The Last Resort (12 page)

What a terrible waste of time,
I said to myself. Such good upbringing, such delicacy, and for what? To end up as the little weekend tart of a man like Antonio Sánchez López? All you had to do was look at Sánchez López (or just plain Sánchez, or on occasion Antonio S., as Fernanda indicated) to see that he was a horse of an entirely different breed, a man who belonged to that exceedingly ambitious elite that I don’t quite know how to describe. “From another world,” as my mother would have said—she always had such a sweet way of identifying social differences. Short in stature, he had a fairly large head. In fact, just about all of him could be summed up in that head, which was attached to his cylindrical, compact physique like a little canister of gas. His outfit was very similar to that of the herd leader, except that his parka was a far more intense shade of hunter green, the quilting far more expensive, and the suit underneath was very well cut and exceedingly urban. No sporty attire for him—no, no. Everything about his outfit seemed to scream out to the world, “Now, I want you to know, goddamnit, that I have gone straight from the office to the plane—I haven’t got time for things like changing clothes. I’m far too busy for things like that.”

If you studied him closely, the man’s outfit was truly perfect, but tackiness has a way of showing up in the least conspicuous accessories. Socks, for example. And in the case of Sánchez, it was a pair of thin nylon knee-highs that revealed just what kind of a man he really was. It is a crying shame, but social climbers do tend to take an awfully long time to correct the sock problem. And so, despite the darkness, Sánchez’s socks sang out
La Traviata
—or perhaps
I Pagliacci
would be more appropriate—given that they were sheer and highly flammable, like the cheapest DuPont products.

I made a little bet with myself right then, and I knew I wouldn’t be wrong. This man was a journalist. A fashionable journalist, the kind who earns a fortune by destroying everything that moves. Later on, thanks to Fernanda, I learned that he was actually a radio personality and not a journalist per se but rather one of those famous ayatollahs of the airwaves—on average, four million ears hung on to his merciless diatribes every week.

Nevertheless, according to some additional information that my niece included in the third fax she sent (or was it the fourth? I’ve lost track, there were so many flying back and forth that week), our hero was much higher up the food chain than I might have guessed judging by his sock choice. I had a lot of fun reading Fernanda’s version of Antonio S.’s romantic résumé: She had a terribly funny way of setting it up and recounting his various adventures. It seemed that this Sánchez was quite the man about town in Madrid, someone who elicited very mixed reactions: disdain, fear, and a substantial amount of hypocritical admiration. I’d better just summarize what Fernanda told me, though, because the love life of Antonio Sánchez López is so typical that it doesn’t deserve more than one or two lines.

Apparently, after dumping the saint who had protected and cared for him during his leaner years, Antonio S. hooked up with a wealthy Catalan girl, the daughter of a baron and something of a black sheep herself. All very convenient for this radio announcer. And so the two set up housekeeping together. Because he was such a modern sort of a guy.

Now, according to Fernanda, this rich Catalan girl was the eldest of her brothers and sisters, and thanks to a little law granting women the right to inherit noble titles, Sánchez might have been able to crown his stellar career by adding a tiny heraldic shield to it, a shield that he could have had embroidered on his custom-made shirts had he so desired. But being the elegant man he was, he chose not to marry the girl. Because he was still such a modern sort of a guy.

Sánchez was a man whose destiny was not marriage—his destiny was to open the eyes of his People, for they were incapable of seeing the Truth. They needed someone to tell them what to think, someone to explain things to the masses, if you will—a person who could tell you why this or that VIP’s position was reprehensible, a person who was not afraid to call someone a thief or a charlatan, a person who could make the airwaves tremble with the irrefutable truth that all of them out there are crooks,
et tout ça, et tout ça.

As the years rolled by—the frivolous eighties, the nineties, and then the new millennium—it seemed that people were yearning more and more for someone who could tell them what to think about the scandals and trends of the moment, and naturally Sánchez was on hand to fulfill such an illuminating (and lucrative) mission. He proceeded along in this manner, interrupting his diatribes only to insert a brief plug for Pepsi or J&B—or any other brand-name product, as long as the properly exorbitant per-minute sum was paid. This is how he became a crucial element of this very holy crusade. There are more nuances to his story, however, and they emerge when you look at it from a psychological point of view, which to me is ultimately the most interesting one. As it turned out, once his need for iconoclasm was satisfied, once he had become rich, famous, and properly feared, Sánchez suddenly discovered—Ali Kazam!—that what he really wanted was to do
precisely
all the things he had so harshly criticized when he was little Mr. Nobody (
que j’adore ça
). And that is the most infallible social rule I know. For that reason, Sánchez now played golf with the masters of the universe. For that reason, Sánchez now wore a quilted jacket just like all the other pretty boys of Puerta de Hierro. And if on this trip (and many others, I imagine) he had left the baron’s daughter behind in Madrid in favor of a timid little blonde, it was no ordinary case of marital infidelity, no, no. The reason for this (
Fernanda dixit
) was that following his unstoppable rise to the top, Sánchez had realized that the baroness had some serious drawbacks: She was a bit too
much
of a black sheep, it turned out. Way too black for such a fashionable man. Because instead of playing tennis like all the other ladies, or giving
sevillana
classes, or embarking on some other respectable, sensible activity that was appropriate to a woman of her class and stature, it seems that the baroness decided to take up jewelry design. Very avant-garde jewelry: necklaces that looked astonishingly like strings of melons, earrings in the shape of penises,
des choses horribles
that, to make matters worse, she insisted on wearing to the very elegant parties (including royal receptions) that, more and more, the Sánchez couple was invited to attend. For the baroness, however, this was not satisfying enough as an expression of her artistic talents and so she had recently taken to doing things like dying her hair lilac and painting her lips green, things that were not nearly as amusing to Sánchez now as they might have been at another time in his life. Conclusion: Of late, Antonio Sánchez, who had worked so very hard to represent the implacable conscience of Spanish society, found himself forced to seek solace in other women, bored to death of squiring this horrible woman about town.

Whether he had found his solace in the timid blonde or not no one would ever really know, given the manner in which the vacation ended. Until now, however, nothing irrevocable had happened. The encounter between these four people and Mercedes Algorta at L’Hirondelle was unfortunate, because all of them knew one another far too well. It turned out, for example, that the leader of the pack (Bernardo was his name, followed by one of those last names that has resounded imperiously in the world of banking, finance, or industry) was married to Mercedes’s first cousin, and the blonde clone (named Bea) was the ex-wife of one of Mercedes’s second cousins. The other blonde, for her part, was separated from her husband, and though she had very little relation to my widow friend, she was a very dear friend of Isabella, the bad girl I had heard about from Fernanda at the restaurant in London. This was all very simple and very cozy, because with people like that, adultery tends to be very incestuous.

Nevertheless, this new road map of sorts took a while to fall into place before my eyes. Until I was able to piece together a conversation that began only after Mercedes had stood up and left the restaurant (“Good-bye, good-bye, lovely to see you all . . .”), all I really thought when I laid eyes on the recent arrivals was:
Oh, thank God. More guests, finally.
Now I had four more candidates to choose from in my search for a backgammon partner who might help me while away the time at L’Hirondelle. And despite the vow of silence that still prevailed over our hotel, I figured that the moment would come when I would be able to tempt one of them into a game. Between one mud wrap and the next, between the sulfate baths and the therapeutic water jets, I knew that all good intentions regarding clean living couldn’t last much longer than two or three days. And that was when I would approach them. I even had my victim picked out. Would Sánchez be well versed in the rudiments of backgammon? Surely he would. And yet, as things turned out, I never did have the chance to roll the dice with him. Very soon—immediately, you might say—my interest in parlor games began to take a backseat to other matters. When I describe what I heard next, you will understand exactly how and why all board games and gambling were suddenly unimportant. And that is because another pastime, far more interesting and amusing, had suddenly opened up for me.

How to Wipe a Bloodstain from a Table Covering

Blood on a table covering, which may be the result of an accident with a carving knife or even murder, need not be a source of concern. Nor should one have to trouble one’s guests by changing the tablecloth as people did years ago, if one treats the affected fabric immediately by rubbing it very forcefully with warm water that has been steeped in Brussels sprouts.

—Notes from the kitchen of Leonardo da Vinci (1483)

Bloodstained Tablecloths

“So how would you like to hear the story of a bad girl? Oh, don’t worry now, Bea, I’m not talking about
you,
darling. Everybody in the world knows about you, sweetheart. No, I mean a real witch, you know the kind, a real bitch, trust me . . .”

Have you ever noticed the terrible assaults on syntax you witness when eavesdropping on other people’s conversations? Utter monstrosities. Other people’s conversations, especially when heard from a nearby dinner table, always sound so perfectly dreadful.

“One of these days . . .” continued the man, in a loud, clear voice, “you will learn the real story about Mercedes Algorta, and it will knock you on your ass, trust me. Bernardo, all of you—the pillars of what the great unwashed refer to as ‘good society’ will tremble to their foundations. Trust me on that.”

Antonio Sánchez was sitting with his back to me, and it is always difficult to understand people’s conversation when you can’t see their eyes. But his voice rang out loud and clear. It was no doubt extremely well honed thanks to the thousands of radio tirades he had delivered in his career.

Since I was unable to look at his face, I decided to inspect the back of his neck. He had a little ring of baldness at the very tip-top of his head, a pasty surface that began at the very center of his cranium. When viewed head-on, Sánchez’s head seemed blessed by a good, very full mat of hair, but when viewed from behind, an unexpected shock of bare skin exposed a sheaf of rosy-colored wrinkles, just like an accordion, whenever the conversation grew intense.

“Listen to me, Bernardo, forget about it. If you’re worried that she’s caught you and Bea
in flagrante
here, I’m telling you, forget about it. Our little Mercedes has plenty of reasons—more than you know—to keep her little mouth shut. Trust me on that. I know what I’m talking about.”

This, I believe, was when I was first disturbed by the way he used diminutives: little Mercedes, little mouth . . . There are some people whose friendly diminutives always come out sounding crueler than their insults. But I still had a bit more listening to do.

“Shit, Sánchez, if you have something to say about someone, just say it already. I can’t stand the way you people ‘in the know’ go around talking about people as if you knew all their secrets and then, when it comes time to talk, you go and act all mysterious. If you want to tell us something, tell us, and if not, then just be quiet. Nobody is in the mood for it. Trust me on that, all right?” That was Bea, the blond clone, imitating him.

I was able to see Bea because she was facing Antonio S. and thus looking straight at me—or rather straight
through
me like the incorporeal being I was, her eyes firmly fixed on a neighboring wall. She looked extremely annoyed, and just as she buried a ring-laden hand in her left cheek, I jumped up a bit in my chair. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but she was one of those new, inflatable-looking women, the kind you don’t ever want to touch for fear of puncturing them and causing an explosion of silicone or oil or plastic or some other synthetic material.

“What exactly do you mean, a story about a bitch? What bitch?” she asked, sighing and looking up at the ceiling as three rings dug mercilessly into the flesh of her cheek. “Make it entertaining at least, will you? Because we all know it’s going to be a bunch of lies anyway . . .” And just when it seemed she was about to finish off her sentence with some kind of final comment, she pulled her fingers away from her cheek. Her thoughts must have wandered onto another, far more interesting topic, because she seemed to be weaving a series of ideas together.

“We all know it’s going to be a bunch of lies. Shit, this is serious, very serious . . . and you, Bernardo, some brilliant idea you and your friend had to go looking for an ‘out of the way’ hotel—well, just look at this place. It can’t be out of anybody’s way if the first person we run into is a woman we’ve known all our lives!”

“That’s right, all our lives,” echoed the other blonde woefully.

“Oh, stop it with the ‘all our lives!’ ” That was the leader of the pack. “You never even see each other.”

“We have known one another all our lives—same school, same coming-out party, same everything. Of course, maybe that doesn’t sound like much to you!”