The Last Resort (4 page)

“I don’t want backroom gossip,” said Molinet, unaware of the decorous and somewhat-rusty masculine instinct that had suddenly come to life inside of him. “I have always found servants’ gossip rather sickening.”

“Oh, you’re ruining my story . . .”

“I’m interested in the facts. We’ve been on this for almost two hours,” he protested.

“I know, I know, but I’m warning you now, it’s not half as intriguing,” she said bluntly, her tone of voice suddenly changing. For a few moments, before she was once again suffused with the drama of her tale, Fernanda narrated the sequence of events like someone reciting a list of Visigoth kings. Setting (colon): a country estate that the Valdéses had just bought in La Adrada, some sixty miles outside of Madrid (semicolon); a very charming country house, no ugly Boteros or Warhols on the walls, like in the Steine home.

“Fernanda, are all these details truly necessary? Can’t we skip the
House and Garden
description?”

“The details, my dear, are to give you an idea of precisely how abnormal Mercedes and Isabella’s friendship was. We’re talking about two people who have ab-so-lute-ly nothing in common. But of course as you well know, one of the golden rules of the human condition is that when a woman—or a man, for that matter—attempts to steal someone’s mate, the first thing he or she does is become the inseparable confidante and soul mate of the future cuckolded spouse. Isabella had her eye on Valdés, and then all of a sudden the two couples began doing everything together, the women putting together little outings and events, sharing the most private secrets—I invite you over to my house, you invite me over to yours, etcetera. And as it turns out, our four protagonists decided to spend the weekend together. Until now everything was perfect. But at this point, on that very Friday, it turns out that Valdés was feeling ill. Not so ill that he had to cancel the weekend date—the opposite, in fact. He actually thought some fresh air—listen closely, Rafamolinet: fresh air!—would do him some good. Now, Mercedes couldn’t get out to the country until the following day, so Valdés invited Steine and Isabella to go with him. The three of them were to leave Madrid at about eight in the evening and Mercedes, who had some things to take care of in town, would arrive on Saturday morning. Everything clear up to now?”

“Yes, everything is clear. I just don’t see why it is so hard for you to—”

“Just pay attention, because if you miss even the smallest detail, the story will lose all its meaning and I will be forced to tell you the version I heard through the maid connection.”

“Fernanda! I beg of you!”

“They reached the country after dinnertime, and the only person in the house was a Moroccan maid named Habibi—incidentally, very good friends with my housekeeper, who talks. Boy, does she like to talk.” Molinet executed a few imperious coughs, and Fernanda continued.

“Now, if Valdés was a bit out of sorts that day, it was because he always suffered in the springtime—allergies, sneezing fits, and so on. Now comes the interesting part.”

“Finally,” said Molinet with a sigh of relief.

“Well, as it happened, the poor man, may he rest in peace, suffered from asthma. Now, being asthmatic is really the most distinguished kind of ailment.” She let out a sigh as she said this, as if she too were a chronic sufferer. “Whenever spring rolls around, people who have asthma become incredibly languid, and they talk in a kind of gaspy, a very, very . . . oh, how would I put it? A very Don Corleone way, kind of a cross between threatening and sexy. Apparently, given how repulsive pollution is these days, the air appears to be full of new fumes, terribly dangerous ones—just look at poor Valdés—Russian fumes, Rafamolinet, extremely dangerous stuff.”

“I’ve never heard of anything so preposterous.”

“Don’t you read the newspapers?”

“Is that why you take all those multicolored pills, dear?”

“Don’t be so old-fashioned, Rafamolinet—melatonin and antioxidants and selenium pills are for staying young and fit, they have nothing to do with Russian fumes. Russian fumes only affect asthmatics, and their effect is so severe that asthmatics are advised to take very special precautions with regard to changes in temperature and climate, and they are supposed to carry around a special, rather bulky inhaler at all times, to use in the event they begin to feel sick. Nobody does it, of course, especially not in a situation like the one our friend found himself in. Because, I mean, can you possibly imagine a romantic rendezvous with an inhaler, Rafamolinet?”

“What do you mean romantic? Romantic with whom?”

“With Isabella, who else?”

“This story makes absolutely no sense to me. Just now you said that the dead man’s wife wasn’t able to go to the country that night but that Isabella’s husband was most definitely there with them.”

“A husband of a certain age, who falls asleep on the couch in the middle of a conversation and who, that night, went straight to bed upon arrival.”

“Ah, I see, I see. Now we seem to be getting somewhere. So there was a romantic tryst between Isabella and Valdés.”

“May he rest in peace.”

“Yes, may he rest in peace. You said that before.”

“And I will say it again. Maybe it sounds provincial to you, you don’t have to remind me, but there’s no need to tempt the spirits. It is a very important precaution, according to my Tarot card reader, especially when one is preparing to discuss certain things about certain dead people.”

“Fernanda, for the love of God . . .”

“All right, all right, I’m finishing up. The point is, Steine goes to bed, quiet as can be, at about eleven, eleven-thirty. Valdés and Isabella claim they are not tired and stay on in the living room for a nightcap. Risky, you might say, to take advantage of such a dangerous opportunity for a little roll in the hay or, to put it bluntly, a fuck. It would have been much easier, and much more comfortable, to wait a day or two and go to a hotel together—how far could they go with this, after all? But their relationship, if you look at it carefully, was in the very early stages. They were in that very romantic phase in which both of them must have been feeling,
Ooh! Anything is possible. Let’s use whatever excuse we can come up with to be alone.
And so they say to each other: ‘Shall we stay here a bit, have another drink?’ ‘Of course, why not? I’m going to put on an album you are going to love. Do you know Silvio Rodríguez?’ ‘Silvio Rodriguez? No, no—who is he? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything of his . . .’ A blatant lie, of course, but that doesn’t matter—any old excuse will do at the dawn of a new relationship, so that the two bodies can inch closer and closer together, first the heads, all very careful, let’s just huddle together to look at the song lyrics. And then, ‘Oh, look, look! Read this—what do you think he means, this bit here about
you are my blue unicorn . . .
what fascinating lyrics!’ And this goes on for a while until, surprise surprise, the passion suddenly bubbles up after a fortuitous brush of the skin. Of course. But anyway, I don’t have to bother describing the ritual to you—you certainly know it well enough. Everything deliciously slow, because what makes these early encounters so very perfect, so very thrilling, is when they are played out like this in slow motion. ‘Can I pour you another drink? Are you hungry at all? There’s not much to eat around here. All I can find are some almonds; would you like some? and then . . . I tell you about my hopes and dreams, you tell me about yours . . . we laugh a little, with the devious knowledge, of course, that all of this seems so perfectly normal. And that, more or less, must have been the atmosphere in that house that night. But given that these things take time, we have to assume that by now it had gotten late, it had to be about one in the morning, and Steine had long since been snoring away peacefully in the guest house in the garden. That was when Habibi, the cook, who was the only other person in the house, suddenly heard noises coming from the living room. Valdés had given her strict orders not to come downstairs, that he would take care of their guest. For this reason Habibi was hesitant about checking in on them—that is, until the music suddenly stopped. Then Habibi heard a thunderous noise, like the sound of something breaking, like a piece of furniture. This was then followed by ‘a lot of very hoarse panting. Just awful. It sounded as if it was coming from a sick animal,’ according to Habibi. That noise, she said, was what convinced her to go downstairs—she was rather frightened, of course. And when she reached the downstairs vestibule, she says, she heard a woman’s voice, followed by the sound of a door creaking—the door that opened onto the garden. Someone was leaving the house. She ran into the living room, and when she walked in, all the lights were out, which led her to believe that she was the only person in the room. When she turned on a lamp, she saw the overturned table. And next to the table there was something else, too, something very interesting that I heard about through the maid connection. Now, are you sure you don’t want me to . . . ? All right, all right, just the essential and substantiated facts, fine. Well, the fact is that Habibi found Mr. Valdés lying on the floor, but she didn’t dare move him.”

“Because he was bleeding, naturally . . .”

“Bleeding? What are you talking about? Why on earth would there be any blood anywhere?”

“When his head struck the . . . the table, or whatever it was . . .”

“No, no, nothing like that happened. Habibi did not dare move him, because he seemed gravely ill. His breathing was very labored. He sounded as if he was choking. And then, just when the poor woman was simply desperate, at that very moment the door flew open and suddenly—guess who appeared?”

“Isabella, who had gone out for help.”

“That is a logical guess, isn’t it? Well, no, actually. The person who suddenly appeared was Valdés’s wife, whom nobody expected to see until the following day. Appeared out of thin air. And right behind her—ten minutes later, however—Isabella and Steine turn up, both of them in their bathrobes, as if they’ve just crawled out of bed. Habibi was calmer by now, because Mrs. Valdés was there to take care of things, so she breathed a sigh of relief. If only we could say the same thing for poor Valdés, whose face had suddenly turned a ghastly shade of blue, according to those present. The next thing Mercedes did—now, listen closely—was this: She asked everyone to leave her alone with her husband. She wanted to call for an ambulance, one of those mobile ICUs. But it was all for nothing, because poor Valdés died long before any help could arrive.”

“Now I get it . . . the man was a real womanizer, and so you think he was having a tryst with Isabella when he suddenly had an asthma attack, which is why she up and left at the most incriminating moment of their little get-together. Really,
c’est très typique.
”

“No, no, no. That isn’t what happened at all. Just simmer down for a second and then you can draw your own conclusions. When they found him, Valdés was completely dressed. He even had his dinner jacket on—a little pretentious, if you ask me. And now I am going to tell you what happened next. I am not going to go into what the gossipmongers have said. I am going to tell you exactly what Mercedes herself told me, and then I will add a few of my own conclusions, because, after all, Mercedes is from Bilbao.”

“And what does that have to do with anything, for the love of God?”

“It has everything to do with this story, silly, because people from Bilbao are so reserved, they never tell you anything at all. They never embellish their stories enough, and this story must be embellished because the Truth—and I mean ‘truth’ with a capital ‘T’—is a terrible bore, don’t you think?”

“Fernanda, can’t you just leave well enough alone?”

“Just wait until I get to the end. You’re going to like it, because despite everything, this seems to be what really happened: Valdés and Isabella were listening to music, nibbling away at a bit of food, all very innocent, when Valdés, in the middle of his seduction, preening like a peacock . . . Now, can you guess what happened?”

“Something ridiculous, clearly.”

“The worst thing imaginable: He chokes! You can’t whisper sweet nothings and swallow whole almonds at the same time, Rafamolinet. The two activities are totally in-com-pat-ible, especially if you are an asthmatic. The least little scare and there goes one of your bronchial passages—it just closes up something awful.”

“Fernanda, for heaven’s sake already!”

“I am telling you, that is exactly what happened. A little almond went down his windpipe and then his nerves kicked in and his bronchial tubes closed up.” Fernanda coughed a couple of times and then raised her hand to her mouth to add a bit of realism to her story: “Just picture the scene: It was one disaster on top of another, one long chain of rotten luck. A lover who gets frightened and leaves, then the Russian fumes, and then Valdés, out of pure idiotic vanity, doesn’t have that special inhaler with him. It’s all very logical, Rafamolinet, because we never think that these things, such ridiculous things, can ever happen to us—’Oh, that bizarre kind of thing only happens to other people,’ we always say. And that, Uncle, is what happened to Valdés. Just picture it. Why, I can practically hear him saying, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. It can’t be anything serious—I just coughed up a bit of almond. I’m fine, really I am. It’s nothing, nothing at all.’ And then he waits a few seconds to see if he can breathe a bit better . . . once, twice, three times, and then: ‘Oh dear, this isn’t going away. My throat feels as though it’s closing up . . . oh no! This is turning into something serious,’ and he loosens his pistachio-colored tie and tries to breathe again: ‘Oh, oh, how can this be happening? I feel awful. Good God, someone help me . . .’ But Isabella has long since left him—and not exactly to go looking for help, either—only to return to the scene later hanging on the arm of Papa Steine.”

“Darling, all I can say is that you have an imagination that could be put to far better use. Why would she do something so foolish?”

“Because she is a petty, frivolous woman. And because she was frightened. Forgive me for saying so, Rafamolinet, but you would make a terrible detective.” After tilting back in her chair to assess the effect of her revelation, Fernanda leaned forward once again to say: