Chapter 17 #2
She shifted her gaze from her father’s painting to the blue dress, which had been pressed and hung from a hook that dangled from the top of the massive double-door wardrobe.
It looked almost like a victory flag. A beautiful, pure shade of blue.
The skies of Puerco Ahogado looked like that when the rain didn’t mar the view.
She’d wear it with the pearl necklace and pearl earrings and her white shoes with the large buckles. Her father had always said bright colors were for young girls. A spinster like Perla had to stick to browns and beiges when she wasn’t in mourning. But not anymore.
“What happened to the boy?” Ulises asked.
“What boy?”
“Salvador.”
“Why do you care?” she asked, eyes narrowing.
Ulises and Inés were not particularly chummy, yet something about the way they talked to each other at times, a furtive gesture here and there that she’d detected, annoyed her.
Like that day when her husband kept looking in Inés’s direction, or an occasion not long ago when she’d observed them having an animated discussion as the girl finished setting the sheets out to dry.
She hadn’t heard a word they said, yet the sight of them talking gave her pause.
“I’d never heard of this Salvador, that’s all,” Ulises said with a shrug. “I realize Inés doesn’t have your deportment and good manners, but I thought she’d be a bit wiser.”
She perked up at his words, for it was true, her niece lacked poise and refinement. “So did I, and yet what can one do? I blame my sister for her lax ways when Inés was small. Anyway, I don’t know what happened to Salvador. He went away,” she said.
Though she did know. But she didn’t want to remember her niece’s terrible accusations, the awful fight they’d had that day, her father’s furious eyes.
And still she’d kept the girl in the house.
Perla hadn’t kicked her out, although she ought to have.
What had Perla earned in exchange for her magnanimousness?
Nothing but scowls and bitterness from her wayward niece.
“She was always a terror, Inés. When she was a child, she didn’t talk. She was like a mute, not a word from her. Then when she did talk, I often wished she’d go quiet again. I fantasized I could sew her lips shut with black thread, and she wouldn’t say another word.”
She realized she’d spoken out loud. Her husband looked at her curiously. Perla ran a hand through her hair. She felt rattled, out of sorts, almost feverish. It was the excitement of the festival.
The dog was barking again. Perla rubbed her hand against her temple and turned to her husband. “Will you tell them to quiet that mutt down? How is anyone supposed to rest when it’s making a racket?”
“I’ll go see about it,” he said.
He left and she fanned herself and looked at her father’s portrait. At last, unable to stay in the wicker chair contemplating the old painting, she stood up and walked toward the hallway. Her body felt leaden, heavy from the alcohol she’d imbibed.
She reached the top of the stairs, and she looked below and saw Inés. She was carrying a bundle of sheets in her arms, and she chanced to look up at Perla.
Inés barely glanced at her, busy heading in the direction of the garden, but the look terrified Perla. She felt a choking fear.
Inés did not resemble Encarnación. Except in the eyes. Those dark eyes that made her think of her sister.
Perla had meant for this to be a joyous day. A day of new beginnings, of life, but death seemed to gnaw at her happiness. She went back to her room and threw herself back into the wicker chair, where she waited for her husband to return.
—
Perla’s mother dies a long, agonizing death.
The doctor walks in and out of the house each day, takes the woman’s pulse, utters inanities while she lies delirious, clinging to life.
At last, her mother expires, and Perla makes sure she is buried in a beautiful black dress, with her rosary between her hands.
She takes a steady lover the summer her mother dies.
Plutarco is a salesman who stays at the guesthouse every few months.
At first, she sleeps with him out of terror.
The terror of the stench of death hugging the walls, raking her skin.
She’s spent so much time in a sickroom, tending to a frail madwoman, and she fears the life has leached out of her body while she was sitting at her mother’s bedside.
She also fears the noises of the house. Her father’s loud commands, the tapping of his cane against the floor.
Her niece jumps rope and sings a song, and it’s like nails on a chalkboard, it gives her migraines.
Now that the child has regained the capacity for speech, she seems intent on making as much noise as possible as she rushes up and down the stairs, stumbles through the gardens, and laughs in the kitchen with the servants.
In Plutarco’s bed she finds relief. An escape. She sneaks into his room, where neither her father nor her niece can venture, and slips between the sheets. The weight of the man’s body, the push of him inside her, reminds Perla that she is alive.
She finds this arrangement more satisfactory than her occasional jaunts to the port to meet anonymous men in drinking dens.
It is convenient, for one, and it also grants her the vague illusion that a future lies ahead for her, a future in which she is happy, for the man makes promises about leaving his wife, about starting a life with Perla.
And even if the promises are vague—someday and when the time comes—she clings to them like a drowning woman might cling to a wooden plank.
The liaison, sordid as it may be, keeps her afloat.
Because misery lies beneath the sheets, clasping her tighter than any lover, whispering in Perla’s ear.
The years pass. The girl does not skip rope anymore.
She’s a young woman. Perla has discovered strands of gray in her hair, faint wrinkles fan her eyes.
These things have changed and yet others remain the same.
Her father still bellows commands, still slams his cane against the floor, while the color of the curtains fades more with every season, the damp seeps vehemently through the window shutters, and the blood in her veins seems to curdle.
—
Salvador arrives with the spring. He’s another young man working at one of the nearby coffee plantations, a clerk of no importance with a suitcase under his arm. He comes with a letter of reference and a smile.
The smile is open and warm, and he befriends the other guests quickly enough.
He befriends Inés. They go dancing with other young people a handful of times, always with a chaperone.
It seems innocent. Perla thinks she has instilled enough manners in her niece to keep her out of trouble’s way, yet she has spied an expression of concealed ferocity in the girl, and it makes her wary.
There are certain looks between them, an excessive number of smiles and loud laughter, that indicate a relationship that goes beyond cordiality. She suspects a secret romance and a scandal waiting to happen.
But Perla does not have proof of any misbehavior until one late night she catches the girl coming out of his room.
She orders her back to her bed and has sharp words with the young man.
Salvador is too terrified to protest when Perla orders him to leave the guesthouse, and he packs his suitcase quickly.
Perla and her father have a serious talk with Inés, a talk during which the girl stares at the floor in silence.
Modesty, reputation, family honor. All these terms are declaimed and the cane slams against the floor, punctuating the lecture in this manner, making Inés shiver.
She does not dispute their words; she has seemingly lost the ability to speak.
They order her to stay away from Salvador, a task that is made easy when he leaves town a few weeks later. The girl has become a stone, moving through the house and completing her chores in silence.
Inés’s mutism continues as the days go by, until a letter arrives for her. Perla holds it out to Inés and the girl snatches the paper from her. Other letters have arrived before, and Inés smiled at them. On this occasion, though, she looks distraught.
When she is done feverishly reading, she looks up at Perla.
“Aunt Perla, I need you to lend me a little money. I must go to Mexico City.”
“What business could you have in Mexico City?”
“I need to speak to Salvador.”
“About what?”
“I must go to Mexico City,” Inés insists.
“Why? What’s so important?”
Inés doesn’t reply, but there are tears in her eyes. If Salvador was in trouble, she’d mention it, hoping for sympathy. “Has he discarded you?” Perla asks, guessing at the truth. Inés does not attempt to deny it. She nods.
“I must speak to him.”
“You belong at home, not out there, knocking at doors like a madwoman. You’ll stay in Puerco Ahogado where you belong. Come now, it is time to feed the canaries.”
“He made promises, and I want him to tell me to my face that he does not intend to keep them.”
She pities the girl. Yet there’s a raw desperation in her niece’s face that repels Perla.
Something that’s too open, too wounded. She scoffs.
“Do you want him to humiliate you in person? Only a whore would chase after a man like that. But after all, your mother was the same. Whores, the both of you, slipping into men’s beds and satisfying your dirty urges. ”
The girl’s face changes. That concealed ferocity is bared, like the unsheathed claws of a wildcat. “How dare you say that about my mother!”
“I dare because it’s true. You’re as shameless as she was. She ran off with a married man, and soon enough he tired of her, as this boy tired of you.”
“And you’re a hypocrite! Mr. Azuela is your lover. You also satisfy your ‘dirty’ urges and pretend you’re above reproach. Mr. Azuela—”
At the second mention of the salesman’s name Perla slaps her niece. Inés rubs her cheek and stares at her aunt with tears in her eyes.