Little Indiscretions Read online

  Amalia Rossi, better known as Carosposo, was one of those neighbors who obligingly inform a child of all his or her family’s darkest secrets. As far back as Chloe could remember, Amalia had always been in and out of the house: a fat blond woman, quite a bit older than her mother, divorced three times, the last time from an Italian actor who had left her his surname as well as an exasperating tendency to make light of truly serious matters.

  It was Amalia, wicked witch that she was, who, some years later, had taken Chloe to the bottom of her Italian garden and told her that her brother, Eddie, had just died. And in her dream she suddenly saw the whole scene again, every detail intact: Amalia Rossi’s ring-laden fingers running through her brown hair, snagging every time, while Chloe, absolutely numb, pulled leaf after leaf off the box hedge, thinking: It isn’t true, it can’t be true. Get me out of here . . . somebody help me!

  Thankfully, in the dream, that horrible hand could suddenly be transformed into its opposite: the beloved hand that snatched Chloe out of the Italian garden and took her flying, flying away to Neverland, or anywhere else, anywhere at all, as long as it was away from there.

  Come on, Chloe, fly with me a little while longer, said the hand, while down there in the garden Carosposo’s voice seemed to choke on its own disgusting words of commiseration, like a myopic boa constrictor strangling itself in its tremendous grip for want of prey. Higher, Chloe, come on, up we go . . .

  When she flew away with her brother in a dream, she could believe it was all a lie. Everything that had happened on the nineteenth of February seven years before. It wasn’t true that Eddie had borrowed his father’s Suzuki 1100 to try it out on a straight stretch of La Coruña highway. And the biggest lie of all was that he had lost control of the bike going around a bend, just where the twenty-two-kilometer marker happened to be waiting. Twenty-two: his age then, the age Chloe was now about to reach. But Eddie, like Peter Pan, would never be a minute older: forever young, forever identical to the photo Chloe had carried with her since the day he had died, although she never looked at it. It’s good to carry around pictures of the dead but best not to look at them; it hurts too much.

  For a moment she thought she could see Eddie’s face on the bedside table. But no, it couldn’t be. She must have been imagining it. The photo was in its usual place, in her bag, hidden away in a little red leather case, somewhere under her sports gear and the Led Zeppelin and Pearl Jam CDs. Chloe never took it from its case, but she knew every detail by heart. She had taken it herself. They’d been laughing and Eddie looked so handsome on that afternoon of the nineteenth of February, just before he went away forever. Every one of her brother’s features, so similar to her own, was fixed in her memory: only their eyes were different. Eddie’s were very dark, almost black, while hers were blue, but apart from that, his hair, cut short, was the same color as Chloe’s, the lips were the same, and the shape of the face. Everything about the photo reminded her of that last day, even the clothes he was wearing: his father’s motorcycle leathers, peeled off down to the waist. It was an incongruous sight: a boy with sensitive, almost feminine, features disguised as a biker. That was what they had been laughing about.

  “And where do you think you’re going, Eddie?”

  Her brother had never been especially keen on motorbikes (or anything else to do with his father) and yet that day . . .

  So it’s easy to understand why Chloe preferred not to look at the photo of her brother. Luckily, there were other images filed away in her memory, more faithful reflections of his true personality. Eddie looking very serious with the tip of a pencil in his mouth, for instance, and she only had to concentrate on this image to make it expand and come alive like a film in Cinemascope. Then she could see Eddie writing something on one of those old-fashioned computers. She could see the short hair on the back of his neck, and those lively eyes that sparkled whenever he got onto his favorite topic: literature.

  “Are you writing a novel, Eddie? What is it? I bet it’s a story with adventures and romance and crime and stuff, isn’t it?”

  But Eddie didn’t let her see what he was writing.

  “Not yet, Clo-Clo. I’ll let you read the next one, I promise you.”

  (Chloe hated that nickname: it made her sound like a chicken. But Eddie was her brother, and he could call her what he liked, even Clo-Clo.)

  “One day I’ll let you read what I’ve written, but not this; it’s garbage. I’ve still got a long way to go. The problem is,” he said, sucking the pencil point as if that might help him solve it, “first of all, you need to find a good story to tell.”

  “Oh come on, Eddie, I bet you can think up something really good, something brilliant . . .”

  Eddie kept running his hand through his hair, over and over, as if he might find the secret in there, the key to a good story. But then he ran out of patience.

  “Well, there’s no point racking my brains, Clo. I guess there’s only one way to come up with a really good story, and that’s to have tons of experiences, get drunk, fuck hundreds of girls, kill someone or something—live fast, on the edge, and look death in the face. But it’s just a matter of time. I’ll get there someday, Clo, you’ll see. I promise you . . .”

  “And what happens to a writer if he doesn’t have any interesting experiences?” asked Chloe, who, like a lot of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, was always on the lookout for some patient soul to bombard with rhetorical questions: And what if this happens? And what if that doesn’t? . . . “And what if you don’t get to fuck hundreds of girls or live fast and look death in the face? What if it turns out you don’t like getting drunk and you don’t have the guts to be a killer, Eddie?”

  “Well, then I’ll just have to steal someone else’s story, won’t I?” he replied, sick of her stupid questions.

  They never got to talk about it again. Of all the experiences he had wanted to have, Eddie was granted one, at least: living fast and looking death in the face. More’s the pity, because there at the edge of La Coruña highway, the twenty-two-kilometer post was waiting to send him off to Neverland.

  “COME ON, CHLOE, come fly with me . . . let’s fly higher, let’s dream again.” But . . .

  A RACKET OF voices from the stairway burst into her dream. Startled, she let go of Eddie’s hand. What the fuck? Jesus!

  Eddie wouldn’t have liked to hear her speak like that. He wouldn’t have liked her new haircut either—a short bob, shaved up the back of the neck—or her clothes, and he certainly wouldn’t have approved of her pierced tongue and lower lip, not to mention her left nipple (and various tattoos). In fact, there were a lot of things he wouldn’t have liked about the new Chloe, who was almost twenty-two now, like him. Only he was gone. He had left her alone with her psychiatrist father and her uncaring mother. . . . He had gone and he only came back from time to time, at night, to take her by the hand and whisk her away through the window, although she knew those nocturnal escapades were no more than a dream, so why pretend? Neverland doesn’t exist. It’s a story for little children, and stupid little children at that. All she knew for sure was that Eddie had died seven years ago and the world had gone on without him.

  So how come the photo of her brother was sitting on the bedside table? Chloe was certain she hadn’t taken it out of its red case, she never did, and yet there he was, her brother, Eddie, looking at her with that smile she had tried to imitate so often in front of the mirror. Eddie standing there silently in his father’s leathers with the sleeves tied around his waist, as if he were Michael Doohan, smiling, not knowing he had only minutes left to live.

  “Tell me a story, Eddie. Don’t go; stay with me.” That’s what she should have said that afternoon, but she didn’t say anything, and Eddie jumped onto the Suzuki 1100 and went off in search of stories, because he was only twenty-two years old and nothing worth writing about had happened to him yet.

  “And what if you get old and you still haven’t had any experiences worth turning into literature? What then,
Eddie?”

  “Well, Clo-Clo, then I’ll just have to kill someone or steal their story, won’t I?” he said, and off he went, for good.

  FROM THE STAIRWAY came a clamor of voices and general confusion. Chloe decided to get out of bed and see what was happening, but she took her time. No point in hurrying, she thought. Nothing ever happens anyway. And that was the truth. Since that nineteenth of February seven years before, nothing had happened. Abso-fucking-lutely nothing.

  Ernesto Teldi, the owner of the house

  They say you end up getting used to anything. You even get used to nightmares if they come back night after night, relentlessly, for twenty years. Maybe it was even longer—1976 to 1998: twenty-two years. A whole lifetime, for some.

  Karel Pligh’s shout from the kitchen didn’t wake Ernesto Teldi but unobtrusively took its place among the other shouts that inhabited his dreams, one among many and not the most terrible.

  Just as he had learned to live with his nightmares, Ernesto Teldi knew that the persecution would cease the minute he managed to wake up. It was really quite a reasonable arrangement—calm days in return for troubled nights—and that was how it had always been, both when he lived in Argentina as a young man and since his definitive return to Europe several years ago. Not once in all that time had he been bothered by an unpleasant thought or a fright during his waking hours, not even now that he had to travel quite often to Buenos Aires to look after some new business. Occasionally on his trips he would hear that someone suffering from nightmares similar to his own had finally talked. Some had written books, while others opted for prime-time television, like that bald, sweaty army officer called Serenghetti or something like that, whose public confession Teldi had happened to see one afternoon in the Hotel Plaza. The fellow had multiple chins and reminded him of those shar-pei dogs with their folds of cinnamon-colored flesh. He hung his big bald head and explained to the interviewer that the worst thing was simply walking down the street, “Because, you see, there are all those young people, and you can’t help looking at their faces.”

  Having said that, he wiped his canine jowls with a fat, trembling hand as if belatedly trying to stop the words from coming out of his mouth.

  “What I mean is, well, say I go out for a walk,” he continued with difficulty, “and I’m minding my own business, walking down the Calle Corrientes for example, and suddenly I realize I can’t look at anyone under twenty-five without thinking, That boy or that girl, that gorgeous blonde, maybe she was one of . . . just the right age, you see.” Then Serenghetti paused and turned to the interviewer, who was looking at him with a highly professional and screen-friendly air of disgust. “And then,” he said, switching at this point to the second person in a hopeless bid for compassion, “you remember what you did to their parents when they were just babies, the age their own kids are now, and you hear the motors of the Hercules drowning out their shouts, not completely, though. You can still hear them, and you can’t forget the terrible look in their eyes, and you can see that look in the faces of the boys and girls on the Calle Corrientes or Posadas or whatever. You see what I mean? They’re looking at you, and you’re trying to keep calm and wondering what they know. What’s behind those eyes? But they don’t know anything. They were just babies when we went around and gave them out. And the way I saw it back then, well, it was the most humane thing to do. Poor kids. Anyway, now they have other parents who love them, who brought them up and sent them to school and wiped their noses and comforted them in the first months when they cried at night for their real mothers. But by then their real mothers,” said Serenghetti, sniffing and breathing noisily through his shar-pei nose, “were at the bottom of the river under several meters of dirty water, and that’s where they are still, down at the bottom, dead but not buried, and there you are walking down Corrientes thinking you can see their eyes every time one of those kids looks at you.”

  Serenghetti wiped his own nose after coming out with all this on prime-time television. A moment of silence. A couple of coughs. The interviewer seized the climactic moment and wrapped up the show with a truly professional blend of sorrow and loathing, and the fat guy probably went home thinking now he could breathe a bit more easily having publicly confessed his sins. True, many people would despise him after what he’d said, but they already did, before they knew the whole truth. And now maybe a couple would feel sorry for him. Why not? Deep down, in some dark corner of our souls, we are all comforted to find out that our little cruelties pale into insignificance beside what others have done.

  ERNESTO TELDI, HOWEVER, was of quite a different mind. A public confession was certainly not on his agenda. In any case, what did he have to confess? Nothing. His situation was completely different. He’d done a little deal and it was all over in a night. No one could honestly say he had collaborated with the army or had anything to do with those stupid assholes. His only sin—if you could call it that—was to have maintained polite but distant relations with the colonel in charge of the barracks near the town of Don Torcuato. They had known each other for a good while, almost since Teldi had arrived in Argentina. Minelli always called him Teldi the Spaniard, with a certain respect. Teldi, for his part, thought the colonel was a good sort. One night, just that one night, mind you, it must have been in ’76 or thereabouts, not long after the generals took power, anyway, Minelli asked him a favor: he wanted to borrow Teldi’s light plane.

  That was all he knew. At the time, anyway.

  “Look, Teldi,” said Minelli. “Best not to ask any questions. You do a bit of trading on the black market, don’t you? You bring tobacco back from Colonia and land in the field just across the way. It’s a good little business and you wouldn’t want it messed up, would you? We really don’t give a damn what you do. Listen, here’s the deal: I turn a blind eye, you don’t ask any questions. Got it?”

  So Teldi the Spaniard asked no questions, because in those days nobody did.

  He only started asking two or three years later, very quietly, very timidly at first, when rumors began to spread in the towns along the estuary, rumors about planes that were loaded up when they flew out over that part of the Río de la Plata but always came back empty. There was talk about what happened out there, and screams in the night, but it was better to forget all that or at least push it to the back of one’s mind so it didn’t get in the way, because Minelli was a good sort after all. He kept his word and always turned a blind eye to the smuggling. In return, Teldi kept his side of the deal; he didn’t ask any questions.

  So now Ernesto Teldi could go for a walk on Calle Corrientes or Posadas without a worry in the world, because he hadn’t asked any questions. Not then, not later, when it was all over, when he had given up smuggling cigarettes and had used his already considerable fortune to embark on a new career as an art dealer in Buenos Aires. It all worked out for the best.

  And yet, two years after his little conversation with Minelli, when he was still trading on the black market, something happened one night. Something truly strange, although it was probably no more than a figment of his imagination. In any case, one night as he was flying his plane across the river to Colonia, he thought he heard a shout coming up from the water, then another and another. It was crazy, it couldn’t be . . . With the noise of the engines you can’t hear a thing, especially flying at that altitude. He looked down. The black waters of the river were as quiet as ever: no movement, not a sign of life. “Impossible,” he said to himself, lighting a cigarette to smoke the fright away, and he didn’t give it a second thought. But those shouts took up residence in his dreams. And they were still there twenty-two years later; very reasonable guests really, since they never bothered him during the day and only made their presence felt at night. Fortunately, you can get used to anything in the end, even living with ghosts.

  That is why the shout coming from the kitchen of Teldi’s country house that morning seemed to be just one of the many that inhabited his dreams. He didn’t wake up until Adela came in fr
om the bedroom next door to get him. She had to shake him repeatedly before he opened his bleary eyes, dazed by the light of the real world. The first thing they registered was a letter lying on the bedside table. There it was, a fat envelope addressed to “Teldi the Spaniard,” his name written in green ink. It had arrived the night before, in the mail, without a sender’s name or address. Before looking at Adela, Ernesto stared at that little paper packet that, logically, should never have emerged from the world of his dreams. Shit, he thought, it’s still there. I’d almost convinced myself it was just another nightmare.

  Adela Teldi, the model hostess

  As soon as Mrs. Teldi heard Karel Pligh’s shout, she thought something irrevocable had happened. And if it was irrevocable, why hurry? Adela didn’t leap out of bed or rush into the corridor screaming. She had never been able to understand what it was that impelled people to go running around when they found out about something over which they had absolutely no control: a patient in a hospital whose brain scan has gone flat . . . a drowned child floating in the sea . . . They start rushing around, as if by getting in a flap they could outrun death and rewind the film, back through those crucial minutes. Back to when the brain scan was still showing signs of life and the child was safe at the top of the cliff, under his mother’s watchful eye, a few seconds before he gave her the slip for good and she went running, flying, hurling herself at a small body that she knew was irreparably broken.

  Since the previous night, Adela had known that something was going to happen. There was no specific reason for her hunch except that strange tingling sensation in her fingers. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes . . .” Adela was not a great reader of Shakespeare’s tragedies, but those lines had provided the title of a novel she remembered from her Agatha Christie phase. She had enjoyed that one, and it was true, too, about the pricking. Just before something awful happened, she could always feel it in her thumbs. For Shakespeare, of course, and Agatha Christie, only the worst kind of witches had prescient thumbs, but what did that matter? she told herself. Life isn’t a novel in which everyone has to play a predetermined role and stick to it. In real life, you end up playing all the roles. Sometimes you’re the victim. Sometimes you’re the hero. Or the schemer, or an extra. And so on, right through the cast.