Little Indiscretions Read online

  And it was during the siesta one day, as Carlos was investigating the contents of a room at the back of the apartment, that he encountered the young lady in the painting once again, only to be caught a few minutes later by a maid called Nelly. The siesta was an ideal time for escapades and secret exploration, and Carlos had been making the best of it for several afternoons when, quite by chance, he came upon that portrait of a lady, which he remembered only too well from his first visit to the house after his mother’s death. But now the painting wasn’t in the sitting room, or in any other room, and Carlos would never have found it had he not heard Nelly’s steps approaching and tried to hide in an armoire. There it was, among various dusty bits and pieces, barely visible, half covered by a blanket. Just then Nelly opened the door of the cursed armoire, but she could scold him and yell at him all she liked. Filled with a strange new emotion, he was busy removing the blanket to reveal the lady’s bust. Before Nelly could extract him forcibly—“Naughty boy! Get out of there, you little devil!”—and get hold of his ear—“Don’t you think you can run away from me”—he managed to reach out and stroke that dust-covered neck. His fingers slid down to the neckline of the black-and-white dress, a little farther down, and then to the right to touch those long, slender fingers holding a greenish sphere. “Just you wait till your grandmother finds out what you’ve been doing during siesta time, you stupid child,” shouted Nelly. While he was being told off, the lady in the painting seemed to be watching him with her blue eyes, as if she were heartily amused by it all. And that’s what gave him the courage to stand up to Nelly, stick out his tongue, and yell with a fearless insolence: “Stupid? You’re the stupid one, Nelly. Stupid Nelly! Smelly Nelly! I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  All the same, what he had done must have been very wrong indeed, because from that day on, the door of the room at the back of the apartment was kept securely locked and his grandmother wouldn’t hear a word about the portrait, not even when he came into the yellow room and found her smiling at the successful conclusion of a game of solitaire. Are you listening, Grandma? Please, Grandma . . . But the most he managed to get out of her one day was: “You’re mistaken, young man. A woman in an armoire? What are you talking about? There’s no such thing in this apartment.” And she smiled again at an ace of hearts, or maybe it was a king of clubs, but the smile disappeared as she added: “If you keep on about these bad dreams, I’ll have to tell Nelly not to give you stew at lunchtime. Besides, with this lovely warm weather we’re having, it’s time for summer food, salads and so on.”

  That was the only time Carlos ever heard his grandmother give instructions about the running of the household, except regarding the siesta, which continued to be obligatory at Number 38, and curiously, it was thanks to that much resented nap that Carlos, after finding the portrait, was to make a second great discovery. He learned that during the siesta, a boy may be visited by a peculiar sort of dream from which he wakes all hot and bothered, breathing heavily, with a strange warm feeling between his thighs, which is over too soon, gone like the fleeting image of three long, very white fingers, holding what? Carlos didn’t know, but perhaps he would be able to glimpse it in his next dream, and perhaps he might be able to caress that blond hair too, which sometimes reminded him vaguely of someone else’s hair, but whose? Was it Nelly’s? His grandmother’s? There were so many mysteries, too many, and yet, at the age of eight, there were also important lessons to be learned.

  Such as how to keep your mouth shut.

  FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, his grandmother was dead. The deep-red entrance hall, the ocher dressing room, the yellow sitting room, and everything at Number 38 now belonged to him. He didn’t inherit any money, not a cent; those years of playing solitaire and keeping up appearances must have eaten up all her savings. Since that Easter holiday long ago, Carlos had turned into the sort of young man he had shown signs of becoming as a child: more interested in dreams than in reality, more often to be found at the movies than in class (although, in his own way, he was an assiduous student: he repeated his first year of law three times). In fifteen years, he had grown as tall as his father and had developed the same dark, slightly wasted look, as if fate had used him for an experiment: take the look and bearing of a typical nineteenth-century hero and add a pair of Levi’s. He had curly hair, long sideburns, and skin so pale you could see blue veins on his temples. One day Marijose, his father’s nurse, had said to him: “If you’d been born last century, you’d have made a great hussar.” She might not have known much about military history, but she had watched a lot of historical romances on television and at the movies. Marijose, however, had moved on; her services were no longer required. It would have eased Dr. Garcia’s mind to know that Teresa had left the apartment in Madrid to him and his son, but he had been dead ten months when the will was read.

  All Carlos had to do now was move to Madrid and take possession of Number 38. How he wished his father could have been there; he wouldn’t have had to stay outside this time or face an icy welcome and a halfhearted touch on the arm. But Carlos left the village on his own. When he got to Madrid, he discovered that his inheritance was in a sadder state than he had anticipated. Everything was covered with white sheets: the old beds, all the furniture and fittings he remembered from his last visit. In all those years, no one had bothered to change a thing. Not even the ashtrays had moved; it was as if they were held in place by the will of the departed, as if the whole house were a derelict tomb. Carlos, however, was not bothered about the furniture. Like a little boy loose at siesta time again, armed with his grandmother’s bunch of keys, he went looking for the forbidden door, and then the armoire, and there she was, just as before, the girl in the painting, among piles of useless junk. Carlos lifted up the portrait as a pair of anonymous hands had done almost twenty years before, took it to the yellow room, and returned it to its rightful place, usurped for so long by that landscape with trees that his grandmother liked to contemplate while playing cards. It was only then that he fully realized what the inheritance meant. Number 38 was his, all his. There didn’t seem to be anything very valuable in the apartment, but that didn’t matter: after the sale he would have far more money at his disposal than ever before in his life. Until then, he said to himself, it was just a matter of being careful and finding a part-time job that wasn’t too demanding so that he would have time to continue with his law degree (that was the theory, at least). And while he was looking for a buyer, he could live in the apartment and discover its secrets.

  “SO LET ME get this straight, cazzo Carlitos,” said Nestor, interrupting his employee at this point in the story while a copper pan full of cherry syrup came perilously close to boiling over in the kitchen at Mulberry & Mistletoe. Carlos’s confession had been so long that Nestor felt he was losing the thread, and he had to stir the syrup backward, which is something you should never do, unless you don’t mind your morello cherries turning into sour cherries.

  “So let me see if I’ve got this straight. You have just moved to Madrid because you inherited an apartment, but there’s no way you can afford to maintain it. And just to make things complicated, you don’t know anyone here, but you’re having a romance with a lady who lives in an armoire. Is that it?”

  “Oh come on, Nestor!”

  “What I’m hearing is an unexpected inheritance, a childhood dream, a great romance . . . you sound like the typical wide-eyed country kid who’s just arrived in the big city. Seriously, next you’ll be telling me that one day you’re going to meet this mysterious girl walking a little dog in the Retiro or eating a hamburger at McDonald’s. The vapors from that cherry syrup must have gone to your head, eh, Carlitos?”

  “I know I’ll never meet her—I’m not that stupid. But I keep finding pieces of her everywhere, I swear,” said Carlos.

  And then he had to explain all over again that since joining Mulberry & Mistletoe, he had realized that working as a waiter allowed him to gather the scattered parts of his lost love: one woma
n’s marvelous smile, the ivory skin revealed by another’s low-cut dress . . . and that was enough for him. After all, he didn’t know who the girl in the painting was, when she had lived, whether she was a real person or just the painter’s ideal image. For Carlos, these were insoluble mysteries.

  Alcohol, however, was working its old magic, and Nestor, who was normally so careful, was feeling its effects as well. Once he reached a certain degree of tipsiness, the chef’s attitude changed unexpectedly. “This business with your ideal woman,” he said in an impetuous rush. “I’ll let you sort that out for yourself, but there are such things as omens, and that’s the bit I’m interested in: the twists and turns of destiny.” Then, lowering his voice as if he were about to pronounce a strange spell, he added: “Come on, Carlos, don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to find out who that girl was. Why don’t we try? It’s all very romantic, this searching for her features in other women, but don’t you think it’s silly when you could be looking for the real thing?”

  “I actually see her features,” said Carlos, who was just as drunk as his boss. “Don’t forget I own her now, the woman in the painting, and I can look at her every day if I want to, even if I’ll never know who she is or why she is holding that green jewel.”

  Nestor, however, had something more practical in mind than adoring a picture. So he told his friend what it was and finished off with a little pat on the shoulder, as if to say something like: Forza, Carletto, we’ve had a bit of cognac and a few cherries, sure, but that story of yours is a beauty. So listen, don’t you worry: I know a way of finding out family secrets when there’s no one left to ask . . .

  II. THE GENTLEMAN WITH A CREW CUT

  “I GOT ONE question for you, man—and don’t you be lying to me now. What time you seeing Madame Longstaffe?”

  The Rastafarian, who had been leaning against the Japanese screen cleaning his nails for hours, eyed Nestor suspiciously while Carlos, startled, emerged from his daydream.

  “Wouldn’t be five, would it?” he asked with a menacing air. “ ’Cause I’m telling you now: that’s when she’s seeing me.”

  As he said “me,” he pointed to his chest, visible in the opening of his skintight shirt, with one long fingernail. Carlos seized upon that anatomical detail with his waiter’s eye, schooled over the last few months. Had he seen this character again in the street, he might not have recognized his dreadlocks or his teeth, which were disconcertingly white given the general squalor of his appearance, but he would certainly have remembered that one long fingernail.

  “At five, it’s my turn, man. Five o’clock on the dot.”

  Nestor beamed him a charming smile and told him not to worry, it was quite all right, their appointment was for five-thirty and they were happy to wait. No problem, man.

  The Rasta-man smiled back and was about to resume his position in front of the Japanese screen when his path was blocked by a very nervous gentleman, who, on emerging from Madame Longstaffe’s room, had gone past the door that opened onto the street and come into the waiting room by mistake.

  He stopped. He looked to his right and left, first at the lady on the tapestry-covered sofa, then at the lady by the window. He seemed relieved not to recognize either one of them. The presence of the Rastafarian didn’t bother him, but he was noticeably taken aback when he saw Nestor sitting on the sofa. The cook simply said, “Good-bye, Mr. Tous,” as if he knew him vaguely, but the man beat such a hasty retreat that all Carlos could remember about him was an air of respectability and his gray crew cut.

  “Be patient, Carlitos,” said Nestor with a sigh, referring not to the fleeting apparition of that shorthaired gentleman, obviously, but to the leisurely pace at which Madame Longstaffe was exercising her divinatory skills. It was a quarter to six and there were still three clients ahead of them in line, including their Rastafarian friend. “We’ll just have to be patient,” he said before lapsing again into the tranquil silence he had observed since entering the clairvoyant’s house. So Carlos went back to thinking about what his friend had said to him while the cherry syrup was simmering:

  “Yes, yes, this story of yours is a-very romantico” (Nestor’s accent seemed to become more Italian with each liqueur-soaked cherry) “but like I tell you: getting nostalgic about some woman who doesn’t exist, falling in love with a ghost, and looking for traces of her in other women, this is a-crazy, Carlos, and impractical. I tell you my theory, Carletto. It’s much more logical. Obsessions like this are always an anticipation of something that is going to happen, you see what I mean? That girl in the picture isn’t a real girl, and even if she is, what do you care, because she’s probably dead, or if she’s alive she’s an old woman by now. But if you’re so fascinated by this picture, it must mean that somewhere there’s a girl just like her, exactly the same, and we’ll find her!” shouted Nestor, who was quite worked up at this point.

  Then he declared that he knew a way to discover old family secrets and summon the creatures of childhood fantasy. It was very simple, he said. All they had to do to solve the mystery was pay a visit to Madame Longstaffe, the famous clairvoyant.

  Yet as soon as he had made this declaration, and in spite of his inebriated state, Nestor Chaffino started backpedaling, as if fear had suddenly sobered him up.

  “You know I’m joking, don’t you, Carlos? It’s a silly idea, consulting a clairvoyant. All that stuff about the spirit world, it’s a load of rubbish . . . just forget I ever mentioned it, all right? You’re not going to tell me you believe in witches now as well as ghosts, are you? Look, no spell has ever been able to turn a fantasy woman like yours into living flesh and blood, honestly . . . No, there’s no point in insisting. I’m not coming with you. It’s a scam, the whole thing. I don’t believe in spells. They’re fakes and con artists, all those clairvoyants . . . but what makes it really dangerous is they’re also devilishly cunning. And Madame Longstaffe is the worst of all, believe me . . .”

  MAYBE THE CHERRIES were to blame. Maybe it’s just that there’s something irresistible about a good romance. Or maybe there was another reason for Nestor’s capitulation, one that can’t be revealed at this point in the story. In any event, Carlos finally managed to overcome his friend’s reluctance. So there they were, the two of them, waiting their turn in the little aquamarine room. And that was why Nestor had been so hard on Carlos when they arrived.

  “Cazzo Carlitos, you’re the one who insisted on coming to see this witch, so that’s what we’re going to do, but be warned: I take no responsibility for whatever happens as a result.”

  6

  WHAT THE CLAIRVOYANT SAW

  MADAME LONGSTAFFE, lying flopped on a chaise longue, addressed them in her thick Brazilian accent: “I’m so tired, young man, completely exowsted.” Naturally: it was past eight-thirty and she had been drawing on all her reserves of human and esoteric energy to light the way for four very hard cases (especially the mysterious woman who remained by the window, a truly exowsting client), and all that effort had knocked her flat, as Nestor and Carlos could see from where they stood in the doorway, not daring to enter. Only her legs were visible, wrapped in fine green muslin, resting delicately crossed on the chaise, while her feet, encased in slippers that would have provoked the envy of a Venetian doge, quivered intermittently.

  “What a frightful afternoon! Come in, gentlemen. I’ll see to you in a few moments.”

  But she didn’t stir. Carlos and Nestor went in and sat down on two chairs at the back of the room, next to the desk where the fortune-teller plied her trade. An imposing pair of thrones they were; the short-legged Nestor was left with his feet dangling. Just as well: a few seconds later, a small fluffy white dog appeared and began to manifest a lively interest in the chef’s ankles. Quite a fixation, to judge from the way he was barking and trying to get at them, while Nestor, having recoiled into the chair, didn’t know whether it was better to wait out the siege or shut the mutt up with a well-aimed kick.

  “Fri-fri, tais-toi,” said
Madame Longstaffe from the chaise longue, then “Sit!” and “Raus!” Her polyglot performance would no doubt have greatly impressed the two friends had they not been busy giving each other knowing looks, telepathically united in their pity for the little dog, conducting a silent dialogue that might have run something like this: “Nestor, did you hear what she called the fluff ball?” “I’m afraid I did: Fri-Fri, son of Fru-Fru, no doubt.” “Poor creature! Thank God animals have no idea of the awful things going on around them . . . I mean, can you imagine?” “I agree, I agree, don’t start me: just the thought of having one of my relatives (my father, maybe) mummified and stuck on top of an alabaster column with a nameplate . . .” “And knowing you might end up like that yourself one day.” “It’s terrible.” “Isn’t it just?”

  And they concluded their telepathic conversation with a mutual shudder.

  The memory of the stuffed Maltese terrier in the aquamarine waiting room prompted them to look around and discover that the room they had entered was a splendid example of the inimitable Longstaffe style of interior decoration. It was dimly lit by a single Bloomsbury lamp, but what little light there was permitted them to make out various motionless animals, watching them with blind, glass eyes from a series of display cases: one or two large iguanas, what appeared to be an owl over on the right, a vixen with a glaucous stare, and no doubt other witnesses to Madame’s love affair with taxidermy. But before they had a chance to scrutinize the rest of the cases from which yet more immobile creatures peered, their inspection was cut short by the clairvoyant, who rose (not without a good deal of effort) from her divan and came toward them, holding out her hand.