The Last Resort (14 page)

I watched as Sánchez’s crown expanded for a few seconds and furrowed back into place in an oblique set of folds.

“The tragic outcome of that night,” Sánchez said, “had nothing to do with financial distress, or surreptitious lovers. No, no, it is something far more disturbing than that. Of course, if you’d rather discuss something else, Bernardo . . .

“Now let’s get one thing straight,” he continued, and I could just barely see him positioning his improvised chess pieces, moving glasses and other random objects around the tablecloth, but my field of vision was blocked by his back. “I do not plan to use this story for my radio program, because I happen to be above this sort of boudoir gossip. But if you want to know what
really
happened that night and why Valdés died the way he did, just listen to me, Bernardo. Now, I want you to picture the dying man as if he were the white king. Very well, here we have Valdés, the white king, at the end of the game. Let’s see. What other pieces do we have here? A white queen, a black queen, and Habibi the Moroccan maid, who we will say is a black pawn. Do you follow so far?”

The leader of the pack nodded with an air of intense concentration, while Bea smoked a cigarette and stared straight through me to the wall at my back, ignoring her friends entirely. She seemed to have lost all interest in the story, unlike Ana, Our Lady of the Innocents, who couldn’t tell a bishop from a rook. She suddenly piped up with a question that, at least to my ears, sounded incredibly stupid:

“All right, Antonio. But if Valdés is the white king, who is the white queen and who is the black queen?”

Sánchez was perfectly delighted by this question—you could tell by the way the long, straw-like hairs on his neck plunged into his shirt collar as his body tightened, keen as a bloodhound about to pounce on a rabbit.

“That is the first time anyone has asked me the million-dollar question. Who is the black queen? You tell me. Is it Isabella, who everybody knows—” As he emphasized “everybody,” he looked straight at Bea, and I was truly chagrined that I could not see the expression on his face, but I suspect it was defiant, “—who everybody knows was with Valdés and did nothing to help him? Or is it our little Mercedes, who took advantage of the little predicament to free herself from her annoying and very rich husband, who did nothing but go to bed with all her friends?”

Either my luck was worse than usual that day or else it is extremely difficult to be a good spy. To my great dismay, the Germans at the table next to the window suddenly decided, at this extremely delicate point in the conversation, to get up and leave the restaurant, all of them chattering away at the same time like a swarm of giant flies. First they moved to the right, then to the left, making it difficult to predict quite where they would land, but somehow I knew they would end up directly in front of me.

I believe I mentioned before that there were four of them: two women and two men, but at that moment the group seemed much larger, and if they made me think of a swarm of flies, it was because of the very loud buzzing noises—some high-pitched like mosquitoes, others deeper, like black flies—that suddenly descended upon the space between me and the party I was so intently studying. They had gotten up en masse and advanced toward us talking up a storm, with that mindless chatter of people who feel that having fun means they must be utterly hilarious at all times, even as they say good-bye and go off to bed for the night—flies with mosquitoes, or flies with flies, or however they paired themselves off.

For the love of God,
I prayed, silently begging them not to come to a halt stop in front of my four Spaniards, not to suddenly pipe up with some comment that would make them all stop in their tracks.

But they did. They stopped, and a tall man with round tortoiseshell glasses said exactly what I feared he would: “By the way . . .”

And then, to make matters worse, he strategically positioned himself in the spot that most obstructed my view. The girls walking behind him, with their fat hands and massive hips, also chose that moment to stop, and they stood there readjusting their short skirts (far too short for their Bavarian legs, if you ask me) as they laughed in their very Bavarian laughs. Due to this unfortunate bit of timing, all of Sánchez’s comments were intermittently drowned out by a most unwelcome flurry of German chitchat.

“Now, let the record stand: The problem is not that Valdés choked on anything that night or that he suffered from some kind of fit or whatever you want to call it. That can happen to anyone. The problem is that
after
it happened they just sat there and let him die like a stray dog.” This was what I heard Sánchez say.

“No, no. It was in the Göeses’ house,”
said a strident German voice.
“We were all so drunk, and Friedrich said to me, look at Franz Johann, look at him . . .”

“. . . and that is exactly what happened. That bitch let Valdés die. She could have saved him, but she let him die—there’s no doubt about it.”

What bitch? I wondered. Isabella? The Moroccan maid? Mercedes? All I could do was silently curse Franz Johann and his friends.

“. . . No, no, it wasn’t the Göeses’ house, I’m telling you for sure it was during the
Graf Spee
thing. After that they threw her in the lake . . .”

“Ja, ja, ja,”
said one of the two pairs of Bavarian legs.

“Ter-ri-ble,”
noted Franz Johann’s friend.
“Ha, ha, ha.”

“But also, it’s just so wretchedly simple. Nobody had to do anything, really, it was dumb luck. I mean, picture it: The guy is right there, dying in front of you, and you can either do something to stop it or not do anything at all. It’s a split-second decision. One second, that’s all you have. So what do you do?”

“Right, right.”
Franz Johann wouldn’t let up.

At this point, all the chitchat—that of my Spanish friends as well as that of the Bavarians—was suddenly drowned out by laughter of varying degrees and pitch, a noise that sounded like yodels being yelled off the highest mountaintops. It went something like this:

“. . . Ja, ja, ja he threw her in the pool . . . !”

“. . . I mean it, listen to me, Bernardo . . .”

“Ahh.”
That was a sigh from the other pair of Bavarian legs.

“Very few times in life does one find oneself in this type of situation. Naturally, it is not the same as actually killing someone, because in fact it is much simpler and much easier to justify, even to oneself: ‘How perfectly awful, I couldn’t do anything to save him,’ you tell yourself, totally bereft. But in the bottom of your heart you know the truth. And that, my friends, is human nature for you . . .”

Another yodel, this time in simultaneous falsettos and contraltos:

“. . . Hee, hee, into that free-zing swimming pool, hee, hee, hee . . . !”

“. . . All you really have to do is look the other way and let nature take care of the dirty work. Let’s say that in this specific case Mercedes
did
call for an ambulance, and let’s say they picked up the call, and then let’s say, oh, that she was maybe a little vague about explaining how to get to the house . . . nobody would ever find out, right? Because she was the only other person in the room with Valdés at that moment. Very convenient, wouldn’t you say?”

“Ja, ja . . . but wasn’t it at the lake?”
More yodels all around.

“. . . And so now she’s a widow . . .”

“Yes, yes, and the water was free-zing cold, you can’t even imagine . . .”

“. . . Which is a very bitter pill to swallow if you recall the kind of reputation Valdés had, plus the fact that everyone is now speculating that Isabella was caught up in it . . .”

“Ja, ja, right, Margaretha? You were there, too, weren’t you . . . ?”

“. . . But you see, the catch, the real explanation is this: this lady was sick and tired of putting up with him, and so she took a lover. It’s so obvious, trust me . . .”

“. . . I get shivers just thinking about it . . . and I mean, we were so, so drunk that night . . .”

“. . . And since she has a lover, they probably agreed to meet here. I would bet any amount of money that this lady has come here for a little rendezvous with someone. We’ll find out soon enough, don’t you worry. And that, my friends, will be the conclusive proof that what I have said is one hundred percent true.”

“. . . nein, nein, Margaretha, you tell them what happened that night . . .”

Fortunately, Margaretha appeared to belong to one of the lighter species of those irritating insects; she was a far more delicate yodeler than her noisy friends. I watched her float toward the door to the restaurant, practically dragging the singing Bavarians amid a chorus of laughs and yodels until they finally disappeared from sight, leaving me absolutely exposed in front of the group I was trying so hard to study.

You see, I had been caught leaning forward into a kind of triangle, the most obtuse angle of which now hovered dangerously close to Sánchez’s head. When the timid blonde suddenly looked over at me, I found myself forced to squeak out a very solicitous
“Gute nacht”
in the hopes that my Swiss boarding-school accent would work the miracle of convincing them that I had been listening in on the Bavarians’ conversation and not theirs. An absurd situation no matter how you looked at it, one that I would have to address in the least embarrassing manner possible. And so I decided that the most sensible thing to do was to get up as quickly as possible and walk past my newfound Spanish friends, repeating my good night wishes in the most Germanic way I knew.

“Gute Nacht,”
I said, controlling the desire to click my heels to camouflage the words. They didn’t even see me. As I walked out of the restaurant, despite the fact that I now had all the time in the world to organize my thoughts, I could only think of one thing to add to the list that I had scrawled at lightning speed on Fernanda’s fax. During dinner, I had jotted down the name “Habibi,” followed by the words “stolen bracelet.” And all I could think of to add were the words “Did SHE let him die” followed by a question mark. Really. It was all so terribly confusing.

Needlework

One should never be idle when it comes to repairing any imperfection or flaw one may discover in one’s attire. Needles can be our most faithful friends, because they can be responsible for breathing new life into our oldest (and perhaps most forgotten) items of clothing.

—Countess Drillard,
On Being Elegant,
On Being Lovely,
chapter on wardrobe

Pine Needles

You must believe me when I say that I did not drink a single drop of alcohol with my dinner. I think this is an important detail to mention, because what I am about to tell may sound as though Johnnie Walker or, perhaps more accurately, General Gordon (since I do prefer gin) was involved.

I had gone up to my room, which is on the second floor of L’Hirondelle, and turned on the light—not the overhead light but the side light, to avoid waking Gomez, who sleeps close to the window. As I took off my jacket and tie I observed a very strange phenomenon, which I will now describe. On occasion I have read in some or other book a description of this type of occurrence: that of entering a room and suddenly feeling that one is the victim of a vast conspiracy. Inanimate objects, especially walls, begin to close in on you and your mind begins working overtime, digesting all sorts of unpleasant existential thoughts. Thoughts that somehow connect the present to the past, bringing you back to the most abominable childhood memories, awakening those memories from their tranquil slumber. And then, all of a sudden, these thoughts conspire with the astonishing movement of the walls, which threaten to close in on their victim in such a way that recalls the horrifying prophecy of the witches who once, long ago, sang the words, “Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until / Great Birnam Wood, to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him.” Or, in more practical terms, that “Molinet shall never fear that his past may conspire against him . . . until the walls of his bedroom begin to act like the Birnam Wood.”

This phenomenon did not occur instantly. No, it materialized in the form of a claustrophobic shiver that came over me as I glanced toward the walls of my bedroom, covered entirely by needles. Yes, needles: needles that were conjured not by a bizarre curse or spell but rather by the hotel decorator, who had decided to line the walls in a pine-forest print. The walls, the bedspread, and the curtains, too, were covered in them: hundreds and hundreds of identical pine needles. At L’Hirondelle d’Or, you see, every room is decorated according to a different botanical motif, and mine happened to be that of pine needles. I haven’t been able to admire the decor of any other room, but I discovered the flower-and-plant scheme by listening to the chambermaids. The room next to mine, for example, is the
chambre du muguet.
Next to that room, the
chambre pistache,
and a bit further down the hall, the
rose de thé.
The names are all in French, and always botanically oriented, perhaps to compensate for the fact that the hotel is located in the middle of a desert.

My room is very daintily called the “pine-needle room,” the
chambre des aiguilles de pin.
And in honor of this, the room is upholstered in prints that bear the long, fine needles that tend to fall from evergreen trees and come in twos—those Siamese-twin pine needles joined at the head.

I removed my jacket and tie in the semi-darkness. Gomez was snoring away in his little corner, louder than I might have liked, but I didn’t even notice him or the pine needles until I finished undressing. That was when I suddenly found myself covered in them—hundreds of identical pine needles, like the long legs of an endless chorus line or a lineup of pointing fingers. They were like hateful thorns pricking at my memory, making the past crash down on the present, precipitating a deluge of distant, long-forgotten experiences that had been buried, very well buried, but which suddenly reappeared, threatening to pounce and then close in on me like a fake forest. Now, I am perfectly aware that walls cannot move, not even walls covered in needles like these. That is why I want to make it very clear that I did not drink any alcohol whatsoever during dinner.