Little Indiscretions

by Carmen Posadas

  From where he was sitting, Serafin could not see his face in the bathroom mirror, just his hairline and his wrinkled forehead. A whole life spent trying to flee, trying to forget that delicate boy with whom he had played the piano all those years ago, only to end up giving himself away like this. He winced, and the wrinkles on his forehead deepened. Behind them was a crowd of jostling thoughts, but the most insistent was that silly, childish wish: if only I could push a button; if only it were that easy to get rid of a pest, I’d do it without a second thought. And Serafin Tous, who normally wouldn’t have dared to hurt a fly, swiveled around to examine the flusher, wishing he could use it to free himself of Nestor and flush away all his fears and anxieties. He pushed the button, and a thundering roar made the little room tremble as if the plumbing were about to burst. Good Lord, thought Serafin, you can tell they don’t come here often: nothing works properly. But vacation houses are always like that. So many things can go wrong: flooding, cracks in the walls, even dangerous short circuits. Serafin stood up, and, as if a household spirit had been waiting to confirm his theory about the dangers of vacation houses, when he tried to switch on the light over the mirror, there was a flash. The bulb had blown. Just as well he had good reflexes and was able to jump out of the way, otherwise he might have gotten a shock. This place really is dangerous, he thought. I’ll have to tell Adela. Someone could have a nasty accident here. Or maybe, thought Serafin, falling back into his childish wishful thinking, maybe it would be better to say nothing. After all, sometimes you do happen to be at the right place at the right time. You might witness an accident, for instance, and do nothing to help the victim. You hear him shouting and know that you should reach out and give him a hand, but instead you stand there unmoved and do nothing—or, worse, you decide to give destiny a little nudge. Serafin examined the lightbulb, which was giving off a delicious burned smell. Accidents can happen so easily, he thought. You don’t actually have to do anything, just be ready to give bad luck a helping hand, and that can be as simple and easy as pressing a button. Yes, thought Serafin, emerging from the bathroom with a more positive outlook and a few new ideas. All sorts of unexpected things can happen in the course of an evening. You never know, do you?

  WHILE ENJOYING THE delicious meal organized by Adela and talking with the guests at his table, Serafin Tous would toy with the idea of provoking an accident. It would give him something interesting to think about for the next couple of hours.

  THERE WAS A third person who also would have liked Nestor to disappear, and that was Adela Teldi. But she was not yet making plans. Instead, she was thinking: Careful, remember what he said. Carlos is like a son to him. Don’t forget that.

  As she was getting dressed for the party that evening, Adela tried not to look at herself in the mirror. She was scared of what she might find in her eyes: the anxiety caused by two discoveries she had made quite by chance that afternoon. First, she had recognized Nestor and remembered that he was a friend of Antonio Reig, who used to be their cook back in Buenos Aires. Then she had discovered something even more disturbing. Like a doubting Thomas, she wouldn’t have believed it possible unless she had seen it with her own eyes and heard it with her own astonished ears; there were simply too many coincidences, and none of them fortunate. Not only did the caterer happen to be someone who knew about her past, but as she was entering the kitchen unannounced, she had been lucky (or unlucky?) enough to overhear him talking with his employees, and from what she heard, she was sure he had told them everything that had happened in Argentina, including the death of her sister.

  Trying to repress that memory, as she had done so often in the past, Adela inspected her body, searching for the paths traced by Carlos’s hands, hoping they would help her forget. But this time, instead of giving her pleasure, the inspection was painful, so painful that she almost expected to see wounds on her arms and shoulders. There were no wounds, but the pain persisted and Adela expressed it as a kind of sum, the arithmetic of her anxiety. One, this man has recognized me. Two, he has already told his employees what he knows about my life. And three, he said that Carlos was like a son to him. You don’t have to be very smart to put these three things together and realize that, given how fond he is of Carlos, he’s bound to warn him not to get mixed up with the likes of me. But of course he wouldn’t even think of doing that unless he knew about our relationship, and he doesn’t, not yet, I’m sure of that at least.

  This gave her some relief. The pain ebbed, but only for a moment, because she soon realized that it was just a matter of time before Nestor found out about her and Carlos. Love, she thought sadly, flaunts itself, as you well know, my dear. Love can’t help giving itself away: a beatific smile, a slight trembling, a special tone of voice, a glance . . . at some point Nestor would surely discern one of these symptoms in her or Carlos. And then the game would be up.

  She was afraid her eyes in the mirror would betray all this—the fear, the danger, the impending end of her love affair—so she turned away. But it isn’t easy to get dressed without looking at yourself. Adela had chosen a dependable plain black gown. In a woman’s wardrobe there are always some things that require the use of a mirror and others that don’t. There are temperamental dresses, which call for a considerable amount of testing, tweaking, and adjusting in front of the mirror, while others are less capricious and can be relied upon to do the job, like the one Adela had taken from the armoire. She put it on quickly, without thinking, but then she faced the problem of how to fix her makeup and hair without looking in the mirror. She would have to take a glance at herself, but just a quick one, so as not to let the other, left-handed Adela, who lived on the dark side of the moon, tell her something she didn’t want to hear, something along the lines of: You see? I told you. It had to happen. You should have listened to your thumbs; they’ve always warned you when something unpleasant was in the offing. And omens and portents aside, what did you expect, you silly old thing? Did you think you’d be able to get Love with a capital L for free? It was only to be expected; something was bound to go wrong. Face it, twenty-five years of marriage and a long string of lovers take their toll, to say nothing of that painful secret you’ve been trying to hide even from yourself. You were so brave yesterday when you decided to make a clean break, promising that when the party was over, you would risk it all and give love a chance. Perhaps you thought you were paying a high price. Well, that was nothing. Yes, you’ll have to endure uncertainty and the fear of losing him, but that’s not all. The past always comes to collect its debts, Adela: your dead sister, the affair that led to her death, the guilt . . . It’s true those memories are only ghosts, but ghosts have a nasty habit of coming back to haunt the living. They come back when you least expect them, in the most unlikely forms, and the ghost of what happened in Buenos Aires is here now in the form of a cook with a pointy mustache.

  The mirror could not tell Adela any of this, because she would not look at it. As she had done so often in her life, she simply stopped herself from thinking. If you prevent ideas from forming, they don’t exist, or at least they can’t hurt you. But that was just a trick. Whether she looked at the mirror or not, whether she thought about it or not, Adela knew that she would have to do something to prevent Nestor from putting an end to her newfound happiness. The best thing would be to get in first, talk to Carlos, and tell him the truth, because in the end, thought Adela, why would he care about an old story, something that happened years ago, in another country, to people who meant nothing to him? A youthful error, a silly fling that ended badly, true, but who hasn’t committed a little indiscretion at some point in their life?

  By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. As she tried to zip up her dress, Adela’s fingers brushed against her bare skin, and she could feel her thumbs pricking. A strange presentiment made her fingers retract as she was struck by the similarity between the feel of two bodies and the form of two names, one fresh in her mind, the other buried deep in her memory: Carlos Gar
cia and Ricardo Garcia. She imagined them side by side, like father and son. The strange sensation persisted in her thumbs, prompting the realization: the same skin, that same feel, the same surname. But where do you get these crazy ideas from, Adela? That’s ridiculous! As if two men with the same last name had to be related! Garcia, for God’s sake, it’s one of the most common names in Spain. You really are losing the plot, my dear. Why don’t you stop being silly and have a proper look in the mirror? It’s no good trying to do it like this, you’ll go out looking a fright, like a witch on a bad hair day.

  But Adela didn’t dare. She was too scared of what she might glimpse in the background: another coincidence, too awful even to imagine. What if Carlos Garcia was the son of Soledad and Ricardo? What then? A one-in-a-thousand chance, and the odds against that gossipmonger of a cook putting it together must be a million to one, but what if . . .

  What if it were true and he knew, thought Adela, looking into the mirror now for the first time, unafraid. I’d just have to silence him for good. But fortunately that won’t be necessary. There couldn’t be that many coincidences. Stop worrying and finish getting dressed; you’re going to be late.

  Then Adela did something she hadn’t done for years: from her jewelry box she took the green cameo that her mother, Teresa, had given her for her fifteenth birthday. She couldn’t remember ever having used it as a brooch, but that old jade disk with its gold setting went well with the austere black dress she had decided to wear. And now stop being silly, she told herself as she headed for the door. She opened it, and shut it behind her. She looked around at the landing, at all the things she would soon abandon forever, and she smiled. A small price to pay, really, for what the future holds, as long as nothing goes wrong. And nothing will go wrong. I’ll make quite sure of that.

  Adela went down the stairs. She was going to play the role of Mrs. Teldi the model hostess one last time, and tomorrow . . . whatever happened, tomorrow would be the first day of the rest of her life.

  AS ADELA WENT downstairs, Chloe was in the room over the garage at the Lilies, which she was sharing with Karel Pligh, thinking, Nestor! I could strangle him. Only he could have come up with a waiter’s uniform like this. It’s like a Mao suit or biker’s leathers or something. It’s so tight I’m going to fry like a chicken.

  Nestor had not been amused to discover that Chloe had left her waitress uniform at her parents’ house. It always gave Mulberry & Mistletoe’s catering a nice touch of class, he felt, to have a girl waiting in a dark smock, a little cap, and a white organza apron. “But I guess if you’ve left it all in Madrid, there’s nothing else we can do. All right, Chloe, go and put on Karel’s spare suit. But if you’re going to dress as a man,” he warned her, “do us all a favor and play the part convincingly. Walk like a man, lower your voice so as not to give the guests a fright, comb your hair back, and above all, for God’s sake, remove those rings and studs and things, will you?”

  Chloe had already put on the trousers and the severe-looking jacket, which buttoned right up to the neck like a biker’s leathers, and she was standing in front of the mirror, removing her rings and studs, gently, so as not to hurt herself, reciting the origin of each metallic object: this is the one my pal Hassem gave me for Christmas; I bought this one in a one-pound shop; and Karel gave me this one . . . he’s so sweet, and gorgeous too. As she removed them, one by one, she realized it had been ages since she had seen her face unembellished, and faces change, it’s fucking amazing how they change. She decided to comb her hair before removing the ring in her bottom lip, because she knew it was going to hurt. She looked in Karel’s kit and found a comb and a tube of gel, then turned on the tap. She was starting to get into this cross-dressing thing. She began to imitate the way she’d seen any number of men, from Karel Pligh to her brother, Eddie, comb their hair. The Travolta method: the right hand wields the comb while the left follows, stroking. Hey, this is fucking cool. It looks good. I look like . . . and her hands acquired a life of their own, combing away, stroke after stroke, slicking all her hair back until she looked like a boy, a young man of twenty-two. That was how old she would be next month.

  “What the hell are you doing in there, Chloe? Hurry up, for God’s sake. Nestor will be furious.”

  Off in her own world, Chloe vaguely heard Karel Pligh’s words through the bathroom door and her hand froze.

  “What? What is it? Who’s that?”

  “Karel, who else could it be? We’re really late. Open the door or I’m going down without you.”

  Instead of acceding to this demand, Chloe kept looking for the eyes she thought she had seen in the mirror. Without turning around, she said: “You do that, K. Go down and stop giving me the shits.”

  And as she spoke, she realized that the eyes looking back from the mirror were not blue like hers but black and stern, and they seemed to be saying: Don’t talk like that, Clo-Clo. You never used to talk like that.

  “Is that you, Eddie?”

  The face in the mirror looked like Eddie’s, but it wasn’t. It was hers: the ugly and possibly unhygienic ring in her lower lip was a giveaway. Not Eddie’s style at all.

  “Hang on Eddie. Just a minute, I’ll take it out for you. I promise I’ll never wear it again.” And, very carefully, she removed the last ring from her lip so that her brother’s reflection could smile back unimpeded from the mirror. There, that’s better. Now, let me touch you.

  The whole scene lasted no more than a minute. Chloe was back in the world of her dreams, playing with her brother, but then she reached toward the reflection to caress his eyes, so different from hers, and as her fingers touched the glass, she realized that the spell had been broken and the face looking out from the cold surface of the mirror was a girl’s face, her own.

  “I’m not going to warn you again, Chloe. Nestor has called us three times.”

  All the mirror showed now was a girl dressed as a boy. She looked like Eddie, true. She had the same hairstyle, and the suit she had put on was even reminiscent of the leathers he had worn that last afternoon, but the eyes were different. Once again those dark eyes had abandoned her.

  THAT NIGHT, AS she waited on the tables and attended to the guests, Choe would keep trying to find her brother’s eyes again in all the mirrors of the Lilies.

  “Are you playing hide-and-seek with me, Eddie?”

  3

  THE DINNER AT THE LILIES

  ERNESTO TELDI RAISED his glass and said: “It’s a great privilege for Adela and myself to have been able to gather thirty-three of the world’s most original and important art collectors and to welcome you all to the Lilies tonight.”

  From their appearance, there was no way of telling that the thirty-three people seated around the dining room at the Lilies, their gazes converging on Ernesto Teldi, were all specialist collectors, each expert in a particular kind of art or antiquities. Most trades and professions have some kind of distinguishing characteristic, a way of dressing or talking, a particular form of pedantry or snobbery, but collectors of rare objects have nothing in common except their idiosyncrasy; each is a unique specimen, in the most literal sense. Take Mr. Stephanopolous and Mr. Algobranghini, for instance. Both knew all there was to know about knives and swords, but apart from that, the only thing they had in common was an immoderate fondness for tawny port. When the Teldis were charging their guests’ glasses for a toast, both Algobranghini and Stephanopolous had rejected the Cava, opting instead for a slim red glass of ’59 vintage Royal Port. In all other respects, their personalities could not have been more different. Despite his Greek name, Stephanopolous was a pure product of the British ruling class: Eton, Oxford, a life in the country, surrounded by dogs, cats, and horses. Algobranghini on the other hand looked like an old-style tango singer. Karel Pligh was captivated by his pin-striped suit, the carnation in his buttonhole, and his slicked-back hair. Every inch the Buenos Aires spiv, he thought as he refilled the collector’s tiny glass for the tenth time. The reincarnation of Carlos Gard
el, I swear.

  A curious observer would have been struck by the bewildering diversity of styles on display that evening. It was an odd assembly to say the least. Despite her name, Miss Liau Chi, the famous collector of ghost stories, seemed to have stepped out of a novel by Wilkie Collins (rather than off a plane from Hong Kong). The three “Dickensiana fetishists” looked, respectively, like an overweight boxer, a severe Breton matron (in the mold of Becassine, from the old French comic books), and, more appropriately, the living image of Mr. Squeers, the stingy teacher in Nicholas Nickelby.

  Also present were the icon collectors (a young woman who looked like a model, an Orthodox priest, and a young man with a smooth, angelic face, who appeared to be much younger than his passport said he was). On seeing this youth, Serafin Tous couldn’t help thinking, What an exquisite creature, but immediately his gaze slid from the cherub to the kitchen door, behind which Nestor was no doubt lurking among his pots and pans. I hope he burns his hand and has to be taken to the hospital, thought the judge. Was it really so terrible to wish a little household accident on someone, a little time off work . . . or maybe a serious accident that would dispose of him for good and leave Serafin and his friends in peace.

  But leaving these bad wishes aside (the air at the Lilies was thick with them that night, and all were meant for Nestor), let us resume the description of the guests. The rest of the lineup was composed of conventional-looking ladies and gentlemen, with two exceptions: the “Rapanui statuette fan,” who looked like the reincarnation of Humboldt the naturalist, and Monsieur Pitou, the guest of honor, an eminent expert on the love letters of the famous. All through the evening Monsieur Pitou had been the object of Ernesto Teldi’s subtly seductive attentions. He was a tiny man, barely more than four and a half feet tall. He had exquisite hands, and his limbs and trunk were perfectly proportioned, but his face . . . The owner of the world’s most beautiful love letters was spectacularly ugly, and his body was shrunken, as if a love spell in reverse had turned him from a prince into a frog.