Lilia's Secret (10 page)

I packed my bag to visit Juan, who lived south of Mexico City. I was excited that I had a definite purpose now. The pain had receded, although I could still see it blinking at me in the dark.

We made a pact not to tell Andrés what I was doing for the moment. I could tell this wasn't the first time they had kept something from him. They were enjoying themselves immensely, but I had a few twinges of guilt, which I suppressed. I had far more to feel guilty about, anyway. I winced every time I thought about Matías. Gabriela told me not to bother ringing Juan beforehand. ‘He won't answer,' she said.

‘And you don't want him to, either,' Lupita added. ‘He'd only say no.'

‘This way you can just turn up and pretend you're a dumb gringa,' Gabriela said. ‘Not that you are a gringa, but he'll think you are. Harder for him to turn you away if you are on his doorstep.'

Bill's temples throbbed as he sat across the café table from Gerardo. The noise of the coffee machine reverberated inside his head. He'd thought it'd been a step forward finding his father's grave, but they'd made no further headway.

‘It is correct, what I am saying, Mr Bixton,' Gerardo said. ‘No one wants to talk about him, and they don't want to talk about Lilia either. Two people crossed themselves when I mentioned her name.'

‘That's impossible. Are they saying they don't remember her?'

‘They are saying they will not talk about her,' Gerardo explained in an overtly patient tone.

‘What'd she die from?'

‘With all due respect, I don't think you're listening. Nobody will talk about her,' Gerardo said. ‘But we should visit her ranch. It's still standing.'

Bill nearly spat out a mouthful of coffee. ‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘I am.' Gerardo's jaw tightened.

‘Where is it?'

‘It's towards the hills on the east road out of town,' Gerardo said, his voice still steady.

Bill slipped an envelope across the table towards Gerardo.

‘I won't be seeing you tomorrow,' he said.

‘Are you going on a trip?' Gerardo asked.

‘No, you are.' Bill grinned. ‘Back to Mexico City.' He tapped the envelope. ‘A week's worth. Thanks for your time, but I think I can manage from now on.'

Bill sat in the
zócalo
repeating her name – Lilia de Las Flores – like a mantra to calm himself. It sounded like a ribbon of water to him.

The night before and again that morning, he'd practised his questions in Spanish. If people spoke slowly he might be able to understand their answers. He licked his lips and bit them. It wasn't as easy as he'd thought without Gerardo. The trouble was everyone stood in groups. He scanned the square, looking for targets. A car disgorged a middle-aged woman in a fawn dress, then drove on. He hurried up to her before she could meet anybody.

‘Señora, pardon, señora, por favor querio un momento con usted.'

The señora stepped back almost into the road, hugging her handbag to her.

‘No, no. Excuse me. I didn't mean anything. I just wanted a moment to ask you a question. Sorry.'

The woman waved him away, in small jerks.

‘You don't understand,' Bill tried to explain, backing away. ‘Sorry, sorry.'

His neck burnt as he hunched over and crossed to the other side of the
zócalo.
Ten minutes later he'd calmed down enough
to approach somebody else. The old man was sitting by himself on a bench watching kids nearby run screaming around the trees.

‘
Pardon, señor. Querio te pide una cosa
.' Bill tried to smile with the confidence he'd once had back in Boston. ‘I'd like to ask you a question,' he added in English, for good measure.

The old man swivelled to look at him. ‘
Si
,' he smiled.
‘Si.'

‘
Querio saber algo di Doña de Las Flores
. I'd like to know something of Lilia de Las Flores.'

The old man's face closed. He hoisted himself off the seat and shuffled away.

Bill approached another group of three people. The man was wearing a tie, which Bill considered a good sign. The two women wore big gold earrings. ‘
Pardon
, everybody,' (he'd have to learn the word for ‘everybody') ‘
querio saber algo de Lilia de Las Flores.
'

Bill waited while they looked at one another. The taller of the women turned, her sharp pink lips smiling. She cocked her head at him and then stepped past at the exact moment that the other two stepped away as well.

He went up to a group where the women wore black shapeless dresses, their legs poking out from under them like thick stumps. They grinned and nodded. He put his question about Lilia to them and within a heartbeat they'd gone back to their conversation as if he didn't exist.

Bill gave up. Either he owed Gerardo an apology or his Spanish was worse than he'd thought. He went into the café, which faced on to the
zócalo
, and ordered a coffee from the bar. Coffee in Mexico was stronger than he liked but he was getting used to it. He took his seat with a scrape against the floor tiles.
Alberto, the café owner, waved at him from the back. Bill nodded. It was a small balm after the morning of rejection.

Alberto brought the tray himself. ‘No buns today, Bill?' he asked in his heavily accented English. Bill shook his head and rubbed his paunch. ‘New resolution.'

The café owner turned to leave. ‘Alberto,' Bill called him back. ‘Did you speak to Gerardo about my father and Doña de Las Flores?' It was a relief to speak English again. ‘Gerardo has gone back to the city so I'm taking over.'

Alberto looked at him, wiped his hands on his apron and sat down.

‘She's been dead twenty years. Your father, fifty. Why do you want to stir up the past?'

‘There's something to hide then?' Bill pressed.

Alberto winced. ‘Not hide.' He tapped the table with his little finger. ‘Just leave alone.' He flicked a speck of dust from the table. ‘When I was a child, I'd see the Doña going to mass each Sunday. Dressed always in black in the old way with skirts that brushed the ground. That was about thirty years ago – she must have been in her sixties. She seemed so old she could have broken. Nobody talked to her, everybody made way. I didn't ask. I knew how she fitted into the village – she was the one to be scared of. Sometimes my parents would threaten to give me to Doña de Las Flores if I didn't scrub the floor well enough, or keep the garden watered. When I was older she stopped coming to the village and I stopped thinking about her. I was at university in Monterrey when she died.' Alberto paused. ‘It was only when Gerardo started asking questions that I thought about what I really knew. I have some childhood memories – rumours she killed her many husbands.'

‘
Killed
them? Many husbands? What do you mean?

Alberto nodded. Bill felt a rushing in his ears. ‘I knew about one before my father. How many others?'

‘She was a woman of five husbands.'

‘She killed them all?'

‘The first one left her.'

‘Do you know for sure she killed them?'

Alberto shrugged. ‘I have no proof she killed them, but that's what people say.'

Bills hands shook under the table. ‘Don't you care?'

Alberto shook his head. ‘The past is nothing to do with me.'

Bill pulled himself together. ‘If this is all known, why don't people talk?'

‘They feel, how you say? Violated by your questions.'

‘Violated?' Bill sputtered.

‘Even if they didn't mind talking about her, they wouldn't to a gringo.'

‘Why not?' Bill asked in exasperation.

Alberto pursed his lips so that some of the hairs in his moustache went up his nose. ‘That's how it is in these parts. We don't talk to strangers.'

‘You're talking to me.'

‘I have lived away. Not far, but still away. Very few people leave here for university or anything else. If they do, they don't come back.' Alberto smiled. ‘Anyway they won't be happy that I speak to you.'

Bill did not smile back. ‘Don't I have a right to know about my father?'

Alberto nodded. ‘You do. And the people here have the
right to their silence. These two rights sit side by side rubbing against each other.'

‘What about you?' Bill challenged. ‘Don't you want to know the truth? The facts.'

‘They make no difference to me,' Alberto said gently. ‘Maybe you just have to face up to the past.'

‘What do you mean?' Bill said, more aggressively than he'd wanted.

‘Bill,' Alberto was even more gentle. ‘They say that Doña de Las Flores was a powerful, beautiful woman. Nobody resisted her. So she killed your father. Who will pay? There's nobody left. Nobody who carries her name remains here.' Alberto stood up.

‘Is that why nobody speaks – you all know she's a murderess but don't want to do anything about it?'

‘Leave it, my friend. Go home. Leave us with our ghosts.'

‘One of those ghosts is mine,' Bill said to Alberto's back.

Alberto went back to the bar and sat down beside a group of men. One or two of them raised their voices. Bill sipped his coffee. He thought he heard the word for ‘foreigner' in their conversation, but he stared fixedly out of the window.

The next morning he got up early and took the lunch Teresa had left on the bench for him. He set off sluggishly towards Lilia's ranch, since sleep had eluded him. There'd been words he couldn't remember twisting in his brain all night, leaving him bruised this morning. He longed for Carole's hand in his. Not the stranger running his home, his wife from years ago. He remembered a picnic by a lake. She was pregnant with Hil, their first. She'd made fried chicken and chocolate chip cookies and they ate them on a plaid picnic blanket. She lay with her
head on his shoulder and they'd tickled each other's palms. Before the big house had separated them.

Ah hell, he'd even take the stranger, as long as she looked at him as she had the day she'd given him the brochure a couple of weeks back. For a moment he'd felt she cared.

Bill wiped the sweat from his forehead. Here he felt his body like he never had before. He knew he'd bulked up after retiring but now he felt every pound and his self-disgust made him feel even heavier. He sat down to rest by the side of the road. There was nothing to distinguish the patch of scrubby ground he sat on from any other: it was all the same. The air still had a freshness to it this early but he could barely feel it, could only feel the confusion Alberto's words had churned in him. Other husbands. Other murdered husbands. Had his father known? Why would his father marry a known murderess?

After a few minutes he hauled himself off the ground and got back on the road. He didn't know how far the ranch was, and the sun was getting fiercer by the minute. Red earth stretched as far as he could see. Mountains rose out of the flat land.

Forty minutes and four rests later, finally he saw a black dot disturbing the horizon. This gave his footsteps new energy. The dot became a building. Eventually, Bill reached the gate and fumbled with the latch. He had a pang for Carole again, and her impatience with anything you couldn't see. She would have been reassuring in this place, which felt as if it were full of ghosts.

He moved up the path to the cracked fountain. There was a trio of lions in the centre. A head had broken off and lay where
it had fallen in the dish. He let his gaze travel over the house ahead of him, the barn to its left and an impressive tree in front of that, and he listened. Everything was still, baked and lonely. It was as if the bones of the place had been picked dry by the sun.

This had been his father's home. He realised he'd hoped he'd feel less lonely here. Like a punch in the gut it struck him that what had been aching in him ever since he landed in Mexico was loneliness. He rubbed his paunch and tried to comfort himself that loneliness was better than the caged panic he'd felt at home. It was no good. This loneliness didn't have the same edge but it was deep and cut him anyway.

Bill mopped his face with his handkerchief. The house looked tired; its stucco walls peeling like chapped lips. It wasn't extraordinary – it was much smaller than his father's house in Boston, although it was bigger than any he'd seen in Aguasecas. It had two storeys, the bottom protected by a deep verandah. The front doors were made of wood, with faded carvings that looked worn and thirsty but must have once been beautiful. The barn was less sturdy, with a plank missing here and there like teeth that had decayed. The tree was a marvel of life and shade in this place.

His father might have sat under that tree. His father could have been lonely here.

Something prickled up Bill's spine. He steeled himself to go further up the path towards the door which, he could see now, was engraved with bent figures on donkeys, carrying wood and carting water. Many wore hats, but he traced the shape of a woman with her hair flowing over her shoulders. He wondered if Lilia had looked like that with her hair down. He shuddered. A murderess.

He tried the handle and it was locked. He rattled each window, but the shell of the house was shut tight against him, so he went back down the stairs of the verandah and looked under rocks for a key. Nothing. Should he break a window? He stood still pursing his lips, his hands clamped to his hips. Finally he moved over to the tree and stretched out on the ground.

Fierce patches of sun stabbed through the branches on to his body, but he was too tired to move. Lying there, he let time tick by as if it were physical. Eventually he sat up, leaning against the tree trunk, and peeled back the brown paper from his lunch. It was early but he needed it. He took a bite from the
quesadilla.