Lilia's Secret (25 page)

‘You can't go yet. You still don't have evidence that Lilia murdered your father.'

Bill shrugged again. ‘It doesn't seem necessary anymore.'

‘You don't have your father's body either,' Maddy pressed.

‘He belongs here.'

Maddy put her head on the side. ‘He's still your father.'

‘What's your father like?' he asked, to distract her.

‘Dead,' she said. ‘A long time ago.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Bill, looking away. He forced himself to look back. ‘What was he like?'

‘Distant.' Maddy looked distant too now.

‘What is it?'

She shook herself. ‘I feel him more these days, even though he died when I was a kid.'

She looked as if she might go on, but she didn't and Bill felt out if his depth. ‘When are you leaving?' he asked her.

‘Soon, I think, but I want to get a hold of Andrés first. You should stay.' She bit her lip for a moment. ‘There's still so much to find out. What happened to Lilia's daughter? What happened to Amalia?'

‘I think Ramiro knows more than he's saying.'

‘I get the same feeling, but he is not talking to me. You unhinge him.'

‘He unhinges me.'

‘Stay Bill, just for a few more days. Stay and we'll work this out together.'

Magdalena came around to Marta's house with a message for me. He'd rung from the airport; he was hiring a car and he'd be here soon.

Andrés.

His name curled around my tongue like wispy smoke and my longing for him filled me. I sat on my bed, taking a moment before the tears came. He was on his way. I realised how scared I'd been, worried that he could never forgive me.

Eventually I wiped my nose and went to shower. After towelling myself down I looked at myself in the mirror above the basin. Did I still look like me? Two big eyes stared back. My hair was longer. I hadn't had the time to do it before I'd left home so it had already lost its sharpness. The weeks and heat had given it wispy curls that I hadn't had since I was a kid. I'd tried to get my hair cut twice here. The first time I'd got as far as sitting in the chair. The hairdresser stood behind me with a pair of scissors in her hand, fluffing my sparse locks optimistically. Her hair, piled in streaky brown layers down her back, pointed out the deficiency of mine. Her bruise-black lipstick shone as she stretched her lips in concentration, her head cocked to the side. I smiled encouragingly and explained
that I needed it trimmed quite short, at which she took a quick step back, to the side and then forwards again. She laid the scissors down on the metal bench with a clink and went off to ‘consult'.

She brought back a short, fat woman, holding a broom whose bristles were so stubby it was hard to see what threat they would have been to dirt.

The short, fat woman was the owner and she didn't want her ‘girl' involved in this. I wasn't sure what ‘this' was but I nodded emphatically and slid out from between them. I thanked them and passed the girl the hand towel from around my shoulders. Neither of them smiled back.

The second time I tried to get my hair cut was a few days later, when the sweat was tracking down the back of my neck. I itched my head violently and headed for Aguasecas's other little salon. The mirrors in this one were square rather than love-heart-shaped, which I took to be a good sign. Salsa blared out of the beaded door-curtain, which was an improvement on the silence in the first one as well. A skinny-hipped man in tight black jeans came in, drying his hands on a cloth. ‘Bingo,' I said under my breath and rattled the beads on my way inside.

‘Hey, gringa,' he sang towards me. ‘You need some straightening out?'

I nodded, and sent him a smile. He flicked the hand towel with a flourish and indicated I sit.

‘Just so you know,' I said straightaway to avoid confusion, ‘I'm not a gringa, but I do want my hair cut.'

He shrugged. ‘Of course,' he said, moving around me, apparently taking snapshot images of my head from various angles.

‘Really short,' I added.

He stopped looking at my head and locked eyes with me. ‘No, no, no,' he said, as if that was all that was necessary, and resumed his angle view-taking.

I sat there for a moment looking at his bobbing head.

‘So what are you going to do then?' I asked.

‘The crucial thing is to keep the length and give it shape,' he said, staring intently at the back of my head. ‘I see layers.'

‘I see too much sweat,' I said into the mirror.

‘It's more charming this way,' he said, fluffing it about.

‘OK,' I gave in.

It didn't look so scrappy after he'd finished, but it wasn't as sharp as my normal look. Still, I thought Andrés would like it. I brushed it now and held it back from my face. My skin was dark under my eyes but no more than usual. I bit my lips. I'd run away, not been upfront about why and where I was going, and had been unfaithful. Would I tell him about Matías? If you don't tell isn't it like a rock between you? I'd worried at this in the middle of many nights in Aguasecas and I still wasn't sure what to do. At that moment, though, I decided. I was going to find a quiet space between us again and worry about confessions later.

I saw him before he saw me. He stepped out of a white car on the other side of the square and headed towards the church, near where I was sitting on a bench underneath a tree.

What a stranger he looked. And yet that quick-stepped walk of his brought a smile to my face. When he was close
enough I called out, ‘Hey,
hombre
.' He stopped and looked around, recognition on his face but not completely certain he had it right. When his eyes found me he bounded over and clasped his arms around me, gripping tight. After a few seconds of clinging we pulled back and kissed, trying to get inside each other. When we pulled back again, he looked at me, ‘Hey man, yourself,' he said. ‘
Mi mujer
, my woman. Where the fuck have you been?' he added in a whisper.

‘I love it when you swear in English,' I said in a mock dramatic whisper. ‘It's so sexy.'

‘Bloody woman!'

We spent a long afternoon in bed. He took my wrist and kept kissing it. The relief of being with him broke over me, wave after wave. His embrace seemed strong, unbreakable. I breathed him in with such gratitude.

‘Why are you crying?' he asked me.

Looking at him through watery eyes he was still so solid and clear to me. ‘I didn't know if you'd want me back.'

He held me so tightly. ‘
Te amaba antes de conocerte; te amaba de que yo naciera
. I loved you before I knew you. I loved you before I was born.'

I gripped him tightly.

‘I thought I'd lost you,' he went on, ‘and it sent me nuts. I had to come and find you.'

‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.'

‘For what?'

‘For loving me. For finding me.'

We made love again, this time more slowly, with less hunger and more sureness.

I tried to explain what he meant to me. How messy and raw
I'd been before I'd met him, and how calm and contained he made me feel. I told him how the rawness had come back after we spoke about having a baby together. It was as if my skin had been peeled off like the lid of a can and all my wounds were exposed again.

He held me tight. ‘We don't have to have a baby.'

I clung to him. ‘You are my skin, you hold my insides together,' I said.

He drew back and shook his head. ‘It's not true. You hold yourself together. You come all this way on your own, you fight with your demons on your own and this, too.' He took my wrist and kissed the skin. ‘You will soon be healed yourself. You are your skin, but let me be the clothes over you.'

We looked at each other and a giggle bubbled out of us at the same time. And then we were laughing, great belly laughs that couldn't be stopped.

We lay for a moment in the wake of the laughter. ‘This Armani shirt needs to eat,' he said.

We got the bus to Santa Maria for dinner because I didn't want to share Andrés with anyone in Alberto's café. He ordered taquitos and
pescado veracuzana
and
mole poblano
. ‘Three mains,' I said. ‘I must have taken it out of you.'

He laughed. ‘It's my first night in Mexico, I am desperate for my food.'

I let him have his love affair as he shovelled the food on to tortillas and stuffed it into his mouth like a man starving. He sat back and stretched his arms in the air when he'd finished. ‘It's good to be back.'

I grinned. ‘Lucky you don't live here though, you'd be the size of a house.'

We moved to the balcony and ordered tequilas. We looked over a beautiful old square, a small breeze every now and then to ease the stillness. The square was surrounded by two-storey buildings from the sixteenth century.

‘So,' he said, taking a sip from his small tequila glass. ‘We should talk. My grandmother. What mysteries have you revealed?'

I screwed up my nose. I'd tried to think of a way to tell Andrés everything I'd found out about Lilia and Juan, Padre Miguel and Magdalena, Ramiro and Bill and Señora Piña, and I hadn't come up with anything to hold their stories together – they would all spill out and confuse him. But suddenly I knew. I would tell the story just as Andrés would have done.

‘I'll start from the beginning. As you know, Lilia was born in 1905, and, like everybody round here, was really poor. Her family lived just out of town on a small hacienda. She was only a few years old when the revolution began.

‘When she was eight she joined the revolution and that's where she met Javier-Alberto. They became heroes. They took risks that nobody else did. People say it was as if their passion made them invincible.'

I took a sip of tequila. Andrés kept his eyes on my face.

‘See that church over there?' I pointed across the square. ‘That's where they married. Lilia was seventeen. She gave birth to her first baby hanging off a tree, just after she'd killed a man by stabbing him in the throat.'

Andrés grimaced.

‘Everybody thought it was amazing that a baby could be born like that amidst the horror of the fighting – they thought it was a miracle. The baby became like a symbol of hope, a kind of saviour for them all.

‘By the time Lilia had her second baby, a little boy, the fighting had wound down so they were living back in town. Then, like you said, one day Javier-Alberto went out for tobacco and never came back.'

Andrés broke in. ‘This can't be right. She couldn't have been nineteen, that would have made my father way older than he was.'

I nodded. ‘Yep. This is what I'm trying to tell you. Lilia's son was your
grand
father, not your father.'

‘What?'

‘Her first child, a daughter, disappeared, and the second, a boy, grew up to have two sons, your father and Juan.'

‘Are you
sure
?'

I nodded.

‘Shit!' He paused. ‘Does
Tío
Juan know?' I nodded again.

‘You saw him?'

I explained that I'd visited Juan before going to Aguasecas; that I'd given Juan the news by telephone.

‘What did he say?'

‘I think it's terrible for him.' I paused. ‘Especially because of who his real father was …'

Andrés nodded at me impatiently to go on.

‘… El Tigre, the …'

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I know who he is.' He banged the table. ‘
Madre de dios
. Are you absolutely certain?'

‘No doubt. I'm so sorry.' I took his hand and squeezed it. ‘He married a woman called Amalia, but after giving birth to your father and Juan, she disappeared.'

‘Could she still be alive?'

I screwed my face up. ‘We just don't know yet.'

‘So my grandmother could still be alive? Juan's mother?'

‘Look,' I broke in. ‘It's unlikely. I don't think anyone should get their hopes up. She'd be in her seventies anyway.'

‘You're probably right,' Andrés said, pressing his lips together.

I went on. ‘A few years after Javier-Alberto walked off, Lilia married somebody else. He died a few years later, apparently an accident when he was cleaning his gun. Another fifteen years or so went by, her son grew up and she married again – George, an American rail businessman, who died a couple of years later, from a “heart-attack”.' I put my fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks. ‘His friend, William Bixton, came down to find out what happened to him, and William, too, fell in love with Lilia and left his wife and son for her. Husband number four.'

‘And he died too,' said Andrés.

I nodded. ‘By then El Tigre was already an outlaw, but nothing too unacceptable.'

Andrés raised his eyebrow at me.

‘Just drugs and things – he and Lilia were both running drugs.' Andrés didn't bat an eyelid so I went on. ‘That's when El Tigre married Amalia, had the kids and then she disappeared. Lilia had a huge falling out with El Tigre, who'd really began to earn his name. She cut him off and raised Javier and Juan as if they were her own. Except she treated them so badly that they ran away from her as soon as they could.'

‘How did you find out all of this?' Andrés tapped the table.

I smiled mysteriously. ‘Lilia married her last husband when she was in her fifties, just after Juan had ran away. That husband lasted the longest, about ten years. And about fifteen
years after that she died when she was eighty-one years old.'

‘How did you find out so much?' he insisted.

‘I had some help.' I told him about the awkward silences I'd come across; how people here wouldn't talk about her. I told him about Padre Miguel and Magdalena and Ramiro, and then of Bill and his Mexican half-sister.

‘So do you think Lilia killed her husbands?'

‘We still don't know. Bill was trying to exhume his father to do some analysis but he's given up. We know that she was capable of killing: she killed during the war, she killed cattle rustlers after the war. She was cruel to your father and Juan.

‘Others say the opposite – that she was good, the village healer and midwife, and she supported people after the war.'