Chapter 9
“That’s the problem. She doesn’t want you to woo her, not like that. Flowers and chocolates won’t work. Cándido has brought my aunt chocolates and flowers and played at polite words for a long time. She’s used to it,” Inés said.
“Should I throw her over my shoulder like a caveman? Is that what a girl like you craves?”
It was late at night. She’d slipped into his room so they could talk without anyone else around.
Speaking in the darkness, with moonlight filtering through the window, it felt like a parody of a lovers’ midnight rendezvous, him sitting on the bed and smoking a cigarette while she pulled up a chair and lounged close by.
“It’s not about what I enjoy. I’m saying Cándido has done that, it’s an old routine. When you go after women, it’s not always chocolates and silly lines, is it?”
He was startled by her words, his pride needled. Silly lines! She hadn’t been there to hear him speak, and he had not given Perla a box of chocolates. He’d been a gentleman. It wasn’t his fault the woman was odd and seemed to think a kiss on the hand was an insult.
“I got the impression from her letters that might be the way to behave.”
She scoffed. “You’re wrong.”
“Then again, we didn’t correspond long enough. And she is guarded.”
A second scoff, and he couldn’t see her face clearly in the dark, but he could bet she was smiling a wide, mean smile. “Fine, then, tell me more. What kind of man does she like? Draw me a simple picture, like you would for a child.”
There was a brief silence as Inés considered his words.
“She had a longtime lover a few years ago.”
“Did she? I’m surprised.”
“Nobody knows about him.”
“Except you. How did you find out? Did you rummage through his luggage and find naughty love notes?”
“I do the laundry. I took a look at the bedsheets,” she said simply.
He muffled a laugh at that straightforward answer, and now he knew for certain she was smiling. He was skeptical about this alliance, but he was discovering a certain giddy joy in their whispered conspiracies. It was almost like a game; there was a heedless lightness he hadn’t felt in years.
“What was he like?”
“Plutarco? He was a salesman who stayed with us regularly. I don’t think he’s the kind of man she likes, he was simply the kind of man she could find in a pinch. She likes people with class, and he didn’t have any.”
“What else?”
“He was ordinary. I think that’s the trick. You shouldn’t be ordinary. When she started buying those magazines with the lonely hearts ads in the back, she looked so eager as she flipped through them. I think they made her feel that there might be another kind of man out there.”
He took a final drag of his cigarette and extended his arm, reaching for the ashtray and putting the cigarette out. As he shifted his position, he was able to get a glimpse of her face in profile, looking out the window as she spoke, moonlight bathing her, lips slightly parted.
“A man like in the movies. That’s what the women who write to you want, don’t they? An impossible man.”
“It depends. Some of them are practical. They’re widows who need a husband to help them pay for the rent or the groceries.
Others want to marry almost anyone because they feel time is running out and they abhor the idea of people calling them spinsters.
Then there are many people who never learned how to live alone.
It sounds like your aunt doesn’t fall into any of those categories. ”
“I suppose not. I don’t think she’s terrified of being called a spinster; she’s been one long enough. And I don’t think she ever feared living alone, not with me around.”
“Did she have a sweetheart when she was younger? Someone other than that salesman. Someone she might have married.”
“There was a wealthy young man, many years ago. He asked for my mother’s hand in marriage instead of hers and then my mother ran away with another man. It made our family notorious.”
“I see. It must have been fairly humiliating for her.”
“It was fairly humiliating for my mother too, when she had to return to town.”
Inés stood up and drifted closer to the window.
“Let me guess: the cad had impregnated her, and everyone pointed at her.”
“Yes,” Inés said coolly. “They pointed and called me a bastard.”
“Same with me. Although my old man did eventually marry my mother, hauling his heavily pregnant bride to a church to the horror of her parents.”
“At least he was honorable enough to marry her.”
This time he did laugh. She turned and looked at him in confusion.
“My father was many things, but honorable was not one of them. But he cared about family in his own way. He didn’t rid himself of me when I was a child, although it might have been easier than dragging a boy with him and raising me all alone.
Then again, he put me to work early enough. ”
“What happened to your mother?”
“She passed away when I was small. The Spanish flu,” he said, thinking of her smiles and her stories about Arabian princes and genies in bottles.
How quickly, how easily, the sickness had carried her away, those lips that had spoken a thousand fairy tales going silent a few days after the disease knocked at their door.
“Mine passed away when I was small too.”
They were quiet and he didn’t like it, because there was an intensity to her silences, and a ceaseless curiosity that made him nervous. He liked talking to her. Words tumbled out of his mouth with a startling ease. He was accustomed to speaking lies, not truths.
“Your father, then, he’s the one who made you into a criminal.”
“It was the family business, so to speak. Some people inherit companies. Others inherit their parents’ looks. The luckless ones inherit their bad habits.”
“You’ve never wanted to do anything different? Only thieving and lying?”
“My old man did what it took to keep us fed, to keep me safe. Besides, I loved the stupid bastard. I did as he said. I didn’t know right from wrong and grew up crooked, I suppose. And then, eventually, it didn’t matter. We were what we were.”
“Maybe when you were little you didn’t understand. But how old are you now?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“That’s old enough to learn better. You’ve never thought about attempting to make a living with an honorable trade?”
“Which trade?”
“You look like the men that star in pictures.”
“Just because I have a pleasant smile doesn’t mean I can act on camera, or that I’d ever be able to weasel my way into a producer’s good graces.
Plus, I hate the idea of that sort of work,” he said, and he thought of casting couches and all sorts of entanglements that this na?ve girl probably couldn’t understand.
For all her bravado, she was still soft at the edges.
“I don’t think you like work at all.”
“Are you going to give me a sermon about the dangers of easy living? That’s hypocritical, coming from a girl who is willing to rob her aunt blind.”
“I have no choice, I told you. I’ll never have the money to get out of here if I don’t—”
“You could leave without a peso and beg, and that would be more honorable, no? But it would be incredibly foolish and you’re no fool. Neither am I.”
She stiffened and was silent, while he threw her an exasperated look. How dare she judge him? What did she know about anything? This provincial nothing of a girl.
“And yes, I want to taste something different. That’s precisely why I’m here.
I want a real score, and with the money I make, I want to buy myself a real life,” he said.
“Same as you, a fucking real life, which is damn expensive. More than you can imagine. Once I have that, I’ll never do this shit again. ”
He was speaking too much, too openly. He didn’t even understand why. But it had been ages since he’d had someone to talk to. His confidant had been his father, and he was dead. He had no friends, couldn’t depend on crooks like Moisés. Lovers, when he took them, were brief, nameless affairs.
Trust no one, his father had warned him. The mantra had served him well so far.
“We should get back to business,” he said, since that was the whole point of their secret meeting. “It sounds like what your aunt wants is passion, something you’d find in pictures, isn’t that right?”
“I suppose so.”
“I can fake it. But I want to know more about her. Tell me her phobias, her favorite books, anything that comes to mind.”
The girl spoke, she rattled off facts. A half hour passed, and he considered it prudent to bid her good night. As she was about to leave the room he was struck with a question.
“How did your mother die?” he asked.
“An accident,” Inés said, quickly and stiffly, but she did not walk out, both hesitant and curious as she stood in the moonlight and looked up at him. “What about your father?”
“An illness.”
But he hadn’t just been ill. He’d been terribly sick, slowly wasting away, until the strong, clever man that Ulises had admired so much was nothing but a skeleton who could barely slur a few words.
Ulises had used the cash they had left to pay for a good casket, a great wreath of white flowers, and the extravagance of a perpetual plot in the Panteón Francés.
He didn’t have money to waste, but he couldn’t bear the idea of his father’s corpse being hauled out after a few years, his body disturbed, his bones mixed with the bones of a stranger.
His father wanted to end his days in the Panteón Francés and Ulises used all his money and wheedling and several bribes to obtain a precious lot and pay the priest from the nearby Convento de los Carmelitas Descalzos to say a prayer for his father’s soul.
After the funeral, he dragged himself to a cantina and drank and wept until he vomited and his eyes were dry.
I’m an orphan, he thought afterward. Which was a funny thought to have at his age—he’d been twenty-six when his father died—and yet he supposed it was true. He was utterly alone.
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