The Japanese Lover (3 page)

“I want to know how on earth you managed to bamboozle the old man like that,” he accused her.

“Who do you mean, Mr. Voigt?”

“Who do I mean? Frenchie, of course. How could this have happened right under my nose?”

“I'm sorry, I didn't mention it because I thought the problem would sort itself out.”

“Oh boy, it did sort itself out, didn't it? How am I going to explain it to his family?”

“They don't need to know, Mr. Voigt. You know very well that old people fall in love, even if it shocks people outside.”

“Did you sleep with Devine?”

“No! How could you suggest that!”

“Then I don't understand. Why did he name you as his sole heir?”

“What?”

To his astonishment, Voigt realized that Irina had no idea what Frenchie was planning to do, and was more surprised than anyone at the contents of the will. He was about to warn her she would find it extremely difficult to lay her hands on any of it, because his legitimate heirs would fight down to the last cent, when she announced point-blank that she didn't want a thing, because they would be ill-gotten gains and would be bound to bring her misfortune. Everybody at Lark House knew Jacques was not in his right mind, and so it would be best to sort things out quietly: surely a diagnosis of senile dementia from the doctor would be enough. Irina had to repeat this twice before the dumbfounded director could take it in.

Their attempts to keep the situation quiet soon came to naught. Everybody in Lark House heard about it, and Irina became an overnight sensation, admired by the residents but criticized by the Latino and Haitian staff, for whom it was a sin to refuse money. “Don't spit into the sky, it'll only fall on your face,” Lupita warned her. Irina couldn't figure out how to translate such a cryptic proverb into her native Romanian. Impressed by the lack of self-interest of this humble immigrant from a country hard to find on a map, Voigt offered her a full-time contract with a higher salary. He also convinced Jacques's descendants to give Irina two thousand dollars as a token of their gratitude. In the end, she never received the promised reward, but as she could not even imagine such a large sum, she soon forgot about it.

T
he intrigue and commotion surrounding Jacques Devine's inheritance brought Irina to the attention of Alma Belasco, and once all the fuss had died down, she asked to see the young woman. She received Irina in her spartan apartment, seated with imperial dignity in a small apricot-colored armchair, with Neko, her tabby cat, curled in her lap.

“I need a secretary. I want you to work for me,” she announced.

This was not so much an offer as an order. Since Alma barely acknowledged her whenever they passed by each other in the corridor, Irina was completely taken aback. Besides, half the residents lived modestly on their pensions, occasionally augmented thanks to help from their families, and had to strictly make do with the services provided, because even an extra meal could ruin their meager budgets. None of them could afford the luxury of a personal assistant. The specter of poverty, like that of loneliness, always hovered around them. So Irina explained that she had little free time, because after finishing her day at Lark House, she worked in a café and also went to people's houses to wash and groom their pet dogs.

“How does this dog thing work?” asked Alma.

“I've got a partner. His name is Tim. He works at the same café as me. He's also a neighbor in Berkeley. He owns a van equipped with two tubs and a long hosepipe; we go to the houses where the dogs live—I mean where the dogs' owners live; we connect the hose and wash the clients—I mean the dogs—in the yard or out on the street. We also clean their ears and trim their nails.”

“The dogs' nails?” asked Alma, hiding her smile.

“Yes.”

“How much do you earn an hour?”

“Nine dollars in the café, and twenty-five per dog, but I split that with Tim, so I get twelve and a half dollars.”

“I'll take you on trial at thirteen dollars an hour, for three months. If I like the way you work, I'll raise it to fifteen. You are to work for me in the evenings, as soon as you finish your duties at Lark House, two hours a day to start with. The hours can be flexible, depending on my needs and your availability. Do we have a deal?”

“I could quit the café, Mrs. Belasco, but I can't leave the dogs. They already know me and are expecting me.”

This was how things were left, and how a business relationship that was soon to become a friendship began.

During the first few weeks in her new job, Irina went around on tiptoe and was often at a loss, because Alma Belasco turned out to be bossy and demanding about details but vague about instructions. Soon, however, Irina lost her fear and became as indispensable to Alma as she was to Lark House in general. Irina observed Alma with the fascination of a zoologist, as if she were some kind of immortal salamander. This woman was unlike anyone she had ever known, and very different from the old people on the second and third levels. Jealous of her independence, she was not in the least sentimental or attached to material possessions, and seemed aloof toward everyone but her grandson, Seth. She appeared so self-assured that she did not look for support either from God or in the sickly-sweet religiosity of some of the Lark House residents, who flaunted their spirituality and went around preaching ways of reaching a higher state of awareness. Alma had her feet firmly on the ground. Irina assumed her haughty attitude was a defense against other people's curiosity, and her simplicity a kind of elegance that few women could copy without appearing to have let themselves go. She wore her white, wiry hair short, and combed it through with her fingers. Her sole concessions to vanity were bright red lipstick, and a masculine fragrance of bergamot and orange blossom; wherever she went, its fresh smell covered the faint odor of disinfectant, old age, and—occasionally—marijuana that was typical of Lark House. She had a prominent nose, a proud mouth, big bones, and hands worn rough by hard work; brown eyes with heavy, dark eyebrows and violet rings beneath them gave her the look of a night owl, which even the black-framed glasses she wore failed to disguise. Her enigmatic demeanor created a sense of distance: none of the staff addressed her in the patronizing way they did the other residents, and none could boast that they really knew her, at least not until Irina Bazili managed to penetrate her private fortress.

Alma lived with her cat in one of the independent apartments, with a minimum of furniture and personal belongings. She drove around in a tiny car, completely ignoring all traffic regulations, which she chose to regard as optional. One of Irina's duties was to pay the parking fines that regularly arrived. Alma's upbringing meant that she was polite, but the only friends she had made at Lark House were Victor, the gardener, with whom she spent many long hours working on the raised beds where they planted vegetables and flowers, and Dr. Catherine Hope, against whom all resistance failed. Alma rented a studio in a warehouse space divided by wooden partitions that she shared with other artisans. She continued with her silk-screening, as she had done for sixty years, although she no longer sought artistic inspiration in her work, but simply to avoid dying of boredom before her time. She spent several hours a week there, assisted by Kirsten, who despite her Down syndrome was able to fulfill all her tasks. Kirsten knew the color combinations and tools that Alma used. She prepared the fabrics, kept the studio neat and tidy, and cleaned the brushes. The two women worked harmoniously together, without the need for words, intuiting each other's intentions. When Alma's hands began to shake and she could no longer grip a brush, she hired a couple of students to copy onto silk the designs she drew on paper, while her faithful helper watched them as keenly as a prison guard. Kirsten was the only person who allowed herself to greet Alma with a hug, or to interrupt her with wet kisses whenever she felt a sudden wave of tenderness.

Without ever seriously intending to, Alma had become famous for her original, brightly colored kimonos, tunics, kerchiefs, and scarves. She herself never wore them: she preferred black, white, or gray loose-fitting trousers and linen blouses that Lupita dismissed as the rags of a tramp, never once suspecting how much those rags cost. Alma's silk screens were sold in art galleries at exorbitant prices to raise funds for the Belasco Foundation. Her collections were inspired by her journeys around the world—animals from the Serengeti National Park, Ottoman ceramics, Ethiopian lettering, Inca hieroglyphics, Greek bas-reliefs—which she quickly renewed as soon as her rivals began to copy them. She had refused to sell her brand or to work with fashion designers; each of her original creations was reproduced in a limited edition that she closely supervised and then signed. In her heyday she'd had around fifty people working for her and had produced a considerable volume of work in a big industrial warehouse south of Market Street in San Francisco. Since she had no need to sell anything to earn her living, she had never advertised, but her name had become a watchword for exclusivity and excellence. When she turned seventy she decided to cut back on production, to the severe detriment of the Belasco Foundation, which had counted on this income.

Established in 1955 by her father-in-law, the legendary Isaac Belasco, the foundation created green spaces in at-risk neighborhoods. Although the goals of this initiative had primarily been aesthetic, ecological, and recreational, it also produced unexpected social benefits. Wherever a garden, park, or square sprang up, delinquency rates declined, as gang members and addicts who had been previously ready to kill each other for a packet of heroin or a few more inches of turf now found a common interest in looking after this corner of the city that belonged to them. In some they had painted murals, in others built sculptures and children's playground equipment; in all of them, artists and musicians gathered to entertain the public. In every generation, the Belasco Foundation had been headed by the firstborn male member of the family. This tacit rule did not change with female liberation, because none of the daughters bothered to question it. One day the responsibility would fall on Seth, the founder's great-grandson, who could not refuse it even though he had no wish whatsoever to receive such an honor.

Alma Belasco was so accustomed to giving orders and keeping her distance, and Irina so accustomed to receiving orders and being discreet, that they would never have come to appreciate each other were it not for Seth Belasco, Alma's favorite grandson, who made it his job to pull down the barriers between them. Seth met Irina shortly after his grandmother moved to Lark House. The young woman fascinated him from the start, although he could not have said why. Despite her name, she had little in common with the East European beauties who in the previous decade had taken the men's clubs and model agencies by storm; in fact, from a distance Irina could be taken for a scruffy-looking young boy. She was so inclined to remain invisible that it took a good pair of eyes to even notice her. Her baggy clothes and knitted hat pulled down low did not exactly make her stand out. Seth was attracted by her mysterious intelligence, her impish, heart-shaped face with a deep dimple in the chin, her startled greenish eyes, her slender neck that emphasized her vulnerability, and her skin, so white it seemed to glow in the darkness. Even her childlike hands and chewed nails moved him. He felt a previously unknown and disturbing desire to protect her and shower her with affection. In the winter, Irina wore so many layers of clothes that it was impossible to judge the rest of her appearance, but several months later, when summer forced her to abandon the protective coverings, she turned out to be well proportioned and attractive, in her own raggedy way. The knitted cap was replaced by gypsy head scarves that could not completely cover her head, so that a few locks of almost albino blond hair constantly framed her face.

At first, the only link Seth could establish with her was thanks to his grandmother, since none of his usual seduction techniques appeared to work. Later on, he discovered the irresistible power of writing. He told her that with his grandmother's aid he was compiling a century and a half of the history not only of the Belasco family but of San Francisco itself, from its foundation to the present day. He had been mulling over this vast saga for fifteen years: a raucous torrent of images, anecdotes, and ideas. If he could not get it all down on paper it would drown him. This was something of an exaggeration—the torrent was little more than a tiny trickle—but his description so caught Irina's imagination that Seth had no choice but to set to work. In addition to visiting his grandmother, who contributed her oral history, he began to collect information from books and the Internet, and to collect photographs and letters written at different time periods. This won him Irina's admiration, but not Alma's. She accused him of having grandiose ideas and sloppy habits, a fatal combination for a writer. If Seth had paused to reflect, he would have admitted that both the book and his grandmother were nothing more than pretexts to see Irina, this creature straight out of a Nordic saga who had materialized where least expected: in an old people's home. But however long and hard he reflected, he would have been at a loss to explain the irresistible attraction she exerted on him: her tiny orphan's bone structure and consumptive pallor were the exact opposite of his ideal woman. He usually went for the healthy, tanned, cheerful girls who were so common in California and in his past. Irina showed no sign of being aware of the effect she had on him; she treated him with the casual kindness usually reserved for other people's pets. Her polite indifference, which he would once have seen as a challenge, left him in a constant state of shy paralysis.

Seth's grandmother began to dig among her memories to help her grandson with a book that, by his own admission, he had already spent ten years writing in fits and starts. No one was better qualified to aid him in this way than Alma, who had the spare time and was not yet afflicted with any signs of senile dementia. Alma took Irina with her to visit the ancestral Belasco residence at Sea Cliff, to go through her boxes that no one had touched since she had left. Her old bedroom remained under lock and key, entered only for cleaning purposes. Alma had disposed of almost all her possessions: she gave her jewelry to her daughter-in-law and granddaughter, with the exception of a diamond wedding ring reserved for Seth's future wife; her books to hospitals and schools; clothes and furs, which no one dared wear anymore in California for fear of animal-rights protesters who might launch a knife attack, to charity shops; she distributed other things to whoever wanted them, keeping only what mattered to her: letters, diaries, press cuttings, documents, and photographs. “I have to sort out all this stuff, Irina, I don't want anyone rummaging in my private life when I am really old.” To begin with she tried to do it all on her own, but as she began to trust Irina she began to delegate to her. The young woman ended up in charge of everything, apart from the letters in yellow envelopes that arrived from time to time, which Alma always made vanish immediately. Irina was under strict instructions not to touch them.