Lilia's Secret (20 page)

I left yet another message for Andrés. I'd tried home, work, mobile. I imagined my messages on the answering machine. I imagined the silence of the lounge room and I tried not to imagine Andrés listening to me leaving one of those messages.

I hadn't been able to talk to him since our horrible fight. This morning I had taken the bus to Santa Maria to try him again, and my mother. She was never home either. Perhaps she had gone to visit Andrés and they were both sitting in the lounge room listening to my messages. Once I got back to Aguasecas I went to the café and talked to anybody who came near me, trying to calm myself.

Ramiro appeared and insisted on joining me. He ordered
mole poblano
and refused to talk about anything but the weather until his white serviette was laid ceremoniously upon his lap and wine sparkled in his glass. I ordered an enchilada.

‘It's important to have rituals, is it not?' he wriggled his ears at me.

I smiled and nodded.

‘You Westerners have lost so much.'

I agreed again, noncommittally.

‘You are all lost. And you more than most.'

I tried not to let the shock of his direct attack flush my face but, of course, I failed. He waved his fingers. ‘I don't have time to be subtle,' he said. ‘You are one big mess.' He smacked fingers to his lips together to emphasise ‘big'.

‘No, I'm not,' I said weakly.

He pointed to my wrist. ‘Yes, you are.'

I looked down at my right wrist.

‘You see,' he said. ‘Yes, you see.' I was off balance and he grinned. ‘But let's talk about Lilia. Isn't that what you want?'

‘Yes.' I pressed into the bandage.

‘What have you found out?' he asked, his tone mocking. ‘You have proof that she killed those men?' He lurched forward. ‘It will help nobody if you pursue this. Let her memory rest in peace, for the sake of us all.'

I looked down: he was gripping my arm with his hand. I pulled away.

‘I have no proof,' I said.

He seemed to settle inside his skin again. ‘Go home,' he said. ‘There is nothing for you here.'

‘Did Lilia kill her daughter?' I blurted out, putting into words for the first time what I tried not to think about.

Ramiro tipped over the salt as he went to take a sip of water. I felt sorry for his old-man clumsiness, his shaky hands.

‘She would never kill her own blood,' he hissed. ‘Never.'

‘What happened to her daughter then?' I pursued him.

He shook his napkin at me as if to ward me off. ‘Perhaps she sent her to be looked after by relatives. I don't know – she disappeared.'

‘You don't know,' I taunted him. ‘You think you're so close to her, but you don't know much do you?'

‘
You
don't know what you're playing with. You with your black T-shirts and creased pants, you come here for a few weeks to escape your dreary life, looking for answers you'll never understand. Go home and book yourself into therapy. All you Westerners need therapy.'

He took a careful forkful of
mole
and ate it.

I hated him with an instant rage that I could have touched. I am not a person who lives largely. I live a small life, focused on myself, all the while maintaining the pretence that I'm not. I wear my nice clothes easily as if I hadn't taken time to choose them. I wear my hair casually as if I didn't pay a lot of money to have it look like that. I live in my beautiful Bondi apartment overlooking the ocean as if luck had dropped me into it, instead of having looked at a dozen others first. And, worst of all, I live with Andrés as if it's a favour to him. I never let my friends know that he is more necessary than water.

I avoided Ramiro's eyes. It was wrong that I was sitting opposite his dried-up, pinched face and not Andrés's.

I try to avoid thinking about the effort life costs me. And yet when I am alone I am aware of how painful each breath is. I am ashamed of this pain. Sure, my father killed himself when I was a kid, but everybody I know has a sad story. What claim do I have on pain when half the world's mothers watch their children die from too little food in their bellies?

I hate people who talk incessantly about their childhood. I had a boyfriend who'd been in therapy for years. He mounted a campaign to win me when I was seventeen and resistant to declared passion. It took four months of moonlit walks and Joe Cocker's plaintive songs, but I began to trust him. And that was the moment, his mission accomplished, that he moved on.
In those four months I heard the constant refrain, ‘I've done so much work on myself that you'll never meet a saner person.' I met him years later and he was still saying the same thing and still in therapy.

I didn't want to be like those people. But I saw in this moment that while I didn't appear to be like them on the outside, internally I was playing the same record. I projected the fiction of woundlessness, but obsessed about my pain to myself. It was exhausting.

It's funny how you can know all this in one instant. I got up from the table and walked to the door without saying anything to Ramiro. As I closed it behind me, I saw through the glass that he was smiling, actually, grinning. I surged with fury. I went back to the table and sat down – that wiped the grin off his face.

‘Back so soon?' he asked.

‘I'm not leaving until I know the truth.'

It was disturbing to see the old man twist his napkin like he did. But gradually he stilled. He looked at me. ‘Let's go to the ranch, tomorrow, after lunch,' he said.

I knew going back to her place with him was the wrong thing to agree to. But I couldn't help myself.

I rang Juan. On the sixth ring he picked up.

‘It could only be you,' he said, by way of hello.

‘You really raced to the phone,' I said, by way of greeting.

I told him that his father was not Lilia's first husband, who'd walked out one day for tobacco, but her son, El Tigre. There was silence. I waited.

‘
Cogida apagado!
Impossible.'

‘Well, I can see why you've had to take yourself out of society with language like that,' I said, trying to lighten the tension. It didn't work and the silence snaked between us.

‘It's true, Juan. Everybody says so here.' He still didn't say anything but he hadn't hung up either, which I took as a positive sign. ‘Did she ever tell you she was your mother?'

‘She never contradicted us,' he said in a low voice. ‘Who is my mother, then?'

And then I realised my mistake. There was too much hope in his voice. ‘We don't know if she's still alive,' I said quickly. ‘Her name was Amalia. She disappeared when you were a baby.'

‘How old?'

‘I don't know.'

‘SHE killed her.'

‘You don't know that.' I heard hard breathing down the phone. ‘Juan,' I said gently. ‘Come and find out. This is your story, not mine. You should be doing this.'

Just more raspy breathing.

‘Do it, Juan,' I said. ‘Come here and put these demons to rest.'

He barked a dry laugh. ‘Go back to her place, her source of power? I can hardly breathe in here already.'

I didn't say anything. He sounded angry now; disorientated perhaps. ‘You know I haven't been out of this house for seven years and seven months. It's bad enough that she's getting in here. I'm not going out to her.'

‘Juan …'

He interrupted me. ‘There has been nothing in my life to indicate that the truth will set us free. Knowing that my father was one of Mexico's most evil men does not help.'

‘I'm seeing things.'

‘Visions?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘The local priest, Padre Miguel, says that sometimes you have visions for other people.' I paused. ‘I'm wondering if you or Andrés's sisters are those other people.'

‘I have enough of my own.'

‘I know.'

‘What are you seeing, then?' he sighed.

‘A pair of small feet under a bush in Lilia's courtyard.'

‘What colour is the skin?'

‘Brown.'

Neither of us said anything for while.

‘Ever been pregnant?' he asked.

‘Never,' I said, as if scolded. ‘Your father had an older sister who disappeared as a baby. I'm wondering if the feet could be hers? Could Lilia have harmed her?'

There was silence between us that I couldn't crack open.

‘How would I know? I can't help you,' he finally said.

‘Come on, Juan.'

I heard him sigh. ‘As much as she was evil it's unlikely she'd hurt a baby. She was good with them. Talk to people there,' he said. ‘I can't help you anymore.'

‘Nobody here talks, they're followers of your religion,' I replied. ‘Are you eating?'

‘Now and then,' he said and rung off.

I was left holding the phone to my ear. His hang-up seemed like a small act of violence.

I knocked at the door of the presbytery. Father Miguel wasn't home but Magdalena took one look at me scratching at my wrist and ushered me in.

I asked her if she knew about Lilia being a healer and midwife. She ignored my question as she went to the big credenza in the kitchen and returned to sit beside me. She unscrewed the lid of a small jar and wiped out a swathe of gooey, foul-smelling cream with the tips of her fingers. Taking my right wrist, she laid it on her lap and dabbed carefully as I tried not to flinch. Her warmth through the floral housedress she wore seemed unbearably intimate. I wanted to snatch my arm back and at the same time to lay the rest of myself in her lap. I thought I might cry because of her kindness, but she laid my arm back on the table before I let myself.

I can't remember the feel of my mother. There is one photograph of us together, taken outside the church. She's wearing an A-line dress in swirling paisley patterns of orange and pink; I am tucked under her elbow and pulled into her side. I've studied that photo several times and each time I wondered what that must have felt like, being tucked into her wing. In the photograph I am looking up at her as if I adore her. But I don't remember feeling that either.

Magdalena screwed the lid back on and thrust the jar at me. ‘Apply it every hour,' she said. ‘Every hour.' Then she added, ‘My second name is Maria. Just like Lilia's.'

I frowned at her.

‘Lilia Maria Marta,' she said impatiently. ‘That's her name. She helped my mother give light to me, just as she helped almost everybody give light. That means many people have her name, even the boys.'

‘What, the boys are called Maria as well?'

Magdalena nodded. ‘Or Marta. Their second names. It means we owe her our lives.'

‘Magdalena, did she kill all those men?'

Magdalena shuddered. ‘No, no, no. Don't say that.' She crossed herself and kissed the bent knuckle of her index finger. ‘Nobody knows for sure that she killed them.'

‘Suspicious though.'

She shrugged. ‘Yes, of course it looks bad. But often things are not the way they look. The important things, anyway.'

‘But none of you wanted to know the truth?'

She gestured in agitation, as if to say, ‘Don't ask me anything more.'

I sat quietly for a moment while she polished the table with her tea towel.

‘Maria Marta Cordóba,' I said. ‘That was the name on the quilt.'

‘It was her mother's name,' Magdalena said. ‘It means her mother made the quilt. It's the custom here – to sew your name into the quilt you made. She was blind, you know.'

I thought about the incredible garden depicted in the quilt. It was magical. Magic woven by a woman who couldn't see it.

The front door slammed. ‘
Hola
,
hola
,
hola
,' sang Padre Miguel, his voice drawing closer each time.

‘We're in here, Padre,' Magdalena yelled back.

‘So, who is “we”?' he asked, as he came around the door rubbing his hands. ‘Ah ha, excellent.'