Authors: Carmen Posadas
Rafael Molinet keeps his distance from the golfers, preferring to observe them from his window. He feels tired just watching them leave so early in the morning, dressed up like two men on a holy mission. Instead of looking like two Tyroleans (thank God; it certainly would be the wrong moment for that), they wear brightly colored outfits, which makes it very easy for Molinet to locate them from any hotel window. Sometimes they are nothing but two dots—one red, one yellow—glowing on the horizon down at the far end of the course near a faraway palm tree.
Now, while some people keep busy playing golf, others use their time here to rest. Take Ana, for example, who lies down next to the Jacuzzi and forgets about everything. Behind her dark sunglasses, she puts all those torrid nights of passion out of her mind. Every so often she gets up a bit, but only to take a sip of Diet Coke in an effort to erase the taste of the repulsive kisses that still cling to the inside of her throat. And as many times as she can bear it—once, twice, a thousand times—she submerges her body in the clear waters of the Jacuzzi as if it were the Ganges and she were a very sinful Buddhist nun. What she does not like, however, are the mud baths. She feels there is something slightly obscene about the way the hotel guests wander around the area covered in all sorts of grotesquely colored mud—“from the days of the Romans” as claimed by a very large sign that she has read many times over out of pure boredom now that she has gone through all her reading material, including her gossip magazines and even the little leaflet inside the box containing her diet pills. She reads the sign yet again:
“The black muds are rich in zinc salts and are ideal for those with circulatory ailments,” it explains. “They have also proven effective in cases of mild hair loss.”
Could the case of Antonio Sánchez be described as mild? Could zinc possibly put a stop to the hair that seems intent on dwindling down to a little crown eternally beaded with little pearls of some greasy substance? At the very least, his head does look a bit more attractive with the coat of mud—it almost makes Ana want to take a healthy slab of the stuff and slather it on him one night to make his baldness (not his hair) disappear, like a Delilah reincarnate, silent and vengeful. Nevertheless, she remains where she is and takes a few more sips of Diet Coke.
Bea does not add any new activities to her boring routine today, either. For two days now she has been doing her exercises with significantly less brio than before—not because she has lost interest in her fitness regimen, but because she is afraid of being caught by surprise in an unorthodox pose. By the new guest, for example—a fascinating man whom Bea knows very little about, except that he writes screenplays and makes heartfelt movies that supposedly “make you feel like he’s talking to you and only to you.” At least that’s what everyone says. Bea explains all of this to Ana, to fill her in a bit—Ana is always so clueless.
“An a-dorable boy,” Bea adds, and it’s true. All you have to do is look at him—he barely even looks like a writer. In her experience, writers are usually pasty-skinned weirdos who have phobias about traveling in elevators and who wear studiously wrinkled jackets, the type of men who yawn whenever they are not the topic of conversation. No, no—Arce is different. Bea can tell from all the photos she’s seen of him in the magazines: Even the way he poses is different. Not once has she ever seen him photographed, like most writers, in front of a cluttered bookshelf or cradling his head with three fingers as if the wisdom contained in his brain was simply too heavy for his human neck to support. Santiago Arce looks more like an actor—an actor playing a writer. Not the usual actor who gets typecast as a novelist in the movies. He doesn’t have any of Hugh Grant’s wry cynicism or Anthony Hopkins’s penetrating gaze, or Jeremy Irons’s odd combination of sexy and sickly. Arce is strong, healthy, and innocent, and he has a square jaw and the kind of smile that reminds Bea of a cowboy from the Wild West. He is different, and original, and perhaps that is why she can’t quite think of an exact comparison for him. All she can say is that he is adorable, adorable, a-dorable . . .
“And maybe,” she says to herself, “just maybe he’ll appear at my side and explain to me what the hell a baobab is.”
But Santiago Arce does not appear. Not at the restaurant, not at the mud baths, and certainly not at the golf course or the tennis courts . . . It almost seems as if he’s not there at all. Perhaps he is staying at L’Hirondelle d’Or à la Martin Amis, “finishing his latest novel in quiet solitude,” as per the hotel promotional brochure.
Wanting to be discreet, Bea is lying facedown on her lounge chair, very close to the mud baths. She adores elusive celebrities, and she doesn’t even care if Santiago Arce is playing hard-to-get, because he has now achieved the status of the divinely mysterious. In hotels, this type of guest is particularly fascinating—they are people who somehow manage to show up on everyone’s radar. Because of them, people suddenly start sneaking constant peeks at all the doors so that they can catch a glimpse of the famous person as he or she walks into the room. And they wait, just as Bea is waiting now, for the right moment to approach the guest and say, “Oh, hello. Aren’t you so-and-so? I loved your film.” Or something of the sort.
And while Santiago Arce is elsewhere, either hiding or reading or smoking or writing screenplays, at least one pair of eyes (actually, two) remain very intently focused on his absence.
The other two eyes are those of Molinet, who is back in his room, far from the scene at the mud baths. Just a few minutes ago he put down Fernanda’s latest fax, jolted to attention by what he thought was the sound of Arce’s voice in the garden outside, which prompted him to drop everything and rush over to the window. He looks left and right but sees no one, and he hears nothing but the “uhu-uhu” of the birds.
I am going to have to figure out a new system if I want to find out what the devil is going on at L’Hirondelle,
he thinks, because all this long-distance snooping has proven utterly fruitless.
Molinet very quickly concludes that he most definitely needs to pursue a new line of investigation; if not, all his unanswered questions will simply fall between the cracks. He needs to talk, yes, but with whom? Well, the most loquacious of the group, obviously. That is usually the best tactic. And so he tells himself that in the next few days—perhaps tomorrow, or the day after at the latest—he will begin to question Bea or perhaps Ana, the timid blonde who seems awfully happy that Sánchez spends the greater part of his day playing golf, an activity that gives her plenty of time to surrender to the pleasures of her blank mind as she lies there by the mud baths or the winter pool. Molinet, meanwhile, remains at the window. Just when he is about to abandon his post and finish reading his niece’s fax, he hears that “uhu-uhu” once again from somewhere else in the garden. And he almost doesn’t even bother to look. “It’s only the birds,” he says to himself. “It may sound like people whispering, but it’s just the birds.” Nevertheless he stays there, peering out the window, and then, through the vine leaves he spies two human subjects that he had not noticed before.
Once he puts on his distance glasses, he very easily ascertains that the two figures are Mercedes and Santiago Arce, softly chatting in a remote corner of the garden.
The Story According to Mercedes, Part Two
No longer will I try to write about good manners as my friend J. P. Bonilla, the editor of Alfa Contemporary Editions, wants me to, nor will I continue jotting down my impressions of L’Hirondelle d’Or. I would be hard-pressed to do it now, you see, because the panorama has changed so radically. What was once a secret hideaway filled with only the most innocuous pleasure seekers, as L’Hirondelle was when I arrived (two Belgians, a group of Germans far too young to interest me, and that curious man who I like to call the Marquis de Cuevas), has become a neighborhood block party. Or a cocktail party. Or perhaps a masquerade ball is more like it. I am not one for exaggeration, but this is more or less the state of things here now.
It is also something of a disappointment to realize that the more you try to run from your ghosts, the more they pursue you. I had scarcely been here two days when I suddenly found myself face-to-face with the very incarnation of everything I wanted to leave behind me in Spain. Fate’s cruel hand could not have picked out four more perfect representatives of what I least wanted to see: Bea, my elementary school classmate; Bernardo, her lover (everyone knows they are lovers, and everyone
knows
that everyone knows, except those directly involved, who prefer to keep up the charade, hiding out and making everything much more awkward for them and for the rest of us, who couldn’t care less about their illicit affair). In addition to these two we also have a busybody radio-show host whose specialty is nosing into people’s private lives, plus a dumb blonde—I don’t know which is more dangerous.
I can only assume that the four of them were as annoyed as I was about the coincidence, which forces us into the typical awkward situation: We are all in relatively close quarters, which means we bump into one another at all hours of the day and night, and though I wouldn’t go so far as to say we are friends, we definitely know one another well enough to make all the run-ins sufficiently uncomfortable. Sometimes I get nervous when I start thinking about what they must be thinking: the four of them over there, me here all alone . . . But then again that is the great advantage of coming to a spa hotel like this. We are all here on a holy mission to lose weight and eat properly, and that does get you out of a lot of things. We are not here, after all, to while away the time playing canasta—we’re here to shed pounds, and every minute here is costing each of us a bloody fortune, so we are far better off using our time to lift weights and exercise. We don’t even have to sit together at mealtime if we don’t want to. We are all subjected to the same grilled fish, steamed vegetables, or lamb in broth, and the hotel staff recommends we take the same places at every meal. With such a practical hotel-mandated excuse, it’s easy enough to decline any disingenuous offer of friendship. But what happens when we suddenly spot someone whom we
would
like to meet? It is still a bit too soon for me to say whether our recent arrival might interest me, but I do have to admit I was intrigued when I saw him walk into the solarium the other morning. I was in a corner by myself, well removed from the others, when Santiago Arce—that’s his name—made his entrance at the very same time as the Marquis de Cuevas. At first I thought they had come in together, but when I saw that Cuevas was just looking for that dog of his, I realized that Arce had just come in for a look. We all turned around to check him out—I mean, so little happens in this damn place—and he looked at us, we looked at him . . . the look on his face was a cross between bewildered and wary, as if he was sizing things up, not quite knowing what to look for. The inquisitive look on his face, however, quickly turned into one of surprise (and I wouldn’t say he was pleasantly surprised, either) when he realized that all of us in the mud bath area were from Madrid—with the exception of the Marquis de Cuevas, of course. And so we had no other choice but to wave hello, cough up a bit of awkward conversation, and crack a few smiles before Arce excused himself, saying he had to go up to his room to put on his bathing suit. But he didn’t come back down after that. We didn’t see him at dinnertime, either, or at breakfast the next day. For a little while, he seemed to have disappeared into thin air, it was as if the desert had swallowed him up—that is, until two days ago, which is when we ran into each other again.
It was Sunday morning. I remember because I decided to go down to the mud baths much earlier than usual. On Sundays people tend to get up late, and it never occurred to me that I might actually bump into someone, much less Bea, my old classmate. But there she was, already sitting at the door, in her yellow robe and with a very determined look on her face, anxious to get going with the daily round of activities, which begin at nine on the dot, in perfect British (or Swiss) punctuality.
Bea smoked. At that hour of the day there was no way I could imagine inhaling even the most innocuous light cigarette, much less a Gitane, which she offered me with a broad smile. Now, I am not one for judging people by the brand of cigarettes they smoke (and I in fact have my doubts about that method of analysis), but I have always felt that there are generally two categories of women who smoke unfiltered cigarettes: The first group is comprised of tough broads; women who aren’t necessarily butchy but who speak with a gravelly voice and wear their hair and nails very short. The second category is a more indefinable sort, and Bea definitely belongs to the latter. Although I’ve known her since childhood, I have never quite managed to decide whether she is a good-girl type or if she is actually a little more perverse. For example, I don’t know if she would ever be nice enough to do me a favor in the event I needed something. What I do know is that people have a pretty low opinion of her, possibly because she talks like a truck driver despite the fact that she looks like a Barbie doll. There is something about the very texture of her that is downright synthetic. I don’t know how else to describe it.
She’s indefinable, yes, and contradictory. We have run into each other just about every day this week, and Bea has been very friendly, though distant and tactful, which is ideal as far as I am concerned. And so I really have nothing to say about her aside from the fact that she smokes Gitanes from dawn to dusk. That is all. I have no opinion of her. Perhaps that is because I have been judged so often and so casually by so many people lately that I no longer dare attempt to judge anyone else. I can present my impressions of people and things, but I prefer to leave the interpretation to someone else.
The point is, there we were at the door to the spa, the two of us. The minutes ticked by, making me wonder about the hotel’s very Swiss punctuality, and to pass the time Bea and I chatted a bit. The conversation, naturally, wound its way toward Santiago Arce—where he was, why he had disappeared from the action, et cetera . . . Bea was of the very romantic opinion that he had come here to hide out and write a screenplay about a hotel like L’Hirondelle d’Or, and we stood around for a few minutes talking about him until, finally, the door opened and we were able to go in for our morning mud bath session, along with a very friendly Belgian couple who had also risen early that Sunday morning.