Chapter 34
In truth, I didn’t need to decide what I wanted.
I wanted everything. I wanted the silver bracelet on my wrist and the obscene print on my wall.
I wanted the house in La Cieneguita, with chickens roaming the backyard and neat rows of rubber boots lined up along a tiled entryway.
The purity of morning, fragrant and cool.
Solitude and unfettered sex and the joy of work that I loved. Mostly I wanted never to go back.
Sometimes Louise seemed like the key, murmuring the answers to questions I hadn’t fully formed, as if we were speaking in that shared code I’d perceived from the first morning in the café, when she told me she was going to kill someone and I thought, She could, and the thought pleased me and attracted me to her.
At other times, she grated on me. Her unspoken demands for pity; her overweening authority; her petty jabs at Tom, at marriage itself.
One morning around this time, we were sitting in the hidden café, at the table near the entrance where I’d once observed the young woman reading her book.
Louise was facing in, haloed by sunlight.
Through the window over her shoulder, I could see rows of painted doors, women passing with their brightly colored plastic shopping bags.
“That first time you came to my house,” Louise began, “when you were talking about Allan’s painting.
I never told you this: He made it when I was pregnant.
You were speaking about the shape, with the tiny legs.
Tenuous, I think you called it, or was it fragile?
It touched me, your describing it that way.
It was as if you knew.” She searched my eyes. “I lost the baby.”
“Oh, Louise, I’m so sorry!” A horse was passing in the street, I’d heard the clop of hooves and now saw at the periphery of my vision the absurdity of the rider’s sombrero, like an actor portraying a Mexican at a theme park. In the silence, something nagged at me. “Your daughter—”
“Yes, finally we did have a baby. Only Allan never saw her. He died a month before she was born.” She shrugged her shoulders and laughed, that peculiar laugh she had—Oh well, that’s life.
“That first pregnancy, we were living in Italy. We had a small farmhouse in Umbria, about an hour north of Rome. We had these two wonderful chickens, similar to Bella. Allan would be painting, and the chickens would come into my bedroom and nestle, one against each hand. After a few minutes—but you won’t believe me. ”
“No, what?”
“The chickens would nestle in my hands, cooing, until two eggs dropped into my palms. Did you know they’re soft until they come out? The eggs. If you touch them before they’re out, the shells are warm and soft as water balloons. But then the instant they’re out, they’re perfectly shaped and hard.”
“You’re joking,” I said, laughing lightly. It was true; I didn’t believe her. Not just about the eggs. “I thought you told me that Allan died here, in San Miguel.”
“Yes,” Louise answered without hesitation.
“We moved back after I miscarried. A change of scene. And then, after I lost Allan, my Italian friends helped me get back to Italy and open my gallery. I don’t know how I ever got through it.
” She glanced at me. “The point is, sometimes true family is not given but found.” She reached across the table, solemnly taking my hand.
After a pause, she surprised me by saying, “There’s a favor I have to ask you. ”
“Of course,” I reflexively answered.
“I have an old friend, from when I lived here before. He’s a marvelous artist, I very much want you to meet him, only—”
“What is it?”
“I want it to be at your house.”
“Why not yours?”
She made a dismissive gesture. “My house isn’t suitable for entertaining.”
“But you entertain all the time.”
“This is different.”
We went back and forth a while longer, Louise saying that her house wasn’t beautiful enough, she had no view, her furniture wasn’t amenable to a seated meal with more than two or three people.
I countered half-heartedly. My main hesitation, unvoiced, of course, was how I would present such an odd request to Tom.
But as usual, she wore me down and I said yes.
We settled up. A few minutes later, as I was flagging down a taxi, I asked if I could drop her somewhere.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly.”
The usual rigmarole. The back-and-forth.
Then speeding away along the narrow street lined with parked cars, banda music blaring from the radio.
Louise had turned sideways, peering out the window.
I looked at the faint lines around her eye and the trace of scar along her jawline and the slight, irreverent lift of her bottom lip.
Those small details that I seemed to have known forever.