GOOD-BYE, MY friend, thought Carlos, standing at the window of his attic room, watching the shiny bag as it was carried away, containing a body that had once been Nestor Chaffino. But no longer, because the corpse of a friend is already a stranger. So Carlos had discovered, observing Nestor’s face that morning. And as the hours went by, he noticed other changes that confirmed his theory about the transformation of corpses: before long, he could hardly find a trace of his friend in that gray remnant. The head seemed to have shrunk, as if death were an overzealous Jivaro tribesman. Carlos preferred not to kiss the wretched mask—it seemed so alien to Nestor. The death of his father had taught him that memories keep better if they are not associated with the vision of a dead body. The less one looks at the dead the better, because it is hard to erase what the eyes have registered, and those who have spent hours looking at the lifeless face of a loved one often find that image superimposing itself on their fondest memories of the departed. There is no such danger, however, in paying one’s respects to an anonymous, shiny body bag. Good-bye, Nestor; good-bye, my friend. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to start gathering my things.
Even after a death, the living have their chores to do, so Carlos turned from the window to start packing. He looked around at the room he had shared with Adela last night. It didn’t feel like his room at all, but why should it? The only things in it that belonged to him were two shirts, a waiter’s uniform, and a pair of jeans. Even the objects on the bedside table were not his but hers. Sitting on the unmade bed, Carlos stretched out his hand to pick up the watch Adela had left behind and lifted it to his lips. A lover’s belongings are passion’s strongest and most faithful allies, often more faithful than their owners. Tick-tick, said the clockwork, beating like a heart. Everything will be all right, tick-tick. And Carlos put the watch back where he had found it: yes, it would all work out in the end.
Then his fingers encountered the green cameo, which Adela had left behind along with her watch. Carlos had not noticed it before, as it was hidden by various other objects. It was beautiful, it was hers, but somehow he was not inclined to kiss it, perhaps because cameos do not beat like hearts.
IN A FEW hours’ time I’ll leave all this behind me, thought Adela, sitting on her unmade bed like Carlos upstairs. Beside her was an old wooden box she had just taken out of the armoire. She opened it. Adela was not a romantic. Throughout her life she had been careful to keep sentimentality out of her love affairs. It’s far more sensible; it saves you pain. So for years she had not examined the contents of that box, in which she had piled up letters, passionate words, declarations of love, souvenirs, photos . . . the memories of many, many years. Adela preferred not to look at them, since each letter, each object, represented a piece of her life that was gone forever and each reminded her that the years had fled like her looks, and that she was no longer the woman who had inspired those beautiful words. Beautiful and dead, Adela. All you have is the future. Love while you can. But first . . .
Before leaving it all behind, the Lilies and her memories, Adela had one last thing to tie up. She sat down at the little table in front of the window to write a farewell letter to her husband. A rather nineteenth-century way of doing things, cowardly too, but without doubt the simplest solution. An unwritten but long-standing rule of their marriage enjoined both Ernesto and Adela to avoid all embarrassing displays of emotion, particularly the distasteful and inconvenient sort of scene that would go with announcing one’s departure after twenty-something years of convenient cohabitation. So she wrote:
The Lilies, 29th of March
Dear Ernesto
(Then she paused, searching for the right words.)
CARLOS, however, had no difficult letters to write or old memories to say good-bye to. His attention was focused on relics of a much more recent past: the objects Adela had left behind the previous night. What should I do with this? Should I put it in the case with her clothes? Should I take it myself? They had agreed not to leave together. They would meet up later, in Madrid, after a few days, when things had settled down a bit. At the Phoenix Hotel perhaps. That would be wonderful: they could start again where it all began. Carlos looked at his watch and then at Adela’s: there was five minutes’ difference between the two. No doubt hers was showing the correct time. It was getting late. He picked up the few things that were left, and, last of all, the cameo.
Dear Ernesto,
I don’t know how to begin this letter. You will probably think I have gone mad, or, worse still, that I have turned out to be just as stupid as those deluded, romantic women we used to make fun of.
Adela stopped again, suddenly conscious of her thumbs. A superstitious fear made her check for Hecate’s symptom, which always warned her when something bad was about to happen, but she could feel nothing. Relax. Everything is all right. The cook is dead. No one can go delving into your past now.
AS HE PICKED up the cameo and put it in his pocket, Carlos realized that, since the moment he had seen it pinned to Adela’s dress, he hadn’t given it another thought. But that was hardly surprising; so much had happened since then, such terrible things. Before putting it away, he wrapped it in his handkerchief. It had an odd glow, but there was no reason to interpret that as a bad omen, he thought. And besides, he should have been grateful, really, because today, or maybe in a few days’ time, when they were reunited forever at the Phoenix Hotel, he would be able to ask Adela and find out how that cameo had forged such a beautiful link between them long before they met. “You tell me where you got that cameo, and I’ll tell you a story you won’t believe.” That’s what he would say to her, and they would probably end up having a good laugh about the invisible threads that for years had been drawing them toward each other. Even if Adela’s cameo isn’t the same as the one in the picture, thought Carlos, it’s such an odd coincidence; it’s enough to make you believe in Madame Longstaffe’s prophecies. But it is the same cameo. It has to be. I’m sure of it.
AS IF SENSING the danger, Adela Teldi’s fingers tightened on the pen and began to tingle. Without realizing it, she wrote, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes,” in her letter to Ernesto, and then had to cross it out, because it had nothing to do with what she wanted to tell him. Come on, Adela, just forget about those stupid premonitions. You’re never going to finish the letter this way, and it’s getting late.
. . . ADELA’S BLOND HAIR, so much like his grandmother’s . . . the resemblance between the Lilies and Number 38 . . . a portrait kept in an armoire for years, and the blue eyes of a girl who must have been Adela . . . Carlos had thrust the cameo to the bottom of his pocket, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He had gathered all his things and was walking across the landing. As he passed the door of Nestor’s room (Good-bye, my friend), the thoughts that were troubling him crystallized as questions: Why was the picture of Adela banished from the yellow room? Why did his grandmother forbid his father to enter Number 38? Why had his mother, Soledad, died in Buenos Aires, of all places? And why hadn’t he recognized Adela as the girl in the picture when he had been looking for her in every woman he saw?
SOMETHING WICKED this way comes . . . Now that Carlos had left his room, Adela could hear him walking across the landing upstairs. The steps were young and curious and full of dangerous questions: Who is this woman? What exactly happened? Where and when? Of course she could not actually decipher or even guess what those steps were asking, but her witch’s thumbs knew. The prickling was painful now, and it continued until, suddenly, the steps upstairs came to a halt. Who are you? Why? How did it happen? Twinge after twinge as Adela tried to guess why the steps that had sounded so resolute and dangerous a moment before had stopped.
Since Adela was not possessed of Madame Longstaffe’s extraordinary powers, which would have been particularly handy for understanding this scene, she would never know that as Carlos went past the door of Nestor’s room, his mind a welter of ever more clamorous suspicions, something the cook ha
d said the previous afternoon came back to him. He had already remembered it once, on seeing Adela in the salon of the Lilies, wearing that cameo from the painting: “One day you’ll realize, cazzo Carlitos” (it was as if Nestor were there, whispering in his ear) “that there are times in life when it’s best not to ask questions, especially when you suspect you’d be better off not knowing the answers.”
“. . . SO GOOD-BYE, ERNESTO, I don’t expect you to understand,” wrote Adela. She was writing fluently, her fingers relaxed now, not a trace of that premonitory prickling. The pen flew over the paper, finishing off the highly conventional, bourgeois farewell letter to her husband: “I’m sorry, believe me. I don’t regret a moment of the years we have spent together and I hope you won’t either. I wish you all the best and I bid you good-bye with . . .” As she was finishing this sentence, Adela raised her head, as if defiantly, and looked out the window, but being shortsighted, she did not see the object falling from the floor above.
So she would never know that on her last day at the Lilies, just before she walked out and left it all behind, upstairs in Nestor’s room Carlos had decided to get rid of the green cameo so that its lustrous sphere, bulging with troublesome questions, would disappear among the various shades of green in the garden of the Lilies. And there it remains to this day, among the leaves and branches, if anyone should care to confirm the veracity of this story.
FROM HIS WINDOW, Serafin Tous also saw Nestor’s body taken away, but he didn’t have flowers cut, like Ernesto Teldi, nor did he pause to watch the sun sparkling on the shiny body bag, as both Adela and Carlos had done. Rather than observe the goings-on in the garden, the mild-mannered magistrate preferred to busy himself packing his bags. Serafin Tous was intending to leave that day. Nice house, the Lilies, but not the sort of place in which he was inclined to linger—too many unpleasant associations.
Fastidiously, he began to fold his clothes, starting with the trousers, following the method his late wife had taught him, so that they would be impeccable when he got home. He took them from the hangers, checked the alignment of the creases, then packed them away: the blue on the gray and the beige on the blue. But as he was folding the beige pair, he realized that there was still a very noticeable sherry stain at the crotch. That was from yesterday, when Nestor had appeared on the terrace and given him a shock. A silly little accident, nothing serious . . . But it is remarkable, he reflected, how accidents can happen, and just at the right time too, occasionally. He was no longer thinking about his mishap on the terrace but about another, much more serious, and for him much more fortunate, household accident: the door of the cool room happening to swing shut while that bothersome cook was inside. It couldn’t have come at a better time, thought Serafin. He realized that death by freezing was no trifling matter, of course not, but he couldn’t help wanting to shout: Thank God for household accidents!
Serafin Tous proceeded to pack away his shirts. First he put them into the very practical and handsome covers he had brought with him (one of his late wife’s ideas), which he then smoothed and laid in the bottom of the suitcase: there, excellent. Nora would have been proud of him. Household accidents are quite unpredictable, thought Serafin, who was beginning to find this line of thought most reassuring. And they happen all the time, much more often than people think, all sorts of accidents, from disasters to little slipups, often just silly things. Anyone can give himself an electric shock with a toaster or start a fire with a panful of hot oil, say. It can happen to anyone, anyone at all. And yet, as Serafin Tous admired his perfect shirts, he felt a little thrill of pleasure, as if the sight of them so neatly piled had revealed something to him. Suddenly it seemed there was something different, unique, about the accident that had set him free. Something, but what? Serafin didn’t know quite how to put it: the way it had happened, the place, the circumstances . . . there was something curiously domestic and benevolent about it . . . motherly, you could almost say. Yes, that was it.
The mild-mannered magistrate was counting his pairs of socks now: five of them, each folded in two, each bearing a discreet little label on which the name of their owner, Serafin Tous, was written in navy blue, black, or bloodred. It was another of his late wife’s practical ideas, to prevent the pairs from getting mixed up in the wash or lost in hotels. Among many other things, Nora was a superlative housekeeper, he thought proudly. There wasn’t a stain she couldn’t remove or a household mishap she couldn’t set right, such was her skill. Serafin always admired the way she directed those invisible but indispensable operations that transform married life into an idyll. With Nora, everything in the house seemed to run itself. Her organization was perfect: no detail was neglected, the meals were always done to a turn and delicious, and it all seemed to happen effortlessly. There was never an unpleasant cooking smell in the house, never an object out of place, and Nora herself had the rare virtue of being unobtrusive. It’s only now that I really notice you, my dear, said husband to wife, now that you are gone, now that I need you, my treasure. The people we really miss are those who quietly filled our lives with pleasure, not the noisy fools we couldn’t help noticing when they were alive.
Serafin Tous had gone into the bathroom to gather his toiletries, and as he packed them away—the impeccably clean razor, the tube of toothpaste rolled up from the bottom, just like Nora used to do it, to save him the trouble—an idea began to take shape in his mind. He found himself marveling once again at the neat, domestic way in which all his problems had been tidied up. Domestic and practical at the same time, he thought. It bore the mark of a woman’s touch or, rather, the delicate touch of a ghost, because there was something about this accident that reminded him of Nora. So as he put his razor and his other toiletries away, Serafin wondered if the souls in the next life could shut the doors of earthly cool rooms, and finding in favor of this conjecture, he couldn’t help exclaiming: “It was you, Nora, wasn’t it, my darling?”
AS THE BODY of Nestor Chaffino was being carried through the garden to the gate of the Lilies, Chloe was sitting in front of the window at a makeshift desk with a look of girlish concentration, as if she were preparing to note down all her observations like some sort of record keeper. A little black moleskin notebook lay open to her left, and she was holding a pencil, which every now and then she raised to her lips. Now the pencil stopped halfway, as if she were trying to work out some particularly difficult problem.
An observer of human behavior watching her at that moment through the window would have been able to see how, behind the elaborately neat desk, the room was a complete mess, with the contents of Chloe’s backpack spilled on the bed and her clothes scattered all over the place, while among the rumpled sheets lay the red case containing the photograph of her brother, Eddie. Yet if that same busybody had happened to be in the bedroom just a few minutes earlier, he would have witnessed an even odder scene. He would have seen Chloe striding up and down the room like a child throwing a tantrum, leafing through the notebook, then rummaging around in her backpack until she found the photo of her brother, as if she wanted to confront one object with the other, absolutely furious, as if those objects, photo and notebook, were to blame for a betrayal or, worse still, a pointless murder.
But there was no curious observer looking in through the windows of the Lilies, just a cockroach on the mat outside the front door, wiggling its antennae knowingly, as if it understood the quirks of human psychology. But who can really understand what makes a capricious girl like Chloe tick? Or how she might come to believe that she could modify the destiny of someone who died before his time. Or why she might think that sooner or later he would return to this world to complete the life he left unfinished. Few can fathom such irrational thoughts, but that doesn’t stop them from existing and explaining why Nestor was now inside a shiny body bag on the way to the cemetery while Chloe observed his departure with a smile.
“And you got what you deserved, old fool,” she said. Put me back in the same situation and I’d do exact
ly the same thing again, every time, she thought, relishing each detail of what had happened in the kitchen the previous night, like a triumphant artist or the perpetrator of a perfect crime.
With her pencil still suspended in midair, as if she were choosing which part of the perverse story to relate to her nonexistent readers, Chloe decided to leave aside what had happened in the small hours of that morning, when she had heard Nestor whistling in the cool room. She preferred to evoke what she felt a little later on, looking into her brother’s dark gaze reflected in the mirror, searching for an idea, a message, some way of making him stay close to her. Chloe remembered how gradually she came to the conclusion that the only way to revive the memory of the dead was by fulfilling the desires they had when they were alive. A simple, obvious idea that gathered force as she stared at herself in the mirror. On the last day of his life, Eddie had gone off on a motorcycle because he had this crazy idea that to be a writer he had to “live fast, have tons of experiences, kill someone, fuck hundreds of girls, whatever, Clo-Clo, you wouldn’t understand, you’re too young.”
And when she had asked him what would happen if it turned out he didn’t have the guts to do any of those terrible things that were supposed to give him the experiences he was looking for, he replied: “Well then, Clo-Clo, I’ll just have to steal someone else’s story, won’t I.” That’s what he had said, her brother Eddie, but he didn’t carry out his plan; instead, he went away forever, leaving it all unfinished.
Little Indiscretions Page 23
