maggie over her mother’s shoulder. She shakes her head in warning. “Maggie knows nothing,” Calista says. “Leave her alone. If you stop shouting, Mamá, I will tell you.”
Slowly, María-Luisa turns back to face her. The energy seems to have left her body. Her daughter’s tone tells her all she needs to know. “Who is it?” she asks. “Wait.” She waves one hand in the air, stiffly, in dismissal. “You may go, Maggie.” Her eyes do not leave her daughter’s face. “Calista and I will continue our conversation in the drawing room.”
And so Calista tells her. During the telling, the air shimmers between mother and daughter. The room doesn’t feel big enough to contain all that Calista now has to confess. And María-Luisa is relentless: she will know it all, unpick it all, down to the last detail.
“How long?” she asks. Both of her hands are tight fists at her sides, the knuckles showing white.
Calista can see her mother calculate something when she answers: “Just over six weeks. Since the day he was here at lunch.” She hears her own voice grow defiant. Calista likes the feeling. It is time she stood up to her mother; she is, after all, an adult, entitled to her own life. And Alexandros is wealthy, well connected, from a good family: all the things her mother has always told her are important.
“Are you pregnant?” María-Luisa asks this so softly that Calista has to strain to hear her.
“What? No!” she shouts.
“You have been sleeping with a man for six weeks. And for six weeks you have lied.” Each of María-Luisa’s words resounds; they slap the air. “How can you be so sure you are not pregnant?”
Calista is silent. Last month, she was safe. This month, she cannot know for sure, not yet.
“You know that you will have ruined your life if you are, don’t you?”
Calista digs deep and finds another reserve of defiance. “We love each other,” she says. “We can marry.”
Her mother shakes her head. Her face is sorrowful. “You have no idea what you are talking about,” she says.
“You married when you were nineteen,” Calista shoots at her. “That’s not so different from me, is it?”
“Exactly,” her mother spits back. Her eyes search her daughter’s face. “You have no idea what is ahead of you. No idea at all.”
* * *
Two, maybe three weeks later, just as Calista’s exams are finishing, comes the certainty. Her and Alexandros’s baby is on the way. Calista cannot feel sad about that; this baby is her way out. To a bright new life with her handsome and romantic new husband who loves her to pieces.
But Calista can still hear María-Luisa’s howl, all these years later; she can still hear her mother’s words when finally she could speak.
“You’ve made your bed, my girl. And now you may lie on it.”
pilar
Madrid, 1965
* * *
Pilar is putting the finishing touches on her uniform. Severely cut black dress, starched white apron, black shoes, and sheer black stockings. She puts on her tiny pearl earrings and passes one hand over the smooth darkness of her hair. Not even one stray curl. On the upper floor of the restaurant, Señor Roberto is nothing if not exacting. The informal bistro downstairs is another matter: that business is delegated to a manager. Roberto does not feel the need to be so demanding there.
Pilar pins the frothy white cap into place, still convinced—even after all this time—of its silliness. Pilar is not a fan of frivolity. Nevertheless, she checks in the mirror to make sure the cap is on straight, that the grips that keep it in place are no longer visible. Señor Roberto will examine this, as he examines every detail, before permitting his waiting staff to grace the floor of his dining room. He is, perhaps, the only restaurateur in the city who employs women to serve in his exclusive establishment.
Four days a week—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—for more than eight years now, Pilar has arrived at exactly five o’clock in the afternoon to begin the preparations for evening service at Number Eleven.
Alfonso Gómez had introduced her to his old friend Roberto almost as soon as Pilar arrived in Madrid. It seemed that Señor Gómez knew everybody who was worth knowing. Pilar became aware of how small the huge capital city really was—something that surprised her—almost as small, in many ways, as Torre de Santa Juanita.
But here, people seemed to be connected to one another in different ways. They were not yoked together by poverty or envy or long-forgotten family feuds over land. Nor were they held together by the simple threads of friendship. Instead, these men—because in Pilar’s experience, they were exclusively men—were woven into one another’s lives in ways that spelled influence, mutual benefit, the advantages of business deals well done. Discretion was everywhere: a quiet, well-bred guest, present at every gathering.
When Pilar first started at Number Eleven, Roberto had trained her himself. For almost a year, she endured weekend after weekend of exhausting rituals, of punishing, repetitive tests that measured everything from her knowledge of wine and food to her memory for names and faces. Tests that, above all, assured Roberto he could trust her. “You are ready,” he’d said at last. “Table three is yours.” And a wave of his hand flourished his approval. Pilar had looked at him, afraid to understand what she thought she had just heard. Her? Ready? For table three?
Roberto walked away. “You know what to do,” he said.
Pilar had been filled with a mix of exhilaration and terror. Hidden from the rest of the room, three was the most discreet of all the tables at Number Eleven. From the street, the building that housed the restaurant was indistinguishable from all the other apartment buildings on either side. There was no name, just the number, carved into a rough-hewn block of olivewood. Some patrons booked a table months in advance; their eagerness was palpable. Some had no need to book: those who were preceded by a hush and a flurry of activity in the dining room, those who were shown to their table by Roberto himself.
Pilar also learned that for others, a table would never become a possibility, no matter how long the supplicants were prepared to wait.
Famous faces were everywhere under Roberto’s roof. Politicians, members of aristocratic dynasties, men of the Church. Occasionally, there was a woman or two—but only late in the evening, after hands had been shaken, coffee taken, business concluded.
Señor Gómez was a frequent visitor, along with a changing sea of nameless, faceless men who followed in his wake. Their conversations were always in English, a language that Pilar pretended not to understand beyond a few simple phrases, greetings, numbers. Señor Gómez had told her it was better that way.
She felt grateful—and not for the first time—that Señor Gómez had insisted, when they’d first met, that she take English classes at night. “It’s the future,” he told her. “The business world everywhere will come to rely upon the English language.” He’d looked at Pilar over the tops of his half-moon glasses as he tapped the desk in front of him for emphasis, his gold rings glinting in the light. “You don’t want to be left behind; you are a clever young woman. Go to it.”
And so Pilar did as she was told. And Pilar is still doing what she is told. She watches; she learns; she waits.
On those evenings when Señor Gómez dined at Number Eleven, he gave no sign that he knew her. Pilar glided around the table, served the courses seamlessly, and answered all the questions the guests might put to her.
* * *
Tonight, Señor Gómez will arrive with a party of six. Señor Roberto has already briefed her. At nine, the party will gather in the bar downstairs, where an aperitif will be served. They will choose from the menu at their leisure; dinner will be served at ten. “Very important clients of Señor Gómez. From Cyprus, I understand. Señor Gómez is most anxious that we give them five-star treatment.”
Pilar smiles at him. Almost a decade of following orders has made her brave. “Don’t we always?” she asks.
Roberto allows the ghost of a smile. “The highest standards are only maintained . . .”
“By demanding increasing levels of excellence from ourselves and from others,” Pilar finishes for him. For a moment, she wonders if she has gone too far. Roberto has a mask that never slips, not even at two or three in the morning when he invites the staff to sit and have a drink with him after all the guests have left.
But tonight, Pilar is feeling giddy. At twenty-six years of age, she has already achieved more in this city than she ever thought possible. Soon, she will tell Roberto that she is leaving. She no longer needs to work so hard. She is now, after all, part owner of a building: a fully tenanted, fully operational apartment building, something Pilar still cannot quite believe. She cannot tell Roberto this, of course; Señor Gómez would never forgive her. He likes to keep all the different aspects of his life in their separate compartments. “Business,” he tells Pilar, “is mostly a matter of not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Play your cards close to your chest. That way, people do not get the opportunity to take advantage.”
Pilar has always followed Señor Gómez’s advice; she has taken it to heart with a mixture of gratitude and respect. He has, after all, looked after her interests and made it possible for her to be financially independent, perhaps even on her way to being rich one day. There are times even now when she needs to pinch herself.
But lately, Pilar has become conscious of a growing restlessness. She needs to make some changes, to work a little less, to enjoy herself and her freedom a little more.
Roberto looks at her now. He nods his approval. “You are correct. Ever-increasing levels of excellence. I have absolute faith in you.” This time, he does smile as he moves away. Pilar feels light and almost happy. She walks across the landing to where one of the junior girls, Maribel, has prepared fresh flowers for table three. Poppies, carnations, and a colorful profusion of anemones in white, pink, purple.
“They’re beautiful,” Pilar says. “A lovely combination.”
Maribel smiles. “Señor Roberto insisted we have something bright and colorful to remind the guests of Cyprus.” She shrugs. “He wanted carnations to represent Spain. These men are here in Madrid after all.” Maribel hands the arrangement to Pilar. “Be careful,” she says. “I have only just watered the oasis. Mind you don’t spill any on your uniform.”
Pilar walks slowly back to the dining room and puts the flowers in the center of the table. Using her measuring tape, she places each table setting at the appropriate distance from its neighbor. She makes sure the cutlery is spotless, the crystal is gleaming, and the napkins are folded into soft, white petals.
When she is satisfied, she goes down to the kitchen to quiz the chef about the courses her guests might choose. There is still plenty of time, but she has a lot of detail to attend to.
* * *
The first course is almost done. There is a reassuring buzz of conversation around table three. Pilar moves behind each of the seated guests, checking the wine glasses and the water glasses, on the alert for the smallest sign that something might have been overlooked.
The table has settled into two distinct groups. Three heads on either side of the table lean closer to one another as words are emphasized, issues teased out, disagreements soothed. The men’s voices have become low and insistent. The man at the center of these two groups leans back a little and lights a cigarette. He glances to his left, towards where Señor Gómez is seated. Pilar is aware of this man’s physical presence: it is almost visible, a haze of clear color. His silence is a powerful one. She guesses—having witnessed similar scenes before—that the others around the table are doing this man’s bidding.
Pilar slides a clean ashtray onto the table to the man’s right and removes the used one. She is quick, unobtrusive, but he catches her nonetheless. He turns and looks at her, his eyes keen, inquisitive. “Thank you for the excellent service,” he says. “You understand English, I think?”
“Yes, sir, a little.”
He nods. “I should like to know your name,” he says. He continues to look at Pilar, his gaze unwavering. His eyes are dark. They give nothing away. Pilar can see the sheen of sweat on the broad, tanned dome of his forehead. He is completely bald. His goatee beard is neatly trimmed, with occasional glints of gray showing against the blackness.
“Pilar, sir.” She can feel her face begin to grow warm and is suddenly grateful for the restaurant’s dim lighting.
“Well, Pilar,” he says, “my name is Petros Demitriades. I hope we will get some time later to speak about your beautiful city. I am a visitor here. I’d like the point of view of a na
tive.” He leans forward and taps the ash off his cigarette into the ashtray Pilar has placed at his hand. His eyes never leave her face.
Pilar smiles and inclines her head. “Of course, sir,” she says. “It would be a pleasure.”
She moves on, aware that his gaze is following her, and she begins to panic. Men have tried to pick Pilar up before, of course, but Señor Roberto has always guarded his female staff fiercely.
But this is different: she does not want Roberto’s protection. She is, all at once, in the grip of a sexual attraction she has never known before. Barely able to catch her breath, she hears the relentless beating of her heart. It thuds against her rib cage, trying to escape. Pilar retreats behind the lacquered service screen for a moment and furtively wipes her hands on her uniform dress. She doesn’t dare crease her apron, and instead becomes engrossed in the orders for the main course. Nobody will disturb her here, at least not for a moment or two. Calm yourself, Pilar says. What is wrong with you? Get a grip.
This man is much too old. In his early sixties at least, although it is impossible to be sure. Tall, powerful, physical.
Get on with it, Pilar tells herself sternly. Get a move on and do your job.
* * *
Señor Roberto looks pleased as the evening draws to a close. He visits each of the tables personally. Pilar admires the way he has a word for everyone, the way he remembers the saint’s day of each of his most famous diners, the names of their children, their successes in business or music or film. Maribel and Alicia, both junior waitresses, have always been great for cinema gossip: they have recently whispered to Pilar that the great Buñuel himself once had lunch at Roberto’s.
Right now, the air is hazy with the blue mist of cigar smoke. Pilar can smell the fumes of Señor Roberto’s best twenty-year-old brandy; she hears the notes of discreet, masculine laughter as business is wrapped up and farewells are exchanged. Soon, Señor Roberto will close the doors and invite the staff to have a drink with him before the last cleanup begins.