A guard with a thick moustache found him early the next morning.
“Get up out of there, pal, unless you want me to call the police,” he said.
Santiago stretched awake. A yellow petal was stuck to his lips, and his eyes were swollen with pollen.
“You’ll get one hell of a fine for crushing the flowers. Get up, you hear me? And pick up that flask . . . I thought it stank like whiskey.”
“Is it late?”
“The sun’s been up for ages and will burn that binge right out of you.”
Santiago smiled at him.
“What are you doing sleeping here, anyhow? You’re young, but you don’t look like a delinquent.”
“I’m new to the city and was lonely. I missed home . . .”
“So you go and sleep in a garden? Do they sleep with plants where you’re from?”
“I was born in a town in Castilla.”
“Go on. As far as I know, everyone in Castilla sleeps in a bed—a good, sturdy one at that . . .” The guard clucked his tongue.
“Would you like to hear a good story over breakfast?”
“Son, I had my coffee and churros hours ago.”
“I promise you’ll like my tale. I’m a storyteller, did you know?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what this is: a cock-and-bull story. Come on, pal, get up. We open soon and there are two school groups today. I don’t want the kids finding a dopey young man—not much of an example.”
“You’ll see. I usually tell stories about the sea when I perform, stories my great-grandmother told me when I was little, but I’ve got one I just invented for you. It’s amazing. It’s about women who are cursed . . .”
The guard, a soap opera aficionado, scratched his head.
“All right, kid, I’ll listen as I walk you out. And if I like your story, I just might not call the authorities.”
“You’ll love it. I tell a fantastic tale.”
Santiago and the guard walked down leafy lanes, exotic treetops bending down to better hear the stream of words. The guard, a man near fifty named Isidro, walked more and more slowly as Santiago got to the heart of this story of passions. They took several trips around the duck pond, went in and out of the greenhouses three times before the tragedy came to an end. The guard honked into his handkerchief and wiped tears from his eyes, blaming it on allergies, before shaking Santiago’s hand goodbye.
“Come by when you’ve got another story to tell—but this time during regular business hours.”
From then on, Santiago would often visit before closing. He would accompany Isidro on his rounds, entertaining him with ocean waves and eucalyptus as fragrant as a prostitute’s heart. They began meeting outside the gardens as well. Isidro was single, childless, and his life consisted of TV and a passion for sports lotteries and the Atlético de Madrid soccer team. He was also devoted to the saint whose name he bore, one in a long line of Isidros that ended with him and his cousin, a priest at San Isidro Church. The guard was happy to learn that Santiago liked prayer, whiskey, and gardens, that he could recite the Gospels as if blessed and went in search of holy relics. The boy would kneel down and pray that his wish be granted, that he meet someone whose identity he did not reveal, someone—Isidro suspected—who tormented his soul, just like a Venezuelan soap star. Santiago was perfect for the part: impossibly good-looking, an orphan with a fortune—that’s what he told Isidro—working in the bohemian world of the theater, breaking the hearts of dark-haired beauties, the darker their eyes, the better. Isidro witnessed this one memorable June day that began with a favor to his cousin, going to view the incorruptible body of Saint Isidro the Laborer, followed by a fast as they sat in the Plaza de Oriente, needing time to digest the grace of such a relic, a day that ended in a bar hop toasting miracles and sampling tapas with a group of women tourists from Andalusia.
Santiago would occasionally attend an Atlético game with Isidro. The guard was convinced his hobby—the shouting, the goals, the frittata sandwiches and insults hurled at the referee and linesmen—helped Santiago forget, for a while, whatever was tormenting his soul. But when he saw Santiago perform, he realized the boy would never quiver at a tremendous penalty-kick save or midfield goal quite like he did up on that stage telling his stories. Whenever he performed, Santiago felt as if he were up on the church dais at home, during those messianic years when his voice could raise the hair on the arms of the faithful, when he believed his happiness was destined to last forever.
Their friendship grew as the months passed. In late July, when an apartment came free at the house on Calle de Antocha where Isidro lived, Santiago was easily persuaded to rent it.
“Living at a hotel that long will only make you feel uprooted,” the guard assured him. “If you’re not going back, then you’d better find a home somewhere else.”
“The home I want is impossible, Isidro. I’m only moving because I’ve missed having a kitchen where I can make my grandmother’s recipes.”
The garbage truck finished its work at Plaza de Matute and turned into Calle de Antocha. It passed Santiago, rumbling on in search of garbage cans. A full moon hung low over the roofs, as if it had come loose from the sky. Building façades looked bathed in milk, and bats flew into streetlights. When Santiago reached the house he had moved into just that morning, irises stirred in his chest. There were two great big wooden doors and a long, uneven cobblestone passage that carriages had once bumped down to the building that was now more than two hundred years old. The superintendent’s apartment was through a set of glass doors, with rusty mailboxes lined up outside, waiting for the postman. Santiago climbed a bleached, gray stairwell. The newly polished banister was attached to each step by an iron bar ending in a lion’s head. Like a child’s ice cream cone, the walls were two colors: vanilla from the ceiling halfway down and chocolate from there to the floor.
Santiago stopped on the second-floor landing before a door with a gold metal peephole in the shape of a rosette. That was where Isidro lived. Santiago considered ringing the bell to see if he wanted a drink but looked at his watch and saw it was late. He continued up to the fourth floor, where his apartment was. He had liked it the moment he saw it: the large entryway with honey-colored floorboards, plaster cornices with a flower motif along the ceiling, like in some of the rooms at Scarlet Manor. The similarities did not stop there. White shutters on the windows and balconies, a turn-of-the-century boiler streaked with grime resistant to all cleaning, and a white clawfoot tub in the bathroom that brought to mind happy steam-filled afternoons that smelled of soap and his grandmother’s skin.
Santiago walked down a creaking hall to the bedroom. Since the apartment came furnished, all he’d brought was his kit bag with its cards, toiletries, and a change of clothing. It lay on the floor, next to a double bed in a white iron frame. He left the light off; moonlight streamed in through the window, illuminating the room, comforting him. He stroked the scar on his wrist and lay down in his shorts.
All of a sudden, he felt a tomb pressing down on his heart. It began to smell of wet earth. Santiago stood, trembling, dizzy with an invisible omen. He opened the window with a shaky hand and inhaled the night air. Among the pipes crisscrossing the narrow inner patio walls were rows of windows aligned in the dark torpor of dreams—all but one, that is, the one directly across from his bedroom. A small lamp illuminated a desk covered with books and papers. A woman sat with a quill in hand, writing what Santiago sensed in the pit of his stomach were the hieroglyphics of his destiny.
He stared at the woman’s profile, the ribbons of chestnut hair falling down over a turquoise robe. The smell of ink and parchment paper wafted up like a strand of life and death. The woman set the quill on the desk, picked up a cigarette, and placed it in a long holder, lighting it, the smoke smudging her face for an instant. Santiago reached into his kit bag, pressing down on his toiletries, his razor slicing the tip of a finger, which began to gush blood. Leaving that trail of memories behind, he crept to the window and found the woman at hers, reaching into the sky in search of nonexistent rain. The moon, reflecting off TV antennas on the roof, flooded her face, and Santiago could watch her without being seen. He grew sick with ecstasy, affection, and fear. This woman had been resurrected from his dreams: the sad, jet-black eyes he had sought for so long, the small nose, the geometric cheekbones, the thin neck, the full breasts peeking out from her half-open robe. Santiago stood still, his extremities numb with an intense heat, blood dripping onto his chest, his knees, his shorts, absorbed in the splendor of reality until the woman left her window, lay back on a cushioned divan near the desk, and began to quell the heat with a peacock feather fan.
W
ATCHING HER, SANTIAGO
fell asleep standing up and woke on his knees, his head resting on a spot of dried blood. The cut on his finger was proof of the previous night’s reality. He got to his feet with the sound of nutshells cracking as his spine fell back in line, then he stretched and leaned against the wall, smiling. He was afraid to go to the window and find her. First, he wanted to savor events alone, internalize them, die with them if necessary. He recalled her writing, smoking, looking up at the sky, fanning herself. He fell into bed, curled up in the delight of what was his, the delight of the wait and eventual encounter. He prayed fervently to Saint Pantolomina, showering her with praise, gratitude, and precious stones; he prayed to her virginal irises and her serious eyes; he prayed to the blessed body of Saint Isidro, to the splinters from Christ’s cross, and fell back asleep muttering a series of Our Fathers.
At three o’clock that afternoon, Santiago was awakened by a shout that suddenly hung in the room.
“Paco! Mari’s on the phone!”
It was a woman’s voice, coming from the courtyard. For a moment Santiago had no idea where he was. Flashes of anxiety exploded in his mind: He pictured himself in bed at Scarlet Manor, curled up to the heartbeat of vegetation as it climbed the trellis; he pictured himself in his cell at the church, his fingers sticky with Padre Rafael’s medicine; he pictured himself in his military cot, dazed by the flatulence and sweat of strangers; he pictured himself in his Madrid hotel room, botanical garden dahlias under his pillow. Until he sat up in a swirl of sheets, Santiago did not recognize that house with its window open onto paradise. He wondered whether the voice might be hers, though it sounded different from the one he’d heard in the chapel to Saint Pantolomina. This one sounded rude, angered by the day-to-day minutiae of life. He wondered whether she lived alone, with a girlfriend or family, whether she was married or had children, and the sting of impatience, of needing to know, pricked his chest. He slipped over to the open window and scanned the inner patio. The desk lamp was off. A pyramid of books that might have been dictionaries or encyclopedias had grown up around it, but papers continued to dominate. Over the divan lay the fan and the turquoise robe.
His mouth was parched. Santiago went into the large kitchen decorated with vanilla-colored furniture. He let the water run and poured himself a glass. Heat led him to open the window, desire to search for the woman in the window across the way, and destiny to find her in the kitchen, her windowsill filled with potted petunias, eating what looked like a chicken sandwich. The thrill that coursed through him when he realized she needed to eat like every other human, to drink a cola as she seemed to do with near-adolescent enthusiasm, caused him to let down his guard and be seen. He smiled when she did, after licking a drop of mayonnaise from the corner of her mouth. He smiled unaware of the tears in his eyes, the rain-scented sweat coursing down his body. A cramp of hunger brought him back to this world. He moved away from the window, slid down a cabinet until he was sitting on the floor in a fit of laughter.
Since there was nothing to eat in the kitchen, he went back to his room to breakfast of a cigarette and a few loose pieces of gum he found in the bottom of his kit bag. He had planned to go shopping that day, but evening was already dismantling the sky and he had no intention of leaving home, no intention of letting her out of his sight as long as he lived.
Santiago’s tenacity nearly made him sick. He spent hours spying on the woman from the bedroom, from the kitchen, taking great care not to be discovered again. He stalked her like an animal his prey, running from one room to the next, barefoot, panting. He watched her smoke with her long cigarette holder, write with the quill dipped in violet ink, consult the books on her desk, fan the heat while sitting on her divan in a blur of peacock feathers, and dance with her arms like a swan’s neck, her body’s undulations leaving him crazed in a puddle of sheets. He was fascinated by her short pants and the shirt that left her bellybutton bare. He was even fascinated by the fact that she had to relieve herself; her bathroom window was next to his, and though he could not see her, he felt the fury of the chain and peed at the same time, laughing. When overcome by weakness, Santiago would give in and smoke, utter the names of books of the Bible named after women, and recite saintly poems, transcribing the verses on his arms to forget his hunger.
Before it was completely dark, someone rang his bell. Santiago assumed it must be Isidro but decided not to answer—he wanted no one to disturb his joy. I’ll drop by tomorrow, he thought. Before long he realized the guard might know who she was and was overcome by another wave of delight. Something as simple as her having a name seemed almost supernatural. A name by which to remember her, a name that contained her entirety. Santiago’s dreams seemed dull, tedious, soulless, compared with a life with eyes wide open. Still, he did not go see Isidro but spent another night watching, for she worked until dawn. As he watched he imagined names, discarding some with a laugh, savoring others, as if he might discover the answer in the way the syllables rolled off his tongue.
Her name was Úrsula Perla Montoya, and she wrote romance novels. When her first book was published, she insisted they include her middle name in homage to her grandmother, a Persian poet who at the turn of the century fell into the arms of a Spanish archaeologist excavating near Persepolis. He brought his bride back to Spain years later, a converted Christian hauling a trunk of secrets and Eastern garments, not to mention a longing for the desert locked in her dark eyes, a longing only ever satisfied on holidays in Almería. She had looked after Úrsula until Úrsula was twelve, when death took her like a sandstorm, sealing her heart with an infinite dune that Europeans insisted was angina. Only her granddaughter understood the reality of this loss, which sent her to a Catholic boarding school in Valladolid while her parents, classical actors, toured the world. At her grandmother’s wake, Úrsula took diabolical pleasure in sharing one last secret with her: the reason the deceased’s lips remained parted, melancholy puffs of superfine sand and salty dust slipping out, causing sneezes and hot flashes in the mourners. Ever since then, though not a woman easily drawn into the hurricane of nostalgia, Úrsula Perla Montoya fell asleep to the droning of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer that her grandmother had sung like a lullaby, overwhelmed by the cataclysm of a soul that never ceased being Muslim, telling her woes to a stone the size of an egg and dancing a thousand-year-old dance whenever she was troubled. It was her grandmother who taught her Persian, the language they spoke together, and Úrsula translated from and into whenever not immersed in the literature of love, an emotion she considered a tool of her trade.