Lilia's Secret (6 page)

‘What are you doing?' Andrés came into the kitchen and caught me scrubbing the taps. His lean, toned body blocked out the moonlight for a moment. I bit my lip and looked up at him, the cloth still in my hand. I wanted to say, ‘It turns out that the white knight I thought was going to save me is a guy who wants two kids, a dog and a mortgage.'

He was laughing. ‘Cleaning? In the middle of the night? I was wondering when I might see a bit of Mexican woman in you.' He grabbed for my hand, took the cloth and threw it back on the sink.

‘Come to bed,
mi mujercita Australiana
,' he said. ‘My Australian woman.' I let him lead me back, but I think that was the moment I felt I might have made a mistake. Andrés's love wasn't going to save me from my darkness after all.

Back in bed, he took my hand and stroked it as he began to murmur in a low voice. ‘I knew this Mexican woman. She had her hair like this,' he indicated the top of his head in circles. ‘Like snakes coiled high on her head. Her hair was very black. But the most extraordinary thing about her was not her hair, but her eyes. One eye was green like a cat's and the other was brown as the trunk of the tree that stands in the middle of the rainforest. Both eyes smouldered like jewels. They were her curse. People believed she was a sorceress with the ability to do
great damage to them. Especially as she grew richer and richer.'

‘I don't want to be told stories like a child.' I sounded petulant.

‘Not a story then,' he said, his lilting Mexican accent not missing a beat. That was one of the things I liked about him: he didn't bother taking offence. ‘How about a lullaby instead, honey-bell?' I would have refused that too, but he began to sing something I didn't understand and it was lovely. I usually laughed when he sang because he did so badly and very loudly. But this lullaby he sang in a low, sweet voice, just loud enough for only me to hear. I softened and lay back down beside him, but I wasn't going to talk about the moon in my belly, or anywhere else.

We lay looking at the water for so long I'd thought he'd gone to sleep. But then he spoke. ‘It's not a story I made,' he said. ‘I'm telling you my life. That woman is my grandmother.'

‘But you said she was rich. Your family was poor.'

‘She had two sons: my father, Javier, and
mi tío
– my uncle – Juan. I never met him. He is like a hermit – sees nobody, speaks to nobody. He lives on his own outside Mexico City.

‘Both sons hated their mother, my father so much that he refused to take a cent from her when she died. So all her money went to Juan. But it hasn't made him happy, so my cousins say. I see them every now and then.'

‘Does Juan have a family?'

‘He has four children and he doesn't see them. They're all adults, families of their own.'

‘Where do they live?'

‘Up north.'

‘Do they try to see their father?'

Andrés shook his head. ‘I don't think so. We don't talk of it, but I think they respect his need to suffer.'

I looked at Andrés and pulled a face.

He shrugged. ‘People live as they can.'

I blew out my cheeks.

He laughed. ‘You Anglo-Saxons, you all think you have a right to a harmonious life. I respect you for it. This innocence is something I like.'

I smiled.

‘Why did her sons hate her?'

He paused. ‘Apparently she was capable of great cruelty.' He paused again. ‘So my sisters tell me. They know more about her than I do.' He yawned in the dark. It was late, but I wasn't going to let him sleep now.

‘One day my grandfather, a Spaniard called Javier-Alberto, went out for tobacco and never came back. My grandmother was furious. She took every single sign of him, made a big bonfire and lit it under the next full moon. Nobody ever heard anything about him again. They think he could not have survived whatever curse she put on him.'

‘That's not evil,' I chided him. ‘Any woman could do that.'

‘Could they?' He tickled me. ‘You would put a curse on me, would you?'

‘The curse is supposition,' I said. ‘It's just sensible to chuck out all his stuff.'

Andrés raised an eyebrow and continued. ‘They say she took her revenge by marrying again and again, and each husband met a premature death, leaving her richer and richer. One died from a shooting accident, another a heart attack, then a
mysterious illness took the next. It's generally believed she killed them.'

I pushed myself up on one elbow. ‘
Really
?'

He shrugged. ‘I don't know. I'm only telling you what they say.'

‘This is your grandmother. Don't you want to know more?'

Now Andrés pushed himself up. ‘My sisters are a little obsessed with her. It worries me sometimes. They already live enough in the twilight zone.' He wiggled his fingers in the air to indicate spookiness. ‘I don't like to encourage them.'

‘How many husbands did she have?'

‘Five. I don't want to encourage you either. My grandmother seems to have a way of getting into people's heads and taking up residence.'

‘Is she still alive?'

‘She died peacefully from old age about twenty years ago, in the early eighties, just before my father died.'

‘You never met her?'

He shook his head.

‘So what did the last husband die from?'

‘Persistent.' He grinned. ‘Who knows – perhaps he did just get ill? People stopped wanting to know how the husbands died. They went along to the funerals because nobody misses a chance to honour the dead. After all, you never know what good the dead can do for you.'

‘You're making this up.' I pushed him.

He shook his head solemnly. ‘But there are other things, things I don't know. She was hard on Javier and Juan. My father escaped from her farm when he was ten.'

‘At ten?' I yelped. ‘He was just a kid. What happened to him?'

‘He walked and walked until he was nearly dead on his feet. A little starving stick kid. After a day, a night and another day, he hid under a table at a market in a little town. His plan was to steal food when the market woke up, then keep going. He was discovered sleeping, rolled up like a snail in a basket. There are many wild boys without homes in Mexico and normally they are driven away from the towns. But my father was taken to the local priest and given some tortillas and beans. He was frightened they would send him back, so he said nothing when they asked where he'd come from. He stayed with that priest for three days. My father had excellent manners so I suppose they realised he must have run away from a fine family.

‘He slept on the floor in a small room off the kitchen. On the third morning, through the murmurings in the kitchen, he heard his mother's name – Lilia de Las Flores. He was frantic that they were going to take him back. He screamed and bit them as they loaded him on to the back of a pick-up truck so they tied some rope around his legs. He worked at the knots, but they were too tight. Then, after some hours, my father realised that the trees looked different. They would have been back in Aguasecas, his town, by now if they'd been going that way. He began to hope.

‘Sure enough, when they did stop two days later it was in a small village just outside Mexico City. He lived there in a priest's house, carrying the sacrament for him when they went to visit the sick, polishing the silver candlesticks, drying the dishes. He was very lucky.'

‘Did he find out why they didn't take him back to his mother's house?'

‘When he was seventeen and ready to leave, he did ask. His priest would only say something vague about knowing he'd run away from a bad woman.'

‘No wonder your father was troubled.'

‘He was the lucky one. Poor Juan, at eight, was left behind on his own with her. When he eventually escaped two years later he was caught stealing an apple and drafted into the army – a terrible place for a young, sensitive boy who was used to being abused.'

‘God. How come you're such a happy person, coming from all that?'

‘It didn't happen to me.' He shrugged. ‘They made the way clear for us to be happy. It would be wrong not to be.'

Even though it was late when we finally stopped talking, I lay awake.

What makes a woman so cruel her own children need to escape from her? What kind of a woman could kill somebody she's made love to? Is evil a disease that's transmitted through the genes? Could there be something deep in Andrés that even he didn't know about?

If I had a child, would I turn into my mother, hard and bitter? If I had a child, would I turn into my father, and stop coping?

I couldn't have a child, but perhaps Andrés could not be without one. Looking back, it wasn't as though this was new. Unlike other men I'd gone out with, he stopped to cluck at babies in somebody's arms or tucked big-eyed into a pram.

‘Sweet,' I'd thought. ‘What a lovely man.' Of course, now I saw it as an early warning sign.

The next morning I got up and went for my run without Andrés again. I ran faster than I ever had around the cliff path. I heard the waves crash against the rocks, and felt the bite of the fresh sun as sweat slicked the back of my neck. When I got back he handed me the carrot and apple juice he'd made.

‘Why didn't you wake me?' he asked.

I shrugged, towelling down my face. ‘You looked so cosy,' I said.

‘I suppose I look “cosy” every other morning too, but that hasn't stopped you shaking me into my runners.'

I shrugged again and drank the juice down in one go. ‘Maybe you looked sweeter than usual.'

He looked at me scratching my wrist but didn't comment. I showered and dressed and got my bag ready for work, just like any other day; I kissed Andrés goodbye on the cheek. He gave me a sidelong look but, again, didn't say anything.

At work, I sat at my computer ignoring the software package I'd been working on, scratching my wrist until blood seeped through the chapped skin. I watched the small patterns it made and I doodled square boxes inside square boxes on my notebook.

Eventually I typed Lilia de Las Flores into Google. There was nothing relevant. Andrés had said that his grandfather's name had been Javier-Alberto Cohen when he'd left Spain in the early 1900s. After meeting Lilia, he'd changed his name to de Las Flores because she reminded him of flowers, so she had changed her name as well. Romantic, wasn't it? Yet it only took three or four years before he was gone. I guess he just got fed up with the demands of babies and the ordinariness of it all. I couldn't blame him.

I typed in Javier-Alberto Cohen and, as I'd expected, nothing came up.

Over the next week I found myself poring over the newspapers for stories of murder and unhappiness; stories of violence where even families destroyed one another. I moved politely around Andrés and he watched me. At night I lay awake beside him.

On the third day I rang him from the office. ‘I have to work late tonight,' I told him. I left work and walked and walked. I walked from the city to Bondi in an hour and a half, and by the time I reached the water I'd made my decision. I had to get away for a while.

‘Dad, Dad!'

Bill dragged his eyes away from his suitcases, lined up at the kitchen door ready to accompany him to Mexico City the next day.

‘Dad, you're only with us one more day, do you think you could focus on our conversation, just once?' Angela said.

Carole shushed her, but she persisted. ‘How long will you be away?'

‘I don't know, but I'll keep in touch.'

‘You make it sound like we're business associates,' she said, tapping her fingers on the table top. ‘Nobody's going to speak English down there. Wouldn't it be better to hire a detective who knows how to do this kind of stuff?'

Carole nodded. ‘I was thinking, Bill,' she said, ‘why don't you take Jorge down with you? We won't need a driver while you're away, and he could really help. He speaks Spanish for a start.'

Bill looked at his family. Carole's brow was furrowed; Laura, the spitting image of her mother, had her elbows on the table and her chin cupped in her hands; Hilary's arms were crossed; and Angela was scowling at him as she chewed on her nail.

He sighed. ‘I need to do this on my own. If I go down there flashing money, how far do you think I'll get? They'll tell me all sorts of lies as long as there's money in it.'

‘Couldn't you pretend that Jorge was your friend or something?' Laura asked.

Bill shook his head in disbelief. Had they never seen him and Jorge together?

‘What more do you need to know about your father, anyway?' Hilary added. ‘He went down there to find out what happened to his friend, let his dick decide he should stay and got sick and died. What's to know?'

‘Don't talk about your grandfather like that,' he snapped.

Hilary rolled her eyes.

‘Anyway, what if he didn't? What if she lured him down there and somehow trapped him? What if, instead of him abandoning us, we abandoned him?' Bill said in a conciliatory tone.

‘At least you'll learn Spanish,' Angela said. ‘How far have you got with it?'

‘I've got the phrasebook your mother bought me and I'll take that on the plane. What about this meal, hey? Esperanza's outdone herself again.'

The conversation swirled around him as he focused on the pork he was carving. The women laughed. This was how it always was: they laughed and chatted and he carved the meat.

The next morning he was at the airport saying goodbye. He tried hard to feel something more than relief, but he didn't look back once as he headed for the plane.

When Bill stood on the street corner outside his hotel in Mexico City he was still relieved, but now there was a rawness to it. He'd swapped the pain of being an outsider in his ordered home with the pain of being an outsider in a whole chaotic country. And now everybody could see he was an outsider.

In those early years, Carole had tried hard to get him to travel. He'd been too busy. Besides, America was the best country in the world – why go anywhere else? One year she'd booked tickets to Venice as a birthday surprise, but he'd had a merger on that week. She hadn't gone either.

This was something though. For a heartbeat he wished she was by his side.

Cars wheezed by, horns beeping constantly. People zigzagged through the speeding traffic without faltering. He jumped aside as a man wheeling a mattress in a wheelbarrow down the footpath yelled a warning. Bill walked up the avenue in the hot sun and watched as the traffic lights, turning from green to red, stopped the river of cars. People thronged on to the road, threading among the cars: children selling packets of chewing gum; a man with a cloud of balloons; a beggar, hand outstretched, with a baby packaged to her chest in a blanket; a woman with sticky sweets in an open box slung around her neck; two people, one on the other's shoulders, juggling. Bill's eyes widened as he watched them expertly timing their performance and their money collection to the traffic lights. The red turned back to green, the people melted away and the river flowed again.

The place even smelt different, and it wasn't just the gasoline. This fast-moving chaos smelt … airier, despite
the pollution. More free. He nodded imperceptibly to himself. Boston smelt careful.

A man with cheekbones pushing through his skin spoke before Bill could turn away.

‘I shine your shoes.'

Bill shook his head, suddenly alarmed.

‘I shine your shoes, see – best shoe polish. Best ingredients, very black.'

Bill backed away, still shaking his head.

‘I have shine. Best shine in all of Mexico City,' the man insisted.

‘No, don't need my shoes shined,' Bill croaked.

The man grasped Bill's sleeve. Beneath his moustache he was missing two teeth. His breath suggested decay. ‘My children, you know. I need to shine shoes for my children.'

Bill snatched his hand away so violently that the man stumbled. They were so close Bill could see that the whites of his eyes were yellow.

‘No, really. Shoes are fine.'

‘My children, not.' The man was down on his knees smearing black cream on Bill's shoes.

Bill kicked his foot away.

‘Don't touch my shoes! Don't touch my shoes!' His voice was high and thin.

A woman in a beige suit stopped beside him with a calming smile. She spat some Spanish at the shoe-polish man, who packed his box up without a word and moved on.

‘I'm sorry,' the smooth woman said. She wore a soft pink scarf around her neck, just the way Carole would. ‘These people don't understand sometimes.' She flicked a speck from
her lapel; her neck was brown like cream coffee. ‘Is your hotel near?' she asked. Bill shifted his feet uneasily. He didn't pay for sex.

‘If it is, you should take your meals in the Zona Rosa,' she continued. ‘Just two blocks that way.' She smiled in a distant, charming way.

Bill flushed with embarrassment at his mistake.

‘They speak English there. Better for you.'

He tried to say something but ended up just nodding. The woman stepped away, then turned back. ‘And don't mind the beggars,' she said. ‘There are too many to worry about.'

‘Thanks, thanks.' It wasn't much of an offering but at least he'd found his voice. ‘Coffee?' he asked quickly. ‘Coffee to thank you properly?'

‘Thank you, no. I am in a hurry,' she turned away and was gone.

He walked the two blocks to the Zona Rosa; it felt more contained here, just like she'd said. Hot-cakes-for-breakfast safe, and he recognised things in the stores. He bought Carole and the girls a pair of earrings each.

The next morning, as Bill sat in the crowded café, the coffee he was cradling bit his hands with heat. Nobody was looking at him and that was just fine. He was examining the froth in his cup when a pair of pristine black shoes appeared beside his table. His eyes traced up the legs, all the way to the young man's face. He looked to be in his mid twenties and had carefully spiky hair.

Bill waved him away. ‘I'm still drinking this one.'

The youth stiffened. ‘I'm not the waiter, sir. I understand you to require a translator.' He spoke English with a clipped British accent.

‘Sorry,' said Bill. ‘Sit down. Can I get you a latte?'

‘Thank you,' said the youth.

‘I like your accent,' Bill said, with a conciliatory smile.

‘I've just completed my Masters in Business in London. My name is Gerardo Benítez and, as you can see, I have excellent English and of course excellent Spanish – skills I believe you require.'

Gerardo hadn't smiled once.

‘Yes, I do. Bill Bixton, pleased to meet you.' Bill extended his hand. ‘I'm going up to Aguasecas, just a few hours out of Monterrey. I understand it's a small place and not many people speak English, so I need a fixer. You know what that means?'

‘Of course,' Gerardo said. ‘I am available for two months. My father stipulates that I work somewhere before I join our family business, so I would be pleased to assist you in your endeavours. These are my terms.' He opened a black leather compendium and took out a stiff sheet of white paper. He passed the page to Bill, clearing away the sugar bowl and moving Bill's cup and saucer to the side of the table. Bill held back a smile at Gerardo's exaggerated precision.

The figures on the page were in dollars as well as pesos. Bill nodded; what Gerardo lacked in personality he made up for in attention to detail.

By the time they reached Aguasecas, Bill was exhausted. He'd insisted on going by bus to avoid the impression of having money. At first, it had been a ‘comfort coach' fitted with a television. True, the television had been in Spanish and the journey had gone on, but compared to what came next it had been a pretty easy ride.

On day two they'd switched to a small red and blue bus with wooden window frames and no glass. The seats were also wooden and it didn't help that Bill had extra padding. His size actually worked against him, since two people fitted on to the other seats and he took up most of one all by himself. A small child or elderly woman would perch on the edge of his seat, but they wouldn't let him stand; Gerardo said they thought he'd take up even more room if he stood in the aisle. Bill mopped at the sweat on his face with a handkerchief that was already damp, his knees cramped and bruised from banging against the seat in front.

It was even hotter when they reached Aguasecas. Bill felt as if the heat could lick off the top layer of his skin. He took shallow breaths, and he was so wretched with exhaustion he could hardly hold himself upright.

Gerardo had left him and his three suitcases in the town square, the ‘
zócalo
', he'd called it. Bill slumped on a wrought-iron bench under a lemon tree, leaning on his daypack to rest. The square was rimmed with lemon trees, which looked as if they'd been shrunk to exactly the same size. Even through his exhaustion he could feel the difference in the air. Mexico City's frenetic energy was replaced by the stillness of searing heat.

Three boys, who looked about twelve years old, skidded a soccer ball between them a few feet away. They seemed to be
getting closer. Bill drew his suitcases into him. One of the boys stopped with his head on one side and gawked at the gringo. Bill mopped at his face again and imagined how old and flabby he must look to the boy. Why was Gerardo taking so long?

An hour later, Bill was still waiting. Gerardo had sent a young boy with an ice-cold fresh juice for the North American. Normally Bill was too suspicious of strangers to accept anything that may have been tampered with, but this he gulped down. The river of iced watermelon tasted like a small piece of heaven.

He sat up straighter and watched as the door of the church opened to the sound of church bells, and people streamed into the square. Suddenly kids were everywhere. Their parents stood in groups beneath the little shade the lemon trees afforded. An ice-cream cart was doing good business.

In retrospect, Bill thought, he probably should have taken Gerardo's advice and not insisted on arriving on a Sunday morning. Gerardo had told him that since there was no formal accommodation here he'd have to ask from house to house to secure them something. Hard to do if everyone was at church.