Little Indiscretions Read online

  Nestor pricked up his ears at the last words and stopped stirring. “Her?”

  And Carlos went on. He wasn’t really conscious of sharing a secret with his friend; it was more like he was talking to himself.

  “Not that I ever stopped. I mean, I used to think about her every day before, but the problem is now, since starting this job, when I look at a woman’s hands, I keep thinking they’re her hands, or I notice the neckline of some woman I’ve never seen before because it looks like her neckline. Haven’t I ever told you about the woman in the painting?” he asked. “No, I guess not. I haven’t told you or anyone else, and I’m not going to start now. There’s no point in telling anyone about her.”

  Nestor said nothing. He kept stirring the syrup, but one more cherry soaked in cognac was all the prompting Carlos needed to launch into the story of a very old secret, a secret that went right back to his childhood.

  5

  I. THE WOMAN IN THE PAINTING

  “CAN YOU IMAGINE,” said Carlos, feeling he had found the perfect introduction to his story, “can you imagine spending your whole life looking at mouths and lips, hoping to find a smile you’ve never seen? And if I told you I spent my time at work, and the rest of my time, for that matter, searching for things like a shadow falling across a woman’s neck or the curve of an earlobe, you’d think I was crazy, wouldn’t you? But everywhere I go, I’m on the lookout for details like that.”

  Nestor’s response to this curious effusion was to say: “Come on, Carletto. It’s all right; don’t be ashamed. Some of the things that go through our minds seem completely crazy, but there’s not a lot of nonsense in the book of fate, if you see what I mean, Carletto.”

  Carletto didn’t see at all, and he didn’t understand why Nestor’s curious accent kept coming and going, shifting from Spanish to Neapolitan and back again, depending on his mood and what he was saying. But on that fateful afternoon, alone with Nestor in the kitchen at Mulberry & Mistletoe, having finally resolved to tell his story, Carlos didn’t give a hoot (as Nestor would have put it) about his friend’s wandering accent. It could roam the whole world over for all he cared. He was busy trying to find the words to tell the story of an old obsession, one that went back almost to his birth.

  He went on to explain why for many years now, but especially in the last few months, he had been haunted by the image of a woman and why a pair of adolescent lips could have such a hypnotic effect on him—he’d stop whatever he was doing and follow their curve, or perhaps it wasn’t so much the lips themselves as the smile that lingered on them, for the mouth that obsessed him was always smiling. In his mind’s eye he could also see a pair of rather inexpressive blue eyes, neither cold nor still, just absent. Then the hair, platinum blond, tied back so you could just make out the shape of an ear and tell that it was unadorned. And, farther down, the shoulders, where his gaze could have lingered a lifetime had it not been drawn immediately to the hands, so different from each other: the serene right hand, fingers slightly apart, as if they were about to alight gracefully on a veranda rail, while the left was holding something close to her chest: a little sphere, a jewel or some sort of cameo, intensely green in color.

  It was, of course, a portrait he was describing. A painting of a girl about whom Carlos knew nothing: a painting that had always been in his grandmother’s apartment in Madrid. He had been there only twice before he had inherited the apartment, two or three months earlier. And the third time he had gone to visit his new property, not long before joining Nestor’s staff, a mass of childhood memories had come flooding back.

  WHEN NO ONE IS left to tell what happened, family histories keep their secrets. Only the walls could have explained, for instance, why Carlos’s grandmother and his father hardly ever spoke to each other. Father and son lived far from Madrid, in a small town near the Portuguese border. The father, Ricardo, was a quiet, unambitious GP, who had been through life without causing any disturbance apart from the flutter inevitably provoked by a handsome body in a doctor’s white coat. The grandmother, Teresa, was his wife’s mother. And his wife, Carlos’s mother, was called Soledad. She had been dead for many years.

  Carlos had not yet turned four when his mother died, and that was so long ago now that all he could remember of her was the ching ching her bangles made, a sound that should have been cheerful but wasn’t. In his memory it was accompanied by words that he couldn’t be sure he had actually heard, since they might have been part of that store of early memories fabricated retrospectively from what other people had told him. In any case, he associated the ching ching of the bracelets with a voice whispering in his ear: “Carlitos, give your mother another kiss. She’s going on a trip. Another kiss, darling.” That was all. His memory had not retained a single feature of her face. Soledad was faceless, although it would have been simple enough for the obliging fabricator of false memories who lives in all of us to restore those features, one by one, since Carlos kept several framed photographs of his mother in his sitting room. Some of the frames were wooden; others, imitation silver. And on each frame a name, a date, and a place were inscribed: Soledad, San Sebastián, 1976 . . . Soledad, Galicia, 1977 . . . and so on, up to the most recent: Soledad at her parents’ house, 1978. She always had the same smile, and the face that Carlos discovered in those photos was not at all like his own, since his mother’s hair was very dark and her straight but pretty eyebrows were darker still. Some of the photos showed Ricardo Garcia as well (although he wasn’t mentioned in the inscriptions), always sitting or standing close to his wife. In those, Soledad had a calm expression. “Soledad, San Sebastián, 1976,” for example, showed them in summer clothes, sharing a beer in the Paseo de la Concha, while in “Soledad, Galicia, 1977,” they were laughing, arm in arm, ignoring a woman to their right, who looked like she was trying to get out of the picture. Any one of these images could have provided him with a false memory, or at least a face to go with the tinkling of the bangles or the more doubtful recollection of a voice asking for a kiss, in spite of which all he could remember were sounds, a voice perhaps, but no face.

  APART FROM THE sitting room with its reverently displayed photographs, the house in which Carlos had lived with his father had all the virtues and vices of an exclusively masculine habitat. When the father of a young child loses his wife, he usually looks for some way to fill the gap she has left. Either he marries again or, sooner or later, he ends up delegating the more tedious domestic tasks to a female relative—a sister or a second cousin, who looks after the day-to-day running of the household and occasionally revives the memory of the departed, sometimes speaking of her fondly, sometimes quite the opposite. So the dead mother lives on in her house, with the help of her female successor. But that is not what happened in the Garcia household.

  It was clear from the start that Ricardo Garcia was not going to follow the pattern. He never showed the slightest desire to remarry (although he did become almost conjugally fond of eau-de-vie and, later, anisette) and was quick to reject the offers of two distant cousins who would have been only too happy to help him out. He mourned for Soledad in a very private and unspectacular way: by building up a collection of framed photographs.

  In the end, the housekeeping problems were solved quite simply by hiring help. As soon as Carlos was old enough, he was packed off to boarding school, and the chores were done by local girls who came in now and then to cook, change the sheets, and give the living room and the bedrooms a quick dust. They hadn’t known Soledad; they just did the work. So little by little, all things feminine disappeared from the house and from Carlos’s life, including the living memory of his mother. The dead are all too easily reduced to anonymous photographs growing dim in their frames on the mantelpiece unless love or hate keeps them alive.

  QUITE A DIFFERENT fate, however, awaited the girl with long fingers and blond hair, whose portrait hung in his grandmother’s flat. Perhaps because this girl, unlike his mother, did have a face. Carlos remembered very clearly how he had
discovered her. What is more, he could relive every detail of the scene. It was his earliest childhood memory, and there could be no doubt that it was genuine. It could not have been made up afterward from the stories that others had told him. It must have happened just as he remembered, because no adult would have bothered to tell him about it. Only children are interested in such things.

  He was sitting on the floor, playing with something or just tracing the arabesques in the carpet with his finger, when unfamiliar feet approached suddenly and a pair of hands put a painting down against the wall beside him: an oil painting of a young woman with blond hair. A few moments later, the same hands put another picture next to the portrait, but it was much less interesting: a drawing of what appeared to be a tree, or maybe several trees. In any case, it disappeared from view soon afterward. It was lifted up and hung where the blond lady had been, high up on the wall, so high that Carlos had never seen her before.

  But he had come face-to-face with her now . . . and those blue, indifferent eyes were smiling at him. He could have put out his hand and touched that deliciously white hand, delicately grasping something in its fingers. His contemplation was interrupted by murmuring voices engaged in a long, unintelligible conversation. He looked up briefly but paid no attention to the voices, fascinated as he was by the strange apparition down at his level, on the carpet, in the child’s world where young women with long fingers and smiling blue eyes are unknown and only the seamy underside of the adult world is visible: chair and table legs, heating pipes, a cobweb beyond the reach of the fussiest feather duster, and the feet of those who move in the grown-up world above, disdainful feet that seemed to be gesturing at the picture of the girl, and women’s shoes standing on tiptoe as if to stress a point, or so it seemed. Meanwhile there she was, with her curious smile and her look of indifference. It didn’t seem to bother her at all being down there on the ground, a talking point for so many opinionated feet.

  A few minutes later they made her vanish. This time four arms and as many unfamiliar hands—such strong, such lucky, hands—reached down to the young lady and lifted her up into the adult world, out of his sight.

  IF CARLOS WAS eventually able to determine that he had first seen the portrait in February 1982, it was because a few days later something else had happened, something which, unlike that fateful meeting, had since been overlaid with a multitude of false memories: he learned of his mother’s death. Despite the gravity of the event, he could not remember it clearly or visualize the scene, because Soledad had died unexpectedly, a long way away, during a trip to South America. So there was no painful sickness to remember, no corpse to kiss good-bye, not even a funeral, or if there had been one, someone had decided it would be better for such a young child not to be present. That sensitive soul, whoever he or she was, had spared him the sight of his mother disappearing under a pile of white flowers and spadefuls of earth thumping on the wood of the coffin. And the Our Fathers. And the Hail Marys. He had been spared all those memories.

  Carlos could, however, remember the following days. That short space of time seemed more like a century, it was so crammed with memories, some true, some false, none of them pleasant. Moist kisses from lots of people he didn’t know and anonymous, pitying voices saying, “Poor thing.” Such a weight of tears, laments, and sighs. Then the trip back to the village, just him and his father: it was the end of an era. For Carlos, who was not yet four years old, it seemed like the end of childhood. Thinking of his cousins, whom he had met briefly at his grandmother’s apartment during the days of mourning, and his friends from the village, he supposed he must be an adult now, because nothing so grown-up had happened to any of them.

  Years went by before his second encounter with the woman in the painting, though just how many was hard to say. All Carlos knew was that it happened during Holy Week, but was he seven, eight, nine, or ten when he went to Madrid for the holidays? He did not know. What he did know was that his father was overseas at the time, and that was why he’d had to spend a couple of weeks at his grandmother’s apartment. His father hardly ever left the village; it must have been the first time he’d gone away since his ill-fated trip to South America with Soledad. For the first few years after her death, when Carlos was younger, Ricardo never mentioned the long journey that had taken him and his wife to Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, but suddenly, around the time of Carlos’s second visit to his grandmother’s apartment, he began to talk about it often, especially when he had exceeded his habitual dose of spirits. On such occasions (Carlos particularly remembered a long conversation on the train to Madrid), Ricardo would go over everything he and Soledad had done in Buenos Aires: the places they had visited together, how happy she’d been, and so on, in great detail, all recounted and relived with a strange, almost pedantic insistence that Carlos would only begin to understand many years later, when he had grown up and learned to deal with his own unwelcome memories. He realized then that his father’s insistence had been motivated by a secret desire to wear out that painful part of his past, as if he were compulsively putting on the same article of clothing day after day, unconsciously hoping it would fall apart sooner rather than later, at which point he would be able to relegate it to a box and forget it forever without qualms.

  AS TO THE exact dates of Carlos’s second visit to his grandmother’s apartment, if he had asked his father (which he had not done and could not do now), perhaps he would have been told that the visit had taken place in April 1986, when he was eight years old. Eight: the age of exploration, of ghosts and secret forays; the age at which a mystery lurks behind every curtain and every armoire opens into a magical world, which you may enter at any time, but who knows when you will return?

  His grandmother’s apartment was especially rich in mysteries.

  It was only many years later that Carlos would come to wonder why his father had not been allowed to cross the threshold when they had arrived that day, and why, instead of kissing her son-in-law, Grandma Teresa had rather coldly touched his arm. But that was grown-up stuff, and he was busy with mysteries of his own.

  There were so many things to discover in that apartment.

  For a start, you could see right away that it belonged to someone rich, as opposed to all the houses Carlos had known until then: his father’s desolate residence and the homes of his friends, which smelled of boiled vegetables and could all have done with a fresh coat of paint. Nothing like this light-filled apartment with its high ceilings: Number 38 Calle de Almagro. Number 38, his grandmother used to call it, speaking of the apartment as if it were a person.

  “Be good, Carlos. I’ll come and pick you up as soon as I get back.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Eat all your food and try to get up a bit earlier on Sunday.”

  “Yes, Dad. Of course, Dad.”

  “Listen to your grandmother and do what she tells you . . .”

  Addressing herself directly to Carlos and ignoring his father, his grandmother said: “Let’s get one thing straight, young man: at Number 38, you’ll have a siesta every afternoon,” at which point Carlos looked her in the eyes for the first time.

  And then he thought, or rather, a thought began to form that would develop over the few days they spent together: Grandma Teresa was like her apartment, full of corners. Both were large and angular; both had unexpected nooks and crannies. People are a lot like their houses, at least from a child’s point of view, so Carlos soon came to identify his grandmother’s moods with the various rooms at Number 38, which varied in appearance depending on whether the doors to the hallway were open or shut and whether it was raining or dark outside. Some sunny mornings, for instance, Grandma Teresa seemed to resemble her dressing room, and when you came to think of it, they both smelled of lavender. His grandmother seemed so fragile then, the deep darkness of her eyes offset by the almost metallic blondness of her hair. And the dressing room made the same impression: its walls were painted a very pale ocher, contrasting with the darkness of the two wi
ndows, which were always shut. But at night a hard gleam came into his grandmother’s eyes, banishing any hint of fragility, and then Carlos thought she was like the entrance hall: a damask-hung tunnel, predominantly red. Yet all these childish impressions were like sketches for the definitive picture: Grandma Teresa in perfect harmony with the décor of her yellow sitting room.

  Teresa spent most of her time in that almost circular room, with its one window opening onto a balcony and a stretch of sky, not always blue. She never entertained any visitors there but sat alone, a vague smile on her face as she played solitaire in front of the fireplace, ignoring Carlos and hardly even glancing up from her cards when he came in to give her a kiss. Rather than look at him, she would lose herself, or so it seemed, in the contemplation of an utterly uninteresting painting hanging on the opposite wall—a landscape with a tree—while with her elongated fingers she placed a jack on a queen, then an eight on a seven . . . all the while saying not a word to her grandson. But that, as Carlos soon discovered, was the best thing about his grandmother and her yellow room: most of the time both of them were distantly kind. Only around three o’clock did they liven up briefly: the room was illuminated by watery afternoon sunlight and Grandma Teresa, without fail or variation, intoned her stern refrain: “As you well know, young man, here at Number 38, you have a siesta.”