Obsession (Year of Fire) (88 page)

“When are you leaving?” he asked, his heart racing.

“Next Monday, April sixth. We’re already getting everything ready. Today we’re going to get the vaccine for yellow fever.”

“It’s over, Juana! I’m going to see Matilde even if I have to break down the door to Trégart’s house and drag her back out.”

“Wait, stud. An idea is coming to me. Sofía invited us to have dinner on Saturday because she wants to say good-bye to us. And she’s going to give us some packages for Amélie, her daughter. Why don’t you ask Sofía to invite you to dinner? Then Mat won’t have any option but to see you and you’ll be able to talk.”

Matilde walked into her aunt Sofía’s apartment and spotted him immediately. Al-Saud looked at her and smiled. He wasn’t alone. Yasmín, Sándor and Alamán were with him. She didn’t realize that Ginette was taking off her coat and shika. Juana shrieked, happy to see them, and greeted them jumping up and down histrionically, while Fabrice frolicked around her like a puppy. Sofía and Nando kissed Matilde and led her to the living room. She still didn’t feel in control of herself when Sándor and Yasmín approached her to thank her for what she had done for him in the chapel of the Médaille Miraculeuse. Alamán hugged her and, with his eternal goodwill, got a smile out of her. Eliah moved away from his brother and bent down to greet her. He kissed her near the corner of her mouth, just as he had done in the past, and whispered to her, “Hello, my love. You look beautiful.”

Matilde hurried away and slipped into the group, seeking refuge. Eliah stared at her, heartbroken.

“Chin up,” Alamán urged him. “Soon her anger will pass.”

“Please, take care of what I asked you.”

Alamán nodded and went deeper into the apartment. He found Ginette in the kitchen.

“Tell me, Ginette. Where did you put our coats?”

“In the first bedroom on the right.”

They were on a sofa. He immediately spotted those belonging to Matilde and Juana. If Juana was carrying her phone with her, the matter would be more complicated. He rummaged in her purse and found it. Then he took out the battery and inserted a satellite tracking transmitter the size of a flattened lentil. He put the phone back together and slipped it into her bag. As for Matilde, Eliah had asked him to put it in her shika, which she took with her everywhere. Alamán frowned at it. It wouldn’t be
easy to place the little lentil in this loose fabric. He decided on the strap, which had a little hem. He took out his Victorinox knife and made a little slit at the seam of the strap, where it met the body of the bag. He peeled a label off the minuscule transmitter, pushed it inside and pressed down so it would stick.

Sitting opposite Matilde, Al-Saud looked at her skinny wrists and saw how she pushed the food around on her plate without enthusiasm. Matilde, feeling his gaze fixed on her, urged herself to bolt down tiny pieces of meat and vegetables and to pretend that she was in good spirits. Still, it was hard for her to swallow them; her glottis had closed up. Everyone else was laughing and talking about their trip to the Congo, but she felt an increasing sense of alienation and bottomless anguish. She kept her eyes on her plate and moved them around a very limited radius, until she allowed herself to raise them just a few inches to take in Eliah’s big, dark, hairy hands. She hadn’t been fooling herself, a fleeting glance at them was all it took to imagine them on Celia’s skin. She lifted her chin and looked at his lips, and imagined them running down her sister’s inner thigh. She couldn’t stand that he had been with Celia. When their eyes met, it didn’t matter if Al-Saud saw tears in her eyes because she knew that he would also see fury.

It felt like the longest, bitterest dinner of her life. She wanted to leave. She escaped into the library, where she had seen a phone. She would call Ezequiel and say, “Come to rescue me.” As she was dialing the number, she heard the click of the door closing. She looked over her shoulder and saw Eliah. She finished dialing and, before anyone answered, his index finger ended the connection. She rounded on him with the phone still pressed to her ear.

“How dare you?”

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“I think there is. After everything we went through, you and I, you can’t say that we have nothing to say to each other. You can’t leave without listening to me, without giving me the opportunity to explain myself…”

“Celia already explained very well how things are. And the article in
Paris Match
took care of telling me what you really are.”

It was a low blow and Matilde knew it. She saw the pain in his green eyes and immediately regretted saying it.

“That’s the first time in your life that you’ve been cruel to anyone,” Al-Saud reproached her. “And you had to do it with the person who loves you most.”

“I don’t want to talk anymore.”

Matilde swerved around him and headed toward the door. Eliah grabbed her by the wrist before she opened it. Matilde shook the contact off brusquely.

“Fine, we won’t talk here. Where, then?”

“Tomorrow, at Ezequiel’s house, at four in the afternoon.”

Matilde went back to the dining room with everyone else and Al-Saud stayed in the library to calm himself down. He was alarmed by Matilde’s hardness. He didn’t recognize the resentful, scathing woman he had just spoken to.

It became obvious, from the dark circles around their red-rimmed eyes, that neither of them had had a good night. Matilde held out her hand to indicate that he should sit, and Al-Saud noticed that it was trembling. When he thought of the happiness that they had shared, he had the urge to start screaming out of pain and impotence.

“How is Leila?” Matilde wanted to know, from an armchair all the way across the room from Al-Saud’s.

“Very sad. She’s barely said a word since you left.”

“I’m going to call her tomorrow to say good-bye.”

An uncomfortable silence fell over them. Matilde had her eyes on her intertwined hands as if she was praying, but she heard Al-Saud moving in his seat. He had perched on the edge of the seat and was staring at her fixedly.

“Matilde, my love, I know what happened in the George V was extremely unpleasant. But we can’t let the tantrums of a crazy woman—”

“Let me remind you that that crazy woman is
my
sister.”

“Yes, your sister, who didn’t and doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Why did you lie to me, Eliah? When I asked you if there had been something between you, right here, the night of the party that Trégart threw, you told me you were just friends.”

“Because I wasn’t going to say to you
right here
that we had been lovers. Please, my love,” he said, and left his place to sit next to Matilde, “understand me. Your sister and I were destined to have a fling in the past…”

“She doesn’t refer to it as a fling. She says that you promised to leave your wife.”

“That’s a lie!” he protested, getting upset. “I never,
ever
promised her anything. Both she and I knew that what united us was sex, and nothing more.”

Matilde stood up and moved toward the window. The word
sex
in Eliah’s mouth in reference to Celia was more than she could bear. She lifted the voile curtain and looked down on the street. The peace on Avenue Charles Floquet, the sound of the leaves of the chestnut trees rustling in the wind and the far-off bark of a dog worked on her mood like a sedative. She closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted. She thought of sending Al-Saud packing, of running to her room, diving into bed and staying there asleep until so much time had passed that she had forgotten these three months in Paris.

Al-Saud crept up stealthily so as not to frighten her and put his hands around Matilde’s tiny waist. He bent down and nuzzled her hair with his nose, reaching down to her neck so he could kiss and smell it. Matilde noticed that he had put on A*Men; she hadn’t put on any perfume, not even the Upa la-lá.

“My love,” he whispered passionately, “you don’t know how much I miss having you in my life. I love you so much. I can’t stand this separation. The pain is killing me. Let’s get out of here and start to live our lives together.”

The way Matilde got rid of his hands and moved away from him, with a delicacy indicative of her control and determination, filled him with fear.

“You lied to me too much, Eliah. You hid your long romance with my sister and never confessed the true nature of your business to me.”

“There’s nothing between Céline and I.”

“But there was, don’t tell me that there wasn’t. For a relationship to last so long, there must have been more than sex.”

“Matilde, I’m going to say something that will sound chauvinist to you, maybe even simple-minded, but a man knows he’s in love with
a woman when he only wants to make love to her and everyone else simply ceases to exist. That has happened to me, in the length of my thirty-one years, only once: when I met you. I only want you, I only want to make love to you, I only want to be with you. No one else.

In spite of herself, Matilde believed him.

“You didn’t tell me what you really do.”

“You didn’t tell me that you suffered from a disease when you were sixteen and that you can’t have children.” Instinctively, Matilde turned her back on him to hide her shame. “Why didn’t you ever talk to me about that?”

“Once, when you told me you were a pilot,” she said, forcing herself to breathe, “I asked you if you had been in any wars. You answered yes, but that you didn’t want to talk about it because it didn’t bring back good memories. I’m saying the same thing to you now: I don’t want to talk about that. For me, the battle against cancer was the war I had to fight and I don’t remember the experience fondly.”

“Were you going to mention it to me at some point?” he asked, with an undercurrent of anger and sarcasm. “When were you planning on telling me you couldn’t have children?”

“Never!” She rounded on him so violently that Al-Saud startled. “I wasn’t planning on telling you ever because I knew that sooner or later our relationship would have to end. The thing with Celia at the George V just sped up the inevitable.”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean by that?”

“That when I went to the Congo, we were going to end. We don’t have a future. I don’t trust you. Every woman that came near you drove me insane with jealousy. On the other hand, there’s my career, which is paramount for me.”

“Do you mean to say that while we were loving each other, while we were sharing what we shared, you knew that you were going to break up with me?” Matilde nodded, without looking up, but when she heard the parquet creak, she made herself look at him. Her soul sank to the floor. Al-Saud was putting on his jacket. It was clear that he was leaving. “You deceived me, Matilde. I never imagined you could be so cold and calculating. You used me like a fool. You used me. You’re no better than your sister Céline. At least she was always sincere.”

Matilde saw him open the door to the little sitting room, cross the hall and leave the apartment. A strange thing happened when something upset her—she thought about something stupid and meaningless.
I don’t recognize those black pants. They look good on him.
She was afraid to move. If she started with movement, everything else would follow and she felt as though she didn’t have the strength to do it. When she saw Ezequiel standing in the doorway, looking at her sadly, Matilde fought the urge to cry. The more she repressed it, the harder it got, and the tension in her body made her tremble. Finally, her vision clouded over, her resistance ceded and she crumpled to the floor, where she suffered a breakdown that brought tears to Ezequiel’s eyes. He ran to curl up next to her and console her. Juana watched them from the door, swept the back of her hand over her eyes impatiently and ran to get her agenda. She had to make a call.

“Snicks?” That was all that was left from her “Snickers” nickname for Alamán.

“Yes, Juani. What a surprise. I wasn’t expecting your call.”

“I’m sorry to bother you. Are you busy?”

Alamán, standing naked next to the bed, glanced at the woman he had just had sex with.

“Busy? Not at all. What do you need?”

“Could you come pick me up from Trégart’s and take me to Eliah’s? It’s urgent.”

“I can come in an hour, does that work for you? Let me write down Trégart’s address.”

They got to Al-Saud’s house at seven in the evening. Juana was afraid he wouldn’t be there.

“You ring the bell. I’m scared if I say it’s me, he won’t want to see me. He was blowing smoke out of his ears when he left Trégart’s house.”

Leila opened the door and emitted an exclamation when she saw Juana. They hugged.

“Where’s Matilde?”

“Ohhh, Leilita! She fought with Eliah. It’s very bad.”

“I want to see her.”

“We’re going to the Congo tomorrow. I don’t think there will be time. Is Eliah here?”

The girl nodded and said, “Gymnasium.”

“I’ll stay downstairs so you can talk quietly,” said Alamán.

Juana went up the stairs that were so familiar to her. She did so slowly, appreciating every detail of the eccentric Art Nouveau decoration and smiled, thinking of how happy they had been during those weeks in the strange house on Avenue Elisée Reclus.

Even through the closed gymnasium door, Juana heard Al-Saud’s exclamations as he exercised. She inched the door open without making a sound. Eliah, in white karate pants and a naked torso, was kicking a long bag of sand hanging from a steel wire set up on a system of poles that allowed him to move it from one side of the dojo to the other. She had tried to move it for fun, and thrown herself at it with punches and kicks, without budging it an inch. So when Al-Saud, letting out a shout, kicked it and made it slide a few feet along, Juana had an idea of exactly the type of rage that was dominating him. She was afraid of him. Nonetheless, she went in.

“Hello, stud.”

Al-Saud was doubled over so that his torso almost brushed his knees and was breathing with difficulty, but he turned his head from there and looked at her with hatred. He straightened up with deliberate slowness and wiped his forehead with a towel before speaking.