—
FROM WHERE LUCY sat beside her gambler she had a view through a casement window, a view of a long street that led to the foot of a mountain. And what Lucy liked best about her casement window view was that as nighttime turned into dawn, the mountain seemed to travel down the street. It advanced on tiptoe, fully prepared to be shooed away. Insofar as a purely transient construction of flesh and blood can remember (or foretell) what it is to be stone, Lucy understood the mountain’s wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free-floating hope and desolation. Her wish for the mountain was that it would one day shrink to a pebble, crash in through the glass, and roll into a corner to happily absorb tavern life for as long as the place stayed standing. Lucy tried to write something to Safiye about the view through the casement window, but found that her description of the mountain expressed a degree of pining so extreme that it made for distasteful reading. She didn’t post that letter.
Safiye had begun working as a lady’s maid—an appropriate post for her, as she had the requisite patience. It can take months before you even learn the location of a household safe, let alone discover the code that makes its contents available to you. But was that really Safiye’s plan? Lucy had a feeling she was being tricked into the conventional again. Safiye instigated bothersome conversations about “the future,” the eventual need for security, and its being possible to play one trick too many. From time to time Lucy paused her work on the rose book to write and send brief notes:
Safiye—I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to think; I’m afraid I’ll only be able to send you a small token for this St. Jordi’s Day you wrote about. I’ll beg my forgiveness when I see you.
Safiye replied: Whatever the size of your token, I’m certain mine is smaller. You’ll laugh when you see it, Lucy.
Lucy wrote back: Competitive as ever! Whatever it is you’re doing, don’t get caught. I love you, I love you.
On April 23rd, an envelope addressed in Safiye’s hand arrived at the post office for Lucy. It contained a key on a necklace chain and a map of Barcelona with a black rose drawn over a small section of it. Lucy turned the envelope inside out but there was no accompanying note. She couldn’t even send a book, Lucy thought, tutting in spite of herself. She hadn’t yet sent the book she’d made, and as she stood in the queue to post it she began to consider keeping it.
The woman in line ahead of her was reading a newspaper and Lucy saw Safiye’s face—more an imperfectly sketched reproduction of it—and read the word “Barcelone” in the headline. Some vital passage narrowed in her heart, or her blood got too thick to flow through it. She read enough to understand that the police were looking for a lady’s maid in connection to a murder and a series of other crimes they suspected her of having committed under other names.
—
MURDER? IMPOSSIBLE. Not Safiye. Lucy walked backward until she found a wall to stand behind her. She rested until she was able to walk to the train station, where she bought train tickets and a newspaper of which she read a single page as she waited for the train to come. She would go where the map in her purse told her to go, she would find Safiye, Safiye would explain and they would laugh. They’d have to leave the continent, of course. They might even have to earn their livings honestly like Safiye wanted, but please, please please please. This pleading went on inside her for the entire journey, through three train changes and the better part of a day. A mountain seemed to follow along behind each train she took—whenever she looked over her shoulder there it was, keeping pace. She liked to think it was her mountain she was seeing, the one she’d first seen in Grenoble, now trying its best to keep faith with her until she found Safiye.
Safiye’s map led Lucy to a crudely hewn door in a wall. This didn’t look like a door that could open, but a covering for a mistake in the brickwork. The key fit the lock and Lucy walked into a walled garden overrun with roses. She waded through waves of scent, lifting rope-like vines of sweetbriar and eglantine out of her path, her steps scattering pale blue butterflies in every direction. Safiye had said that Lucy would laugh at the size of her gift, and perhaps if Lucy had found her there she would have. After all she’d never been given a secret garden before. But the newspapers were saying that this woman who looked like Safiye had killed her employer, and Lucy was very much afraid that it was true and this gift was the reason. At nightfall she considered sleeping among the roses, all those frilled puffs of air carrying her toward some answer, but it was better to find Safiye than to dream. She spent two weeks flitting around the city listening to talk of the killer lady’s maid. She didn’t dare return to the rose garden, but she wore the key around her neck in the hope and fear that it would be recognized. It wasn’t, and she opted to return to Grenoble before she ran out of money. Her gambler was in hospital. There’d been heavy losses at the blackjack table, his wife had discovered what he’d been up to, developed a wholly unexpected strength (“inhuman strength,” he called it), broken both of his arms, and then moved in with a carpenter who’d clearly been keeping her company while he’d been out working on their finances. Still he was happy to see Lucy: “Fortuna smiles upon me again!” What could Lucy do? She made him soup, and when she wasn’t at his bedside she was picking pockets to help cover the hospital bills. They remain friends to this day: He was impressed by her assumption of responsibility for him and she was struck by the novelty of its never occurring to him to blame anybody else for his problems.
—
A FEW WEEKS after her return to Grenoble there was a spring storm that splashed the streets with moss from the mountaintops. The stormy night turned the window of Lucy’s room into a door; through sleep Lucy became aware that it was more than just rain that rattled the glass . . . someone was knocking. Half-awake, she staggered across the room to turn the latch. When Safiye finally crawled in, shivering and drenched to the bone, they kissed for a long time, kissed until Lucy was fully woken by the chattering of Safiye’s teeth against hers. She fetched a towel, Safiye performed a heart-wrenchingly weak little striptease for her, and Lucy wrapped her love up warm and held her and didn’t ask what she needed to ask.
After a little while Safiye spoke, her voice so perfectly unchanged it was closer to memory than it was to real time.
“Today I asked people about you, and I even walked behind you in the street for a little while. You bought some hat ribbon and a sack of onions, and you got a good deal on the hat ribbon. Sometimes I almost thought you’d caught me watching, but now I’m sure you didn’t know. You’re doing well. I’m proud of you. And all I’ve managed to do is take a key and make a mess of things. I wanted to give you . . . I wanted to give you . . .”
“Sleep,” Lucy said. “Just sleep.” Those were the only words she had the breath to say. But Safiye had come to make her understand about the key, the key, the key, it was like a mania, and she wouldn’t sleep until Lucy heard her explanations.
From the first Safiye had felt a mild distaste for the way her employer Señora Del Olmo talked: “There was such an interesting exchange rate in this woman’s mind . . . whenever she remembered anyone giving her anything, they only gave a very little and kept the lion’s share to themselves. But whenever she remembered giving anyone anything she gave a lot, so much it almost ruined her.” Apart from that Safiye had neither liked nor disliked Señora Del Olmo, preferring to concentrate on building her mental inventory of the household treasures, of which there were many. In addition to these there was a key the woman wore around her neck. She toyed with it as she interviewed gardener after gardener; Safiye sat through the interviews too, taking notes and reading the character references. None of the gardeners seemed able to fulfill Señora Del Olmo’s requirement of absolute discretion: the garden must be brought to order, but it must also be kept secret. Eventually Safiye had offered the services of her own green thumb. By that time she’d earned enough trust for Señora Del Olmo to take her across town
to the door of the garden, open it, and allow Safiye to look in. Safiye saw at once that this wasn’t a place where any gardener could have influence, and she saw in the roses a perpetual gift, a tangled shock of a studio where Lucy could work and play and study color. Señora Del Olmo instructed Safiye to wait outside, entered the garden, and closed the door behind her. After half an hour the Señora emerged, short of breath, with flushed cheeks—
“As if she’d just been kissed?” Lucy asked.
“Not at all like that. It was more as if she’d been seized and shaken like a faulty thermometer. I asked her if there was anybody else in the garden, and she almost screamed at me. No! No. Why do you ask that? The Señora had picked a magnificent bunch of yellow roses, with lavender tiger stripes, such vivid flowers that they made her hand look like a wretched cardboard prop for them. Señora Del Olmo kept the roses in her lap throughout the carriage ride and by the time we’d reached home she was calm. But I thought there must be someone else in that garden—the question wouldn’t have upset her as much otherwise, you know?”
“No one else was there when I was,” Lucy said.
Safiye blinked. “So you’ve been there.”
“Yes, and there were only roses.”
“Only roses . . .”
“So how did you get the key?” They were watching each other closely now; Safiye watching for disbelief, Lucy watching for a lie.
“In the evening I went up to the Señora’s sitting room, to see if there was anything she wanted before I went to bed myself. The only other people the Señora employed were a cook and a maid of all work, and they didn’t live with us, so they’d gone home for the night. I knocked at the door and the Señora didn’t answer, but I heard—a sound.”
“A sound? Like a voice?”
“Yes—no. Creaking. A rusty handle turning, or a wooden door forced open until its hinges buckle, or to me, to me it was the sound of something growing. I sometimes imagine that if we could hear trees growing we’d hear them . . . creak . . . like that. I knocked again, and the creaking stopped, but a silence began. A silence I didn’t feel good about at all. But I felt obliged to do whatever I could do . . . if I left a door closed and it transpired that somebody might have lived if I had only opened it in time . . . I couldn’t bear that . . . so I had to try the door no matter what. I prayed that it was locked, but it opened and I saw the Señora standing by the window in the moonlight, with her back to me. She was holding a rose cupped in her hands, as if about to drink from it. She was standing very straight, nobody stands as straight as she was standing, not even the dancers at the opera house . . .”
“Dead?”
“No, she was just having a nap. Of course she was fucking dead, Lucy. I lit the lantern on the table and went up close. Her eyes were open and there was some form of comprehension in them—I almost thought she was about to hush me; she looked as if she understood what had happened to her, and was about to say: Shhh, I know. I know. And there’s no need for you to know. It was the most terrible look. The most terrible. I looked at the rest of her to try to forget it, and I saw three things in quick succession: one, that the color of the rose she was holding was different from the color of the roses in the vase on the windowsill. The ones in the vase were yellow streaked with lavender, as I told you, and the one in the Señora’s hand was orange streaked with brown.”
Lucy mixed paints at the back of her mind. What turned yellow to orange and blue, purple to brown? Red.
“I also saw that there was a hole in the Señora’s chest.”
“A hole?”
“A small precise puncture”—Safiye tapped the center of Lucy’s chest and pushed, gently—“It went through to the other side. And yet, no blood.”
(It was all in the rose.)
“What else?”
“The stem of the orange rose.” Safiye was shivering again. “How could I tell these things to a policeman? How could I tell him that this was how I found her? The rose had grown a kind of tail. Long, curved, thorny. I ran away.”
“You took the key first,” Lucy reminded her.
“I took the key and then I ran.”
The lovers closed their eyes on their thoughts and passed from thought into sleep. When Lucy woke, Safiye had gone. She’d left a note: Wait for me, and that was the only proof that the nighttime visit hadn’t been a dream.
—
A DECADE LATER, Lucy was still waiting. The waiting had changed her life. For one thing she’d left France for Spain. And the only name she now used was her real one, the name that Safiye knew, so that Safiye would be able to find her. And using her real name meant keeping the reputation associated with that name clean. She showed the book of roses she’d made for Safiye to the owner of a gallery; the man asked her to name her price, so she asked for a sum that she herself thought outrageous. He found it reasonable and paid on the spot, then asked her for more. And so Safiye drew Lucy into respectability after all.
Señora Lucy’s separation from Safiye meant that she often painted landscapes in which she looked for her. Señora Lucy was rarely visible in these paintings but Safiye always was, and looking at the paintings engaged you in her search for a lost woman, an uneasy search because somehow in these pictures seeing her never meant the same thing as having found her. Señora Lucy had other subjects; she was working on her own vision of the Judgment of Paris, and Montse had been spending her lunch breaks posing for Señora Lucy’s study of Aphrodite. Montse was a fidgeter; again and again she was told, “No no no no as you were!” Then Señora Lucy would come and tilt Montse’s chin upward, or trail her fingers through Montse’s hair so that it fell over her shoulder just so. And the proximity of that delightful frown clouded Montse’s senses to a degree that made her very happy to stay exactly where she was as long as Señora Lucy stayed too.
—
BUT THESE WEREN’T the paintings that sold. It was Señora Lucy’s lost woman paintings that had made her famous. The lost woman was thought to be a representation of the Señora herself, but if anybody had asked Montse about that she would have disagreed. She knew some of these paintings quite well, having found out where a number of them were being exhibited. Sunday morning had become her morning for walking speechlessly among them. Safiye crossed a snowy valley with her back to the onlooker, and she left no footprints. In another painting Safiye climbed down a ladder of clouds; you turned to the next picture frame and she had become a gray-haired woman who closed her eyes and turned to dust at the same time as sweeping herself up with a little brush she held in her left hand.
“And the garden?” Montserrat asked.
Lucy smiled. “Still mine. I go there once a year. The lock never changes; I think the place has been completely forgotten. Except maybe one day she’ll meet me there.”
“I hope she does,” Montse lied. “But isn’t there some danger there?”
“So you believe what she said?”
“Well—yes.”
“Thank you. For saying that. Even if you don’t mean it. The papers said this Señora Fausta Del Olmo was stabbed . . . what Safiye described was close enough . . .”
—
MONTSE THOUGHT that even now it wouldn’t be difficult to turn half-fledged doubt into something more substantial. She could say, quite simply, I’m touched by your constancy, Señora, but I think you’re waiting for a murderer. Running from the strangeness of such a death was understandable; having the presence of mind to take the key was less so. Or, Montse considered, you had to be Safiye to understand it. And even as herself Montse couldn’t say for sure what she would have done or chosen not to do in such a situation. If that’s how you find out who you really are then she didn’t want to know. So yes, Montse could help Señora Lucy’s doubts along, but there was no honor in pressing such an advantage.
“And what about your own key, Montserrat?”
Lucy’s key gleamed and Mont
se’s looked a little sad and dusty; perhaps it was only gold plated. She rubbed at it with her apron.
“Just junk, I think.”
—
ALL THE SHOPS would be closed by the time Montse finished work, and the next day would be St. Jordi’s Day, so Montse ran into the bookshop across the street and chose something with a nice cover to give to Señora Lucy. This errand combined with the Señora’s long story meant that Montserrat was an hour late returning to the laundry room. She worked long past dinnertime, wringing linen under Señora Gaeta’s watchful eye, silently cursing the illusions of space that had been created within the attic. All those soaring lines from ceiling to wall disguised the fact that the room was as narrow as a coffin. Finally Señora Gaeta inspected her work and let her go. Only one remark was made about Montse’s shamefully late return from lunch: “You only get to do that once, my dear.”
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Page 2
