“What are you doing, Chloe? Higher, just reach up and get it. What are you stopping there for, staring at yourself like an idiot? Come on, that’s quite enough messing around. I haven’t got all night.”
But Chloe didn’t move or dare open her eyes, because she knew that when she did, Eddie would have disappeared again forever, gone back to Neverland. The insect had climbed up to her shoulder now. The detergent Nestor wanted was just a few centimeters farther along on that filthy, slimy shelf, but in spite of her boss’s impatience and the voice of Miss Liau Chi, who had just come into the kitchen looking for her (“Come back here, young man. I have something to tell you, something you’ll be very interested to hear, I assure you”), she remained perfectly still until, finally, that absurd pose became impossible to maintain and she reached out and grasped what she had been asked to fetch. When she looked at herself in the mirrorlike door of the cool room on the way down, she was forced to admit once again that it had all been a fantasy: her eyes were hopelessly, unequivocally blue.
“Come here, young man. We need to have a little chat, you and I,” insisted Miss Liau Chi.
4
A DOOR SHUTS
THREE-THIRTY IN the morning and all the guests had finally gone home. Good-bye, Mr. Stephanopolous, we’ll be in touch . . . Thank you, Mr. Teldi. Yes, see you soon. And thank you, Mrs. Teldi. It’s been a pleasure to talk with a woman of your intelligence. I did enjoy our little chat about Atatürk. Your remarks were so penetrating . . . Good-bye, Monsieur Pitou. Thank you for coming . . . Good night, Miss Liau Chi . . .
The voices had faded away, the lights had gone out, and, all alone in the kitchen, Nestor supposed he was the only person in the house still awake. He always liked to take a moment to savor his culinary triumphs in solitude, like an artist reliving his moments of glory or a lover indulgently recalling each detail of an amorous encounter, sometimes enjoying the memory more than the experience itself. The texture of my lobster salad was just perfect, thought Nestor, glowing with pleasure. Absolutely spot on: not too hot, not too cold; not too hard, not too soft. When I looked out from the kitchen and saw the smooth motion of Ernesto Teldi’s mustache, I knew it was superlative.
UPSTAIRS, AT THAT very moment, beads of cold sweat were gathering in Teldi’s mustache. Suddenly, he sat up in bed. It wasn’t the usual nightmares. Lying there unable to get to sleep, he had just come to a decision. The time has come, he said to himself. It has to be tonight. It isn’t sensible to let this sort of thing drag on; I’ll go and have it out with him right now. Ernesto Teldi looked at his watch and guessed that the cook would be sleeping in his room up in the attic, a little room tucked away up there where no one would hear anything. Just as well.
OH, MY SEA bass with potato and dill soufflé, thought Nestor Chaffino fondly, not up in his attic room but down in the kitchen still, with his elbows on the big Formica table that had played its modest part in his success. When I went out to be congratulated by the guests, Adela Teldi declared that never in her life had she tasted a dish of such simple sophistication. What a splendid way of putting it!
AT THAT VERY moment, Adela gently touched her lips, then reached out and did the same to Carlos, who was sleeping next to her, as if she were trying to pass on a secret that she had not dared to put into words. She had sworn that as soon as they were alone together, she would tell him everything that had happened in Buenos Aires, so he would hear it from her rather than Nestor, and yet when the party was finally over and they were alone in Carlos’s little attic room, neither of them said a word. A couple of times she had felt that Carlos was on the point of asking her something, but when two bodies are so hungry for each other, words are out of place.
I’ll tell him tomorrow, tomorrow, I promise, thought Adela between feverish kisses.
But when the fever had abated, and her well-preserved but middle-aged body lay still in Carlos’s youthful embrace, Adela Teldi reconsidered. Love, she thought, is so complex, so delicate, this love at any rate . . . Perhaps it would be better not to put it to the test with confessions and secrets. I have to talk with that cook, buy his silence if necessary, beg him if I have to . . . There’s no alternative, my dear, she said to herself, smiling. You have to make sure he keeps quiet, no matter the cost, whatever it takes. At your age you can’t afford to let anyone spoil this chance of happiness . . . The ship has gone down, and you’re clinging to a plank, holding on for dear life. Adela kissed her lover’s forehead. He was sleeping the deep sleep of the young, which was lucky. He wouldn’t be able to hear what happened when she went into Nestor’s room down the corridor.
AND AS FOR my mousseline sauce, thought Nestor in the kitchen, sighing with an artist’s pleasure and a lover’s devotion, only sensitive and melancholic souls like Serafin Tous can fully appreciate that smooth, rounded flavor, with just the slightest hint of lemon. During his little speech to the guests, Nestor had smiled knowingly at Serafin as he mentioned the mousseline, and a look of tormented ecstasy had come over the judge’s face. One needs to have a feminine sensibility to appreciate certain flavors, thought Nestor. I don’t expect Mr. Tous’s friends are aware of that side of his personality, and they probably wouldn’t care for it. But his little secret is absolutely safe with me. Not just because we met at Freshman’s and it would be unprofessional to pass on information about a colleague’s clients, but also because I won’t hear a word against a man who knows his mousseline sauce.
03:47, CLICK . . . 03:48. The phosphorescent numbers on Serafin Tous’s alarm clock flipped over implacably, like the artful drip-drop of Chinese water torture, like the leaves of a calendar mercilessly marking the passage of time and the approach of a dreaded day. Unable to sleep, Serafin decided to get up. The night was black, conducive to melancholy, but also to wild thoughts. Where could that miserable individual be sleeping, he wondered. That slanderer, that gossiping cook. Serafin didn’t know the house, but he imagined that the rooms for the domestic staff would be up in the attic, so he headed that way. He didn’t switch on the light. He groped his way in the dark, so when he passed the armoire mirror, he was spared a surprising sight: in the eyes of this placid gentleman who wouldn’t hurt a fly there was a gleam as hard and sharp as a stiletto.
AND WHAT ABOUT my splendid chocolate truffles! thought Nestor, going over it all again, like a lover remembering and reliving every move, every caress. Never have nuances of flavor been so masterfully blended, if I say so myself: vanilla, bitter chocolate, liqueur, a touch of ginger. That’s the trick. The ginger is the secret ingredient that makes a really good chocolate truffle. Though of course only the cognoscenti can tell, the few who are capable of analyzing such a magnificent symphony of flavors. That’s why I got so cross with young Chloe when she put two truffles in her mouth at once. Two truffles! “Let me tell you something, Miss Trias,” I said to her. “Only a person possessed of two souls could appreciate the full range of flavors in two of Nestor Chaffino’s truffles. Do you have any idea . . . ?” But she just said Fuck that or Bullshit or one of her other favorite expressions. With such a limited vocabulary, what kind of inner life can she have? That’s the problem with the young these days, thought Nestor sadly. I bet right now her dreams are full of heavy-metal music or something equally brainless and vulgar.
BUT NESTOR WAS mistaken, for as it happened, Chloe Trias was dreaming of her boss’s chocolate truffles in the room she was sharing with Karel over the garage. And like a sensitive soul—or, rather, two sensitive souls—she was savoring the memory of that hint of ginger and the sweet vanilla, summoning up the delicious aroma of the liqueur. Yet this sophisticated gastronomical fantasy, which would have come as a great surprise to Nestor, did not last long. It was quickly displaced by other dream fragments, in rapid and fluid succession, as often happens when one is falling asleep. A couple of Pearl Jam songs went through her mind, combined with an erotic memory featuring the very tasty Karel Pligh, who was lying asleep beside her. Then, in the garden of the Lilies, she saw a cockroach on
a doormat, reflected in a mirror, while Miss Liau Chi whispered in her ear: “Do you believe in ghosts?” All this was quickly swept away by a rush of other, equally incoherent images, but after a couple of minutes of this turbulent dreaming, Chloe woke up and lay there, tossing and turning, unable to get back to sleep. Shit, she thought, now I’ll probably be awake all night like a fucking owl. Periodically, light from one of the lamps shining on the facade of the Lilies burst into the room like the beam of a lighthouse. While the room was briefly illuminated, Chloe looked at Karel, then across at her pack, which was sitting on a chair, spilling its contents like a torn rag doll. The room was plunged in darkness again, and Chloe remembered how she had panicked before the dinner when she couldn’t find her maid’s uniform. That was why her stuff was in such a mess: T-shirts, a bikini, underwear . . . everything except the case where she kept the framed photo of her brother. That red case never left the bottom of her backpack, but the rest of her things, lying scattered around the room, looked like ghosts from one of Miss Liau Chi’s books. Crazy old Chinese cow, thought Chloe. She’s supposed to hang out with ghosts and see dead people and stuff, and she couldn’t even tell I was a girl. As if I looked like a fucking guy, she thought, before realizing that in a way she had fooled herself, too: it was because she had dressed as a man that, for a few seconds, she thought she had seen Eddie’s eyes in her reflection.
She tried to go back to sleep. Maybe tonight she’d be lucky and dream that her brother was coming to take her away to Neverland, like before. Come on, Eddie, come and play for a while, she said like a little girl, but instead, a pair of memories came to haunt her sleeplessness: the moleskin notebook Nestor always kept hidden in the pocket of his chef’s jacket and the delicious flavor of his chocolate truffles. The truffles must have been put away in the Westinghouse cool room in the kitchen, she thought, the one that has a shiny metal door like a fun-house mirror.
Chloe kept tossing and turning, cursing her insomnia. She couldn’t get to sleep, but each time she came close, pleasant thoughts began to stream through her mind, like the memory of Eddie’s smile, the smile she thought she’d seen a few hours ago. And she could swear a voice was speaking to her, saying, Come on, Clo-Clo, come down; here I am. But she was wary. She was afraid of going down to the kitchen and being disappointed again. This time she wouldn’t find her brother’s eyes looking back from the cool-room door. He was just playing games with her again, like he used to when he was alive and she would ask him: “What are you writing, Eddie? It’s a story with adventures and romance and crimes and stuff, isn’t it? Can I read it?” And he would reply: “Not now, Clo-Clo. Later on, I promise.”
But he was lying. There was no “later on,” because her brother got it into his head that he had to live fast, since he wanted to be a writer and nothing worth writing about had happened to him yet. And in pursuit of that stupid fantasy, he had gone away forever and left her on her own.
Insomnia hatches strange ideas. Normally, Chloe wouldn’t have thought of going down to the kitchen, much less looking for her brother’s eyes in the cool room door. Chloe was a sensible girl at heart, and she wouldn’t normally have risked another disappointment: having to admit that her brother was playing hide-and-seek with her. But insomnia is not sensible. Come on, Chloe, it said to her, a chocolate truffle is just what you need. It’s well known that chocolate helps you go to sleep. Come on, don’t be frightened. If you’re scared, all you have to do is avoid looking at the door. It’s a deceptive, distorting mirror, like the ones they have in amusement parks: it plays tricks on you, hurtful tricks sometimes, but you can just ignore it. Although, if you decide to be brave and look . . . who knows?
When the garden lamp shone into the room again, Chloe jumped to her feet. She was naked, and two items of clothing lay strewn on the chair: Choose me, said a T-shirt on which was written PIERCE MY TONGUE, NOT MY HEART. No, choose me, insisted the plain waiter’s jacket, with its button-up collar, the jacket she had worn that night, pretending to be a boy. And, as if she were Alice in Wonderland again, Chloe hesitated before finally deciding on the jacket.
Ah, what the fuck’s it matter, she thought as she put it on. I’m just going down to get a chocolate truffle, I’m not going to be looking at myself in any mirrors.
IT WAS FOUR in the morning. That was the time on each of the characters’ watches. The wall clock in the kitchen was running slightly slow and still hadn’t chimed. That old Festina clock, clouded over with steam and smoke, looked down on Nestor, who, suddenly realizing how late it was, roused himself from his pleasant reverie and, as if addressing a friend, said: Okay, old mate, you’ve had a wonderful day, a tiring one too, so it’s time you toddled off to bed.
Which is what he was about to do when something caught his eye.
“Oh sugar!” he exclaimed. He had forgotten to put the boxes of leftover chocolate truffles back in the cool room. That wasn’t like him at all.
The kitchen clock struck four as Nestor opened the door of the Westinghouse cool room.
ERNESTO TELDI’S WATCH was very quiet; it didn’t even tick. But it had a luminous face, which glowed in the dark as he climbed the stairs, heading for Nestor’s attic room. Serafin Tous’s Omega did not have this feature, so nothing, not even a phosphorescent dot, revealed his whereabouts as he tiptoed in the darkness, which was periodically illuminated by the beam of the lamp sweeping across the facade of the Lilies, shining in through one of the windows onto the stairs. Both Teldi and Serafin waited for the darkness to return so that they could move without being seen.
IT WAS FOUR A.M. on Adela’s watch, too, but she had left it on Carlos’s bedside table, beside the green cameo, so its luminous face hadn’t witnessed her quick steps across the landing from Carlos’s room to Nestor’s. Nestor had been given the largest of the attic rooms: a very nice bedroom with two doors, one opening onto the stairs and the other leading to the rest of the servants’ quarters. Adela Teldi came in through the second of these doors, a few minutes ahead of the other night visitors. She entered without knocking; in circumstances such as these, etiquette is inappropriate. What? she thought. No one here? She took a few steps in the dark, then the lamp beam shone into the room and revealed that it was empty, the bed untouched. Maybe he’s in the bathroom, she thought, and sat down to wait. Two simultaneous noises made her start. It’s him, he’s coming. My God, what am I doing here? As Adela prepared herself, both doors opened at once and the silhouettes of two men entered stealthily. Yet neither shape was Nestor Chaffino, so when the light shone through the windows of the attic room again, three faces looked at one another in amazement, and, like a startled and out-of-tune choir, the voices of Adela, Ernesto Teldi, and Serafin Tous demanded in unison:
“What are you doing here?”
“What about you?”
“And you?”
OF THE CHARACTERS in this story, Karel Pligh was not the only music lover. He was not the only one who sang to express his state of mind. “C’est trop beau” is a pretty song. It’s not a tarantella or a Neapolitan folk song, but when it came to choosing a tune to accompany a pleasant task, Nestor was no chauvinist; he didn’t restrict himself to the repertoire of his beloved Italy. So the following scene unfolds to the tune of “C’est trop beau.” Nestor was about to put the boxes of truffles away in the cool room. He had stacked ten boxes on the table and he was going into the Westinghouse to put them against the wall at the back, where they wouldn’t get in the way. “C’est trop beau notre aventure / c’est trop beau pour être heureux . . .” The light from the kitchen did not reach far into the dark interior, where the frozen bodies of game animals were dimly visible—rabbits or hares, maybe even a small deer—but Nestor preferred not to investigate further. “C’est trop beau pour que ça dure / plus longtemps qu’un soir d’été.” He had forgotten the rest of the words, so he continued whistling the tune and amused himself with this joyful rendition for a few seconds before going back out to get the rest of the boxes. Just a few second
s: the space of a breath, but some breaths last an eternity.
WHEN CHLOE CAME into the kitchen, she stopped in her tracks for a moment. Then she saw that the door of the cool room was open and heard a happy whistle emerging from within. As she approached she could hear noises, as if someone were in there moving things around. But it was a different sound that attracted her, drawing her toward the shiny metal surface. It seemed that the trick mirror was speaking to her: “Here I am, Clo-Clo. Come over here, don’t be a coward. Come on.”
The whistle from the cool room sounded joyful. How could anyone extinguish such a happy, innocent whistle? But that’s silly. Chloe wasn’t going to kill anyone; she just didn’t want to miss her chance again. She was convinced that Eddie had told her to come downstairs and that he would be looking at her from the other side of the mirror. So, to see Eddie’s eyes in her reflection, Chloe had to move the door. Not shut it, just give it a bit of a push. You’re not going to trick me this time, are you, Eddie? You’ll be there when I look, won’t you? And sure enough, when she dared to look, for a moment Chloe saw her brother’s unmistakable dark eyes in her own reflection. She couldn’t help reaching out toward those eyes, which seemed to be smiling and asking for a kiss. And as she leaned against the cold surface, the door swung shut with a click.
Little Indiscretions Page 21
