The next day, after Fausta had brought him his lunch, I wrote: “I should not have been like that to you—Rude and thoughtless maid from the library” on a piece of paper, ran up to his rooms and pushed the note under his door. And I stayed away from the library for a while, only returning when the chatter of the books reached me where I slept in the maids’ dormitory on the other side of the house. He wasn’t there that night, but when I went to my shelf of choice to take down Galileo, I saw a slip of paper sticking out of the neighboring book. The slip read: “To the pretty thief—read this book, and then look for more.”
I loved some of the books he chose, others sent me to sleep. I turned his slips of paper over and wrote down my thoughts. One of the books he chose was a slim pamphlet of poetry that didn’t make much sense to me: I dismissed it with a line borrowed from other poems he’d introduced me to: It may wele ryme but it accordith nought. He responded with a really long and angry letter—I think he must have been the author of those poems I didn’t think were good.
Isidoro wouldn’t come near me, even when I began to want him to. We’d spend nights reading together, on separate sides of a shelf, not speaking, listening to the books around us. According to Stendhal it takes about a year and a month to fall in love, all being well. Maybe we fell faster because all was not well with us: every day it got harder for me to keep you to myself, and he could not forget that he was dying; he fought sleep until the nightmares came to take him by force. He fell asleep in the library one night—he had done this twice before, but out of respect for him I had left using a route that meant I could pass him without looking at him. But when I heard him saying: “No, no . . .” I went to him without thinking and leaned over him to try to see whether I should wake him. He was younger than the look in his eyes suggested. I don’t know what his sickness was—it had some wasting effect—even as I saw his face I saw that its beauty was diminished. You can read character in a sleeping face, and his was quite a face. The face of a proud man, vengeful and not a little naive, a man with questions he hadn’t finished asking and answers to some questions I had myself. He opened his old man eyes and took a long, deep breath, as if breathing me in. It must have looked as if I was about to kiss him. Our faces were very close and curtains of my hair surrounded us; if we kissed it would be our secret to keep. I kissed him. Then I asked if it had hurt. He said he wasn’t sure and that we’d better try it again. And he kissed me back. I didn’t want to leave him after that, but I had to be back in bed by the time the other maids began to wake up.
Montserrat, I wrote that being in love with your father was nice, but being in love with Isidoro Salazar was like a dream. Not because of money or anything like that—! The man loved foolishly and without regard for the time limit his learned doctors had told him he had; he made me feel that in some way we had always known about each other and that he would be at my side forever. When Fausta Del Olmo took me aside and asked: “Is there anything you want to tell me?” my blood should have run cold, but it didn’t. After all she could have been asking about the pregnancy.
Beyond Isidoro’s staircase is a door that connects to a walled garden. The garden is Isidoro’s too: he planted all the roses there himself and took care of them until he got too sick to do anything but just be there with them of an evening. We were often there together. It’s a long walk from the top of the garden to the bottom, and I’d carry him some of the way. Yes, on my back, if you can imagine that. He was drowsy because of his medication—he had to take more and more—but even through the haze of his remedies he remembered you. “The baby!” I told him you didn’t mind (you don’t, do you?) and that his weight was balancing me out. He grew more lucid when we lay down on the grass. He was so fond of the roses; one night I told him that he wouldn’t die, but that he would become roses.
“I wouldn’t mind this dying so much if that were true,” he said, slowly. “But wait a minute . . . roses die too.”
“Well, after that you’d become something else. Maybe a wasp, because then you could go around stinging people who don’t like your poems.”
It was around that time that I kept finding gifts on my bed. Little gifts, but they got bigger and bigger. A mother of pearl comb, a calfskin purse, a green cashmere shawl. I told Isidoro to stop giving me gifts. The other servants were asking about them. Isidoro simply smiled at first, but when he asked me to show him the gifts I saw that he was perplexed and that they hadn’t come from him.
“Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?” Fausta Del Olmo asked, and maybe it was just a beam of sunlight that struck her eye, but I thought she squinted at my stomach. She added that the master would return in two weeks’ time. I didn’t even answer her. Suddenly she pushed me—if I hadn’t clutched the stair rail I would have fallen—and as she passed me she hissed: “Why should it be you who sees him?”
That afternoon I found the last gift under my pillow. It was a diamond ring. I put the box in the pocket of my apron and kept it there until nighttime, when I went to the library. I showed the ring to Isidoro and asked him what I should do. He said I should marry him. He had instructed Fausta Del Olmo to put the ring beneath my pillow; he was sure that she had been responsible for the other gifts, even though they were nothing to do with him. She was planning something, but it didn’t matter, or wouldn’t if I married him.
“Time is of the essence,” Isidoro said. All I could do was look at him with my mouth wide open. And then I said yes. He said I must fetch a priest at once, and I didn’t know where to find a priest, so I went and woke Fausta Del Olmo up and asked her to help me. She gave me the oddest look and said: “What do you want a priest for?”
“I’m marrying Isidoro Salazar tonight,” I said.
“Oh, really? And I suppose he’s the father of your child too?” she whispered, her eyes glinting the way they do when she gets hold of a secret at last.
“Please just hurry.”
Fausta Del Olmo put on her coat and slippers and ran out to fetch a priest, and the man of God arrived quickly; he was calm and had a kind face and took my hand and asked me what the trouble was. “But didn’t you tell him, Fausta, that this is a wedding?”
Fausta shrugged and looked embarrassed and I began to be frightened of her all over again. Something was wrong. I took the priest to the library, and Fausta Del Olmo followed us. Isidoro wasn’t there, but when I opened the library door, a door at the far, far end of the room slammed shut. Isidoro had seen Fausta and escaped into the rose garden. I went after him, but Fausta and the priest didn’t follow me—they were talking, and Fausta was pointing at something . . . I now realize it was the door to Isidoro’s rooms that she was pointing at.
Isidoro wasn’t in the garden; after searching for him I went back into the library, which was also empty. I could hear a lot of noise and commotion in the rest of the house, footsteps hurrying up and down the wing where Isidoro’s rooms were. I saw his rooms, the inside of them, I mean, for the first time that night. The priest Isidoro and I had sent for was praying over a waxen body that lay in the bed. When the priest finished his prayers he said that I must not be afraid to tell him the truth, that no one would punish me, that I’d done well to send for him.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“This man has been dead for at least a day. No, don’t shake your head at me, young lady. See how stiff he is. He’d been very ill, poor soul, so this is a release for him. You came here this morning and found him like this, isn’t that what happened? And your master is away, so you worried all day about who to tell and what you would say until the worry made you cook up this story in your head about a wedding. Isn’t that so?”
All the servants were listening, but I still said no, that he was wrong. I put my hand in my pocket to take out my ring and show it to him, but the ring was gone too.
“My ring,” I said, turning to Fausta Del Olmo, who replied in the deadliest, most gentle voice: “What
ring, Aurelie? Be careful what you say.”
After that I stopped talking. I looked at the body in the bed and told myself it was Isidoro and no one else. This was a truth that I had to learn, things would go very badly for me if I refused to learn it, but the lesson was very hard indeed.
The priest left, promising to write to the master as soon as he got home, and all we servants went to bed. Fausta was the last to leave Isidoro’s room, closing the door behind her as quietly as if he was just sleeping. Then she took my arm and dragged me downstairs to the maids’ dormitory, where judge and jury were waiting. Was I mad or was I simply a liar? They’d already taken out the little gifts I’d received and were talking about them: Now Fausta told them where the gifts had come from. I’d taken the key to the library from the master’s laundry, she announced, and I’d been selling off a number of his valuable books. I inferred from this that this is what Fausta herself had been doing before I’d interrupted her with my library visits.
“But how stupid, to spend the money on things like this,” the cook said, flapping the green shawl in my face.
“Some people just don’t think of the future,” Fausta Del Olmo said. A couple of the other maids hadn’t joined in and looked as if they didn’t entirely believe Fausta Del Olmo. Perhaps they’d had their own problems with her. But then Fausta announced that even Isidoro Salazar had known I was a thief. She showed them some of the slips of paper Isidoro had left for me in the library, slips he must have left that time I stayed away. The words “pretty thief” persuaded them. The master is a generous man and stealing from him causes all sorts of unnecessary difficulties. Now that some of his books are gone he may well become much less generous. The servants drove me out of the dormitory. They went to the kitchen and took pots and pans and banged them together and cried: “Shame! Shame! Shame!” I stayed in my bed for as long as I could with my covers pulled over my head, but they were so loud. They surrounded my bed, shame, shame, shame, so loud I can still hear it, shame, shame, shame. I fled, and Fausta and the servants chased me through the corridors with their pots and pans and screeching—someone hit me with a spatula and then they all threw spoons, which sounds droll now that it’s over, but having silver spoons thrown at you in a dark house is a terrifying thing, you see them flashing against the walls like little swords before they hit you. It would’ve been worse if those people had actually had knives: they’d completely lost their minds.
I made it into the library by the skin of my teeth and locked the door behind me. I wrote, am writing, this letter to you, my Montserrat. The servants have given up their rough music and have gone to bed. You will be born soon, maybe later today, maybe tomorrow. I feel you close. I know where I will have to leave you. As for this letter, I will give it to the roses, and then I must get out of here for a while. How long? Until I am sure of what happened, or at least the true order of it all. Did I somehow give him more time than he would have had on his own? The entire time I have been writing this letter I have felt Isidoro’s eyes on me. He seems to be telling me that we could still have been married, that if I’d only brought the priest and not Fausta we could still have been married. Of course he cannot really be telling me anything: I have seen him as a dead man. Why am I not afraid?
Montse found that she’d walked the length of the library as she read her mother’s letter. Now she stood at the door to Isidoro’s garden, which opened with the same key. Outside, someone in the shadows took a couple of startled steps backward. Señora Lucy.
“I saw all this light coming out from under that door,” Lucy said. “That was new.” She peered over Montse’s shoulder. “Swap you a rose for a book,” she said.
“sorry” doesn’t sweeten her tea
/
To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely
To you who sleep a lot because you are bored
To you who cry a lot because you are sad
I write this down.
Chew on your feelings that are cornered
Like you would chew on rice.
Anyway life is something that you need to digest.
—CHUN YANG HEE
Be good to Boudicca and Boudicca will be good to you,” Chedorlaomer said. Boudicca and I eyed each other through the blue-tinted glass of Ched’s fish tank, and I said: “Tell me what she is again?”
To the naked eye Boudicca is a haze of noxious green that lurks among fronds of seaweed looking exactly like the aftermath of a chemical spill. But Ched’s got this certificate that states Boudicca’s species is Betta splendens, colloquially known as Siamese fighting fish because fish of this kind have a way of instigating all-out brawls with their tank mates. It’s almost admirable. Boudicca doesn’t care how big or pretty her fellow fish are; if they come to her manor she will obliterate them, whether that means waiting until the other fish is asleep before she launches her attack or, in the case of a fish that simply refused to engage with her, eating the eggs that the other fish had spawned and then dancing around in the water while the bereaved mother was slain by grief.
So now Boudicca lives alone, which is exactly what she wanted all along.
I get this vibe that Ched the eternal bachelor sees Boudicca as a fish version of himself, but he’s never said that out loud, at least not to me. We don’t have those kinds of talks. Even if Ched and Boudicca are on some level the same person, the fact remains that the man is able to feed himself and the fish needs someone to see to her nutrition a couple of times a week.
Ched called me over to tell me he was going away for two years and he expected me to take care of Boudicca. Twice a week for two years! Plus Ched’s house is spooky. The House of Locks, it’s called. That’s the actual address: House of Locks, Ipswich, Suffolk. He travels a lot and I have his spare set of keys for use while on best friend duty, watering his house plants when he used to have house plants, collecting post, etc., but when I’m in there I don’t linger. Nothing has actually happened to me in there. Not yet, anyway. But every time I go into that bloody house there’s the risk of coming out crazy. Because of the doors. They don’t stay closed unless they’re locked. Once you’ve done that you hear sounds behind them; sounds that convince you you’ve locked someone in. But when you leave these doors unlocked they swing halfway out of the doorframe so that you can’t see all the way into the next room and it’s just as if somebody’s standing behind the door and holding it like that on purpose. The windows behave similarly—they won’t fully open unless you push them up slowly, with more firm intent than actual pressure. Only Ched really has the knack of it. Apparently the house’s first owner took a particular pleasure in fastening and releasing locks—the feel and the sound of the key turning until it finds the point at which the lock must yield. So for her the house was a lifetime’s worth of erotic titillation.
—
IT’S A NICE HOUSE for Ched too, in that it’s big and he got it on the cheap, and anyway he’s not really comfortable in overly normal situations. As it is he hears voices. Nobody else hears these voices but they’re not just in Ched’s head, you know? In this world there are voices without form; they sing and sing, as they have from the beginning and will continue until the end. Ched borrows their melodies: That’s the music part of the songs he writes. For words Ched uses rhymes from our village, the kind that nobody pays attention to anymore because they advocate living by a code that will surely make you one of life’s losers. A lot of stuff about living honestly and trying your best. Even if you only have one tiny job to do, do it well, do it well, do it well . . .
These songs of Ched’s turned out to be a hit with a lot of people outside our country. Ched got Internet famous and then magazine famous and all the other kinds of famous after that. It was fun to see. His mother still says to me: “But don’t you think people overreact to our Chedorlaomer? These girls screaming and fainting just because he looked at them or whatever. He’s just some boy from Bezin.”
&
nbsp; That’s the power of those true voices, man.
And now that you know that Ched and I are from a small village that might make you say Oh OK, so that’s why this guy believes in voices he’s never heard. But trust, living in a small village in a country that’s not even sure it’s really a country you see a lot of shit that’s stranger than a shaman (which is what Ched is, or was, before he started making money from the voices). Every day there was news that made you say “Oh really.” Some new tax that only people with no money had to pay. Or yet another member of the county police force was found to have been an undercover gangster. If not that then a gang member was found to have been an undercover police officer. An Ottoman-style restaurant opened in a town nearby; it served no food but had a mineral water menu tens of pages long, and fashion models came to drink their way through it while we played football with their bodyguards. Speaking even more locally there was this one boy at our school who had quite a common first name and decided to fight every other boy in our postal code area for the right to be the sole bearer of that name—can you imagine? I was one of the boys on his hit list, and I was already getting picked on because I didn’t have a father. But what a ridiculous place we were born into, that fatherlessness was a reason why people would flick a boy’s forehead and say insulting things to him, then pile on four against one when he took offense . . . it’s not our fault we’re ridiculous people, Ched and me. How could we be anything else?
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Page 4
