Chapter 11 #2
She went to the kitchen, where Estrella was chopping onions with an expert hand.
They had a little radio—a birthday gift from Estrella’s oldest son, who fixed radios and vacuum cleaners in the port—and were listening to boleros.
A woman sang “No Vuelvo Contigo” while Fito sat at the table reading the funnies.
“Fito, can you take the dog for a walk?” Inés asked.
“Can’t right now. I need to buy ice. But there ain’t no point in going until it’s noon. The fishmonger was out drinking last night.”
Inés had heard there were houses in the bigger cities where they had home freezers, but those were for wealthy folks, and so in Puerco Ahogado people bought their ice from the fishmonger and someone had to walk there and fill a pot.
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“He was drinking with the professor. They play dominoes on Mondays at La Dominica.”
Inés frowned. “That horrid man! He promised he wasn’t going to play and drink anymore.”
“The professor isn’t ever going to stop drinking,” Estrella said as she stopped her rhythmic chopping and looked up at Inés. “He’s the way he is. His soul is crooked. It’s because of the day of the month he was born. It’s all fated, Nina Inés.”
“I hate it when you talk of fate,” Inés said, thinking irritably about the circumstances of her birth, her family, which apparently decreed that she be chained to this house and never venture far from Puerco Ahogado.
Estrella shrugged. Inés turned to Fito. “Why do you need ice anyway?”
“Company’s coming and your aunt wants to make drinks. It’s only Sarita Novo, but you know how fussy she can be, especially after she’s been reading those magazines with cocktail recipes. Martini lunches, she calls ’em.”
“Then you better make sure you get a piece of ice somehow, or she’ll yell at you again. Where’s the kettle?”
“Right over there. You’d think with how she complains about money she wouldn’t be wasting it on ice and drinks. She damn near beat me when I asked her for a raise,” Fito said sadly.
“I told him not to,” Estrella said, shaking her head. “But when do young people listen to me?”
“I need to hand the professor his tea and the dog needs to go for a walk, so you might as well do that before you get the ice. If my aunt sees you reading the paper, she’ll garnish your wages this week.”
“Sure,” Fito said with a sigh.
Inés boiled the water and prepared the tea. She bumped into her aunt as she was heading out of the kitchen with the pot and cup.
“There you are,” Perla said. “I had no idea where you’d gone.”
“I was making tea for the professor.”
“If there’s a sip of alcohol in that ‘tea’ I’ll give you a beating. That dried-up mummy is always sipping my liquor.”
“There’s no liquor.”
Perla lifted the lid of the pot and took a sniff. She replaced it, but she was still frowning. “Fine. But you shouldn’t be nursing him. It’s a waste of time; the bastard is behind on his rent again.”
“He’ll catch up,” Inés assured her.
“I suppose you don’t care if there’s money coming into this house or not, since you don’t pay any of the bills.”
Aunt Perla was in an awful mood. Inés wondered if Ulises was the culprit. After all, he’d tried talking to her again the previous night about money matters and been defeated. But even if Perla had won that battle, she was sure to still be annoyed. Perhaps she was mad at Fito for asking for a raise.
Inés lowered her gaze. Her silence somehow managed to irritate her aunt more than an insolent reply, and she knew it. Quietly, she felt Perla boiling with repressed anger.
“Go ahead, take the tea. Then finish with the linens.”
“Yes, Aunt Perla.”
—
Sunday morning Inés pretended she was ill.
All the other women in the house departed while Nepomuceno snored inside his room.
As soon as she heard the front door slamming shut, Inés leaped out of bed and headed to her aunt’s bedroom.
Ulises was already there, fiddling with two pieces of thin metal, trying to pry open the massive secretaire.
“Will we be able to lock it afterward?” she asked.
“No. Let’s hope she doesn’t notice that it was left open, or that she thinks she forgot to lock it,” he said.
His first couple attempts were futile, and he cursed loudly. Finally, the lock yielded to his ministrations, and he pulled the lid up.
“Come on, help me look,” he said, and smiled.
She smiled back. Their shared secrets were sometimes close to child’s play, lightening her days despite the seriousness of the matters at hand. She supposed it was the pleasure of having a co-conspirator.
They began to riffle through the many tiny drawers and compartments. He held up a piece of paper. “Her will?”
“She doesn’t have a will. She’s superstitious about it, says she’ll dictate it on her deathbed and leave me something if she feels like it. If I’m naughty, she’ll leave it to a charity for wayward girls.”
“It’s someone’s will. Ah, yes. Your grandfather’s will…but that’s your name there.”
“Where?”
“Right here,” he said, tapping his finger against the page. “He leaves the house to his daughter Perla, and upon her passing to his granddaughter, Inés. That’s you.”
“Let me see,” she said. “The house is mine? But Grandfather disinherited my mother. He made no provisions for me.”
“Upon her death. No mention of wayward girls. Let’s see if we can find money. She must have cash,” he said as he folded the will and tucked it back in place.
Inés opened a drawer. It was a stack of letters. For a moment she thought to look elsewhere, but a name caught her attention: Inés Inclán, the envelope said. She opened it and began to read.
“Finally! Let’s see, one hundred, two hundred…”
He was counting bills, but Inés had stopped listening. She sat down on the bed and opened another letter. Then another. She was about to faint, all the blood seemed to congeal in her veins and she felt a pressure in her chest. Ulises turned around.
“That’s two thousand pesos in cash and not even a measly traveler’s check. I can’t believe—” He paused and looked at her. “Is something wrong?”
“My father died.”
“What?”
She extended one of the letters with shaky hands and he grabbed it and read it while she sat there, feeling as though she’d been stabbed. Clean in the heart, that’s how deep the wound ached.
“Buried on March third, 1942,” Ulises said. “That’s a year ago.”
“I didn’t know. My aunt always told me he cut off all contact with us. But look at these letters,” she said, holding them up. “That’s several letters asking if I would write back to him. She never told me.”
She let the letters fall from her fingers. He clasped her hands.
“Inés…I’m sorry,” he said.
He sounded sincere but it didn’t matter. She felt as if the blood really were spilling from a wound in her body as she sat there, weak from exhaustion.
She remembered her father’s voice, back in the apartment in Puebla.
Aunt Perla always said she looked like him, with not a stitch of the Incláns in her blood.
When she’d compared her features to those of her mother, Inés had to agree.
Her mother had bequeathed her eyes and her locks of black hair, but Inés’s mouth, chin, and nose seemed to come from another source.
She’d wondered about him through the years. How could she not when the word “bastard” was used so casually? It indicated a taint. Eventually she stopped wondering, knowing she’d never speak to him, that he did not care for her.
He’d cared a little, it seemed. Her aunt had snatched that trickle of feeling from her.
Inés ran to the bathroom, where she had to splash water on her face to keep herself from fainting. She pressed her back against the door and stood there, breathing slowly.
Ulises knocked. “Inés, we need to put these things away. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
When she walked out, he had already put everything back in place and was sliding down the lid of the desk.
“Come on,” he said. “We don’t want your aunt to catch us in here.”
He took her by the hand, and she stumbled behind him. “I could kill her!” she yelled, for the sake of yelling something, because if she didn’t scream, she was going to begin crying.
“You’d get a house, but then you would end up in jail,” he said lightly. “Get back in bed. You’re supposed to be indisposed.”
He opened the door to her room, but she stopped at the threshold and looked up at him. “What do you mean I’d get a house?”
“The will. When she dies, you get the house. It’s not much use if you’re in jail, though,” he said, urging her inside the room. But she clutched his arm.
“No, you’re wrong. It’s extremely useful. She doesn’t have a will. I get the house if she’s dead, and if she dies intestate, then a judge would have to render a verdict about her money and the rest of her things.”
“Intestate is a bloodbath. Relatives end up quarreling for years and it drags and drags out in court.”