“Why is your sister acting this way? What does she have against her past, against you?”
Without waiting for her invitation, he settled in the same armchair he had sat in the night before. With this informality, he seemed to be saying: Come and sit beside me, Soledad. Stop pouring your anger into tearing up bits of paper. Come here and talk to me.
She stared blankly in front of her for a few moments, her hands still full of documents, trying to find an adequate response. Then she threw the papers onto the still-cluttered desk and, as if she had read his mind, came over to him.
“I’ve been trying for twenty years to properly describe her attitude, and still haven’t succeeded,” she said, sitting in the armchair opposite him. “Resentment, perhaps?” she wondered, crossing her legs beneath her Piedmont silk skirt. “Rancor? Or simply a painful disappointment? A huge, bitter disappointment that I sense will never end.”
She fell silent again for a few seconds, as though trying to find the best way to put this into words.
“She thinks we left her on her own at the very worst moment, following our cousin Matí’s funeral. Manuel went back to his medical studies in Cádiz; I left with Edward to start my life as a newly married woman; Gustavo ended up in the Americas. Inés was left alone as our elders slid inexorably into decline. Our grandmother, my mother, and the aunts with their eternal mourning, laudanum, and gloomy rosaries. Grandfather eaten away by illness. Uncle Luis, Matí and Luisito’s father, sunk in a deep well of sorrow from which he never emerged, and our wastrel father, Jacobo, increasingly lost with each passing day in the slums and bawdy houses.”
“What about Luis, the Runt?”
“At first they sent him to a boarding school in Seville. He was only fifteen but barely looked more than ten. He was profoundly affected by his elder brother’s death; he went into a deep depression and took ages to recover. And so Inés was the only one who at first seemed destined to remain in the midst of that hell, living with a troop of the living dead. She begged us to help, but none of us listened, and we all fled. From the desolation, the ruin of our family. From the bitter end to our youth. And Inés, who until then had not shown any particular pious vocation, chose to shut herself away in a convent rather than to have to put up with it all.”
It certainly was a sad panorama, he reflected, without taking his eyes from her. The life of a promising young man cut off in his prime, and as a consequence a whole clan was left in a state of profound despair. Sad indeed, but something still bothered him: he did not see this as being sufficiently devastating to have provoked a collective tragedy on such a scale. Perhaps it was for this reason, because the story she had told was not sufficiently convincing, and both of them knew it, that following a few further moments of silence she decided to reveal more.
“What did Manuel tell you happened during that hunting party to Doñana?” she asked, pressing the tips of her fingers under her chin.
“That it was an accident.”
“An anonymous shot that went astray?”
“I think that’s what I recall.”
“What you know is the story we invented, the one we always tell other people. The truth is that the shot that killed Matí did not come from some unknown gun but from one of ours.” She paused and swallowed hard. “From Gustavo’s, in fact.”
In his mind’s eye, Mauro caught a fleeting glimpse of his rival’s blue eyes. The ones he’d seen in El Louvre Café. The ones in La Chucha’s place. Impenetrable, hermetic, as though filled with clear water turned to stone. So that was the weight on you, my friend, he said to himself. For the first time he felt a hint of somber compassion for his adversary.
“It was his sense of guilt that made him leave for the Americas,” Sol went on. “No one ever said the word killer but we all thought it. Gustavo killed Matí, and so our grandfather gave him a considerable sum in hard cash and ordered him to go away and disappear from our lives. To the Indies or to Hell. For him almost to cease to exist.”
His reckless wager, Calafat’s intuition, the sound of the ivory balls as they caromed off each other on the green baize during the devilish game they became caught up in. Everything was starting to make sense.
Soledad’s voice jolted him out of Havana and back to Jerez.
“But there was already tension in the air. We were inseparable as children, but we had grown up and were moving apart. In that eternal domestic paradise in which we lived, we had naïvely promised to be united and faithful to one another forever. From when we were little, a gaggle of innocent builders of dreams, we created the perfect structure: Inés and Manuel would marry; Gustavo would be my husband. Matí never took part in those fantasies of ours, but as the older cousin he was in charge, and so we decided we would find him a beautiful young lady who wouldn’t cause us any problems. And Luisito, Little Runt, would stay unmarried at our side as a faithful ally. We would all remain the best of friends, have loads of children, and the doors of our shared house would always be open for anyone wishing to see our never-ending happiness.”
“Until reality decided otherwise,” Mauro prompted.
Her mouth twisted in a mixture of irony and bitterness. Outside, the rain continued to trickle down the windowpanes.
“Until grandfather Matías began to plan a very different future for us. And before we even realized that there was a world outside full of men and women with whom we might eventually share our lives, he changed all the pieces on the board.”
Mauro Larrea recalled what Ysasi had told him in the tavern. The generational transfer.
At that moment the little maid with the sallow face came into the study carrying a tray of snacks. She laid it down next to them: cuts of cold meat on a linen cloth, small sandwiches, a bottle, two cut-glass wineglasses. She spoke a few words in English, but he only managed to catch “Mister Palmer” and guessed that this was the butler’s idea when he saw that lunchtime had come and gone without anyone going near the dining room. The maid then pointed to an oil lamp with a decorated screen on one of the tables. She must have asked her mistress if she wanted it lit to provide some light in the gloomy room. The reply was a decisive “No, thank you.”
They paid no attention to the food, either. Soledad had pushed open the door to her past, and there was no place there for the sherry or the duck breasts on the tray. At most this was an opportunity to chew over a kind of bitter nostalgia and share it with the man listening to her.
“Our grandfather set his sights on his grandchildren. That meant he worked out a sophisticated scheme, part of which included marrying off one of us girls to his English agent. That was intended to secure part of his business: the wine exports. He didn’t care that Inés and I were then seventeen and sixteen, or that Edward was older than our own father and had an almost adolescent son. Nor was grandfather concerned that neither of us could understand at first why all of a sudden this friend of the family whom we had known since we were little girls started to bring us Gunter’s marmalade from London, invited us to stroll along the Alameda Vieja, and insisted we read Keats’s melancholy odes to improve our English pronunciation. Edward obviously was not against the idea. And so I ended up, not yet eighteen, giving my consent from beneath a magnificent Chantilly lace veil, naïvely unaware of what would come next.”
Mauro preferred not to dwell on that, and so asked:
“What about your sister?”
“She never forgave me.”
The rustle of her silk skirt told him that underneath the magnificent material she was uncrossing her legs, only to cross them again in the opposite sense.
“Once we realized what was going on, and seeing that at first Edward seemed equally attracted to both of us, Inés began to think of it far more seriously than I did. She began to get her hopes up and almost to take it for granted that, since she was the older one, the one who was more settled and serene, possibly even more beautiful, she would eventually become the defi
nitive object of the affections of our suitor once the rather childish courtship of the two of us ended. Before then, we had both taken this very lightly, although he hadn’t.”
“Your grandfather?”
“No, Edward,” she corrected him quickly. “He took the challenge of choosing a bride very earnestly. His first wife, left an orphan by a rich importer of hides from Canada, had died of tuberculosis nine years earlier. He was a widower in his late forties, passionate about wine, and the owner of a prosperous wine business he had inherited from his father. He spent his life traveling to arrange deals; his son meanwhile was brought up by some maternal aunts in Middlesex. They were spinsters who turned him into a spoiled and selfish little monster. Each time Edward came to Jerez on one of his twice-yearly visits, our house was the closest thing he had to a home, and it was one long celebration. With our grandfather as his staunch business ally, and the ne’er-do-wells of my father and uncle as his closest friends despite the contrast with his Victorian bourgeois morality, all that was lacking was for our bloods to be mixed through marriage.”
She uncrossed her legs again, this time to get up from the armchair. She went over to the table the maid had pointed out earlier, the one on which stood the delicate lamp with its shade painted with tree branches and long-legged birds. Taking a long cedar match out of a silver box, she lit the lamp, and a warm glow spread over the study. Still standing, she blew the match out and, holding it between her fingers, continued her story.
“He soon decided I was the one; I never asked him why.”
She walked over to the big window and went on talking with her back to him, perhaps so as not to reveal such intimate details to his face.
“The fact is, he made a great effort to cut this state of affairs short. He could see what a difficult situation it was: two sisters taken out of the shop window and forced to compete without wishing to, at an age when neither of us was sufficiently mature to understand much of what was going on. Then came the night before the wedding. The house was full of flowers and foreign guests; my wedding dress for some reason was hanging from a chandelier. Inés, who as far as anyone could tell had accepted this unexpected choice quite calmly, was lying in the bed next to mine in the room we had always shared, which is the one you are sleeping in now. Suddenly, she broke down in a fit of inconsolable weeping that went on until dawn.”
Sol returned to her armchair and leaned back in it. Now, even though she was revealing her innermost feelings, she did look him in the face.
“I was not in love with Edward, but I was naïvely seduced by the esteem he began to show me. And by the world that I imagined was at my feet,” she added with a hint of bitterness. “A magnificent wedding in La Colegiata, a splendid trousseau, a maisonette in Belgravia. Trips back to Jerez twice a year, up-to-date with the latest fashions, and surrounded with new things. A paradise for the unthinking, pampered, and romantic creature I was then, a foolish young thing who had no idea of how bitter my uprooting would be, or how hard it was going to be in those first years to live far from my family with a stranger nearly thirty years older than me and who brought an insufferable son to our marriage. A dizzy young woman who never once imagined that this commitment she had fallen into almost by chance would sever once and for all the relationship she had with the person to whom she had been closest since birth.”
Mauro Larrea was taking in every word. He did not drink, eat, or smoke.
“In spite of everything, I learned to love Edward. He was always attractive, attentive, and generous. He got on extraordinarily well with people, was a good conversationalist, knew the world, and behaved impeccably. I realize now, though, that I loved him differently from the way I would have loved a man I myself had chosen.”
Although she did not mean to, her words sounded harsh and unsettling.
“In a completely different way to how I would have loved you.”
He scratched at the scar on his hand until it almost began to bleed.
“But he was always a good companion on my journey. With him I learned to swim in both calm and stormy waters, and it is thanks to him that I am the woman I am today.”
Now it was the miner who rose to his feet. He had heard enough and refused to listen to more. He did not want to continue corroding his soul as he imagined what it would have been like to have spent all those years at Soledad’s side. Waking up next to her every morning, sharing common dreams, filling her fertile womb with daughter after daughter.
He went over to the window, which she had moved away from a few moments before. The rain had ceased, and the gray sky was beginning to clear. In the square, a few scruffy children were splashing in the puddles, running and laughing with pleasure.
That’s enough, compadre. Cut loose from a past that cannot be brought back and from an imagined future that will never exist. Get back to your life at the point where you left it. Get back to your pathetic reality.
“The devil knows where that Gorostiza woman has got to, trying to cause us more trouble,” he muttered.
Before Soledad could react to this sudden change in topic, a voice rang out in the room.
“I think I know.”
Startled, they both turned their heads toward the doorway. In it, accompanied by Palmer, stood Nicolás.
“Santos Huesos has just come back from combing the streets for her, and told me.”
He stepped confidently into the room. His clothes were soaking.
“He told me you were desperately searching for a relative of the Gorostizas’ who had arrived from Cuba. A flamboyant-looking woman whose appearance was different from the ladies around here. I didn’t need any more information to remember: I met her in . . . in Santa María del Puerto?”
“El Puerto de Santa María,” they corrected him as one.
“No matter: I saw her early this morning at the quay. She was about to cross to Cádiz on the same steamship I had just arrived on.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
It was completely dark by the time he raised the brass door knocker in the shape of a laurel wreath. He adjusted his cravat; she straightened the bow on her hat. They both cleared their throats at almost the same time.
“I understand that the lady from overseas who came looking for me might be here.”
Genaro, the aged butler, said nothing but showed them into the office, the room Mauro had been received in when he first disembarked and arrived at the Fatous’ house with a letter of recommendation from Calafat. Since that morning he had not set foot inside this room reserved for customers and for business; he had quickly become a welcome guest and had a comfortable bedroom placed at his disposition, as well as the family room and the dining room where every morning they had served him hot chocolate with churros beneath the unchanging gaze of bearded ancestors. Now, however, he was back at the starting point again: here he was seated on the same pinwale-upholstered chairs, surrounded by the same engravings of motionless schooners. As if he were once more a stranger, lit by the dim lamps of this outer room. The only difference was that this time he was accompanied by a woman.
“Fatou is a fourth-generation shipping merchant as well as a commission agent and a government supplier,” Mauro said quietly to Soledad. “He ships goods throughout Europe, the Philippines, and the Antilles, including a lot of sherry. He owns his own ships and warehouses and also lends money for big ventures.”
“That’s not bad.”
“I’d give my right arm to own a fifth of it.”
Despite the tense atmosphere, they both almost burst out laughing. An untimely, uncouth guffaw to free themselves from all the accumulated anxiety and recharge their spirits to confront all the uncertainties ahead. Unfortunately, this did not happen, because at that very instant the owner of the house appeared.
He did not greet him with the simple “Mauro” with which he had bidden the miner farewell a few days earlier: a solemn “Good evening to
you” showed them that the situation was likely to be as taut as the skin of a drum. Sol Claydon was presented as the cousin by marriage of Carola Gorostiza, and then Fatou, plainly stiff and uncomfortable, sat down opposite them. Before saying a word, he carefully straightened the fine pin-striped material of his trousers over his knees, concentrating on that trifling task in order to gain time.
“Well, now . . .”
The miner preferred to spare him his embarrassment.
“My dear Antonio, I’m truly sorry for the problems this unpleasant turn of events may be causing you.” Using Fatou’s Christian name was of course deliberate. By doing so, Mauro was hoping to reestablish the cordial links between them. “We came as soon as we suspected that Señora Gorostiza might be here.”
Where else could that madwoman have gone, he had thought as soon as they learned from Nicolás that her destination was Cádiz. She doesn’t know anyone in the city; all she has is a name and address written on a scrap of paper, because that’s what she had when she left Havana in search of me. It was at the Fatous’ house that they gave her vague directions to where I was in Jerez, and that’s the only place she can possibly return to. Those were his thoughts, and so that was where they headed without a moment’s delay. They told Nico, who would have preferred a hundred times to accompany them, if only to have something to do, to go and inform Manuel Ysasi, who as usual was busy with his appointments and visits. And to await any reply from the possible purchasers from Madrid. It’s really important to us, Mauro warned Nico as he squeezed his forearm by way of farewell. Be careful, because both our futures depend on what they finally decide.
Soledad and he had weighed up the different possibilities of what to do next. They chose one of the most straightforward ones: to demonstrate that Carola Gorostiza was a greedy, unstable outsider not worthy of an ounce of trust. This was the idea they had in mind when they arrived at Calle de la Verónica and found themselves seated in this room dimly lit by two feeble lamps.