The Last Resort (16 page)

“Nonsense!” I cried aloud as a halo of common sense appeared above my head. “Why, that is the craziest of all the ideas I have heard, so crazy that not even Antonio Sánchez could have dreamed it up, and his talent for sniffing out scandal is far better honed than my own.”

Pine needles, it seems, do not give up so easily, for they hastily interrupted my thoughts:

Sánchez and his friends have not seen the bracelet on Mercedes’s wrist—only you have, Rafael Molinet. What would you bet that she doesn’t put it back on for the rest of her vacation at L’Hirondelle? Letting your husband die can be as easy—and as brazen—as keeping his lover’s bracelet as a kind of trophy. It is all so easy. And that little item proves everything. Only you know the true story of Mercedes Algorta, just as only you know the true story of that other bad girl, long ago. Now
that
is the real reason you care so much about meddling in this affair: because of the strange resemblance between Mercedes and . . .

All right, enough. I am not meddling in anything—I was just curious, that’s all, and bored after all those days with nothing to do. Curiosity and boredom, that’s all. There was nothing at all strange about the way Valdés died. It’s all just malicious conjecture. Gossip, simple and vulgar gossip . . .

Just like that other time, isn’t that right? The gossip spread like wildfire that other time, too, didn’t it? But only you knew the truth. And now, almost forty years later, here you are again, the sole witness to a new series of facts. But what are you going to do with the facts this time around?

“What facts?” I ask. I am so gullible: One should never respond to questions as impertinent as these, even if they are posed by ancient memories that weigh heavily on the soul. I know nothing about these people—I can’t even be sure if Mercedes’s bracelet is the same as the one on Isabella’s wrist in the fax Fernanda sent me, because it came out so blurry. I could ask my niece for a clearer photograph, but to do that I would have to
want to know,
and that is the furthest thing from my intentions—I don’t want to know about any bracelet. I don’t! I tell myself.

What are you going to do with these facts?

It was those damn pine needles again, questioning me, heeding none of my protests.

You claim to have taken an interest in Mercedes Algorta simply out of curiosity, but who are you kidding? Lies. There is nothing more foolish than a man who lies to himself, and you have been lying to yourself for . . . how many years now? Forty? Oh, just admit it, Molinet—after all, what does it matter at this stage in the game? You’re already dead. Or are you going to tell us that you’ve also forgotten the reason you came to L’Hirondelle in the first place? Because we’ll be glad to remind you: Two weeks and, then—ciao, au revoir, good-bye cruel world . . . Your entire stash of sleeping pills . . .

The entire stash? Yes, that’s what the pine needles had said, with a remarkably southern sounding accent, a very old accent that had been lodged somewhere deep in my memory. That was when I realized I was half-asleep: Suddenly I was on another continent, in another country, in a very long-gone era. The pine needles were still there, though, staring at me from the walls, from the bedspread—so very formal and so very enigmatic, a diffuse canopy of leaves that was as thick as the goddamn Birnam wood that was prepared to fulfill its prophecy. And I saw them on the walls, barely illuminated by the moon. They were quiet and still for the moment, but they didn’t fool me, not for a minute.

Despite my best efforts, my eyes slowly began to fall closed and I was soon enveloped in slumber.

How to Behave in Front of a Mirror

As we study our movements while standing in front of a mirror, we must always remember that the elegant woman shall always aim to achieve a harmonious whole of her many disparate parts. Practice your smile before the mirror. Recite certain phrases that you employ in the hope of achieving a particular effect. There are some words that, when pronounced, make the movements of the mouth far more attractive and delightful.

—Countess Drillard,
On Being Elegant,
On Being Lovely

With a Silver Mirror in Hand

Dreams, both the good and the bad kind, have a way of blurring everything. Even the cruelest ones, the ones we struggle so valiantly against, are never very sharply focused; their wretchedness may frighten their victims, but they never do any real harm; rather, they circle around and around their victim but never deliver the definitive blow. Why, it almost seems as if dreams wish to inspire curiosity as well as fear—a dose of sour followed by a dose of sweet, imposing fear and ambiguity all the way through.

I would have been far happier to have had an utterly cruel, crystal-clear dream, the searingly lucid kind that jolts you awake in a cold sweat, with your eyes popping out of your head, still seeing whatever ghastly vision made them open so wide in the first place. But, alas, that was not my dream; that was not my punishment.

It began, as I remember it, in a thunderous rather than a visual manner. In my dream, I suddenly found myself in Montevideo, on the first and last night that we would spend in the great house at El Prado, the estate that had belonged to my father’s family and which had just been auctioned off for a miserly sum of money.

I never loved that house, because it had always felt so foreign to me. Only he could have loved it. Only Bertie could feel the loss of the house he’d been born in. Of course, in practical terms, he had spent very little time living there. Ever since marrying Mama he had moved around a lot, in Europe mostly. And as he played the role of the rich young dandy in places like Paris and London, the old family house had fallen into decline, swallowed up by the gardens that had once been beautiful but which had slowly degenerated into an overgrown tangle of burrs and thick tree branches that spread everywhere in a labyrinth of twists and knots, and wildflowers that covered everything in a kind of crazy natural blanket. There is nothing quite so brutal as nature gone mad. You could see how the bluebells fought against the grass to see who could do a better job of hiding the shape of the outer balconies and the stucco columns around the house. For this reason, by the time I laid eyes on the house, it was virtually impossible to tell what it had been like in its glory days, for the building had been swallowed up on all sides by all that rapacious foliage. Only the front door was visible, and that was only thanks to the efforts of my father’s manservant, Gomez, who was as loyal as a puppy dog—though that was about the only thing that Gomez had in common with such a sweet animal. It was Gomez who had unleashed his machete on the dense underbrush and cleared a path to the front door. All of that, of course, was to indulge my father’s dream of spending one last night in the place—yet another one of his extravagant fantasies that nobody dared protest. Through that very same door Bertie, Mama, and I were to leave the house the next day, never to come back to El Prado. The door had witnessed the exodus of the majority of the furniture, which, like the house itself, had been sold off at rock-bottom prices. Even the most ludicrous offers had been readily accepted. All that remained of the furniture—chairs, a table or two, some beds, and a grandfather clock—lay shrouded beneath sheets that had once been white, though by now they were nothing but rats’ nests. And yet I saw none of this in my dream, for it began with sounds rather than images.

“Gomez, tell little Rafael that he will have to tend to the house and look after his mother for a few hours. Tell him that a boy of his age shouldn’t be afraid of anything. He’s fifteen years old now.”

That was how Bertie always talked to me. He never spoke to me directly, even if I was standing right in front of him. One of his very few ideas that I actually agreed with.

“Tell him, Gomez,” the voice thundered in the vestibule, and despite the chaotic nature of dreams that begin with sounds instead of images, I do think that I began to see myself there at the entrance to the house at El Prado, just to the left of the great grandfather clock whose tick-tock would survive everything that was about to happen. I believe I was hiding behind the stairway, trying in vain to insert my knee between two of the vertical bars that extended down beneath the banister, even though at fifteen I was clearly too old for such childish behavior. “And, Gomez. Be ready to leave at seven on the dot. We have a long trip ahead of us.”

We have a long trip ahead of us. That was precisely the expression he used when he would gallivant around Europe, making up all those stories in which Gomez, faithful hound dog to the end, was used as an alibi, an accomplice, or a stupid excuse. And it was all so unnecessary, because my mother had long since stopped caring about where my father went in that dark suit and hat of his, just as he did that night, leaving a trace of cologne on the sheet-shrouded furniture, that scent of sophistication leaving its mark on a decrepit house that otherwise smelled of mold and rot.

From there the dream grows foggy again, and the events unfold in a jumbled manner. I do not see Bertie leave the house or get into his car with his usual officious air, as if instead of going to a whorehouse he was paying a visit to a notary or a government minister. Gomez may be nodding his head laconically, as I have seen him do so many times before, sitting on the passenger’s side. Yes, yes, his very dimwitted head bobs up and down like that of a great big dog.

The dream then jumps ahead, because that is what dreams do—they jump from here to there and back again until they land on something horrible that makes you see all the things you’d rather avoid. It is pitch-black in the house, because the electricity has gone out, and we have no choice but to light candles if we want to move around at all. For this reason my mother has gone to bed early. “Sleep well, Mama.” “You too, darling, and please don’t forget to blow out the candle. It frightens me, you know. What if you fall asleep? It could start a fire or . . .”

It must be dawn by the time my father returns home. I know this for sure thanks to the damn grandfather clock that chimes on the hour, the half-hour, even the quarter-hour, counting out the time in a way that makes it feel denser and longer—much, much longer. The clock has just struck four-thirty. I hear it from my bedroom one floor above. It has been hours now and I still can’t seem to fall asleep—who could possibly fall asleep with that clock lying in wait, and those rats rustling about, so horribly close by? Sometimes you can hear their tiny claws scratching away at the wood, sickeningly soft little scrapes, and other times they moan in a way that is almost human-sounding, and it makes my hair stand on end. Two flights of stairs separate me from my father now. I can hear him below, in the vestibule at the bottom of the stairs. My mother has chosen to spend the night in a bedroom on the second floor, between me and my father. But I can tell that Bertie is not walking in that direction. No, he is heading further upstairs, to the floor where I have supposedly been sleeping for many hours now. But I am wide awake.

I can hear two other voices in addition to my father’s. One of them is Gomez’s. He’s saying things like “Yeth thir, yeth thir,” in that irritating lisp I always despised. The other voice, much sharper than Gomez’s, grows louder and louder until it is eventually muffled by an admonishing, alcoholic “Shhh!,” a masculine cackle that I know all too well.

The laughter rises. I can hear it coming my way. One of the people is a woman, and I don’t know who she is, but it doesn’t matter, for I have heard that same laugh so many times before, in so many different languages, and it’s always the same: the sound of cheap liquor and seaport music, tinkling away like the sound of coins hastily shoved into a lady’s cleavage, pressed tight inside a ratty bustier. The other laugh, the cackle I know so well, is probably buried in that abovementioned cleavage, because I can’t hear it very clearly anymore. And Gomez, at his side, continues to bark “Yeth thir, yeth thir,” and when I try to figure out what is going on, I begin to hear everything much more clearly: the tick-tock of the grandfather clock racing toward the next quarter-hour, followed by the laughter that once again is quickly stifled, and more words that I can hear easily now that they are coming from a room very close to my own, disrupting the silence. Only one flight of stairs separates them from my mother’s room, and I pray to God that she is asleep, that she has somehow managed to drift off despite the moldy smell, despite the rats, despite everything.

And once again I hear my father’s voice ring out: “We can’t stay in this room, Gomez. Stay with the young lady here, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Yeth, thir . . .”

“I have to find something more respectable than this. There must be a halfway decent room somewhere in this goddamn house.” And the voice that sounds like tinkling coins repeats the phrase: “goddamn house.” I think I detect a foreign accent, Polish perhaps, or maybe from somewhere else. It is an educated voice that is nonetheless betrayed by that tinkling, singsong laughter. My father’s footsteps thump down the hallway, moving closer and closer. I pray that the lock on my door is not quite as rotted as the rest of the goddamn house, because I doubt Bertie remembers which room I decided to sleep in—why would he?—and I don’t want him coming in here, for there are certain things he would be better off not seeing. And so I run toward the closet, to hide the things I’ve borrowed from the house. And I can hear my father’s footsteps approaching.

“Aren’t there any decent beds in this goddamn house?” A door very close to mine opens and then slams shut with a curse. “Nothing here, either, goddamnit. There’s got to be some room . . .”

I can no longer hear the tinkling seaport laughter or Gomez’s panting, either. What I do hear is the sound of Bertie’s firm hand trying to open one door after another. Please, please, I beg silently. Just a few more minutes so that I can get myself out of these things.

What did they think I would do in a room full of trunks piled high with old clothes, crinoline petticoats, and lacy underthings, still bright white, and beautiful dresses from long ago? What did they think I would do in such a lonely house with so many treasures lying all around? I have almost managed to remove the dress. When the petticoats fall to my feet I am naked, completely exposed but for a lace garter belt that I can’t quite manage to undo. This is what my father sees when he flings open the door, and this is what I see now in my jumbled dream: the half-open garter belt, with four ribbons dangling down. Garters that slap against my thighs like a cruel joke, concealing none of the things I wish to conceal. The very heavy silver mirror in my hand casts a glow of light from the left side of the dressing table all the way to the door, and I can see all of this in my dream, just as I can see my father’s face, distorted from so much alcohol, unable to utter the one word that would make him feel so much better: “faggot.” The word is stuck in his throat and sends a tremor through the candles illuminating the room but nevertheless, it does not emerge from his mouth. All he can do is rip the garter belt off my body, and as I watch it fall to the floor, I can hear Gomez cry out from two or three rooms away: