“Good evening, gentlemen.”
The most interesting thing about the famous fortune-teller was not her impressive mass of blond hair or the tunic of transparent green muslin in which she was wrapped or even her height, nearly six feet, but another characteristic altogether, one that neither of them noticed right away.
“It’s up to you,” she said in a lilting Brazilian accent completely at odds with her distinctly Germanic appearance. “What would you like: the shells, tarot cards, or the crystal ball?” And as she said “crystal ball,” she turned her head around, and seeing her head-on for the first time, Carlos noticed how much she resembled the Marbella socialite Countess Gunilla von Bismarck.
“So, what’s it to be?” she asked impatiently, tired perhaps of how her appearance always made strangers gawp. “I don’t have all night, you know, and I’m too exowsted for the shells, so take your pick, mister: tarot or crystal ball.”
Then, seeing Carlos hesitate, she added less abruptly: “All the ways of fortune-telling are pretty much the same in the end, you know. I’ve developed an eclectic method, so you can choose whichever you prefer, only don’t take too long about it.”
“I just don’t know . . .” Carlos said slowly. “Maybe the cards . . .”
But he didn’t get to finish the sentence, because Nestor, who had decided to take matters in hand, launched into a concise and reasonably accurate summary of the story of the girl in the picture, to which Madame Longstaffe listened in attentive silence, interrupting only now and then to say, “What a lovely story!” or, “How delightful!” or sometimes, “Que beleza.” She had picked up the Maltese terrier and put it on her lap. She stroked its head as the story unfolded, and when Nestor was through, she sighed and twisted around to the left as if she were looking for something in one of the desk drawers.
As she did this, Carlos noticed something very odd about the fortune-teller, a quality unique among human beings: Madame Longstaffe’s face had two completely different aspects. Now, for example, looking down, with her hair pulled back, she no longer resembled Gunilla von Bismarck. A sudden and unaccountable metamorphosis had transformed her into the spitting image of Malcolm McDowell: a nasty shock for Carlos, who had recently seen A Clockwork Orange on television. He did a double take and stared incredulously, but there it was, that terrifying face—all that was missing were the stiletto and the single false eyelash under the left eye—and it belonged to Madame Longstaffe, who was rummaging intently through the drawers of her desk. Then she found what she was looking for (a pile of well-worn cards), and turned back to face them: Gunilla von Bismarck again, a much more restful sight.
“To cut a long story short, madame,” said Nestor, who had broken the awkward silence by repeating the end of his little speech, “that’s why we came to see you. Like I said, the boy doesn’t really need a tarot reading to find out about his future. What he needs is a love potion, you know what I mean, some kind of spell that will help him find a girl like the one in the picture, or as much like her as possible. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve been told you can work wonders, madame.”
“Have you now? What exactly have you been told?” said the clairvoyant, interrupting him sharply, and a look of fear flashed across her Barbie doll face (if you can imagine an aging Germanic Barbie doll). “You seem to know a great deal about all sorts of people. Too much, if you ask me . . .”
Nestor smiled, reaching out across the desk to touch the soothsayer’s arm, flattering her all the while. But then his grip tightened, as if to express something that good manners prevented him from putting into words.
“All right, all right, as you wish,” replied Madame Longstaffe, caught off guard and unaccustomed to such treatment from her clients. “Forgive me, I don’t want to be a busybody, but . . . but,” she added, suddenly more animated, turning her head so that she looked like Malcolm McDowell again, “there’s something I want to tell you. It won’t take long. Forget about the boy for a minute. Let’s talk about you: I think I can see something that will happen to you, something you should know about.”
Before Nestor’s menacing grip could tighten again on the fortune-teller’s arm, she continued in the same tone of voice: “You’re suffering from an incurable disease. It’s been diagnosed, hasn’t it . . . cancer, yes? Well, you’ll be glad to know that you’re not going to die of . . .”
At this point Nestor began tapping firmly on Madame Longstaffe’s arm, as if he were sending a threatening message in Morse code, and it must have read something like this: “For God’s sake shut up, you old witch, not another word,” because she pulled her arm away in surprise, as if one of her stuffed birds had pecked at it. Yet only a few seconds later, like a Boy Scout, honor-bound to tell the truth in all circumstances, the two-faced fortune-teller added:
“At least let me warn you, sir. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to have a little chat about the state of your lungs or the dangers of cool rooms and chocolate truffles? And dessert recipes? And what about a little moleskin notebook? No? You’re not curious about that, either?”
The old bat’s totally lost the plot, thought Carlos, but of course he didn’t say a word.
If Nestor sent another message in Morse code, Carlos missed it, because Fri-Fri’s yapping and licking distracted him and the next thing he heard, a few seconds later, was: “Very well, there’s no point in trying to help someone who simply refuses to listen. Anyway,” and again she seemed very tired, “isso não é comigo—why should I care? It’s getting late, so let’s get on with it and wrap this up. Let’s see, what can I give this young man?” Then she began delving in her drawers again with an air of professional authority.
This time Carlos didn’t find the metamorphosis so striking. He must have been mistaken before, when he thought the old woman could change faces simply by leaning forward or turning her head, because now, with the tip of her tongue peeping out between her lips to show how hard she was concentrating, Madame Longstaffe still looked exactly like the Countess von Bismarck—not a trace of clockwork orange. Just as well.
“Here it is,” she said, rising from the depths of her drawers, enveloped in a cloud of dust that was anything but magic. “Esta bom,” she added as she sat up straight and set on the table a tubular bottle the size of a little finger, which she then handed over to Carlos, saying, “Listen carefully, filhinho,” and instructing him to drink four drops every night of the full moon until the bottle was empty.
“And by the time you’ve finished the treatment, young man, things will be looking up: the spell will have taken effect. It’s child’s play, this one.”
“Really? Have you had a lot of cases like this?” asked Carlos.
Wearily, Madame Longstaffe waved her green sleeves at him. “You know, sweetie, if there’s one thing I hate about this job, it’s the monotony. It’s so boring these days. When clients come with love problems, it’s for a spell to help them find the perfect match or to hold on to someone who’s trying to escape. Of course every now and then something unusual does come up. Like someone who wants to blot out the memory of a terrible passion or an unspeakable desire,” said Madame Longstaffe with an absent look, as if she were not talking to her clients but thinking aloud about the day’s events. “Did you see that very proper looking gentleman who left just now, the one with his hair cut like a German soldier in the First World War? Well, he was one out of the bag. He wants to rid his heart of an unwelcome urge,” she added (this inexcusable lapse of discretion can only have been caused by extreme fatigue) while stroking the fur on Fri-Fri’s little head into the shape of a crew cut, before realizing what she had said and pulling herself up short. “Enough of that, Marlene.” (Marlene? Was that the famous clairvoyant’s name: Marlene Longstaffe?) “All I meant to say is that there’s not a lot of variety with these love problems, because, you see, searching for the living image of your ideal woman, well, it’s hardly very original, is it? But if that’s what you want, honey, here it is: that’ll be fifteen thousand pesetas,
and now, if you don’t mind, let’s call it a night.”
That said, Madame Longstaffe rose from behind the desk with a good deal more agility than before and flopped back into her chaise longue, muttering something that was not so much a good-bye as an articulated sigh: “Santa Maria, it’s been a long, long day.”
But to judge from the slight Yoruba accent, she may have been addressing her faithful Fri-Fri rather than her clients.
Their visit had disturbed the mystic quiet of the fortune-teller’s room. Its ambience had been upset by the noise of rummaging in those drawers full of tiny, secret bottles like the one Carlos had taken away. Yet once Madame was comfortably ensconced again in her chaise longue, everything was just as it had been before.
THE DIM LIGHT of the Bloomsbury lamp . . . the glassy eyes of the animals . . . it was all so cozy. To linger there after the appointment would have been like profaning a church. But there’s nothing quite so tempting as a little profanation, and Nestor just couldn’t resist. He put a finger to his lips to stop his friend from speaking.
“Just a couple of minutes,” he whispered urgently, “then we’ll go, Carletto. It’s not every day you get to observe a witch in her den, I’m telling you.”
“Hang on. You’re the one who didn’t want anything to have to do with her prophecies.”
“That’s right, I don’t. I’m just curious to find out what witches do when no one is watching them. She’ll probably pull out a cell phone, and I bet she won’t be calling the spirit world.”
Then the cook put his finger to his lips again and the two friends went back to the place where they had hesitated on the way in.
“Shhh,” he said. “Just a couple more minutes.”
ON THE OTHER side of the room, Fri-Fri had leapt up and made a hollow for himself in the folds of his mistress’s tunic: it was a charming scene. Madame had stretched herself out, and just as before, all they could see were the fortune-teller’s legs, or to be more precise, her right foot, which, bare inside its slipper, was bobbing up and down in time with some imaginary music. That was the only movement. Her slipper, rubbing against the edge of the chaise longue, looked as if it might fall onto the carpet at any moment.
“Come on, let’s go,” whispered Carlos. “This place is starting to give me the creeps. What are we waiting for, anyway?”
But just then they saw Madame Longstaffe reach over to a little table beside the chaise and pour herself a tiny cup of pleasantly scented tea, like a prostitute treating herself to a quintessentially bourgeois pleasure after her amorous labors.
“Let’s get out of here. That awful little dog’s going to sniff us out any minute now.”
But the dog remained oblivious.
The aroma of the tea quickly filled the room, enveloping the furniture, making Fri-Fri sneeze and Madame Longstaffe sing. She sang an old song that went mamba umbé yamamabé, or something like that, with a mezzo-soprano voice well past its prime that rather grated on the ears of the two spies hiding in the shadows. Omi mambambá, mamba umbé yamamabé, she continued tunelessly. What with the song and the strong scent of the brew, for a moment Carlos thought he saw a glint of life in the eyes of a moth-eaten vixen in the glass case to his left. He gripped the witch’s little bottle tighter—the last thing they needed was for him to drop it accidentally (or out of fright) and alert Madame Longstaffe, who was still sipping her tea from a cup so tiny she had already refilled it three times, as Carlos had noted. It was while she was pouring out the fourth cup that the fortune-teller began to speak. But at no point did she turn to face them, remaining supine on the chaise. All she did was make her Venetian slipper bob a little more vigorously, so that it seemed to have a life of its own, or at least to be speaking like a ventriloquist’s doll: “He who believes he is mortally ill shall die not by illness but by ice, and he who believes that words can kill should not keep them so close to his heart.”
Carlos looked at Nestor, who no longer seemed to be amused.
And just then a laugh rang out and filled the room, coming not from the talking slipper but from the ventriloquist herself.
“I knew you couldn’t just walk away,” she said. “Even those who say they don’t believe in omens, like you, Nestor, can’t resist the temptation to find out what destiny has in store for them. Isn’t that right? But destiny loves to play tricks on us . . .”
Madame Longstaffe sat up on the chaise longue, folding her legs beneath her so that her feet and the talkative slippers disappeared. In that position, she looked like a legless torso or a speaking figurehead fixed to the prow of the chaise, with a cup of tea in her hand.
“No, don’t go yet,” she said to Nestor, as if she could read his thoughts. “I want to give you just one piece of advice, and if you follow it, you’ll be grateful to me, I assure you.”
“Sometimes it’s better not to know what the future holds, madame. Especially when you know there’s nothing you can do about it.”
But the old woman insisted. “Listen, all I will say is this: Nestor shall not die—do as you please, enjoy yourself, my friend, fall in love, write a scandalous novel, learn how to play the bassoon, whatever you like. Don’t worry about your future, because Madame Longstaffe has seen it clearly: Nestor has nothing to fear until four Ts conspire against him.”
The cook tried to protest, but the witch, sitting up even straighter, held her little cup out in front of her as if all the world’s mysteries were floating in it.
“You’re suffering from an incurable disease, but you need not worry about that, I promise you.”
“All right, madame . . .”
“. . . too many coincidences,” she continued. “For your luck to turn, four Ts would have to join forces, and that could never come to pass, could it? Although coincidences do occur. The gods are fond of practical jokes.”
Madame Longstaffe laughed again, and her little dog seemed to be laughing with her. Then she added: “You shouldn’t have hidden there behind the door.” She wasn’t laughing anymore. “You really shouldn’t have done that, you know. If what you were after was a love potion for our young friend, you’d have been better off going somewhere else. Any old clairvoyant could have given you that, it’s a piece of cake, but you wanted something else, didn’t you? Yes, that’s right, what you really wanted.” (The Yoruba accent had come back in force, as if she were not a white fortune-teller but Mae Senhora herself, or Aspasia Guimarães do Pinto, the famous yarolixá from Bahia, minus the imposing Yoruba appearance.) “What you wanted was to discover your destiny, and now you have,” she said, bidding her clients good night with an impatient wave of her hand. “Until that fourfold coincidence occurs, you have nothing to fear.
“Four Ts,” she repeated, with a hooligan’s streetwise air. “Four Ts.” (Or was it teas?) “What an evil brew.”
The voice might have belonged to Madame Longstaffe or Mae Senhora, or even Aspasia Guimarães do Pinto, but the face . . . it was definitely the face of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, no doubt about it this time. She even winked at them as she said, “Nothing to fear.”
7
A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT
LYING, DECEITFUL, CRAFTY, and the worst thing is, sometimes she’s actually half right, and that’s what pulls you in; it makes you think all her predictions will come true. Despicable, cunning old witch, stealing people’s hopes and dreams.
This is what Carlos was thinking as he knelt beside the body of his friend Nestor while the Teldis’ kitchen filled up with people and noise. Poor Nestor. There they all were, staring at him. Little Chloe Trias, in her bare feet and possibly naked under a large T-shirt with PIERCE MY TONGUE, NOT MY HEART written on it. Behind her was Serafin Tous, a friend of the family, prudently keeping his distance, as if he were afraid the deceased might suddenly spring back to life like some kind of Lazarus. And there was Karel Pligh, too, trying to explain to the Teldis when and where he had found the chef. Beside him stood Adela (so beautiful, even at this hour of the morning, thought Carlos,
with her freshly washed face and a knowing look in her bright eyes, as if none of this had come as a surprise to her), while Mr. Teldi listened impatiently to Karel’s explanations, itching to take control of the situation—he was the boss, after all.
“All right, all right, let’s calm down. There’s been a terrible accident, that’s all,” he said. “In any case, we’ll have to call the police. There’s no way around that . . . May I borrow your pen? Where did you leave the telephone? Although, since it’s a holiday, they probably won’t answer or the line will be busy. You can never rely on the military—I mean the police. It’s the same all over the world.”
As he spoke, Teldi was holding the phone, ready to dial, and rubbing the cap of a pen on the kitchen table. The line turned out to be busy—what had he told them? As he redialed, his gaze wandered over the table, on which he noticed a perfectly clean egg whisk, a complete set of brand-new knives, and a copy of Brillat-Savarin with a folded tea towel lying on top of it, like a ceremonial cloth on a pagan altar. You had to admit the fellow was a first-class chef, he thought, and a bastard, an absolute bastard. Somehow this opinion had escaped from the world of his dreams, but he locked it away again promptly and dialed: 0 . . . 9 . . . 1, and then, more quickly, 091. Maybe this time . . .
“Police? Are you ready to take this down? Ernesto Teldi speaking, I’m calling from a house called the Lilies on Oleander Road, number 10B. There’s been an accident, no . . . nothing dramatic, I mean, it could have been much worse, it could have been a member of the family.”
While speaking on the telephone, Teldi removed the tea towel with which Karel Pligh had so carefully covered the copy of Brillat-Savarin, and as the conversation dragged on and they put him on hold, then switched him through to another department, and another, he rubbed the cap of the pen up and down on the book’s cover. For a cookbook, he noticed, it was remarkably clean: not a spot of grease or a pastry crumb; clean as a missal.
Little Indiscretions Page 7
