The Last Resort (2 page)

Fernanda was thirty-five years old, but she had an adolescent air about her, the kind that made people think her much younger than she actually was. She had a wide face, clever eyes, and a mouth that smiled often enough to reveal a row of teeth with just a few too many gaps. None of her features could be called perfect in the strict sense, but the overall result was not at all unattractive.

He knew that face of hers, for he had seen thousands like it before, in magazines as well as in real life, where the passage of time always seemed to manifest itself so remorselessly. It was the kind of face that always reminded him of Mickey Rooney. Masculine or feminine, it was a face with adorable chubby cheeks, a snub nose, and smooth dimples that lasted well-past age thirty, when, little by little, wrinkles would etch their way into the skin before time erased those childlike features and turn her into an elderly-looking elf.

Fernanda, however, had not quite begun to pay that steep price for her seemingly eternal youth. Also, she seemed to have a predisposition for seeing everything in life as a kind of amusing joke—she had a dispassionate way of speaking and wasn’t afraid to laugh at herself from time to time. In this manner she regaled her uncle with the details of her life, in the very best manner of the relative one sees on very few occasions.

By the time Fernanda decided it was time to get her uncle up-to-date on her present life, Molinet was already thinking about other topics—the trip he was taking the following day, for example. As such, he only registered bits and pieces of his niece’s storytelling. He vaguely heard something about Fernanda’s children, three big boys of various ages, none of which he could remember, and about how they took lots and lots of classes.

“You can’t even imagine all the classes: piano, judo, tennis, horseback riding, karate, and God only knows how expensive it all is. It’s a nightmare, I’m telling you . . .” From there, his niece then found it necessary to go into a detail about the Ideal Home Exhibition that had brought her to London with the intention of purchasing some kitchen utensils for the catering outfit she ran, something called Paprika and Dill—or was it Cayenne and Dill? In any event, all of a sudden, she leaned in toward her uncle to tell him something in a most conspiratorial tone of voice:

“Listen, Rafamolinet—” That was how she addressed him, saying first and last name all together in one long tongue twister. “Listen: how would you like to hear the story of a murderess?”

For a moment, he felt a shiver run up his spine, but he quickly shrugged it off, certain that he knew what the question was leading up to. He squinted his eyes and then patted his pockets for his glasses. Of course, the explanation was right in front of him: Surely she was referring to one of the actors’ photographs on the wall.
What a melodramatic way of changing the conversation,
Molinet thought, with a touch of displeasure. Maybe he was a bit behind the times when it came to social habits, this banal chitchat used for passing the time, but from his point of view, their conversation had not sunk so low that they had to turn to the hopelessly unimaginative topic of the star photos lining the restaurant walls.

“Darling, really, I would much rather you tell me more about your children,” he was about to reply as a way of redirecting the conversation when he realized that Fernanda’s eyes were not at all glued to the lineup of celebrity photographs. Gazing just a bit to the left of him, peering in between the pillars along the staircase, Fernanda seemed to be spying on someone downstairs in the lower-level dining room.

“Did you hear what I said, Rafamolinet?” she repeated. Molinet then assumed that she always chirped first and last name like that, all together in a powerful phonetic blast, because she went on to pronounce another name in the very same manner.

“Look at her right there, Isabellalaínez,” she said. Then, leaning back to allow her uncle to see who she was talking about, she flicked her chin to indicate some indeterminate location in the downstairs dining room.

“If you lean a bit to the right, you’ll see her. No, no—down there, silly, in the dining room for the nobodies, in Siberia. Boy would she be furious if she knew that I came here and saw where they sat her.”

Molinet looked, entirely skeptical, toward the spot Fernanda was pointing at. His angle of vision wasn’t very good; it was awful, as a matter of fact. The plant that swished against the nape of his neck from time to time covered a fair amount of the space between the pillars along the staircase, and he found it annoying to exert such an effort to follow his niece’s instructions, despite the information she had disclosed. A murderess. Come now, he thought, truly gruesome stories never start off that way. But he relented and dutifully steered his gaze downstairs. All he saw was what looked like a married couple with a considerable age difference between them, sitting at a table and eating in silence.

“Who are they?”

“Darling, I thought that in your spiritual withdrawal from the world you spent all your time devouring gossip magazines.”

“I have never seen those two in my life. Though I sense they are a married couple despite the age difference. Am I right?”

“Yes, a marriage maintained through eight years of mutual boredom. Do you want to hear the story or don’t you?” she asked, signaling vaguely for the waiter to remove the salad she had barely touched. “I have never met anyone more immune to high-society gossip than you, Rafamolinet.”

Molinet didn’t bother to explain that he was an old dog. He wasn’t insensitive to gossip, far from it—he simply did not trust clever conversationalists and their theatrical attempts to liven up otherwise boring conversations.
Coffee time chitchat,
he thought, and his face indicated that yes, he was familiar with her little trick—exaggeration can sometimes be very effective.

“So what do you have to say?”

Molinet shrugged his shoulders without saying anything. The waiter had just arrived with the second course, a cheese soufflé that was listed as an appetizer on the menu and which he had long since learned to request as a main course, since it was quite filling and inexpensive, to boot. “The story of a murderess,” Fernanda had said in that very conspiratorial tone a person uses just before tearing someone to shreds. He looked downstairs. The woman seemed attractive enough to interest him for another ten minutes, at least. Maybe even half an hour, he conceded. She has something of a contradiction about her. She seems like such a good girl.

Molinet paused for another moment to study the husband and then he turned his gaze back to the woman before admitting surrender.
What a shame I have no idea who these people are,
he said to himself.
No matter how intriguing it may be, a story is never quite so fascinating when the protagonists are two illustrious people you don’t know.
Distracted, he took a little sip of the sherry that an imprudent waiter had not seen fit to remove from the table. Then he added, to himself again,
I do hope that Fernanda is not one of those insufferable types who take an eternity to tell a completely idiotic story.

Terrible Things That Happen Only to Other People

Fernanda’s first version of the story of Jaime Valdés’s deathwas told amid a fit of giggles, combined with a confusing tale about two friends and her description of a man who listened to Silvio Rodríguez songs, as well as two or three additional anecdotes that Molinet could make neither head nor tail of. It was now painfully clear that his niece was not someone who could speak and eat at the same time. And to make matters worse, as she talked on and on, the little arabesques she drew in the sauce of her scorned fish grew more emphatic. Once she had laid out the basics, she sat up straight in her chair, waiting for some kind of a response.

“Fernanda darling, I haven’t understood a single word of what you just said.”

She leaned in toward her uncle once more, her fork pointing toward her sauce, threatening to begin a new set of designs, but he stopped her with a halting hand gesture.

Holding out his fingers to reveal a set of fingernails that were not quite as well tended as the rest of his person, he began to enumerate with his pinky: “First of all, there is no way she can possibly hear you. Second, from what I can see, there is nobody in the vicinity who might interrupt us, and third, neither my ears nor my sensibilities will allow . . .
des chuchoteries,
my darling. So, please, start from the top and tell me that . . . terrible story with the same level of detail you use when you tell me about our dearly departed relatives. Better yet, try and do it slowly. With serenity,” he said, and immediately congratulated himself for having used such a word. “Serenity” sounded good. It was a word that he had not used or thought of in quite some time.

“All right, fair enough. But don’t go telling me now that I talk too much. Have you ever thought about how bad girls always seem to have better luck in life than us saints? Well, that is what this story is all about.”

Molinet was able to endure this little digression without losing his patience. It was the kind of digression that often serves as a prelude to a frivolous gossip tale, and he took advantage of the moment to sneak another peek at the two restaurant patrons sitting at the only occupied table downstairs. Drones had emptied out little by little. A group of noisy Italians were still jabbering away at a table nearby, but on the downstairs level the only people in sight were the two that Fernanda had pointed out. In silent boredom, they alternated between taking sips of their coffee and staring out at nothing in particular, and their faces had that ventriloquist’s-dummy look of unhappy husbands and wives who think that nobody is watching them. The man was sixty-something, rather short, and had the curious habit of jerking to attention in his chair every so often, as if to stop himself from nodding off. Now he sat upright once again, took a long sip of coffee, and allowed his gaze to settle on the wall in front of him, as if he was scanning it or waiting for something or someone.

Apart from a pair of unusually alert eyes, there is nothing out of the ordinary about him,
thought Molinet.
He may just be a man who is extremely bored, although I would say he has a certain air about him . . . What would be the right word? Self-assured. Yes, that is what it is, the kind of self-assurance that comes from having held countless glasses of champagne at countless gala benefits where he is always something of the outsider.

Then he turned his gaze to the woman, who was easily twenty-five years younger than her husband. Even from that distance, he was duly impressed with her angular face, which changed depending on whether you looked at her face-on or in profile. It was fickle in the way that some Magyar faces are, with high cheekbones and very dark eyebrows. Her medium-length hair, on the other hand, was very light—an inconsistency. Pulled back, it rested softly against the nape of her neck to reveal her very tiny ears.

“Now, you might think I’m old-fashioned, but I am going to start this story by telling you what Alvaro-husband thinks of our friend Isabella,” he heard Fernanda say.

“He thinks Isabella is a bitch. Well, actually, that’s what he thought of her until the day the two of them ended up in the same Golf Clinic at the Puerta de Hierro Golf Club. ‘Oh, Alvaro!’ she kept saying. ‘Oh, I’m sorry! I’ll just never get the hang of this club!’ And that was all it took to change his opinion—radically change, I might add. But you know, don’t you, that men’s moral judgments can be so . . . fragile when it comes to pretty women. They fall to pieces with a simple little flutter of the eyelashes.”

As Fernanda laughed, Molinet noted that his niece’s eyelashes were not exactly paralytic, either.

“That should give you a fair idea of what kind of person we’re dealing with. In any case, and all joking aside, one thing is for sure: Isabellalaínez—and take a good look at her, now—came very close to getting herself in a big old mess, thanks to her personal charms.

“It’s the oldest story in the world,” she continued. “I could tell it to you in two words. But I don’t want to do that. I think it would be much more fun to first describe all the personalities involved. Tales of adultery are so boring if you don’t accessorize them a bit. Even this one, which ended up in the Almudena.”

“The what, my dear?”

“In the cemetery, darling. Forgive me, I a-a-always forget how foreign you are,” Fernanda remarked. And as she said “a-a-always,” Molinet thought he saw her emphasize this on the table with one of the colored pills that had not met the same fate as their brethren. He couldn’t be certain, however, for he was wearing his distance glasses—he needed glasses for both distance and reading, a double curse that somehow made everything blurry in the end.

“She,” continued Fernanda, tilting her head in the direction of the couple, “is called Isabella Laínez, née Isabel Alvarez. She acquired the Italianesque ‘la’ and the less-common last name of Laínez through her first marriage. I suppose you have heard about the very convenient nature of last names in Spain: If you’re a woman you can practically pick yours. Some women keep their last names. Others—the sharp cookies—adopt the last name of a dead husband, while others choose to mooch off their new husband’s last name. It all depends on the convenience of the pedigree.”

“What about the man with her?” asked Molinet. “He doesn’t look terribly Spanish.”

“Jewish. From Tangiers. Rich, though nobody knows exactly what he does. I mean, just picture it: a house in La Moraleja filled with Boteros and Warhols, a Doberman that answers to the name of Kaiser, and tons—I tell you tons—of money . . . enough to whitewash his own shady past and hide Isabella’s as well. Because she is, after all, from Madrid and she does still have a number of, say, inconvenient relatives in neighborhoods like Ventas . . . or is it Embajadores? Something of the sort, anyway.”

Molinet smiled. He was decidedly in favor of this more venomous facet of Fernanda’s character. “Everybody has a darker side, it is just a question of drawing it out,” as he always said.
Plus,
he told himself.
This is what everyone is going to be like when you get to the hotel in Morocco—divinely superficial, every last one of them.