Lilia's Secret (5 page)

‘There's a terrible power about a woman who can make two grown men, first George and now William, leave their wives to marry her,' one of his mother's aunts said.

The second voice was so cracked and low he had to strain to hear it.

‘She's older than Grace, you know. You'd think that if you were going to leave your wife you'd leave her for somebody younger.'

‘He hasn't even divorced Grace,' said the first voice. ‘Apparently you can marry people as you like down there – nobody keeps records,' the woman sniffed.

‘She's got different coloured eyes,' said the first voice. ‘Whoever heard of that? One green and one brown.'

‘The silly man told Grace all about it in a letter.' The other speaker said and there was a small pause.

‘You should never say a woman is better off without her husband, but in this case you'd have to wonder,' said the first voice again.

Bill felt helpless anger.

Throughout his childhood the idea of the bad woman in Mexico disturbed him. Surely she couldn't have been as bad as
his father had first thought, or he would never have stayed with her. On the other hand, maybe she was that bad; maybe she had stolen his father away. And through all his wonderings was threaded the image of a woman with one green and one brown eye.

A couple of months later he finally accepted that his father wasn't coming back. He imagined him with a little knapsack on a stick like Dick Whittington in one of his storybooks. But his father hadn't run off to seek his fortune; he'd run off to Aguasecas, a town in the north of Mexico, and married a Mexican woman. Bill kept badgering Aunt Thelma about what that meant until she became angry with him and sent him to his room. Eventually he worked out that the words meant exactly what they seemed to mean.

One night, at about the same time as he realised his father had gone for good, he had his books sprawled before him, doing his sums. His mother sat with her hands folded in her lap, gazing into the fire. He slid over to her.

‘It's OK, Mommy,' he said. ‘We've still got each other.'

‘He'll come back, Willy.'

He snuggled into her to see if she still smelt like his mommy. She didn't. She never did again.

Three years after his father's disappearance there was a lawyer at the door. He and his mother went into the library. Aunt Thelma told Bill to keep away, so he sat at the top of the stairs and waited. There was air all about him and he imagined tumbling into it. That would teach his father. But if Bill died
what would happen to his mother? He stared at the marble bannister and found there were 124 dark tan flecks in the space between his hands. The counting calmed him.

When he heard voices coming out of the library he craned his head forward to see them. The lawyer's face was grave, his mother's drained grey. As the lawyer left he pressed Bill's mother's hands between his and clicked his tongue. She smiled wanly, saw off the lawyer, then stood stock-still as the door shut. Bill took the stairs two at a time, but Aunt Thelma was there first.

‘Grace, what is it?' Aunt Thelma shook his mother's shoulders.

He was beside her. ‘Mommy, Mommy, open your eyes.'

She didn't open them. ‘William's dead – a heart attack. There's no money. He's borrowed from everybody to set up some railway scheme. But there never was a railway scheme. He's been taking their money and now there are debts all through Boston.' She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘There'll be no more flowers, Willy.' He hadn't understood at the time, but later he remembered that his father had bought his mother flowers every Friday when he came in from work. ‘Flowers for my flower,' he would say.

From then on her face remained grey and the rest of her followed: her hair, her skin, her clothes. As the scandal of his father's debts spread through Boston, people stopped visiting. Aunt Thelma said she had tried to tell them that his mother wasn't involved. They hadn't believed her, or hadn't cared, or felt that Bill's mother should have done more to keep her husband by her side in the first place.

She sold their house to pay off what little they could of the debt, and they moved all the way across town into a one-room
apartment, where he and his mother slept on a foldaway couch. Soon after, Aunt Thelma moved to San Francisco and nobody came to visit them. In their new place there was no room for a dog.

Bill was on his knees on the floor in the attic. Despite the limousines, the gala balls, the tennis courts, he'd never really left that dingy room with the wallpaper peeling off the ceiling. Everything he'd done since then, everything, had been to make good on what his father had lost. He'd put himself through college, got up early, left work late, married the right woman and said the right things to the right people. And it had worked. He'd done even better than he'd dreamt as a kid who counted the spots on the wall to block out his mother's whimpers. He'd made more money than his father could have imagined; he had power and influence and people lining up for meetings with him.

Yet in this moment he saw that it added up to nothing. It was as if he meant nothing to anybody.

In all his long life since his father's disappearance, he'd never looked into anybody's soul and never let anyone look into his. God knows, Carole had tried, and he'd let her come close in those early years of dancing and holding hands. Bill slumped with the magnitude of his failure. The biggest thing his father had stripped him of was not wealth or social position; it was the ability to love.

He started to rummage through his mother's box again to distract himself. There wasn't much left, and there was no sign
of the hatpin. Then, a small bulge in an inside pocket, an envelope. He unfolded the thick stiff paper.

Bill's hands shook. He looked around for something to count. Nothing stayed still. He wiped his eyes but it didn't help – all he could see was his mother sitting by the dirty window of the apartment with a travelling blanket over her knee, looking at the red bricks of the wall of the neighbouring apartment block four feet away.

Tears leaked from his eyes. His father had promised he'd be back. The betrayal exploded in him. It wouldn't stop rising and suddenly it was there, in his throat, like lava – boiling and frothing. He jammed his hand against his mouth but it didn't stop the shaking. He felt his mother was there in the attic with him, against the wall, soft and sodden. Only it wasn't her, it
was his reflection in a mirror. He, too, could sit staring at the walls in his den for the rest of his life if he didn't do something.

In a flash Bill saw that before he died he had to know why his father had left them. He must go down to Aguasecas and find out what had happened to his father. It didn't make sense that he had left everything: the wife and son he loved, the power and the prestige, for an unknown Mexican woman.

Andrés and I lay on our bed that night taking in the slow rise of the moon. Full and pregnant, it shimmered silk over the water.

We absently caressed each other's skin, listening to the swish of the waves on to the shore below. They were the earth's pulse, and the breeze through the open doors came to us from the four corners of the world. Every cell inside me was round and fat with contentment.

I should have known better.

Andrés brushed over the serrated skin on my right wrist and looked up at me, one eyebrow raised. I shrugged my shoulders, smiled and snuggled into him to distract him. I didn't want to have to explain what had happened on my run that morning that had led to the scratching attack. He traced the contours of my hipbones with his tongue. I relaxed again as he started making circles with his finger on my flat stomach.

‘You see that moon?' he asked, cutting too loudly through the silence.

‘Mmm,' I murmured.

He stretched up close to my ear and whispered, ‘I'd like to see that moon in here.' He tapped my stomach.

I stiffened for a microsecond, then grunted, before slipping off the bed to get myself a glass of water.

‘You want anything?' I asked from the doorway, tying my wrap tightly despite the heat.

Andrés lay back on the bed, watching me. ‘No,' he said. ‘Come back soon.'

I smiled as if nothing had changed.

I stood at the sink trying to steady my breath. I was such a fool not to have seen it coming. There was no way I could have a baby.

There were dirty spots all over the taps, so I picked up the soggy yellow cloth from the draining board, rinsed it under the tap and scrubbed at them.

I knew what having kids had done to my mother; it had turned her into a machine, which got by on too little fuel to keep food on the table and clean clothes on the line. Children had left her hollow. Two eyes, staring out from an empty shell.

It was what I'd been running away from for years.

When I first met Andrés I'd barely noticed him. I'd given him a quick smile of acknowledgement, but not of encouragement, as he'd folded his long legs under the seat beside me on the aeroplane. It was the same look I'd shot the woman in the tailored navy suit on my other side. It was a nod that set up a force field preventing interaction. It was usually so successful that even when I broke for a meal the communication would be contained to polite smiles as trays were passed.

As Andrés put on his seat belt, I locked my eyes back to the pages of
Beloved
, which I was re-reading. I had read it first at university, staying up two nights running, propped against the pillows in my bed, crying, unable to set it aside. I was re-reading it to see if it had been the book that had had such an effect on me, or that particular time of my life.

‘It made me cry,' was Andrés' opening line, nodding at the book.

I noticed his long fingers on the armrest between us, and the sexiness of the dark hairs against the brown skin made me look up at his face. It was unusually round, with high cheekbones, although it didn't add up to handsome. But his eyes were almond-shaped and cats'-eye green. His accent helped too. He had that flowing rhythm of Latin languages. I had loved French and Spanish at university, but abandoned them in favour of programming work, which paid.

He wasn't as old as I'd first clocked him to be. He was probably just under thirty, like me, but that was where the similarity ended. He was wearing an off-white business shirt that nobody I knew of my age would be seen dead in.

‘Which part of it?' I asked.

‘You know, I don't even remember.' He took a folded newspaper out of his bag and smoothed it out. ‘Just the general all of it. The pain they lived inside.'

It was exactly right. I had my answer so I tucked
Beloved
into the seat pocket in front of me.

A few hours after we touched down in Bangkok we were in bed together. That wasn't unusual for me. I was twenty-eight years old and I slept with anybody who asked. What was unusual was that as I lay on top of him I knew I'd marry him.
It was as if all of me recognised all of him. That's how it began.

Over the next few days, as we lay entwined or walked the streets of Bangkok, our bodies clamped together, he told me glorious stories. He was a swashbuckler in the face of death. My stories, if I told any, were puny, dry, bitter things.

I made him swear that what he told me was true. One time, he said, he'd escaped a terrorist bombing in a Peru museum by minutes because he'd stopped to have breakfast with a group of monks. He'd only stopped because one of them had looked up and smiled as he'd passed through the kitchen of the monastery, where he'd spent the night. The smile had reminded him of his sister, Lupita, who used to wake him up every morning by tickling him under his chin.

Another time, Andrés told me, he was walking at two in the morning after a party in his home town of Mexico City. He'd heard a scream. He ran towards it. Around the corner he saw a man waving a gun at a woman cowering inside a Volkswagen. Without a thought Andrés jumped between them.

Eventually the woman passed a wad of notes to Andrés, who passed them to her pimp. Andrés exhaled. Then the woman crawled out of the Volkswagen and began bashing her huge black handbag against the car, screeching. Andrés only just managed to stop her scratching her long purple nails across the bonnet as the man levelled the gun at his head. That was one of the eight times he had been close to the wrong end of a knife or a gun. So he told me.

Andrés was a cat who lived in the world as if he owned it. I'd never met anyone like him. Sure, I'd met bullies who acted as if they owned the world, but their skin reeked of insecurity.
Andrés lived without fear, without terror, without depression.

‘Sure, I know what depression is,' he insisted. ‘I was depressed for a couple of hours once.' He couldn't understand why I burst out laughing.

He was a revelation. I wanted to bask in his sun. In those early days I thought it was as simple as that.

He didn't get to his conference and I didn't go on to Europe. After a week we took the same plane back to Sydney, with our arms still entwined and making everyone sick, I'm sure, although I didn't notice. We took another week off and lay together in my grandmother's big bed.

‘Maddy, Madelina, Madelina,' he'd say. ‘Mmm,' I'd reply, rubbing my cheek against his smooth chest.

‘Nothing,' he'd say. ‘I just love the sing of your name.' I looked right into his eyes and felt it was a sacrament, although I'm not religious.

Andrés was the baby of his family – the one who came after the one who died. One morning his mother had found his one-year-old brother dead in his cot. So Andrés was born into a force field of fierce protection. His two sisters took him to school with them while his mother was at work. By that stage his parents had divorced.

Andrés said his father, Javier, was a phenomenon. He was too big for the two-bedroom flat the family shared. He would make a bucket-load of money and then pour it away in one big splurge, taking the family out to eat and urging them to order what they liked.

Andrés recalled the time they were seated in one of Mexico's best restaurants around a large wooden table with two orange candles flickering at either end. Andrés said the matador in the
painting on the wall opposite, who clutched a wine-red rose between his teeth, seemed to be grinning at him.

‘Try something you've never heard of,' Javier urged his children. Andrés and his sisters giggled as they pored over the menus, the oldest reading to the youngest. The night wound on in a haze of well-being and joy. Javier kept slapping money down on the table for the mariachi trio to sing. They all got to choose their favourite songs. Andrés finally gave in to his heavy eyes as they sang ‘Muñequita Linda' for the third time. In the early hours of the morning Javier wrapped the little ones up and carried them home.

One week later there was no money for even rice or beans for dinner. Andrés shook his head when he told me that story.

He told me that his father had taken his sister, Lupita, on a holiday to Veracruz when she was six. She held her daddy's hand as she ran along the footpath to keep up with him. When they came to the harbour they'd stopped and looked at the boats and ships. Lupita loved a tiny boat painted blue and white called
Joya
, which summed up her delight at having her father to herself.

Beggars crouched against the boat moorings with their arms outstretched. Javier and Lupita sat down at the edge of the wharf, dangling their legs over the water and he brought out the food Lupita's mother had made. They ate in silence, the beggars watching them. As Javier was dusting the crumbs off his hands and stuffing the paper back in his pocket he asked, ‘What next, little one?'

‘Papito, can we give some money to that boy over there?' The boy was playing pick-ups with pebbles. Every time he threw the four stones in the air and turned his hand over to
catch them, he missed. Lupita had been watching him out of the corner of her eye while she'd been eating. His mother huddled against a mooring plank a couple of feet away, cradling a small baby who hardly blinked.

Javier looked around. He pulled out all the coins he had in his pocket. ‘We have five pesos here,' he said, moving them about on his palm. ‘If we give that little boy this money, we will have nothing more to eat until we get home.' Javier considered his six-year-old daughter. ‘Do you understand? It's your decision.'

‘Yes,
Papito
, yes,' Lupita said, without a second thought.

‘I don't want to hear one whimper, one complaint, from you if we do this.'

‘You won't, I promise,' the little girl said.

Javier poured the coins into her small hand and she got up and went over to the boy. The back of his hand was pocked with red from where the sharp stones had hit and bounced to the ground. He eyed her and dropped the pebbles. Lupita crouched down beside him. She took his hand, turned it over and put the few coins into his palm. She smiled at him and then ran off to take her father's hand once more.

She didn't eat for a whole day. She'd stumbled as she tried to get on the bus to go home, so Javier had to carry her.

One month later, just after Christmas, the Three Kings laid out presents at the foot of her brother and sister's beds, but not Lupita's. At the end of her bed was a set of cow horns. Lupita burst into tears. Her father took her on his knee and explained that the Three Kings must have known how badly she'd behaved in Veracruz when she had whined and whined because she was hungry.

‘What kind of a father does that?' I'd asked Andrés. He'd just shrugged. ‘My kind.'

Once Andrés's mother had kicked Javier out, their lives filled with a calm and welcome sameness. Their mother got up before five in the morning to soak the beans and make the meal they would eat that night. They would have breakfast together and she would go to work.

According to Andrés the burden of caring for her children and working didn't weigh her down. Not even when, every now and then, she had to pack them up and flee in the middle of the night because she couldn't pay the rent owing.

His family was too poor to come all the way from Mexico for our wedding. His two sisters remained in Mexico City; he'd lost his father when he was eleven to a heart attack, and his mother seven years later, again to a heart attack. He said he hadn't minded much about his father because he hadn't seen him for years. His mother's absence was like a fresh sore every day.

‘We'll go visit my sisters soon anyway,' he said.

He'd lived in Sydney for eight years. He'd first come to study a business degree, which was much cheaper than studying in the United States. He'd stayed because he loved Australia, but he went back to Mexico City every year or so.

‘Let's just make it us then,' I said. ‘Leave the families out of it.'

He gave me a funny look and shrugged.

So it was just the two of us and twenty or so friends on our wedding day. We stood within a circle of rock on a cliff above the ocean. I insisted on saying our vows in Spanish as well as English, even though we were the only ones who spoke
Spanish fluently enough to understand them. Mariachis sang with their big hats and big music glittering on the water below us. I know it sounds romantic, and it was, but I wished at the time that the music didn't sound so big in the dark.