Authors: Carmen Posadas
“Hi, my name is Erik. I’m from Göteborg, Sweden, and this is my wife, Greta. I’m thirty-four years old, and we have a daughter named Ingrid . . .”
“Pleasure to meet you, Erik. My name is Pierino de Rimini, from Italy, separated twice, three children, Paolo, Carla, Gigi.
Would you like to sit at our table for the next twenty-five days?”
Twenty-five days! Thank God nothing like this is expected of the guests at L’Hirondelle, and may God bless the person who dreamed up this haven for lonely hearts, whoever he may be.
Speaking of lonely hearts, here comes the Marquis de Cuevas again. Actually, I have no idea what his real name is, but he reminds me of that famous Chilean heir who was all over the gossip magazines a few decades ago. They are so amusing, these guessing games. Observing the various people at this hotel, from a prudent distance of course, is the perfect pastime. First I try and imagine who the person is, and then I craft a personality that seems to suit his or her appearance. And this Marquis de Cuevas is a very typical case in point: sixtyish, good-looking, in fine health, although he doesn’t seem like the type of person who would be especially interested in the hotel’s therapeutic treatments—not that one is obliged to partake in them, but still. . . . I have had my eye on him for some time now, and I have watched him walk back and forth past the winter pool, his eyes gazing out toward some faraway point in the distance—but far away in time more than space. I can’t quite explain it, but it’s almost as if he were looking out at an entire decade—say, the 1950s. He wears a white caftan with a little sprig of mint sticking out from the first of a long line of little buttonholes. And caramel-colored slippers. And a hat that looks like a straw-colored Frisbee. To top it all off, he actually brought his dog with him, although this particular dog doesn’t quite fit the look. Normally, characters like Mr. de Cuevas have little poodles, or maybe dachshunds if they’re the serious type. This man, however, is the master of a little basset hound, a chubby, long-eared, sad-eyed creature, the kind of dog that belongs to a mischievous little boy.
What a delicious afternoon. The man sits down on a nearby lounge chair.
“
Viens ici, Gomez, viens.
Bad dog . . .” Gomez? What is he talking about? Does he mean the dog? And is it possible that he speaks Spanish? What an odd coincidence . . . Well, who knows, maybe my hypothesis is correct and he
is
the Marquis de Cuevas, a throwback from another age entirely. But I don’t know, I think I’m making him out to be a much more romantic character than he really is. The world seems to have run out of rich, decadent heirs with Chilean (or Bolivian or Peruvian or Uruguayan or Argentinian) passports. So where did this man come from? My thoughts drift back to Juan P. Bonilla and the fax he just sent me. How my little friend Bonilla would die if he saw all this.
“Now, what you need to do, honey, is go off somewhere by yourself and get some rest. You have had a terrible time with all this. These past few weeks have been just awful for you,” he said to me the other day when he took me out for lunch at Casa Lucio to talk business, or so he said.
“Go, go, forget about everything. Take the advice of a friend who adores you.” Sometimes he says “adore” and other times he says “a-dore,” but it’s not a speech impediment, I’m positive; it must be some kind of affected phrasing I can’t quite put my finger on.
“Your friend who absolutely adores you is going to make you the most indecent proposal. Now, don’t go getting scared, sweetie. I just want you to write a book for us, for our popular nonfiction section, something light that will give you a chance to laugh a little at all those silly beautiful people who say they’re your friends and now look where they are. Take my advice. Take a few days for yourself, you and no one else, and go off somewhere. I’ll make sure you get the proposal. We’re a very eclectic publishing house, and we’d really love to have an author like you.”
Just today I was thinking about that conversation—that’s why I put it down in writing, along with a few of my own reflections—but I don’t know what made me do it. It was just a little idea that floated into my head. Now that I have his fax in hand, I realize that I can hardly even remember what the proposal said, outside of the basic idea that they wanted me to write a guide to good manners. What on earth made J. P. Bonilla think that I would ever agree to write a guide to good manners? People come up with the most bizarre ideas. If I were to write anything, I would love to be talented enough to write about what happened to Jaime that ludicrous night—now,
that
would be interesting. The blow-by-blow story of Jaime Valdés’s death. Not a bad title, eh? How odd, how really and truly odd, because now that I think about it, if I could write the story of everything that happened that night (and everything that has happened to me since) with the sufficient level of irony . . . now,
that
would be a real story about the meaning of “good manners.” And J. P. Bonilla would eat it up, no doubt about it. Of course, it wouldn’t be very publishable, I’m afraid. Absolutely unpublishable, I’d say. And anyway, I don’t have the slightest idea of how to write. I’m awful at it, perfectly awful. Just look at what a mess I’ve made of these notes.
“Gomez,
chou chou,
you stay right where you are.”
I look up and there he is, lying on that lounge chair nearby with a very serious look on his face. His foot seems to be tapping to the beat of an invisible melody: one-two-three, one-two-three.
What is happening now? The dog (And did I catch that right? Is he really called Gomez?) has escaped from his master and is trotting toward me with his head cocked to the right. I wish I had something to offer him, something he might like, even just a potato chip. All I have is my glass of Pimm’s, thanks to the diet regime here. I offer him the little sliver of cucumber swimming in my glass, but he doesn’t want it, of course. Who ever heard of a vegetarian dog? And so he very regally trots away from the pool.
“
Viens ici,
Gomez, bad dog, bad dog!” the Marquis de Cuevas repeats. It must be a combination of the heat and the alcohol that has put me in such a good mood.
So here I am at L’Hirondelle d’Or, far from Madrid. I can stay here as long as I please—a month, two months if I can bear it, for I am in full possession of my time, and my money, too . . . but most of all I am in full possession of my freedom. And that is the most important thing of all.
The man is looking at me. Under his straw hat I can make out an olive-toned face, that isn’t very distinguished, really, a mixture of European and . . . perhaps indigenous South American.
And yet he has such determined, precise mannerisms. How he moves his hands, for example, and the way he flips through the pages of a novel I know he isn’t reading. It takes years and years of boarding school in Switzerland for a person to move like that, even if that person is dressed in a caftan and a pair of bedroom slippers. And I suddenly begin to think about what it is, exactly, that makes a person elegant—or not elegant, for that matter. Some people are completely hopeless when it comes to clothes and yet they always look perfect. And then there are others who may insist on only wearing Armani—like J. P. Bonilla, for example—but they just don’t cut it; it’s something you can tell from a mile off. My God, if I had to explain this in a book about good manners, I wouldn’t know where to start . . . but then again, do I have anything better to do this afternoon? Or tomorrow? Or in the next forty years? This is the perfect setting for enumerating the virtues of being a snob, isn’t it? Now, let’s see. Where shall I begin? Oh no, no. I should drop it right here. The truth is, I feel completely inept when it comes to writing—of course, when one finds oneself in an environment as picturesque as this, one does feel the desire to emulate, I don’t know, Somerset Maugham. Besides, it’s much more fun to describe all the things I see here than to think about putting together a book about good manners, like Bonilla wants. It reminds me of a book my grandfather had, a late-nineteenth-century Russian novel intended to be a kind of manual of the social habits of the day. It was absolutely hilarious, but so affected. The author began each chapter with a bit of worldly advice regarding a specific topic and then went on to describe how that topic manifested itself in the real world. And of course the advice shed absolutely no light on the real-life part, because life is the polar opposite of what you read about in guidebooks about good manners. What was the name of that novel?
Greek Lips,
I think. According to some Armenian proverb, the best liars have the thinnest lips. Or maybe it was
Greek Mouths
. . . ? Anyway, it doesn’t matter much. We all know that the tightest lips and the tightest mouths are those that belong to the biggest liars of all, and we don’t need Armenian proverbs to teach us that. The one thing I do remember from the novel, though, is that each chapter was dedicated to a specific social occasion, like “the baptism,” “the wedding,” and “the funeral.” Things like that.
The Funeral
For two years following the funeral, the widow shall remain in mourning. The great, most austere mourning shall last one year . . . and during the last six months the following variations are permitted: black lace edging, silk, and embroidery (only in jet black).
During the last three months, the widow may wear white and black petticoats, the colors gray, mauve, aubergine, and lilac (to be observed strictly in this order). And finally, when the mourning period comes to a close, she must observe a transition period before beginning to dress as the rest of the world does. This period shall begin with neutral tones, and the jewels may slowly and discreetly emerge from their boxes. She may adorn her hair with a chrysanthemum (of any color), because it is the flower of the widow.
—
Baroness Staffe,
Usages du monde: Règles du savoir-faire dans la société moderne
(1890)
A Widow Is the Very Best Thing a Woman Can Be (The Story According to Rafael Molinet)
A few yards from Mercedes Algorta, two lounge chairs away, there he was.
It was terribly hot, but his face hardly shone at all, because sweating is not very distinguished. His eyes, on the other hand, shone with an owl’s acuity, the kind of owl that knows it is only a matter of time before some hapless little mouse comes walking by. However, the physical appearance of this particular guest at L’Hirondelle d’Or might best be described by plagiarizing Truman Capote’s observation of Jean Cocteau:
Rafael Molinet was a walking laser beam with a sprig of mint in his buttonhole.
That, at least, was how he thought of himself. And this lounge chair was the exact spot where, ten days later, he recounted the full story of all that had come to pass during his stay at the hotel. On that day, October 23, he would go back to the morning of October 13 and begin his story; he even imagined himself telling his tale aloud to somebody, who would no doubt be very surprised to hear it—to his neighbor Reza, the canine coiffeur, for example, or perhaps he would tell it not to one person but to many, an entire audience of choice listeners. And, yes, maybe what he had to say was nothing but an old man’s prattle, a compendium of idle gossip, but it was so very colorful. He had also discovered—far too late in life, unfortunately—that he had a singular talent for embellishing stories and a very refined way of retouching (or sometimes inventing) certain characters, including his own. With this in mind, he would stop for a moment before embarking on his narrative.
“So how would you like to hear the story of a bad girl?” he would ask his audience. And then, without waiting for an answer, he would say to himself:
“For heaven’s sake, for heaven’s sake, no names, no names—that would be in terribly poor taste.”
The audience, he thought to himself, would not take long to react: chairs would creak, bored ears would suddenly prick up to attention, and then, following a few seconds of well-calibrated silence, Molinet saw himself bring the tips of his fingers together, just as his beloved Capote often did, before plunging into the tale of all that had happened at L’Hirondelle d’Or during those two weeks in October—exactly as if he were reliving it right there in front of his listeners. And so Rafael Molinet began to tell his story:
Had it not been the middle of October, a perfectly insipid month of the year, or had the hotel been filled with truly important people, I might never have taken such a keen interest in the story of Mercedes Algorta. Had the situation been different, I might never have thought to ring up my niece Fernanda in Madrid and she, in turn, would never have had the chance to expand upon the two or three bits of common gossip she had fed me in London, gossip that had made a certain impression in this keen old head of mine. In short, had things played themselves out differently, perhaps I would not be telling you this story right now.
The story of a bad girl. That is the story I propose to tell, but don’t go running to any premature conclusions, for the most obvious details are never quite what they seem, and we shall have to go a bit further back and begin at the beginning, as they say—or, rather, at the moment I first laid eyes on the widow.
It was the thirteenth of October. I remember it well. At the time I scarcely even knew that sanctuaries of this type even existed—grand old hotels that have caught on to this new (and very commendable, I am sure) trend of health and fitness. From the moment you arrive, you can see they have thought of everything. Back problems, sir? A bit of rheumatism? Varicose veins? Put yourself in our hands and we will take care of you, body and spirit . . .
I seem to be the only rebellious client who has decided not to avail himself of a single therapeutic treatment, because all the other guests here are wrapped in yellow terry-cloth robes and walk about the place with a very determined air: mud application from nine to nine-thirty, stationary gymnastics in the pool at ten-fifteen on the dot, and then massage, restorative body treatments, the sauna. How exhausting it all seems, even if it is in the name of
mens sana in corpore
. . . In any event, that is the way things are here.