The News from Spain (18 page)

Rosina was asking her about her work—what kind of painting did she do?—and Elvira was giving tight little answers, as if she were on a job interview.

“I’m sorry,” Rosina said. “I’m prying. I know a lot of artists don’t like talking about their work.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Elvira said. Then they were both silent. She felt she was letting Rosina down, being a dull, graceless guest.

Finally Elvira asked about the pictures in the house—she was dying to, they were screaming at her, and it seemed pretentiously nonchalant to ignore them. They walked around and looked at everything, barefoot, carrying their drinks. Elvira, who hated it when people talked in museums, didn’t say anything, just smiled at Rosina from time to time, and once laughed out loud, standing in front of a Goya that was hanging
in the dining room, a toothy, inane-faced portrait of a woman with many jewels in her hair. Rosina laughed too. “You always wonder how he got away with it,” she said.

When they sat down again in front of the fire, it was different. They were peaceful, the awkwardness was gone. The late hour, the storm still slashing away outside and beating on the old window glass, the pictures, the brandy, the deep quiet of the house.

In a book they would have told each other their stories then. They would have been stranded together for a night, high above their ordinary lives: travelers at an inn, fleeing a city in which there was plague; or refugees from a shipwreck crowded into a lifeboat; or survivors of a war holed up in a villa. The threat of death would have hovered, recently and narrowly escaped, possibly still imminent. They would have told their stories without fear, with a reckless noble end-of-the-world candor.

But there was no plague, no shipwreck. The storm was dramatic but not deadly; it was just a late-winter rainstorm. Elvira and Rosina were both guarded, discreet, even secretive people; that wasn’t going to change. They told each other a little bit that night; they made forays. Rosina talked about her grown son—she had moved to this city to be near him and his wife and their two small daughters; Elvira was here because she’d lucked into a small house in the country, with a barn she could use as a studio. But something bigger happened too, an alliance, an unspoken agreement that this would be a patient and safe friendship. They would come to know each other slowly, over time.

2

It would have been nice, impressive, to write:
The countess left Aguas Frescas, taking nothing
. But on second thought, why? Who over the age of twenty would be impressed by such shortsighted renunciation? The lawyers had worked out a decent settlement. And Rosina had wanted a number of things. A few of the smaller paintings, her pearls (though none of the other jewelry), money. She sent word to her husband through the housekeeper that she would like to take some furniture from obscure corners of the house, nothing much, nothing that would leave any room looking plundered. Not even anything from her bedroom—those sad pieces of furniture, paced between, stared at, cried on, collapsed on: they were part of what she was leaving.

Her husband sent word back that she should take whatever she wanted. He was being fair, reasonable, as he almost always was, except when he wanted something that fairness and reason couldn’t easily obtain. Even then, he could cloak his unreasonableness by pointing out hers. “Look what you’re doing to yourself,” he would say, when she had wept and stormed at him after learning of some new infidelity.

I can stand this, she had thought at first. Well, not at first. At first there had been nothing to stand. They were happy. They ran the estate, which included a large and very successful vineyard; they went riding and fishing together; they spent time in the city and went to parties and concerts, bought clothes and books; they were ecstatic and abandoned in bed together. “No,” she would murmur, “no, don’t,” and that was part of the game, for him to overcome her.

For the first few years they would travel abroad together
in connection with the wine business. Then he started saying that one of them should stay home and oversee, as he put it, “domestic operations.” These trips were boring, anyway, he said. You stay here, and we’ll go someplace in the spring. Paris, or New York. So he stopped taking her with him. From the rumors she began hearing of his travels, she surmised a wife would have been an encumbrance.
She surmised
. Listen to the coolness of that, the hard-won worldliness. When she first learned of his infidelities, she was shattered. But eventually she came to feel that as long as his dalliances were conducted while he was away, they had nothing to do with her. She even felt a dim sense of gratitude at his discretion, seeing it as a mark of his respect and tenderness for her (and seeing at the same time the self-abasement inherent in such gratitude).

I can stand this, she thought.

But then he fell for someone at home, one of the maids. Her personal maid, as it happened. Or maybe it didn’t just happen. Maybe that was part of the attraction: trying to do it right under her nose, seeing just how close to her nose he could get.

So now the chase was happening right in front of her, scampering buffoonishly through her own bedroom as if she, herself, were not there at all. The maid wasn’t interested, thank God. She was loyal to Rosina, and told her everything. The count wanted to sleep with her. He wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything, that’s what he’d said.

He must believe it too, Rosina thought. From the maid’s account, it sounded as though he was becoming almost a bully about it, which was against his character, or at least against the character he generally presented to the world. That character, the man he wished and professed and most of the time managed to be—admirable, considerate, courtly—must be like a too-tight shirt that had finally ripped at the seams. Now he’d
pulled it off and left it lying on the floor, for someone else to pick up.

He was growing careless. He was grabbing at the maid in passageways, trying to pull her into corners. Starting out in a whisper, then raising his voice when she resisted. He bargained, threatened, pleaded. His eyes filled with tears. He bellowed. Everyone knew. He must have realized that Rosina knew too.

For several weeks she didn’t leave her room. The household was swarming with hazards. Trysts, confrontations, conspiracies, exchanges of gossip. If she had gone out she would have seen things, heard things. She found it easier, though certainly not easy, to stay in her room, staring at the trees in the garden and at her own tired face in the mirror. She was sick of her own dignity, sick of pretending to be calm while the maid told her the latest incident, and sick with missing her husband—in the middle of all this, she missed him. It felt as though something were awry in him, some physical piece that had shaken loose, and if she could just get in there and tighten it up, he would be himself again, recognizable, and he would recognize her again too; he would shake his head and look at her and put his arms around her.

But she couldn’t get anywhere near him. He addressed her formally, about estate and household business, on the rare occasions when they were alone together. He slept in a different part of the house. On nights when there were no dinner guests, she had a meal brought to her room on a tray, and he ate downstairs, watching soccer on TV.

Besides, what would she have said? “Please”?

He would have looked back at her and said blankly, “What?”

They were at an impasse.

What broke it, bizarrely, was that he accused her of having a lover. What? What? She would have laughed, if she hadn’t
been so tired and heartsick and also afraid of him. He was furious—she’d never seen him so enraged. (He was projecting, the psychiatrist she began seeing several years later would say. He wanted someone else, so he assumed you did too.) The purported lover was a young man, a kid, really, who worked in the house. He did have a crush on Rosina. Once when he came to her room to change a lightbulb, he gave her a poem he’d written: a wistful charting of the symptoms of love. He was so sweet; he could barely look at her. He came back to regrout the tiles around the tub. The railing on her balcony needed attention. “Am I in your way?” Rosina asked. “No, no, stay,” he said. All right, she liked it; it was flattering and comforting to be worshipped a little bit. But that was as far as it went. “He’s a child,” she told her husband, when the startling accusation burst out of him.

“He’s eighteen. He’s a handyman. You’re a married woman carrying on with the handyman.”

And you’re a married man who wants to fuck the maid
, she could have said.

Oh, this was sordid, humiliating. It went on for weeks. In the end he said, “Rosina, please, I’ve been a complete jerk.” It was his use of her name that melted her; she couldn’t remember the last time he’d said her name. Everything got cleaned up; everyone was bundled off. The handyman joined the army. The maid married her fiancé, who also worked on the estate, and the two of them were given the capital sum they needed to start a beauty salon and day spa in Seville.

Rosina had her husband back—but she didn’t, not really. They were very careful. They had gone from “I love you” to “You see? I love you.”

They went on a trip together to India. They came back and tried again to have a baby. He had a thing with one of the gardener’s
daughters, and possibly something with the graphic designer who did the labels for the wine. He told Rosina she was overreacting. “None of this means anything.”

“I can’t stand it,” she said. “I may have to leave.”

“You shouldn’t,” he said. “But it’s your choice.”

He was so patient. She, with her grievance, was so wearying. This is crazy, she thought, or else I’m crazy. She really wasn’t sure anymore. He was calm and reasonable, and she was shaking, crying, listless, unable to eat or sleep. That’s when she started seeing the shrink in Seville. He put her on an anti-depressant and told her she was sane.

3

Elvira wasn’t even interested in Johnny. He seduced her. He came to Burgos to scout for a movie. She was painting, working as a waitress. “My God,” he said, when he came into the café with a couple of other guys for lunch. “You’re amazing. What a face. Would you like to be in the film I’m making?”

She’d rolled her eyes at him and asked him what he wanted to eat.

“Food?” he’d said. “Who could think of food at such a moment?”

She laughed. She got suddenly that he was performing, making fun of this kind of scene. “I know,” she said, writing on her pad. “You’ll have an order of ambrosia, with nectar of the gods to drink.”

“You got it, sweetie,” Johnny said.

After lunch, when his cronies were leaving, he stayed behind and asked if he could see her that evening. She said, No, thanks. He came back that evening anyway. She said, No, really, please.
He asked if she’d meet him the next morning, before the café opened—

“Don’t you have to work?” she said.

—so that he could see her paintings, in daylight.

“How do you know I paint?”

“I bribed a guy in the kitchen to tell me all about you.”

She laughed. He made her laugh. It was a sad time for her—her mother had died a couple of months before, of breast cancer, at fifty-two. Elvira had lived at home for the last four months of that, and then had wanted to get away, anywhere. A friend from art school who was working in Burgos said there was plenty of work and it was a great place to paint. Fine, Elvira said. She was feeling dazed, unhinged. Burgos was fine. She could tell already that this was a period of her life she’d look back at someday and not remember; the days didn’t feel real, each one was erased as soon as it was over. She couldn’t remember last week. Her work was going badly: diligent, correct charcoal studies of stonework. She told herself to have faith, this at least was work, maybe these studies would coalesce and inspire something else, or would turn out to mean something in themselves. But she knew they stank. She would keep them, she kept all her work, but she would never want to look at them again.

This man, this skinny dark weather-beaten intense manic guy in the café, was like a giant mosquito suddenly buzzing around her face. She kept trying to swat him, but he kept buzzing, and for some reason this made her laugh. So she went out with him—which felt like something else she was doing now but wouldn’t remember later. He asked again about her paintings, and she said they were lousy.

“I know what that’s like,” he said.

They were lying in bed at his hotel, smoking. With his free
hand he was stroking her head, over and over; it was very soothing. “Don’t you like your movie?” she asked.

“I like my movie very much. It’s going to be a wonderful movie. And we’ve definitely decided to shoot here. So: You want to come to Barcelona for a few months, while we do the preproduction stuff, or you just want to wait for me here?”

She laughed again.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“No you’re not.”

“I am.”

“Well,
I’m
not.”

“Elvira,” he said, “I’m falling in love with you.”

“Stop it.” She got up out of bed and started pulling on her clothes. “I just don’t have the patience for this right now. I don’t think it’s funny.”

“See? You say you’re not serious, but you are.”

“You’re a very annoying person.”

“Yeah, but you get me. Nobody else gets me. And I get you.”

“Stop it, Johnny.”

He rolled toward her, stretching out his arms. “You know I’m right.” His face was soulful, pleading.

She relented, and laughed.

She went with him to Barcelona. What, was she going to remain steadfast to her waitressing job? Defend her commitment to sketching the bumps and crevices of the dusty stones that made up the walls of the castle of Burgos? She was still reeling from her mother’s death, but a little better now. Awake, at least. She found a little apartment above a music store (mistake: the walls and floor, even the furniture, throbbed with bass notes all day and half the night), and a job in a gallery, where all she had to do was wear short skirts and black tights
and answer a phone that never rang. Johnny stayed with her some nights, not others. He was silly, extravagant. Everything he did was a little, or extremely, embellished. One night she went to bed with him and woke up alone: on the kitchen table she found a card with a big letter
E
painted on it in gold. Very sweet; she smiled and forgot about it. But on her way to work another day, she happened to glance at the wall next to the token booth in the subway, and she saw a big golden
E
gleaming in the middle of the other graffiti there. She started noticing this gilded
E
all over the city, all along her route to work: on the sidewalk outside the café where she stopped for a quick coffee every morning, on the poster-filled brick wall next door to the gallery, and a very small one painted low on the stairway that led up to the front door.