Authors: Translated By Miranda France By (author) Pineiro Claudia

All Yours (11 page)

Ernesto poured himself a drink and sat down in the armchair opposite me. He put his feet on the coffee table, beside the blue folder in which I had placed the cuttings from newspapers which had been published over the weekend about the death of “Truelove”. Or rather “ex-Truelove” or “the one I thought was Truelove”. I couldn’t help staring at his shoes, resting inches from the folder. Finally I could contain myself no longer: “Alicia’s been found,” I said. Ernesto froze. “They found her body yesterday.” I leant towards the coffee table and nudged the folder over to him. Ernesto opened it, then began to read the cuttings chronologically, exactly as I had arranged them. The folder was shaking in his hands. I felt sorry for him; he was like a child. Lali came in, barely acknowledging us. She didn’t look well; doubtless she’d been living it up all weekend with her friend, not sleeping and all that stuff girls her age get up to. But this wasn’t the moment to educate her. What was happening to her father and me was too serious. Anyway, by now we had already devoted too many years and too much effort to her education. Not to mention money! Ernesto had totted all of it up once. By the time she finished secondary school we would have spent, on fees alone, nearly eighty thousand dollars. If you add in geometry sets and so on, uniforms, books, school excursions, the blessed leavers’ trip, the odd private tutor etc, etc, you’re not getting much change out of one hundred thousand dollars. Mind-boggling. And, as Ernesto used to say, all so that she can turn round one day and say she wants to be a model. Or a housewife; that was what I said, because the thought of his daughter ending up as a housewife never even crossed his mind. “She’s better than that,” he said.

Ernesto’s first thoughts were always for Lali, but that day, holding the blue folder in his hands, I believe that he was thinking only of himself. And rightly, too. Because thinking of himself meant thinking of us all, of his family. A sleepless night here or there wasn’t going to change Lali’s life. She stood staring at us for a moment, as hard and dour as always, and then she went upstairs. Ernesto seemed incapable of speaking to her. Worse than that – he started to say, “I couldn’t get your perfume,” but his voice broke, and the remark sounded like something out of a soap opera. Halfway up the stairs Lali looked back at him, then continued upwards. It was a blessing, actually; there are times when those silences adolescent children use to punish us come as pure relief. And she’ll come and talk to us when she needs something, sure enough. “If she knew what her poor parents are going through!” I said. And Ernesto said: “Leave her be, she’s just a child.” Typical of him always to be defending her.

Ernesto waited until Lali had disappeared up the stairs before continuing to read the contents of the folder. As he read, his face contorted. His Brazilian tan seemed to drain away. “Lali mustn’t find out about anything,” he said. His eyes were full of tears. He seemed broken. “The shame of it!” Then he wept, whether for Lali, for himself or for Alicia herself, I don’t know. But he was really crying.

I stood up and went to sit down next to him. Ernesto threw the folder onto the table and stared into nothingness. He sighed. He wiped away his tears and he looked into my eyes. He took my hand and squeezed it. He stroked a lock of hair that had fallen onto my face, put his hand on my leg and said, “Don’t worry, everything will be all right.”

That was when I finally persuaded myself that I had made a mistake.

“Pau.”

“Lali?”

“Yes.”

“Hey, what are you up to?”

“I’m here, at home. How did it go?”

“Really well. And you – what’s up?”

“Fine.”

“Didn’t you go to school?”

“No. Bet you didn’t either.”

“I was so tired after a weekend with my folks. They wore me out. At this stage in the year they don’t mark you down as absent, anyway.”

“…”

“Listen, Pau, about an hour ago my stomach started going really hard. It happened a couple of times over the weekend, too, but then it went away and I felt fine. But now it’s happening more often and it’s not going away. Do you have any idea what it could be?”

“No idea.”

“…”

“Does it hurt?”

“No, but it’s as hard as rock.”

“Hey, it couldn’t be a contraction, could it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think I’ve heard that contractions are a bit like that.”

“A bit like what?”

“Like your stomach going hard.”

“…”

“But I’m not sure, OK?”

“And if it’s that, what do I have to do?”

“God, I wouldn’t begin to know!”

“…”

“You’d have to ask someone who knows. Do you want me to ask my mum?”

“No, don’t make things even more complicated.”

“No, of course I won’t say anything if you don’t want me to.”

“It seems to be going away a bit now.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“Yes.”

“…”

“Has it gone?”

“Yes, just about.”

“Shall we meet up later?”

“All right.”

“I mean, if you’re well enough.”

“Yes, I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“Five o’clock at the mall?”

“Yes, great.”

“Bye.”

My mind was now much more at ease. I set myself to making something really nice for dinner. Something that Ernesto would like. I was too superstitious to make pork with pepper and creamed potatoes again. That’s what I had made the night that Ernesto went off to Brazil with Charo. Instead I opted for chicken with orange, which is a little bitter for my taste, but a sophisticated dish all the same, and one that had no bad associations.

The fact that Alicia’s body had been found didn’t change things so very much. True, if the autopsy was thorough, it would reveal that there had been a blow to the head. But you can never count on thoroughness in this country. And anyway, even if it were discovered, that blow didn’t have Ernesto’s name on it.

After showering, Ernesto came down to eat. Luckily Lali had gone out, to the mall, with a friend. The world could be about to end and you’d still find the malls full of teenagers window-shopping. My God, what a generation! But as far as I was concerned, if she wanted to go to the mall, let her go. And if she went back to sleep at her friend’s house, even better. It would be good for Ernesto and me to have some time alone, to be able to talk and act freely, without worrying about eavesdroppers. This wasn’t the right time to let Lali in on what had been happening.

I served up the chicken. Ernesto looked bad, worried. And with good reason, but you have to put a cheerful spin on things, or reality can kill you. Things were complicated, no denying it. But the situation was not yet irreversible, and that was important. There are few irreversible things in life: death, losing an arm, having a child. There’s no comeback from something like that, for good or ill. Ernesto had not died or lost an arm. He had had a child, with me, and that was something that I knew went in my favour. So we had to fight on, battling to dissociate him from all conceivable suspicion. The real problem facing us was that there weren’t any other suspects in the case. If there had been, the pressure would have fallen on various shoulders, making the whole thing more manageable. But there weren’t. Arguably Ernesto was the only suspect. For me it came as a surprise that he was now officially implicated. I hadn’t known. Ernesto had not wanted to tell me. “I didn’t want to worry you; so long as there was no body, there was no crime,” he said, paraphrasing something I had said months earlier. And I felt a dagger plunged into my heart, because if there was a body, it was my fault. Now there was both a body and a suspect. Apparently two gossips who worked with him and Alicia had gone blabbing to the police and fingered Ernesto. They had said that they were sure that Ernesto and Alicia were romantically involved. They must have thought that they were very clever, very perceptive. And they didn’t even know the half of it! But anyway, girls who work all their lives in offices are like that. Envious, back-biting, sticking their noses in. It strikes me that the closer they work to the centre of town, the worse they are. There must be some sort of ecosystem breeding them. Since they’ve got no lives of their own to fill their free time, they live off other people’s. Their lives revolve around work. They live from Monday to Friday, dreading the weekends, longing for Monday to come around again, so that something can happen to them. Poor things. Like Alicia, who invented a private life with Ernesto. A secret existence, transient, with no future. A Monday-to-Friday, 8.30-a.m.-to-7-p.m. life. And worst of all, a life that was wrecked by her own blood. How could something so ill-conceived ever have ended well? It was so sad. And so inevitable. Mummy would have seen that coming a mile off. Even I would have seen it coming.

The fact was that these women had declared that there was a relationship between Ernesto and Alicia. “OK, they can say what they like, but you made a statement that we saw
Psycho
that night, and I’m going to say the same thing when they ask me,” I said. And I went on, more breezily than I felt so as to cheer him up, “We’ve got an alibi, darling!”

“I said that you watched
Psycho
on the television downstairs, while I was asleep upstairs,” he corrected me. It wasn’t what we’d agreed. “I didn’t want to get caught out. If they had asked me something about the film, I would have been in a mess, whereas sleeping is an easier lie to keep up,” he said. It was an intelligent piece of reasoning. Ernesto’s clearly no idiot. But he is a man, of course, and therefore capable of getting mixed up between Tyrone Power and Mel Gibson. And the way he put it, our alibi still had legs because, if Ernesto had left the house that night, I would still have seen him. Though, of course, Ernesto
had
left the house and I
had
seen him. Mrs Curtis’s “
think in English
” again! But anyway, as far as our alibi went, everything was all right. Everything except for Ernesto’s face, which would have pulled the plug on our alibi in an instant. He was letting his chicken
à l’orange
go cold. “It’s just that I’m scared they’ll think you’re covering for me.”

“Oh, Ernesto, don’t be negative! These men are barely capable of thought.”

The problem was still that there were no other suspects. The system of justice in this country gets worse all the time. They go with the first thing they are told and don’t bother to investigate any further. So the lack of alternative lines of inquiry didn’t look good for us.

“We have to put forward some other suspects, invent something,” I told him. Ernesto reacted badly to this, saying that I was always coming up with mad schemes and how could we invent something that might go against us later on, that no way would he do that. That’s what he said, but his face seemed to say something different. So I pushed a bit further.

“Did this girl have any enemies?”

“No, everyone loved her.”

Except her niece, I thought. “Who inherited her things?”

“I don’t know, her parents, I suppose, since she didn’t have any children.”

But she had a niece, I thought, again without saying anything. “In other words, if we have to rule out money or revenge as motives… that leaves us only with a crime of passion.”

“And that’s where I come in,” said Ernesto grimly.

“Only because you’re alone. We need to find a motive for someone else.” The third side of the isosceles triangle. The third in discord. Or the fourth? Charo was the perfect candidate. She hadn’t loved Alicia, she might benefit from the will and she was romantically involved with her aunt’s lover. Bingo. All Ernesto had to do was put two and two together and say it out loud. But it seemed he wasn’t that good at maths.

“The whole world knew there wasn’t any other man in Alicia’s life,” he said, as though it were important to say this. I realized, with some dismay, that not only had Ernesto failed to latch on to what I meant with sufficient speed, given the circumstances, but that these two office gossips had now become “the whole world”.

“Even if we tried to invent some man, nobody’s going to believe it,” he continued.

And so I corrected him, at the risk of being too obvious: “Let’s invent a woman.”

Ernesto looked at me with surprise. “A woman who’s so madly in love with you that she’ll go to any lengths to get Alicia out of the way.”

Ernesto said, “That’s crazy.” I think he said exactly that, or in so many words. “Someone capable of writing letters and signing them ‘your true love’…” I continued.

“You’ve been looking through my things,” he dared to say.

“Someone who would take photos of you naked…”

“Inés, I can’t believe this,” he said.

“Someone capable of taking off to Rio with you for a weekend.”

“No, no, it’s not possible,” he said.

“All you have to do is put everything in an envelope and send it off to the right place.”

“No,” he said again, but this time with less resolve.

So I went for the jugular. “Would you be prepared to go to jail for her?”

Ernesto said nothing.

“What are you thinking?” I asked, knowing that he would not answer me. Ernesto kept looking at me without saying anything.

I didn’t press the point because the answer was obvious.

No, Ernesto would not be prepared to do that.