Chapter 2 #3
As night approached, the chaperone thought it prudent to take their leave—before the women from the tortilla factories and the dockworkers made their appearance; before social classes mixed in unseemly ways; before Inés and the others danced too many dances to the sound of trumpets and trombones and clarinets—and they headed back to Puerco Ahogado.
And all the while, as they rode the train home, she looked at him, then looked away, and he looked at her and then looked away in turn. Shyly. But she hadn’t been shy when she’d slipped into his room later that night, and she didn’t blush when they tumbled into bed together.
Salvador had been gone for a long time now. He was off in Mexico City, and he’d been the one who’d told her a chauffeur could make two hundred and fifty pesos a month, which meant it was probably rubbish.
That man up there, that Mr. Linares, though, he probably made that and more. Whatever he did for a living. His suit jacket alone must have cost two hundred pesos, and his shoes were polished leather so fine you could see your reflection in them.
She cut a pink carnation from a flowerpot and drifted into the kitchen.
After she stored her purchases away, Inés went back to her room and looked at the cutouts from magazines and newspapers she’d pinned to the walls.
Pictures of movie stars in their beautiful gowns, looking over their shoulders, and shots of actors at premières.
Here and there she’d also pinned a sketch of a dress or an ensemble she’d come up with.
In a place of honor, above the tiny table she used as a vanity, there was a photograph of her mother, Encarnación.
She’d sewn fancy dresses, her mother, back when they lived in Puebla.
Inés couldn’t remember the sights and sounds of the city, only the whirring of her sewing machine, the humming of songs as she stitched sequins onto gowns, the apartment where they lived together, which smelled of the mint her mother grew on the windowsill.
Every week a man would stop by their house.
Inés remembered being held up by this man, remembered his voice and his booming laughter, but she could not recall his face, though she had the impression she resembled him.
This first phase of her life was like a watercolor, luminous and delicate.
Puerco Ahogado was like an oil painting. Her arrival at the house, her introduction to her grandparents and her aunt, the voices and faces of the lodgers at the guesthouse, these were clear and vivid, the colors vibrant and saturated.
There was one gap in her recollections: the spring her mother died.
The days before and after her mother’s death were a blank.
She did not even remember going to her funeral.
It was as if someone had scraped off her memories with a palette knife.
Though, sometimes, she dreamed of Encarnación’s face as she lay at the bottom of the stairs. It was Inés who had found her.
Encarnación had taken a tumble, the fall had killed her. They said Inés had not spoken for weeks after that.
Inés placed the flower she’d cut in a vase set next to the photograph, then she looked among the pile of dress patterns by her sewing machine, flipping through old issues of magazines until she came upon the picture of Errol Flynn she’d been looking for.
She sat by the window and tapped a finger against the picture.
That new lodger, he did have a resemblance to Errol Flynn.
Dashing and with the air of glamour. What was a man like that doing in Puerco Ahogado?
Well-dressed men who looked like they could be in films were not exactly in abundance in their town.
Why would a slick fellow like that be placing ads in the lonely hearts sections of magazines?
She grabbed the bill Cándido had given her and threw open the lid of a cigar box that had once belonged to her grandfather.
It still smelled faintly of tobacco. She added the money to the modest pile of coins and bills she stored inside.
Her hands strayed toward a letter that had been folded and refolded many times, and with careful fingers she held it up.
It was Salvador’s last letter, the one in which, three months after leaving Puerco Ahogado, he informed Inés that he’d met someone in the city and apologized profusely for having given her the wrong impression about the depth of his feelings toward her.
She’d ripped to shreds his other letters and love notes, the paper trail of the yearlong relationship they’d maintained while he resided at the guesthouse, but she’d kept this one letter.
Not out of sentimentality or romantic longing, but to remind herself that all men were dogs and none of them could be trusted.
The rain began to fall, that drizzle more like a delicate mist descending upon the rooftops, and she opened the window.
She inhaled the fresh scent of damp earth and water and greenery.
She closed her eyes for a minute, feeling weightless.
Then she returned the letter to its place in the box and clapped the lid shut.
That Mr. Linares, he might have a lovely suit jacket and look like a movie star, but she was not going to trust him. Not one bit.