Lilia's Secret (16 page)

The next morning he ambled into the kitchen. Angela was at the table with Teresa, their arms coated in flour.

‘What time did you get up, Angie?' he asked.

‘Six,' she said.

‘Early for you, isn't it?'

‘I was woken up by a cart and a donkey braying right outside my window. Teresa was already in the kitchen on her way to the market, so I went with her.'

‘That's great,' was all he could find to say.

‘It
was
great. When we got there it was still dark, and then suddenly the sun came up and everything shone. People pushed and shouted. By eight o'clock rush hour was over. It's really something, isn't it?'

‘Yeah – lively.' He hadn't been to the market before dawn. Sometimes he'd wandered down in the lethargy of the afternoon to pick up some extra fruit, but people sat around in a slow, sweating torpor. He'd thought they were like that all the time. And the fruit was dull and listless, with plenty of flies buzzing in drunken circles. It had made his stomach turn. He'd made a point of ostentatiously swishing the flies away to show the sellers how vigilant they should be.

He didn't like her finding out things about Aguasecas that he didn't know. It was only a matter of time before she'd start asking questions about Lilia and they'd probably talk to her, with her flippy blonde hair and piercing eyes. He didn't want her to know more about Lilia than he did. The town belonged to him, not to her.

It felt like a failure between them, all over again.

He decided to take Angela to Santa Clara to see the house where the famous painter Juan de Silva was born. There wasn't much to see inside his small house – a few bare rooms with
white walls and a rope surrounding the coarse wooden furniture, making slim corridors for the tourists.

This was his moment, he'd decided. He was going to be a father to her. They looked at the little wooden chair where de Silva had sat as a toddler, and the big stove in the corner.

Bill wondered how to start. After five sweating minutes he realised that she was quiet too, and the silence between them started to pulse. There was just the sound of their feet scuffing on the bare floorboards as they moved through the rooms.

In the end Angela started first. ‘Dad, why are you so “not there”?'

‘What do you mean?' He kept his eyes on the table.

She turned to look straight at him. ‘Just what I said.'

‘Well, I'm here now,' he said, trying to pass it off as a joke.

‘Are you?' she said, shaking her head in disbelief.

And there it was – an exposed sore between them, and he couldn't argue with it. He hated hearing it, but it was the thing he'd known since he'd retired. He wasn't there, had never been there, not since he was eight years old. And the weight of it crushed everything.

He couldn't look at her. She wanted something more from him, but he didn't know what it was. The lace tablecloth was blindingly white, like his knuckles. He moved into the next room after her.

‘It's hot in here,' he said. ‘I'll meet you at the café we passed in the square.'

She didn't look up.

When she joined him there was a watery look in her eyes. It was his turn not to look. He did try to make it up to her. He took her bag as they got on the bus back to Aguasecas. He
went to help her aboard, but she jumped ahead of him. She stared out of the window and he counted the spots on the back of the seat in front of him.

Resentment about her intrusion into his life in Aguasecas was a small, curled thing inside him. He wasn't supposed to feel it, he was her father. But he wished she'd talk about leaving.

‘What's wrong?' Magdalena asked me.

‘Look at her face,' she directed Padre Miguel. ‘So white.'

I had to work hard to push away the haze between us.

‘A pregnant woman like you should not be travelling,' Magdalena clicked her tongue.

I straightened. ‘I'm not pregnant!' I said angrily.

Magdalena raised one eyebrow, as I silently calculated. No, I couldn't be. Then I had a flashback to the two perfect feet of the small child under the bush. I rested my forehead on the table and shut my eyes.

They had been slender and beautifully formed, the way children's feet are. I loved to watch my nieces and nephews naked, running under the sprinkler in summer. The fragile strength of their young bodies awed me. I don't know how parents can live with that kind of confident fragility.

Maybe my vision was showing me that there was a child buried under that bush. I scratched my wrist.

‘She can take herself to the doctor,' Magdalena was arguing with Padre Miguel.

‘No, we should call your brother-in-law's cousin. He's not far.'

I sat up. ‘I'm fine, really, I'm fine.' I smiled. ‘It's just a surprise – such an incredible secret.'

Magdalena gave me some water and I sipped down the coolness. Padre Miguel was looking sheepish, as if he hadn't expected the news to have had such an effect.

‘So where …' I began, but Padre Miguel hushed me. ‘That's enough now. You need to calm down.'

I sat there for a few moments wanting to scratch my wrist. Finally I had to break the silence. ‘I guess,' I said to Magdalena, ‘I need to know the whole story, rather than imagining what might be true.'

Padre Miguel laughed, a little nervously.

‘So, my husband?'

‘He is the Doña's great-grandson, which means his grandfather was El Tigre,' she whispered.

‘Magdalena, stop the dramatics,' Padre Miguel broke in. ‘You can see she's not up to them.'

Magdalena shuffled through the pages of the scrapbooks until she came to the one she was looking for. She shoved it towards me. ‘Front page,' she said. The headline read: ‘El Tigre – Trapped at Last.'

‘But this is a national newspaper,' I said, confused.

‘He was famous,' Magdalena said. Padre Miguel nodded with her. ‘Ask anybody in Mexico, they'll know of him. A famous
bandido
. The worst. The very worst,' Magdalena finished in a whisper. Padre Miguel shot her another look.

‘What did he do?' I asked.

‘Many bad things.' Magdalena looked around to see if anybody had slipped in. ‘They say he once skinned a man alive
with his own knife. And when he finished, he dipped the knife in a cup of water and drank the water.'

We shuddered.

‘Is he still alive?' I asked.

She flicked through the pages of the scrapbook and showed me several, turning them over slowly. ‘No More Peacocks for El Tigre,' one headline read. I read it out loud, not trusting my understanding. Magdalena broke in. ‘Yes, he used to keep his own peacocks inside jail. This is making a joke, saying he could still live a wealthy, privileged life in prison, but now that he's dead he'll be just like the rest of us.'

I looked at the date of the newspaper article: 3 March 1984.

‘Who is Javier and Juan's mother?'

Magdalena sat back and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Amalia? We didn't know her, she came from another region. She disappeared after the boys were born. I suppose she went back to her town.' She shrugged again. ‘But nobody knows for sure,' she finished in a low voice, making me shiver.

‘There's something else,' I said, looking at Padre Miguel.

He shook his head. ‘I haven't said anything; you must tell her,' he said. I turned to Magdalena. ‘I saw a small pair of feet under a bush in Lilia's courtyard.'

‘
Dios mio
.' Magdalena crossed herself. ‘You think this could have something to do with Lilia?'

‘Me? I don't know what to think anymore.'

Magdalena put her hands together and paused for a moment. ‘You need to find out. Why did those boys think Lilia was their mother and what happened to Amalia, and Lilia's own baby girl.'

Padre Miguel laughed at Magdalena. ‘I knew you'd crack,'
he said. ‘Finally you come to the table to taste all the juicy morsels.'

Magdalena flushed. ‘Does she look like she is leaving to you? Better that she does this quickly and then we can all get back to normal.'

‘Shit, Maddy. Where have you been?' Andrés said down the telephone line. There was a stripe of anger through his words.

‘I'm in Aguasecas,
amor
,' I said. ‘The only international telephone booth is a long way away, in Santa Maria.'

‘What the
hell
are you doing there? It's been four days, Maddy, four days, since you called.'

I hunched over in the glass cubicle, away from anybody who may be watching. There was a line of people sitting against the wall on the wooden benches provided. They had that torpor that comes with a long wait in oppressive heat. I caught one man's eyes. He wore a grubby white T-shirt over his protruding stomach. From the droop of his thick lower lip I wondered if he was quite right in his mind. I quickly looked away before he thought we'd made a connection.

‘I'm trying to find out about Lilia.'

‘
Why
?' His voice seemed a long way off. ‘This is ridiculous. She means nothing to you.'

‘Your sisters asked me to,' I said.

‘And if they asked you to take up smoking, would you?'

I shrugged but all he heard was silence.

His voice dropped. ‘Come home,' he said.

‘Not yet,' I said, my voice matching his. ‘This is important.'

I heard Andrés sigh. ‘She's not the one you should be looking for, Maddy,' he said. He sighed again wearily. ‘Come home, baby. I miss you.'

‘I miss you, too,' I murmured. ‘But there are things I need to finish here. Listen, I have to tell you what I know already.'

‘Don't do this, Maddy.'

‘You don't own me. Do you want to hear what I've found out or not?'

‘This is bullshit, Maddy. What the hell is going on between us? Are you telling me it's over?'

‘Over?' I gasped. ‘It's not over. It's nowhere near over.'

‘Are you sure, Maddy? What makes you think I'll sit here in Sydney like a lamb waiting for you to decide when to come back?'

A slice of cold went through me. I looked up and saw the man with the protruding lip take a swig from a Corona. I wondered if Andrés had been drinking. Because I didn't drink much I was slow to pick the warning signs. I'd be talking, knowing something was wrong but, being unable to account for it, would continue to drive along on the surface of the conversation when a savvier person would have pulled away.

I'd never spent much time in smoky pubs with bleary-eyed people. You couldn't rely on them to stick to the rules. They were like waves lapping at the shore before landing a dumper out of the blue, leaving you wet and bruised and half drowned. So while my friends were at the pubs at university, I was at the café.

I remember sitting in our pink Holden, parked outside the pub, waiting for Dad to finish drinking. Mum, being a woman, wasn't allowed in, and neither were we. So Dad would be
inside tossing down the beer, undisturbed by the thought of the hard face of his wife in the front seat, or the squabbles of his too many children in the back seat.

Mum and Dad drank beer together sitting on the back porch at the tail-end of a stinking hot 40°C day. The dark would settle around us, deeper and deeper, but nobody moved a muscle towards bed, knowing that sleep was impossible inside our old weatherboard heat-box, even with all the windows and doors open.

Drink was one of the reasons I stayed away from Mum now. My sisters told me that she often drank alone at night.

Andrés wasn't often drunk, but he liked to drink. It was the way he worked out his problems: a big bender and then he'd be all right in the morning. But he could be a nasty drunk, and so it wasn't always all right in the morning, because I would be remembering what he'd said the night before as if it were God's own truth and not unreliable ramblings.

‘Perhaps I could ring you again tomorrow and we could talk then,' I suggested.

‘I don't know where I'll be tomorrow,' he said, with another stab at me.

‘I'll try anyway.' I tried to wrap up the conversation.

‘If it's not too much trouble for you to get the bus,' he said.

‘I'll probably stay in town tonight.' I was trying to keep my tone light.

‘You need to talk to your mother,' he said. ‘She's been calling.'

‘What does she want?' I asked in a tight voice.

‘I'm never here,' he said. ‘Messages on the machine.'

I didn't say anything.

‘You didn't tell her you were going away, did you, Maddy? What possessed you? Why couldn't you tell me where you were?'

When I still didn't say anything, he spat, ‘You're a bloody nutcase,' and hung up.

We'd never hung up on each other before. We'd crossed a line and I didn't know what it meant. Part of me wanted to ring him back and tell him I'd be on the next flight. But there was a bang on the glass of my window booth and the man with the protruding lip was pressed against it, his belly squashed flat against the glass, inches away from me. Two men grabbed him and shoved him back into his chair. I got out of the booth, paid my money to the woman at the register, who barely looked at me, and got out of there as fast as I could.

After catching the bus back to Aguasecas I was too jangled to go back to Marta's. Instead, I prowled streets I'd never taken before, noticing the unevenness of the cobblestones, the way a vine grew over one door, a child jumping up on his father through a window. I was an outsider. I itched my wrist until bloody scraps of skin stuck under my fingernails, and I wiped the scabby bits on my trousers. In a blur I found a tree just beyond the houses in the village, collapsed beside it and sobbed.

I wanted Andrés's arms around me but he was in another country. What had I done to us? I felt as I though I was on another planet high above the stars where nobody else existed and there was barely air to breathe. I don't know how long I was out there, but gradually my shoulders stopped heaving. I was left with weightlessness, lightheaded with exhaustion and lying on the ground like a baby abandoned in the dark. If I
ever had a baby I'd be a terrible mother. I'd hover, and I'd resent the need to hover, and the baby wouldn't know what was up and what was down. And I wouldn't know and it would all be a big mess.

Eventually the ridges of dirt on my face prickled me. I reached up and wiped the saliva and snot and tears away with the bottom of my T-shirt. At least my face was dry again. I lay there a few minutes more, letting the stones bite into my bottom, but the punishment didn't make me feel any better.

The evening had set in and the sky was a dark blue. It was impossibly lovely. If I was a magic princess I would want a dress in exactly that shade and I'd pull it out of the sky and wrap myself in it. Instead I was in filthy trousers and a disgustingly filthy T-shirt, sitting on the hard ground on the outskirts of a town in which nobody wanted me. My beloved husband, my anchor, was so pissed off he might decide I was more trouble than I was worth. And I was unable to sleep because of two tiny feet under a bush.