Lilia's Secret (17 page)

In a flutter of wings a small grey bird landed on the wide balcony balustrade of the café. It picked its way carefully over the pocked stone. Bill didn't move a muscle. This was the closest he'd ever come to a wild thing. When the waiter bustled in the bird flew away and sadness welled up inside him. He cleared his throat and rustled the pages of the newspaper in a businesslike way.

‘More coffee, Señor?'

When the waiter had gone Bill furtively took out his new photograph of Lilia, peeking around to see if anybody could see. He had the whole balcony to himself. He went over to the balustrade and lay Lilia down, hunching over her. Her hair was trained around her head like a crown. Her long lashes didn't blink. He imagined he could see a fine layer of down on her cheek.

The rational part of Bill could see he had allowed himself to be fixated on a disturbing woman, long dead. One who'd wrecked his family and may even have murdered his father. But he could no longer believe she was all bad. There seemed to have been too many contradictions in her. Yes, she'd buried his father as an outcast, but there could be a reason for that he didn't yet know. And if that meant his father was a son of a
bitch who had abandoned his family, somehow that seemed less important here.

It was the heat, Bill told himself. It was the strangeness of the place. He just had too much time on his hands. But another part of him, a bigger part, craved to be allowed this weakness over Lilia. He'd lived such a disciplined life, surely he deserved an absurdity now?

It was so long since he'd felt anything like this.

He'd courted Carole with confidence. After all, he'd been one of the most eligible men in Boston. He waited until he was thirty-five to look for a wife. He'd been assured, already a success. He'd made enough money and contacts to wipe away the past and regain the Bixtons' place among the Boston Brahmans.

Bill looked at Lilia a long time then checked his watch and put her back in his pocket. He sat down at his table to wait for Angela, hailing her as cheerily as he could when she came up the stairs, and standing to kiss her on the cheek.

Angela sat down with a sigh. ‘Dad, it's too hot to be so hearty,' she said.

‘Sweetheart, it's too hot to be so cross,' he replied, already put out himself.

Bill ordered eggs for breakfast, and Angela,
sinconzades
and beans. They talked about the weather and about the cloudless blue sky, carefully avoiding the events of the day before. Angela bit her fingernails one after the other and Bill held his hands tightly together to remind himself not to upbraid her.

Alberto brought their two plates, greeting them and speaking with Angela in rapid Spanish for a few moments. When he laughed he drew the sun into Angela's face and Bill
was torn between the resentment of being shut out and the relief of seeing his daughter smile again. He took up his knife and fork.

‘If you need anything else, let me know,' said Alberto as he flicked the tea towel over his arm and left.

‘Boston is looking less and less perfect each day,' said Angela, with more energy in her voice.

‘What do you mean?' Bill asked sharply. ‘You're not going to give up your studies altogether?'

‘Can you beat this? Everyone is friendly. The days roll into each other in a hazy, lazy way …' Angela waved at the rooftops and the hills beyond.

‘It's a mirage, Angela,' Bill said, leaning over the table. ‘It's nice for now but you can't live like this.'

‘Why not?' she asked.

‘Because you've got your studies, your whole life, before you.'

‘Are you saying being happy isn't enough?'

‘Of course not.' Bill stopped short. ‘But you have to do something with your life. You have to contribute.'

‘I can do that here. I don't need to do it in Boston,' she said.

‘Boston is a good place with good people,' he replied, as if she had personally criticised him. A moment ago he'd been thinking along the same lines, but he'd had his working life. He deserved the trance Aguasecas had put him into. His daughter didn't, she hadn't worked hard enough; she'd barely started.

‘Dad, Boston can be a horrible, snobbish place where some people still look down at us.' She chewed her nails. ‘God knows
why,' she went on, ‘but they do, no matter how much money you make, or how many charities Mom organises.'

Bill reached over and put his hands on hers to stop the nail-chewing. She looked at him in surprise, with a flicker of irritation.

‘Only a few people are like that,' he said.

‘You're right, Dad, only a few. But they're the ones that matter to you and Mom.'

‘What matters to your mom and me is whether you are all healthy and happy,' he said, avoiding her gaze.

Angela barked out a laugh, and he took his hands back. ‘What matters to you is light years away from what matters to Mom,' she said. ‘But since you are so keen on this newfound sense of togetherness, maybe we should get Mom down here.'

He knew she was baiting him. He took three deep breaths while he stared at the carpet of rooftops descending into the valley. ‘You can't spend your whole life the way you have, Angie. You've got a first-class brain and you need to use it.'

‘What about you, Dad? You're down here just bumming around.'

‘That's different.'

‘Why?'

He stared at the vista.

‘If it's good enough for you, then it's good enough for me,' Angela said, folding her arms.

‘No.' His blood pressure was rising again. ‘I've done my time,' he spat out between his teeth.

‘Forty years of service with only seven days off sick,' Angela chimed in. ‘Yes, I know, Dad. It's a prison sentence.'

He was gripping the sides of his chair, because she was right: he had been in prison. He glanced in her direction, but she'd gone back to chewing on her nails and looking over the balcony. He focused on the food on his plate and ate in silence for a couple of minutes.

‘Dad,' Angela broke the silence, her voice back to normal. ‘Nobody says for sure Lilia killed Granddad, but they're confident she had others killed.'

Bill looked at her suspiciously. Just as he feared – people were talking to her and not him.

‘Who told you?'

‘One of Teresa's aunts. I was at her place making tortillas yesterday.' Angela looked at him intently.

He nodded for her to go on.

‘She told me that after the revolution things got so bad that people were starving to death. The few cows or chickens people had started to disappear. Everyone knew it was the bandits who lived in the hills and one night the whole village went down to the police station. There were two young policemen who were just kids from Mexico City. They met the crowd outside the station, listened to the people and then the policemen took their pistols out of their holsters and lay them on the ground. They said the bandits had bigger guns and more experience at killing than them.

‘But suddenly the cows and chickens stopped disappearing. Two months went by, nothing. Then the police found the bandits' bodies decomposing in a cave in the hills.

‘Teresa's auntie said everybody knew Lilia had sold an ivory crucifix to pay for the murders.'

‘That's not evidence.'

Angela scowled. ‘It's something.'

He attacked his plate with his knife, scraping it scrupulously clean. He didn't want to hear this of Lilia. He'd begun to think of her as a force for good. He looked up. ‘What are you doing with your life?' he asked. ‘When I was your age I was at college before and after work. I knew what I wanted.'

Her face showed scorn. ‘Did you get it, Dad? Because if you did you didn't ask for enough.'

‘You had everything you could ask for growing up.'

She shook her head, then fell back. ‘Yeah.' She ripped at her nails again.

Bill made a dismissive gesture in the air between them. ‘Look, Angela. This adolescent rebellion should have been over years ago. What's wrong with you?'

‘You.'

‘How can I be what's wrong with you?' he sputtered. ‘I've hardly even been there to do anything wrong.'

‘Precisely.' Angela's hands were still. ‘And what's wrong with you?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Exactly the same thing. Didn't you have a father who wasn't there?'

Blood rushed his temples. Her audacity appalled him.

‘My father was there when he could be.' His voice was icy. ‘I respected the fact that he needed to go out to work and be the breadwinner. And his disappearance was hardly his fault. He was lured down here and forced to stay against his will.' It wasn't strictly what he thought anymore, but she didn't know that.

‘Was he, Dad? Was he? It was such a relief to you, wasn't it, when you'd retired and began to think that he wasn't just
another deadbeat father, that you were special enough to be the one kid abandoned by his father for a good reason. Unlike the rest of us.'

He couldn't look at her eyes; they'd be cold and hard.

She went on. ‘It was so convenient for you all those years when you were too busy to spend time with us. Are we so objectionable that when you finally leave work you have to run away down here?'

‘Don't you blame me for your problems,' he hissed. ‘What was all that a few weeks ago, when you were crying like a crazy woman on the bed in your room?'

She got up. ‘You are a small, horrible man,' she said to him in a low voice and walked away. As she reached the door she turned. ‘By the way, there's a woman in town. An Australian. She's married to some descendant of Lilia's. She got here yesterday. But you wouldn't know that, would you? Nobody talks to you here, do they? And I don't blame them.'

I didn't belong here. I didn't have a clue who the bride and groom were. And it wasn't just my short, spiky hair; it was my long, flowery dress. I wasn't overly fond of hippie dresses but you could scrunch them into a ball in your backpack and they'd still come out smiling at the end of the trip. The trouble was all the Mexican women in the courtyard were in carefully tailored two-piece suits. It was like backpacking in Europe – you always knew the French by their pressed white Bermuda shorts, and the Australian by their casual confidence – even arrogance – in tatty thongs and worn jeans.

I didn't belong here because everybody else stood lightly, smiling at each other.

Crossing my arms and standing under a tree away from the crowd, I tried to act as if I didn't expect or want anybody to talk to me. It was a searingly hot day, the kind that lifts off the top layer of your skin. My wrist was sweating under the bandanna and I was so tempted to rip it off. That bandanna was the only thing between me and more bloody skin. At least having it there meant I had to think before attacking myself.

A waiter came over with a tray of glasses half-filled with champagne or orange juice. He was younger than me, with
curling eyelashes. I took the champagne and looked over his shoulder. That was something of a triumph. He was exactly the kind of distraction I'd have gone for a week ago, but I wasn't going to do that again, no matter how lonely and frightened I was. Fighting with Andrés, and the chasm it left in me, had made me see how much I loved and needed him.

I held my arms close to my stomach and bore down against the pain in my solar plexus. In doing so I sloshed some of the champagne over the rim of the glass, and over the hem of my dress and my shiny black pointy shoes. I didn't wipe it away. Then I spotted the American in the distance, pasty compared to the Mexicans in the room. He was talking to Alberto from the café and they both looked around. I stepped further behind the tree – I wasn't up to meeting him today. I wasn't up to anything. It was a day for wall-staring from my bed. With this in mind I put my glass on the ground, ready to slink away from the party.

I didn't see the little man come up to me. ‘The Australian, Maddy Maquire, I presume?' I jumped back, startled, spilling my champagne again, this time over my hand. I sucked it off as I looked him up and down. He held a white handkerchief in his hand and swirled it elaborately as he sketched a small bow, holding his white Panama hat with the other. I smiled. The face before me was shrunken back to the bones of his skull; his brown eyes were the biggest things in his face. They looked extraordinarily round because they didn't seem to have any eyelids.

‘Ramiro,' he introduced himself with a modest incline of his head. ‘Padre Miguel says we should talk.'

I took a deep breath and tried to peel away some of the layers of despair.

‘That's better,' he said. ‘I was worried about that murky purple colour you had around you. I saw it from over there.' He pointed to an alcove at the far side of the courtyard. ‘I was watching you.'

He said all this in rapid succession before words could form in my mouth to reply. He was old and papery, but I was at the disadvantage.

‘I see you're not quite with me,' he said. ‘I see things in colours.' He beamed.

‘Nice,' I said, blinking.

‘Not always,' he said. ‘I see things in many hues – red and blues and shimmers. Look at the bride for instance – a tinge of green, that's not good.' The bride wiped some cake from her new husband's mouth and they kissed. ‘See! See!' Ramiro hissed. ‘That kiss was all smudgy brown.'

‘I'm not good with colours,' I said, as if his description were the most natural thing in the world.

He nodded. ‘You should be careful,' he said. ‘You have her colour on you.'

I looked around. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Lilia. You have some of her colour on you. You should be careful.'

‘Why? Why? What could happen?' I asked quickly, in a high voice. I felt a little wild-eyed as I looked around me. Is this what Juan and Andrés's sisters felt, as if her shadow was just beyond them?

He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands as if to say, Who knows what could happen? Then he lowered his voice. ‘That's why people don't want to talk to you about her. They feel her on you. They feel the danger.' He dropped back and
swivelled his eyes about the crowd as if he had just told me a national secret. I wanted to smile and shudder at the same time. I was drawn in by his theatrics, but there was also something about him that made me want to step away.

‘But I am a brave man,' he said.

I gripped my itching wrist and plunged in before I could change my mind.

‘What colour was Lilia?' I asked, congratulating myself for keeping my voice steady.

‘Ah!' His face was alight. ‘She was magic. It slipped out of her pores. She tried to hold it all in, but out it would come. She was all swirls and puffs of gold – when she was young. Now, there was a woman of colour.' Ramiro sighed, with his eyes closed, as if he were in another time and another place. ‘More than any other woman I've ever seen. It lit her up like a rainbow. Whenever she walked, a great sweeping cloak of colour swirled around her.'

‘So you weren't scared of her?' I asked tentatively, breaking into his reverie.

He clipped his attention back to me. ‘Of course I was scared,' he snapped, looking at me as if I were an idiot. ‘But fear is an aphrodisiac too, you know.' His face cracked wide open into a smile. ‘She was a powerful woman: a sweet, powerful woman.'

The same waiter came by and this time I noticed he had a large nose, which made his eyelashes seem shorter. The moment of danger with him had passed. I took another glass of champagne off his silver tray and gulped half in one mouthful.

‘You sound like you were in love with her,' I said.

‘Many were,' Ramiro replied. ‘That was their tragedy. Their
tragedy and their fate. I was the only one to stay in love with her though, and, very importantly, the only one to stay alive. No man stood a chance of withstanding her magic once her colours slipped and slid around him. But I could have loved her better than all of them.'

‘Why didn't you?'

‘Look at me,' he demanded. He swished one hand down the front of him. ‘I haven't much improved with age.'

So he'd looked like an oversized monkey all his life, I thought. No wonder he had a peculiar way about him, having to compensate for that.

‘Ah,' he said, bending towards me conspiratorially. ‘You feel for me.' He wagged a finger in my face as if I were a naughty child. ‘You should be more worried about yourself. I had my grand passion. You are so young, just a piece of gauze wafting in the breeze. You haven't yet learnt to feel the earth underneath your feet.' Ramiro drew back dramatically. ‘And maybe you never will.'

‘Why do you say that?' I asked, annoyed.

He waved his hands and looked back over his shoulder at the group. ‘I see it in your colours. And why else would you be here on this wild-goose chase?'

‘What wild-goose chase?' I asked, holding my wrist as firmly as I could in order to push the itch down, away from the skin, maybe all the way to China.

He looked back at me and smiled in a sad way, shaking his head. ‘You have a great love but you play with him like a mouse. You should hold such a man close, like this.' He cradled one fist in the other and clapped them to his heart.

‘How do you know I don't hold my love like this?' I imitated his action.

‘You're here, aren't you?'

‘A bit suffocating,' I tried to laugh him off, pointing at his still closed fist.

‘No.' He waggled his entwined hands at me. ‘It's the only way human beings can breathe. The one who is our grand passion curls around us, like a skin. Otherwise too much of the world gets in and too much of us leaks out.'

I bit my lips to stop the sudden tears.

‘And you,' he continued softly. ‘You are in danger of letting your grand passion disappear.' He snapped his fingers for emphasis.

I started and grabbed my wrist hard.

‘Who was your grand passion?' I asked, to make him stop staring at me with his unblinking eyes.

He took a step back. ‘Of course,
Lilia
.' He was angry with me.

‘I thought you said grand passions curled around each other – but she never looked at you.'

He gave a short laugh. ‘I never let a small thing like that get in my way. I curled myself tight around her. Passion is passion, whether or not it is requited.'

Anxiously looking behind me, he drew me further behind the tree. ‘There is an obnoxious American here, trying to track me down,' he said. ‘Let me stay cosy with you.

‘It started when we were children,' he continued. ‘She called me “Monkey”, but she did it with such a sunshine smile that it was an endearment. She was beautiful. She wore daisies in her hair – a little crown of them, and a couple more tucked into the ribbons binding her plaits together. Nobody else did that. She had a lovely flower face, and the funny thing was it was always
clean. That's what made her stand out: a clean flower face. Of course, she had those jewelled eyes too: a green jewel on the right and a brown jewel on the left.'

Ramiro closed his eyes and breathed in as if he was inhaling the memory. ‘My auntie,
Tía
Norma, never liked her. “Mark my words,” she'd say, “that one will come to no good.”
Tía
Norma died a disappointed woman though. She died when Lilia was seventeen – too early to see the truth of her prophecy, which was a pity, really, because she liked to be right. It would have comforted her in the suffering of her last weary years.'

For a moment I imagined his aunt lying, pale and discontented, on her deathbed.

‘No,' Ramiro sighed. ‘Lilia never found her passion, and the lack of it steadily sucked the blood from her body.' He looked at me to see if I'd understood what he meant.

‘What happened to Lilia?' I asked.

He rubbed his chin. ‘Let's just say she became very rich, and where there is money, there is power. To me, though, she remained the flower-faced girl. I was always running after her, trying to ambush her with a kiss. She'd rub it off just like dirt and spit on the ground. It became such a habit, you know, no matter how high and mighty she became; I would blow her a kiss and she couldn't help but rub it off. Sometimes she wouldn't even know I was there; I'd be tucked up in that big tree in her yard and I'd blow her a hidden kiss. She'd still rub her face and spit. I couldn't get one kiss, not even with a miracle, to implant itself and grow a seed for me.'

I smiled at an image of him up a tree with his Panama hat balanced on his head.

‘Her voice was like molten fire,' he went on. ‘It was hot and
strong. Some nights I close my eyes and it's as if I were in my pew at the back of the church listening to her read from her Bible. She insisted on reading from her own, you know. Always insisted on her own way after her first husband left. And the pity is that she got it.'

Ramiro barked a little laugh.

‘I was there at the very first wedding – her grand passion,' he said. ‘She was so full of hope; her eyes were big like the moon. She was marrying a Spanish man.'

‘Javier-Alberto.'

Ramiro nodded. ‘I didn't like him, unsurprisingly. I was still young enough then to hope on my own behalf, you see. He was taller than me, more educated than me, richer than me. And, of course, it was near the end of the revolution and he'd been far braver than I had.' He looked at me for understanding and I nodded.

‘The bad omens at that wedding,' he continued, ‘smelt so strong that you could see people's noses turn blue. I don't know how she got through it. She just kept smiling big, although even she had to clasp her wedding handkerchief to her face by the end. It's a tradition that the girl tucks a handkerchief into her garter. At least it was at that time – what young women do these days, I don't know. I'm not as young and nimble as I used to be, so peeking is now out of the question. Lilia had to pull her handkerchief out of her garter. It had lovely blue lace around the edge – I remember it because it seemed to be almost the same colour her nose had become, fighting off that bad-omen smell.'

I thought the blue noses were stretching the rubber band of credulity just that bit too far.

‘Anyway, it happened like this,' he said. ‘They sent out the invitations. That was their first mistake right there, if you ask me. Invitations? Spanish pretension! The rest of us went by word of mouth.

‘Then they chose the church in Santa Maria for their wedding, which, I'm sure you know, is five villages away. Beautiful church, yes, but …!'Ramiro slapped his hands together as if he was brushing dirt off them. ‘This was their second mistake.

‘The days leading up to the wedding were mild and light as lace on a breeze. But the day of the wedding – well, it was as if the day had caught a cold and wanted to pass it on to all of us. The clouds poured down dark rain. No one was sure whether there had been a dawn or not, because it was still dark when we all rubbed the night out of our eyes.

‘The groom did arrive at the Santa Maria church on time. He'd been staying nearby with a family he knew. Lilia eventually arrived, two hours late. But half the guests did not make it. They'd confused the way in the storm; streets they thought they knew suddenly became unrecognisable. Those who did get there shivered and shook in their goose-pimpled skins. There has never been a storm like it since. As you know, around here the sun is usually so sharp it slices into your bones.

‘It was very lucky that she was so late, because the priest never turned up. We found out later his mother had suddenly been taken ill and he'd rushed to be by her side, forgetting all else. Somebody finally rustled up another one; jolted him out of retirement, I think, because his skin had that paper-thin look, as if he already belonged to the next world.'