—
MONTSE WENT HOME to the room and bed she shared with three other laundry maids more or less the same size as her. She and her bedfellows usually talked until they fell asleep. They were good friends, the four of them; they had to be. That night Montse somehow made it into bed first and the other three climbed in one by one until Montse lay squashed up against the bedroom wall, too tired to add to the conversation.
—
WHILE MONTSE had been making up her hours the other laundry maids had attended a concert and glimpsed a few of La Pedrera’s most gossiped about couples there. For example, there were the Artigas from the third floor and the Valdeses from the fourth floor, lavishing sepulchral smiles upon each other. Señor Artiga and Señora Valdes were lovers with the tacit consent of his wife and her husband. Señora Valdes’s husband was a gentle man many years older than her, a man much saddened by what he saw as a fatal flaw in the building’s design. The lift only stopped at every other floor; this forced you to meet your neighbors as you walked the extra flight of stairs up or down, this was how Señora Valdes and Señor Artiga had first found themselves alone together in the first place. It was Señor Valdes’s hope that his wife’s attachment to “that popinjay” Artiga was a passing fancy. Artiga’s wife couldn’t wait that long, and had made several not so discreet inquiries regarding the engagement of assassins until her husband had stayed her hand by vowing to do away with himself if she harmed so much as a hair on Señora Valdes’s head. Why didn’t Artiga divorce his wife and ask Señora Valdes to leave her husband and marry him? She’d have done it in a heartbeat, if only he’d ask (so the gossips said). Señor Artiga was unlikely to ask any such thing. His mistress was the most delightful companion he’d ever known, but his wife was an heiress. No man in his right mind leaves an heiress unless he’s leaving her for another heiress. “Maybe in another life, my love,” Artiga told Señora Valdes, causing her to weep in a most gratifying manner. And so in between their not so secret assignations Artiga and Señora Valdes devoured each other with their eyes, and Señora Artiga raged like one possessed, and Señor Valdes patiently awaited the vindication of an ever-dwindling hope, and their fellow residents got up a petition addressed to the owners of the building, asking that both the Artigas and the Valdeses be evicted. The conserje and his wife liked poor old Señor Valdes, but even they’d signed the petition, because La Pedrera’s reputation was bad enough, and it was doubtful that this scandalous peace could hold. Laura, Montse’s outermost bedmate, was taking bets.
—
ON THE MORNING of St. Jordi’s Day, before work began, Montse climbed the staircase to the third floor. To Lucy from her Aphrodite. The white walls and window frames wound their patterns around her with the adamant geometry of a seashell. A book and a rose, that was all she was bringing. The Señora wasn’t at home. She must be in her garden with all her other roses. Montse set her offering down before Señora Lucy’s apartment door, the rose atop the book. And then she went to work.
—
“MONTSERRAT, have you seen the newspaper?” Assunta called out across the washtubs.
“I never see the newspaper,” Montserrat answered through a mouthful of thread.
“Montserrat, Montserrat of the key,” Marta crooned beside her. The other maids took up the chant until Montse held her needle still and said: “All right, what’s the joke, girls?”
“They’re talking about the advertisement that’s in La Vanguardia this morning,” said Señora Gaeta, placing the newspaper on the lid of Montse’s workbasket. Montse laid lengths of thread beneath the lines of newsprint as she read:
ENZO GOMEZ OF GOMEZ, CRUZ AND MOLINA AWAITS CONTACT WITH A WOMAN WHO BEARS THE NAME MONTSERRAT AND IS IN POSSESSION OF A GOLD KEY ONE AND ONE HALF INCHES IN LENGTH.
Without saying another word, the eagle-eyed Señora Gaeta picked up a scarlet thread an inch and a half long and held it up against Montse’s key. The lengths matched. Señora Gaeta rested a hand on Montse’s shoulder, then walked back up to the front of the room to inspect a heap of newly done laundry before it returned to its owner. The babble around Montse grew deafening.
“Montse don’t go—it’s a trap! This is just like that episode in Lightning and Undetectable Poisons—”
“That’s our Cecilia, confusing life with one of her beloved radio novellas again . . . so sordid an imagination . . .”
“Let’s face it, eh, Montse—you’re no good at laundry, you must have been born to be rich!”
“Montserrat, never forget that I, Laura Morales, have always loved you . . . remember I shared my lunch with you on the very first day?”
“When she moves into her new mansion she can have us all to stay for a weekend—come on, Montse! Just one weekend a year.”
“Ladies, ladies,” Señora Gaeta intervened at last. “I have a headache today. Quiet, or every last one of you will be looking for jobs in hell.”
Montse kept her eyes on her work. It was the only way to keep her mind quiet.
—
THE SOLICITOR ENZO GOMEZ looked at her hands and uniform before he looked into her eyes. Her hands had been roughened by harsh soap and hard water; she fought the impulse to hide them behind her back. Instead she undid the clasp of her necklace and held the key out to him. She told him her name and he jingled a bunch of keys in his own pocket and said: “The only way we can find out is by trying the lock. So let’s go.”
—
THE ROUTE they took was familiar. “Sometimes I go to an art gallery just down that street,” Montse said, pointing. He had already been looking at her but when she said that he began to stare.
“You sometimes go to the Salazar Gallery?”
“Yes . . . they exhibit paintings by—”
“I don’t know much about the artists of today; you can only really rely on the old masters . . . but that’s where we’re going, to the Salazar Gallery.”
Gomez stopped, pulled a folder out of his briefcase, and read aloud from a piece of paper in it: Against my better judgment but in accordance with the promise I made to my brother Isidoro Salazar, I, Zacarias Salazar, leave the library of my house at 17 Carrer Alhambra to one Montserrat who will come with the key to the library as proof of her claim. If the claimant has not come forth within fifty years of my death, let the lock of the library door be changed in order to put an end to this nonsense. For if the mother cannot be found, then how can the daughter?
Enzo put the folder back. “I hope you’re the one,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of Montserrats in this capacity today, most of them chancers. But you—I hope it’s you. Are you . . . what do you know of the Salazar family?”
“I know that old Zacarias Salazar was a billionaire, left no biological children but still fathers many artworks through his patronage . . .”
“You read the gallery catalog thoroughly, I see.”
A gallery attendant opened the main gate for them and showed them around a few gilt-wallpapered passages until they came to the library, which was on its own at the end of a corridor. Montse was dimly aware of Enzo Gomez mopping his forehead with a handkerchief as she placed the key in the lock and turned it. The door opened onto a room with high shelves and higher windows that followed the curve of a cupola ceiling. The laundry maid and the solicitor stood in front of the shelf closest to the door. Sunset lit the chandeliers above them and they found themselves holding hands until Gomez remembered his professionalism and strode over to the nearest desk to remove papers from his briefcase once again.
“I’m glad it’s you, Montserrat,” he said, placing the papers on the desk and patting them. “You must let me know if I can be of service to you in future.” He bowed, shook hands, and left her in her library without looking back, the quivering of his trouser cuffs the only visible sign of his emotions.
Montse wandered among the shelves until it was too dark to see. She thought that if the place was really
hers she should open it up to the public; there were more books here than could possibly be read in one lifetime. Books on sword-swallowing and life forms found in the ocean, clidomancy and the aurora borealis and other topics that reminded Montse how very much there was to wonder about in this world: There were things she’d seen in dreams that she wanted to see again and one of these books, any of them, might lead her back to those visions, and then further on so that she saw marvels while still awake. For now there was the smell of leather-bound books and another faint but definite scent: roses. She cried into her hands because she was lost: She’d carried the key to this place for so long and now that she was there she didn’t know where she was. The scent of roses grew stronger and she wiped her hands on her apron, switched on a light, and opened the folder Enzo Gomez had handed her.
This is what she read:
Montserrat, I’m very fond of your mother. I was fond of everyone who shared my home. I am a fool, but not the kind who surrounds himself with people he doesn’t trust. I didn’t know what was really happening below stairs; we upstairs are always the last to know. Things could have been very different. You would have had a home here, and I would have spoiled you, and doubtless you would have grown up with the most maddening airs and graces. That would have been wonderful.
As I say, I was fond of everyone who lived with me, but I was particularly fond of Aurelie. I am an old man now—an old libertine, even—and my memory commits all manner of betrayals; only a few things stay with me. Some words that made me happy because they were said by exactly the right person at exactly the right time, and some pictures because they formed their own moment. One such picture is your mother’s brilliant smile, always slightly anxious, as if even in the moment of delighting you she wonders how she dares to be so very delightful. I hope that smile is before you right now. I hope she came back to you.
Please allow me to say another useless thing: Nobody could have made me believe that Aurelie ever stole from me. The only person who could possibly have held your mother in higher esteem than I did was my brother, Isidoro. He told me I should give my library to her. Then he told me she’d be happier if I gave it to her daughter. Do it or I’ll haunt you to death, he wrote. The rest of this house is dedicated to art now; it’s been a long time since I lived here, or visited. But the library is yours. So enjoy it, my dear.
Zacarias Salazar
PS: I found Aurelie’s letter to you enclosed among my brother’s papers. I am unsure how it got there.
Aurelie’s letter made Montse stand and walk the paths between the shelves as she read, stopping to sit in the cushioned chairs scattered across the library’s alcoves. She kept looking up from the page, along the shelves, into the past.
Dear Montserrat,
I should make this quick because I’m coming back for you, so really there’s no need for it. I suppose really I’m writing this to try to get my brain working properly again. It will be hard to let you go even for a little while, but Isidoro thought that even if worse comes to worst (which it won’t) the library key will bring you back here somehow.
I’ll tell you about your key: A wish brought it to me. It was my birthday, my thirtieth birthday, and Fausta Del Olmo was the only one who knew. There are people who are drawn to secrets as ants are to jam. Fausta’s one of them. She searches out all things unspoken and unseen—not to make them known, but to destroy them so that nobody knows they ever existed. That’s what makes her heart beat faster, the destruction of invisible foundations. Why? Because she finds it funny. The master once told us about a cousin of his, a lovely, cheerful girl, but touched in the head, he said. This cousin committed suicide one day, quite out of the blue. She did it after talking to her friend on the telephone. That friend now spends her days searching her brain for those disastrous words she must have said, and has become ill herself. As our master was telling us this I watched Fausta Del Olmo out of the corner of my eye. She was laughing silently, but the master didn’t notice until Fausta’s laughter grew so great that she began to choke. She explained that she was overcome by the sadness and the mystery of it all, and she made the sign of the cross. By then I was already so frightened of her that I didn’t dare contradict her. There’s no stopping Fausta because she believes in hell. The master thinks this belief in hell keeps her on the straight and narrow, but the truth is she’s so sure she’s going there that she doesn’t even care anymore. When Fausta brought me a little cake with a candle in it and told me to make a wish I wanted to say no. It’s stupid but I didn’t want Fausta to know my birthday, in case she somehow had the power to take it away. If she made it so I was never born I’d never have had a chance to be me and to hear your father’s honey-wine voice and to fall in love with him. He ran off, your father, and if I ever find him I won’t be able to stop myself from kicking him in the face for that, the cowardly way he left me here. I didn’t yet know I was pregnant, but I bet he knew. He must have developed some sort of instinct for those things. He once said, “Babies are so . . .” and I thought he was going to say something poetic but he finished: “expensive.”
I should be making you understand about the key! When I blew out my birthday candle I wished for a million books. I think I wished this because at that time I was having to force my smiles, and I wanted to stop that and to really be happier.
The master has a husband, Pasqual Grec. Not that they were married in church, but that’s the way they are with each other. Some of the other servants pretend they’ve no eyes in their heads and say that Pasqual is just the master’s dear friend, but Fausta Del Olmo says that they definitely share a bed and that since they are rich they can just do everything they want to do without having to take an interest in anybody’s opinion. Your key doesn’t seem to want me to talk about it, but I will. I will. The master is not an angry man, but he’s argumentative in a way that makes other people angry. And Pasqual is an outdoorsman and doesn’t like to wait too long between hunts; when he gets restless there are fights—maybe three a week. The master retires to the library for some time and takes his meals in there, and Pasqual goes out with the horses. But when the master comes out of the library he’s much more peaceful. I thought it must be all the books that calmed the master down. Millions of books—at least that’s how it looks when you just take a quick glance while pretending not to be at all interested. And the day after I made my wish the key to the library fell into my hands. The master had left it in the pocket of a housecoat he’d sent down to me in the laundry. Of course it could have been any key, but it wasn’t. The key and the opportunity to use it came together, for the master and Pasqual had decided to winter in Buenos Aires. I was about four months pregnant by then, and had to bind my stomach to keep you secret and keep my place in the household. I went into the library at night and found peace and fortitude there.
I didn’t know where to begin, so I just looked for a name that I knew until I came to a life of Joan of Arc, which I sat down and read really desperately. I read without stopping until the end, as if somebody were chasing me through the pages with a butcher’s knife. The next night I read more slowly, a life of Galileo Galilei that took me four nights to finish because his fate was hard to take. I kept saying, “Those bastards,” and once after saying that I heard a sound in another part of the library. A library at night is full of sounds: The unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious. But the sound I heard wasn’t the sound of a book. It was more like a suppressed cough or a sneeze, or a clearing of the throat, or some convulsive, impulsive mix of the three. Everything became very still. Even the books shut up. I looked at the shelf directly in front of me; I read each title on it, spine after spine. There was a gap between the spines, and two eyes looked out of it. Not the master’s, or Pasqual’s, not the eyes of anybody I could remember having met.
I found the courage to ask: “What are you doing here?”
“What are YOU doing here
?” asked the man. I could hear in his voice that he wasn’t well, and then fear left me; I felt we both had our reasons.
“Can’t you see I’m reading?” I said. “Maybe you should read too, instead of SPYING on people.”
“Maybe I should,” he said. “It’s just that I thought you might be like the other one.”
“The other one?”
“Yes. But don’t tell her you’ve seen me.”
“Why not?”
“Because then she’d know that I’ve seen her . . . and I don’t want her to know that until I’ve spoken to my brother.”
“Your brother?”
“Too much talking, pretty thief. I have to rest now. But promise you won’t tell her.”
He didn’t need to describe her; it had to be Fausta he was talking about. I didn’t even want to know what she’d been up to.
“I’m not a thief,” I said. “And I won’t say anything to her. I haven’t seen you, anyway. Only your eyes.”
“Well? What do you think of my eyes, pretty thief?”
“They are an old man’s eyes,” I answered, and I held the Life of Galileo up in front of my face until I heard him walking away. He walked all the way to the back of the library, and up some stairs—I hadn’t known there was a staircase in the library until I heard him going up it—look, Montserrat, and you’ll see that there is one, built between two shelves, leading up to a door halfway up the wall. Through that door is a wing of the main house that only a few of the servants were familiar with, though we all knew that Isidoro Salazar, the master’s younger brother, lived in that part of the house. Lived—well, we knew the man was dying there, and did not wish to be talked to or talked about. A special cook prepared his meals according to certain nutritional principles of immortality that a Swiss doctor had told the master about, and Fausta had told us how she laid the table and served the meals in Isidoro’s rooms. He waited in the next room while she did it, and no matter what he ate or didn’t eat he was still dying. When I thought about that I worried that my words might have added to Isidoro’s troubles.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Page 3
