The Last Resort (20 page)

“Darling,” the voice on the machine said. “Call me as soon as you get in. I’ve got something fabulous for you, something very important, a proposal I know you are going to love . . .” Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.

With the merciless eye of a livestock handler, Bea examines the skin on her forearm and then performs six or seven vigorous repetitions . . . five . . . six . . . seven. And she continues to think.

Back in the days when she acted as a kind of deep throat for a society columnist named Juan Pedro Bonilla, her muscles had not yet grown soft. She would tell him about absolutely everything—confidentially, of course—and he would publish the information in his column: illicit love affairs, forthcoming marital separations, the price tags of the costliest divorces, imminent scandals, blow-by-blow accounts of the private lives of public figures. Bonilla didn’t pay much, but there was a kind of sweet revenge about selling out your friends for next to nothing. After all, it was the shallow nineties and people did pretty much whatever they wanted. So what if the fishbowl practically exploded as everyone madly whispered about who could possibly be the snake that had leaked such-and-such information to the press? Who was their informer? the exposed would wonder. “Oh my God!,” they would cry. “Can you believe it? My private life all over the papers! What a nightmare. When is all this madness going to end?” Et cetera. It didn’t matter much to her. Bea knew that nobody would ever find out that she had been the lady with the loose tongue, and in the end—shit, who the hell cared? Some people would say she was actually doing her VIP friends a favor—after all, they would do anything to get the paparazzi to pay attention to them. In those sweet old days you were a nobody if you didn’t appear at least twice a week in a magazine.

Her chest. Her chest is the one thing that is still in tiptop shape, thanks to Mother Nature and a disciple of Dr. Pitanguy who has since moved on to more fertile and lucrative lands. Her breasts are a veritable gift from the gods. Nobody can tell they are fake, for they are round and only moderately stiff—all she has to do to soften them up a bit is give them a little squeeze: placing them between the palms, pressing hard, and then releasing, deep breath, hands on the elbows . . . that is the formula for achieving the perfect level of firmness. Truth to be told, however, her breasts haven’t been put to much use lately, and as for J. P. Bonilla, she lost track of him a few years ago. More or less around the time he gave up his job as a greedy gossip hawker so that he could focus all his professional energies on a publishing house specializing in big commercial books.
They’re all living like kings,
Bea thinks as she tightens her muscles.
The people who expose human misery, the scandal brokers, they’re all kings. Just look at Antonio Sánchez, Juan Bonilla . . .
It must have been four or five years ago when her friend J.P. made the leap to respectability. And wasn’t that the same year that he had asked her to marry him, the little sweetheart? Poor adorable J. P. Bonilla and his Armani suits—he had them in mustard yellow, leaf green, and a kind of drowned-mouse gray. Back then, of course, she would have had to be downright desperate to settle for a specimen like J.P., but of course that was before her flesh had begun to sag.

The calves are the most forgiving part of the body. A bit of pointing and flexing of the toes is all they require to maintain their shape: point-flex, point-flex, point-flex . . . someone recently told her that J. P. Bonilla is now considered quite the catch among her recently separated friends. Desperate is more like it, though. Desperado—it sounds almost respectable. Bea thinks about that group a lot. Recriminations aside (and she has certainly issued her share of them), she cannot deny that her ongoing affair with Bernardo Salat, which cannot even be considered a romance (too many years, too many hard feelings), has at least saved her from that dismal purgatory inhabited by recently separated women—the ever-growing legions of women without husbands whose numbers are somehow inversely proportional to the number of available men.

A little circle created by the feet, toes pointed as far as they can go, is all that is necessary to activate the circulation in the legs: twice to the right, twice to the left. She can’t deny it—if it weren’t for the fact that Bernardo trotted her out every so often, she too would belong to the club of the desperadoes, working all the cocktail parties and galas, condemned to attend even the most insignificant of social events. Those ubiquitous fortysomethings: Tuesday night, eight to nine-thirty, holding back yawns at some dreadful lecture. Thursday, dragging the heels to the latest it-girl’s reading of her trashy novel. Monday, lunching at Guisando “to see who I bump into.” Wednesday, opening night at the theater. Such a monumental effort, all in the hopes of securing the occasional invitation to a private party. But it pays off: Every so often you do end up getting invited to something. The method works: If you want to stay in circulation you have to be out there circulating.

Now it is time for the facial muscles, the most delicate of all. The face must first be coated with a generous layer of cream so as to protect the skin when one opens the mouth wide to form a giant but silent
A
followed by a giant but silent
O.
“Pa-va-rot-ti” was her favorite word for exercising her lips. Bea doesn’t care if anyone caught her making these strange faces. After all, why would anyone bother looking at her? Everyone else here looks just as ridiculous as she does. She looks to her left and sees Antonio S. reading something about rodents. With difficulty she makes out the words:
“When six rats are placed together in a box, sooner or later they will begin to eat . . . one . . . another.”

Damn,
she thinks.
I really am getting old. I can’t see a goddamn thing.
She decides to turn away. Clearly, she is better off working on another useful word to keep those mouth muscles firm and youthful-looking: “U-til-i-tar-i-an” is extremely effective. The prolonged
u
syllable, the
til
that forces the contraction of the throat muscles, the
i . . .

The door opens. Bea is unable to see who it is, because her facial exercises must be practiced in a supine position and she is lying on her back. But a fleeting reflection of light flashes through the rotunda, and two shadows are suddenly projected upon the glass ceiling. She easily recognizes the first shadow, for it is wearing a hat, and so it can only be the picturesque and solitary individual who wished them
Gute Nacht
the previous evening in the restaurant. The other shadow, however, is much bulkier, its movements agile and athletic. Bea completes her second “u-til-i-tar-i-an” and gets up to see who has cast such a promising shadow.

A very good omen,
she thinks.
A new guest. Hopefully, an interesting one. There are so few of us in this little rats’ nest, and we all know one another far too well.

The Arrival of an Unexpected Guest

An unexpected guest arriving at a shooting should be careful to observe the following simple rules:

1. Do not talk either at the firing point or when walking to your position.

2. Ask the person shooting where exactly he would like you to stand or sit (ideally it will be directly behind the gun and fairly near him).

3. After the shooting host and keepers alike will appreciate a guest who can say after a drive “There are so many in front and so many behind.”

—Debrett’s
Etiquette and Modern Manners
(London, 1995)

The New Guest (as observed by Molinet and Bea)

PAPRIKA AND DILL
Cocktail parties, dinners and other social occasions
(Excellence Need Not Be Expensive)

Madrid, October 20

Dearest Uncle Rafael—

If memory serves me right, this will be my fifth fax to you in the last few days. My God, I haven’t written this much since elementary school. Nowadays, all I ever seem to write are checks, and I suspect you can tell: I have a telegraphic writing style, impossible penmanship and an illegible signature.

But anyway . . . where were we? All right. Now you want some information on a man who turned up at the hotel a few days ago, and just as I have done in previous faxes (fax no. 1 on Valdés, Mercedes, etc., no. 2 on the four musketeers, Sánchez, Bea, Bernardo, Ana etc.), I will give you a bit of a profile on the new character (speaking of which, what the hell is going on in that hotel? It’s like an outpost of the Gran Vía! If all of Madrid had agreed to spend a week losing weight and dropping dirhams in the same remote paradise, they couldn’t have possibly planned it any better!). But anyway. To return to our new guest. If it is Santiago Arce (and I suspect it is, given the physical description), I will tell you this: The guy is (in this order):

1. fabulously handsome,

2. recently separated from an impossible woman, and

3. a screenwriter for the movies,

something that until now was not especially glamorous, but given items 1 and 2, plus the fact that his movie got made with next to no budget and turned out to be a giant and totally unexpected hit, he has become the boy wonder of the moment. Photographed everywhere. We all have our fifteen minutes of fame, Rafamolinet, what can I tell you, and I think Arce is ready to take full advantage of his. The movie that catapulted him into the spotlight is called
Under the Baobab
—I still haven’t seen it, but even my stupidest girlfriends tell me it is utterly marvelous and “makes you feel like he’s talking to you and only to you.” The critics despise him, naturally—they don’t say he’s a bad moviemaker; they just call him a “phenomenon of the masses,” a slightly strange way of saying, “All right, just maybe we’ll forgive you for being such a success.” He, on the other hand, seems just adorable. No matter who you ask, the answer is always the same: “Santiago Arce? Darling, he is just adorable.”

The truth is, I actually think they’re right. He’s the kind of man everyone wants to protect—you want to wrap a big scarf around his neck or knit him a sweater so he doesn’t catch cold. I don’t know what the hell a baobab is, but I must find out just in case I happen to run into him at a party somewhere. Speaking of which, what do you think he’s doing all alone at a hotel in Morocco? Are you sure he doesn’t have some big-eyed blonde with him, or else some BMW-driving intellectual babe to keep him company? It just seems so odd. Maybe in your next fax you can fill me in a little about what exactly is going on down there. To date you have done nothing but squeeze me like a lemon for information, and I have had to write endless faxes providing you with all sorts of details, and yet you haven’t offered the least little bit of gossip in exchange. For example, I would be very interested in knowing various things about your four players—first impressions, comments, and a bit of that observation you are clearly so very good at. For example:

A) At any moment have you seen Bea show contempt for Sánchez in public?

B) Has Bernardo spoken to Mercedes at all or does he avoid her like the plague? (He must have gotten quite a shock when he first saw her there, it must have been tremendous—the poor fool actually thinks nobody knows that he’s been having an affair with Bea for the past seven years . . . anyway, as an Italian would say,
ma figurate
!)

C) I am also interested in knowing about Ana. How is she holding up? I feel terrible for her—she is going through the awful phase of being recently separated. And she has the brain of a mosquito and is sooo inexperienced . . . oh, the idiotic things people do in such circumstances! Oh! One other question: was the information I sent you in Faxes No. 3 and 4 useful in giving you an idea of each of them individually? You haven’t said a thing, Uncle Rafael, and that is really unfair of you. Now, I want to hear some dish on Santiago Arce, everything he does and if he talks to anyone else and

During the days that followed Mr. Arce’s arrival, life at L’Hirondelle had still been as dull as ever. Nothing happened. At least, nothing that Molinet had been able to observe from the outside. Of course, there was a bit of flurry for a moment or two that first morning when the moviemaker made his entrance in the mud bath area. The fishbowl was certainly rattled, and Molinet was on hand to take note of it all.

“Jesus Christ! Will you look who just walked in?”

“Santiago Arce! This is getting to be like a company Christmas party . . . Let me guess—he figured nobody in Madrid could have possibly ever heard of this place.”

“Shit, join the club. God, I feel like we’re in an Agatha Christie novel. I just hope we don’t have a dead man on our hands at the end . . .”

Bit by bit, however, things return to their normal, tranquil state at L’Hirondelle, a hotel that has a way of anesthetizing its guests—could it be something in the mud? The 1,500 calories per day? The lack of human contact? Nothing at all happens here. Even Molinet is beginning to think that the very promising clash between the widow and the four musketeers has lost a bit of its sizzle. It has been a while since he last heard any caustic remarks; all everyone talks about is calories, Swiss chard, and the virtues of fennel. How is it possible that things have come to this?

In the long, deserted hallways of L’Hirondelle, where guests in terry-cloth robes occasionally emerge from the mud baths and walk among other guests in athletic clothes, no longer does anyone find it a nuisance to bump into other people at all hours of the day. Molinet has always felt that there is nothing quite so bothersome as an “acquaintance” at a hotel, a person with whom one feels obliged to chat all the time, but neither Bea nor Bernardo nor any of their friends seems to mind. They are all far too busy, and that, of course, is because their time here has been programmed down to the minute. And so, when they do run into one another on the way out of their morning workouts or their evening mud sessions, they just wave as everyone else at the hotel does, with the same deferential indifference.

Everything transpires in a very serene manner. Everyone does their own thing far from Molinet’s ears, which are as alert as ever, although they haven’t heard a damn thing lately. As such, Molinet has taken to observing his fellow guests from a certain window. Peering out over the multicolored vines, he can see the golf course, where he knows Bernardo and Antonio S. play every day at this hour.