The Last Resort (3 page)

“The story is as follows,” Fernanda began. “Eight or nine years ago, our friend Isabella Laínez suddenly appeared on the scene in Madrid—out of nowhere, it seemed. As if she’d dropped down in a parachute from somewhere. Even before marrying Steine (he calls himself Steine, by the way, so that nobody has the slightest doubt as to his background—Jean Jacques Steine is his full name), she was already all over the place, never missing a single party. She dated all the single men in the city at one point or another, but she had to get herself remarried and was not interested in wasting her time with professional bachelors. No scandals. No bed-hopping (or at least she had a very wise and discreet way of dealing with that). With these tactics, she managed to cultivate a reputation for being something of a prude. Now, believe it or not, that, coupled with a pretty face, works miracles for a woman. And one fine day she turned up married to Steine. It was a smart move on her part; he was the perfect stepping-stone for her. And let me tell you,” Fernanda continued, barely stopping to catch her breath, “Steine had a reputation for being a total bore, but he liked to have a good-looking woman on his arm, and he liked to be ‘in the know’ about things. Beauty and money are not a bad mix, plus Isabella is very sociable—right away she cast her net, to fix things so that she could rub shoulders with—oh, I love this expression—’the right people.’ At first she had a tough time, as you can imagine, but after the first few snubs and a couple of other fiascos, our friend decided to use an infallible method for opening the most exclusive of doors: the old oxpecker system.”

“The what?”

“Come now, Rafamolinet. Listening to you, anyone would think it’s been centuries, not years, that you’ve been away from the madding crowds. The oxpecker: a very old trick for clawing your way into high society. I don’t know how you call it in French, or in any other language for that matter, but you know the routine, I’m sure you do. If you want to be accepted by the flock, the best thing you can do is stick like glue to the biggest of the bunch—just like those giant brown birds that pick lice off of the backs of cattle. Just find the biggest and fattest of the sacred cows and follow that cow anywhere and everywhere. Those are the laws that govern the animal kingdom, and they work just as well for humans. You just have to be a little crafty and patient, and you have to be prepared to put up with a lot of shit. And those are all virtues that Isabella possesses. I have to say she did an excellent job of choosing her cow—her sacred cow, as it were. Marta Suárez is her name. Perhaps that doesn’t mean much to you, but if I were to add a few more details, I’m sure you would get the picture: fifty-something, a big name with certain committees and charity organizations. You know the type—one of those pillars of society who can say anything, even the stupidest little thing, and everyone goes around repeating it as if it were gospel. Have you ever noticed this phenomenon? Strange, but true. It usually comes out sort of like, ‘
Marta
says’ or ‘
Marta
swore to me’ and also ‘my dear, I was just talking to
Marta
the other day . . .’ Everyone just loves to drop names.”

Fernanda paused for a moment and then continued, deeming it unnecessary to go into more detail about such obvious social mores: “Anyway, as I was saying, she was a very well chosen sacred cow, because Ma-a-a-arta”—and Fernanda elongated the ‘a’ in Marta’s honor—“Ma-a-a-arta loves to launch new social stars into the stratosphere, and as coincidence would have it, Isabella was the ideal student: attractive, intelligent, and seemingly submissive, and her husband was more than willing to pay for the debut. What more can you ask for?”

Fernanda broke off for a moment, turning aside so that the waiter could take away her plate and rapidly clear the tablecloth of any offending breadcrumbs before serving dessert. Once her coconut ice cream had been delivered, she continued telling her story.

“All right, so now we have Isabella on the road to stardom, but first—just so you can see the impressive level of work the sacred cow put into this metamorphosis—I am going to tell you about a conversation I heard a few months before Isabella became Marta Suárez’s willing pupil, so you can get an idea of where we’re coming from. The conversation took place at a wedding—I don’t remember whose, but it was one of those really swank events. Guests flew in from London, Rome, who knows where else . . . Anyway, at a certain point, Alvaro-husband and I happened to walk near the Steines; we ended up right behind them, in fact. Isabella looked just beautiful, I have to admit, and Alvaro just stood there gaping at her. Oh no—I know what you’re thinking, but no, no, it didn’t bother me, not at all. Because if he hadn’t been looking at her like that, we never would have heard this little gem: ‘J.J.,’ Isabella said to Steine, ‘J.J., isn’t that the Remy-Davraises? Come on, sweetie, do something so that we can meet them, please, please, please, sweetie, I heard they have the most colossal
gateau
near the Loire!’ ”

“Now, I know you are not going to believe me when I say this,” Fernanda continued after allowing time for a conspiratorial laugh for the malapropism. “You won’t believe it, but in the space of three or four months, Marta Suárez worked a miracle. A total and complete transformation: In one fell swoop she eliminated every last ‘sweetie,’ ‘honey,’ ‘J.J.,’ and other words of the sort. Nothing. There was absolutely nothing about her eager pupil’s speech or diction that would suggest she had studied anywhere but an Irish convent school. Since then, naturally, Isabella has had plenty of time to learn other essentials about the subtleties of language—nuances, intonations, and a number of the more typical mistakes that the more careless social climbers almost inevitably make. And now she never misses an opportunity to let us all know that she knows, for example, that the ladies who lunch never spend their time doing
petits pois
—how ghastly!
quelle gaffe!
—
petits pois
is what one eats with roast beef. And she also learned that children can be
mischievous,
not ‘mis-cheev-ious,’ and that one wears
jewelry,
never ever ‘jew-lery,’ because that sounds perfectly horrible. To make a long story short, the bella Isabella learned, in record time, all the ins and outs of speaking like the worldly woman she aspires to be. She had already worked over her appearance and clothing, but those things, after all, were the easiest to get down. With Marta’s guidance she developed an indefatigable finger that was ready and willing to make the thousand, two thousand, however many phone calls were necessary, just to be able to talk to certain people and say things like, ‘How are you, my darling? Are you feeling better now? Everyone was telling me that you’ve come down with the worst cold . . .’ Her skin grew thicker than a hippopotamus’s after all the feminine slights she had to put up with, and at the same time she learned how to charm the pants off all the men, so that in the end, Isabella Alvarez Laínez Steine—or whatever you want to call her—managed to get every last door in Madrid to swing open for her, even those doors that were considered to be double- and triple-locked to someone like her. You know how these things work, Rafamolinet. Once you’ve reached certain heights, they simply adore you. They take you in just as if you’d been sharing beach umbrellas with them since childhood. Anyway, the fact is, they take you in and they adore you until it isn’t convenient for them anymore. But that’s another topic entirely.”

“So the scene is set then,” Molinet interrupted.

“What?”

“For the lover to enter the picture. From what little I understood of your initial explanation, that is what you were leading up to. And if there was some sort of murder, I would imagine that the dead party is . . .”

“You are so impatient, Rafamolinet. Things are not that simple. What do you want me to do, rip apart the story just so that I can get to the end?”

At that very moment Molinet felt an old social instinct, only a trifle rusty, kick in. Even before Fernanda had begun to discreetly signal that he was to shut up immediately, Molinet knew that the Steine couple was about to walk past their table. He sensed this from the light tickle he felt on the nape of his neck. And from a very lovely perfume that wafted up the spiral staircase, growing stronger and stronger until Isabella Steine materialized, along with her husband, at the top of the stairs.

She looked at them and then approached Fernanda in the friendliest manner, just as Fernanda called out, “Hello, darling! I mean, really, to run into you here when I never, ever see you in Madrid!”

And Isabella, in response, said, “I know, I know. And tomorrow we’ll run into each other on the Portobello Road, of course. You go all the way to London and you run into everyone you know from Madrid, isn’t it crazy?”

A brief moment went by, not long enough for introductions, and Molinet took advantage of the lull to admire the very tall woman, who threw her shoulders back, as do all women who know they are beautiful. There was only one small detail that disconcerted him slightly: When the smile that lit up her face faded, he could see that she had extremely thin lips that a well-outlined lip pencil had failed to conceal.
Greek lips,
thought Molinet. Before he knew it, the Steines were making their way between the tables and Fernanda was back on track with her story, as if the fleeting presence of the Steines had only corroborated the accuracy of all her previous comments.

“Now that you have the background information down,” Fernanda announced, “we have now arrived at the topic of the . . .”

“The lover?”

“Please, do not make me rush through this: For the moment, we have Isabella attending all the little parties in Madrid, pursued by all, everyone telling her how beautiful she is, giving her thousands of reasons to realize that her husband, poor old Steine, is really just a bore who can’t keep up with her—and this, of course, is her own fault. Because she very innocently married the first acceptable male that crossed her path, when in reality she could have done a whole lot better. And then, suddenly—abracadabra—the right man appears: Jaime Valdés, who is, of course, the husband of a very good friend.”

“Typical.”

“I know, I know, but just let me describe this new character. It’s a shame you never met him, because Jaimevaldés was one of those types that you would have just loved to dissect. He wasn’t handsome, exactly, but he definitely had a way with women. He must have been . . . forty-seven—somewhere around there. He went to the same elementary school as my brother Miguel. The Colegio del Pilar, in Madrid. We didn’t know him all that well, but he was a pretty popular sort of a person. Aside from being a real ladies’ man, he always hung around with the successful crowd, if you know what I mean. The kind of people who try to position themselves with the in crowd every chance they get—showing up everywhere with them, going to all the parties, etcetera . . .” Fernanda sighed, looking at her uncle. “Honestly, I will never understand why some people are so obsessed with being part of this in crowd. It’s so much
work:
First you have to freeze your ass off at, like, fifty fox hunts a year. Then you have to start playing golf. And then destroy your knees on the paddle-tennis courts. And be ‘beeeeest friends’ with so-and-so even though they put you right to sleep. And when someone ‘forgets’ to invite you to dinner, you have to casually call them up and ask how they are, for God’s sake. And then? And then, oh yes, you have to listen to opera day and night—even Wagner!—and swear that you absolutely adore it. All the classic tricks of social acrobatics . . . but anyway, enough with all these weaknesses. Suffice it to say that our newfound hero suffered through all these social requirements. But there is one other point I wanted to make: Jaimevaldés was an intelligent man: intelligent, a womanizer, and fatally flirtatious, I would say . . .”

The Italians at the table next to them had asked for their check, which the maître d’ delivered right away, sending a crystal-clear message by carrying it directly over the heads of Fernanda and Molinet.

“Perhaps you ought to get back on track, Fernanda dear. These British restaurants don’t have much patience for our Spanish-style post-meal chats.”

“And it’s a shame,” said Fernanda, sighing again. “Because that means I will have to give you the official version, which is much shorter than my own.”

“There are two versions of the story? I’d prefer the real one.”

“All right, but please do let me just finish painting a picture of our dearly departed. Now, Valdés was married to a very good friend of Isabella’s, a good friend of mine too, for that matter. Her name is Mercedes Algorta. She is from Bilbao, a dyed-in-the-wool native of Bilbao.” Fernanda emphasized it as if it were some kind of special achievement. “Oh yes, I could tell you plenty about my friend Mercedes, plenty indeed. But I’d better just quickly tell you what happened that fateful day before they kick us out of here.”

Molinet looked at his watch. It was twenty to four. As he signaled to the waiter for the check, he took advantage of the moment to ask Fernanda to speed things up.

“Brevity, darling, does not mean going off on tangents.”

“Oh, whenever I think of poor Valdés, may he rest in peace,” she said, a bit more hastily now, “I imagine him just as he was: wearing a soft khaki Bel jacket, some kind of light-colored shirt. The tie . . . hmm, I don’t know, maybe pistachio-colored, with little teakettle designs on it . . . something like that. He was always very up-to-the-minute that way. The pants, gray . . . yes, gray. Very possibly, this was what he was wearing the day of the races. Why not? The point is, as you can surely understand, that what I am about to tell you is the very cornerstone of the story—are you certain that you don’t want to hear the version I heard through the maid connection? It’s much more intriguing, because, you see, it presents a number of additional tidbits that . . .”

“What on earth is the maid connection?”

“Darling. It is by far the best way of learning about indiscretions and unspeakable secrets. Through the hired help, naturally. That is the maid connection. My maid tells your maid, who tells it to so-and-so’s maid . . .”