Lilia's Secret (19 page)

I hadn't told Bill, but when I was talking to him I'd had a flash of understanding about why I wanted to know about Lilia. Before I'd left Sydney I'd skipped over the news of the day and gone straight to the stories of fathers pouring petrol over their kids, or mothers shaking their babies. Horrible stuff. It made me sick to read them but I couldn't put them down. I think Lilia was a bit like that for me. If the rumours about her were true, she defined family violence, but if she didn't kill her husbands then maybe things aren't always as they seem. And if they weren't always as they seemed around Lilia, maybe they weren't around me either. Maybe my family wasn't as bad as I'd thought, and I could have a family of my own after all.

I felt calmer knowing there was a method in my madness. It also made me miss Andrés even more. I was sure now: I needed him like I needed my own skin, to enclose me and keep me safe.

I didn't want to see Ramiro again because it felt as if he could see inside me to where I was all shredded, like my wrist. I couldn't remember doing it but I'd pulled off the bandanna in the night. My skin was like grated cheese this morning.

I sat under the tree on the road to Lilia's ranch. I wasn't going there though. I came here, I told myself, to get some
decent exercise before the scold of the sun set in for the day. It was the fourth time I'd come this far. I moved my back about to find a better spot as the trunk bit into me. It was a skinny sliver of a tree. The branches, such as they were, got thinner and thinner until they petered out against the cloudless blue of the sky, their stark lines uninterrupted by a single leaf. It was an essay in determination: life clings, even if it's by a single thread.

What was it like for my father, in that moment when the last thread holding him to the earth broke?

I hadn't seen a bird since my first trip along this road. No cars, no people, nothing. I wondered what life must have been like for Lilia, out here, all alone. Well, except for all those men she took back to her nest and murdered, I reminded myself.

I dusted myself down and turned to head back to Aguasecas, but after only a few steps I did an about-turn and headed for Lilia's place. I didn't ask myself why; I just wasn't ready to go home.

I went quickly, though, before the fear of what I would find there this time could grow fat. It was only when I was before her gate, then through it and at her door, when it would have been silly to turn back, that I let myself feel the fear. It burnt through me so fast that it turned into panic and I felt as if it would explode out of my mouth. I scratched at my wrist furiously and immediately regretted it – my skin began to seep blood. I banged at the door with my good hand in a moment of rage and frustration.

‘You don't have to go in,' I said against the silence. ‘You can turn around and go home and nobody will know.'

I made a deal with myself. I patted my hand across the top of the door. No key. So I lay down on the ground under the
verandah and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark underneath the decking. That's when I saw it, hanging on a nail behind the paling. The key had a long, round barrel and a three-leaf clover for a handle. I took it off the nail and sidled up from under the house, brushing dust off myself as I eyed the door. The key slipped in snugly; turning it took more force than I expected, but finally it clicked and I pushed the door open a couple of inches. I stepped back, the panic thrashing through me again. I didn't let it take hold.

The door opened wide, letting the sunlight in to do its job, and I pelted up the passageway, ignoring the closed doors to my left and right, and wrenched open the one at the other end of the corridor. It opened easily on to the courtyard garden, which was a small relief. I went straight over to the bush and crouched down, lifting its leaves and patting the ground. I stared hard for several minutes but nothing appeared and my pulse gradually slowed down.

Next, I went up the stairs to the second floor, the sound of my footsteps too loud against the tiled stairs. The top floor mirrored the structure of the ground floor, with the rooms set well back from the balcony surrounding the internal courtyard. I leant over the wrought-iron balustrade, covered with succulent climbing plants that had worked their way up from the garden. It was hard to stay wary in a soft, living place like this. But, like the first time, the way the place sparkled clean bothered me.

All the doors I tried were locked, until I reached the one at the front of the house. It swung back easily and in the murky light I could make out a large canopied bed hung with heavy cream lace. Lilia's room.

Along the wall there was a dark wooden dresser and an enormous wardrobe. The room gave off a wave of oppressive elegance; there were no shadows, no visions, no ghosts.

The only colour in the room was from the embroidered quilt on the bed. I went closer. The background was cream to match the canopy lace and embroidered with thousands of coloured stitches was a writhing garden alive with lilies, roses and vines. I ran my fingers across some of the flower patterns. Had Lilia made this? A woman who could sit patiently all the hours it would take to stitch this masterpiece could surely not be all bad.

I sat on the bed, my back against the headboard, and swung my legs up, wanting to feel what it would be like to be in that garden. I smoothed my hand over the flowers closest to me. I saw small insects hidden in leaves and even a short slender snake curled up inside a rose. I moved about the bed, discovering more of it. There were actual coffee beans and other seeds woven into the story the quilt told. It was an extraordinary piece of work. When I came to the far bottom corner, there was a name embroidered there; in large pink tones it spelt, ‘Maria Marta Cordóba'. So Lilia hadn't made the quilt after all.

Suddenly, my throat constricted. There was air underneath my feet. I gasped and put a hand on the mattress to steady myself. Was this a vision or just the same old thing I'd last felt when I was running on the cliffs in Bondi? I was used to this, I told myself as I steadied my breathing. Then I was up and across the room. I got to the window before I retched, and clung to the sill. There was something different this time. There was more than the sound of somebody else's breathing,
than heavy, slow footsteps, than the sensation of a rope in my hands. This time I knew who the somebody else was; it was my father.

The sensation faded, and I began to own my body again. I gripped the sill harder with one hand as the other flew to my mouth. I missed him so much. I missed my father. The touch of his stubbly cheek, his grin, his bigness. I wanted him back with a terrible ache that convulsed through me, bent me double, and I sank to the ground, sobbing.

Eventually, spent, I sat up to wipe my cheeks. That's when I saw it. There was a the tip of an old photograph poking just over the rim of the wardrobe. The wardrobe was so high that I had to jump at it and jog the photo down.

In it was a young woman holding a baby, with a small child standing at her knee. Somebody had written 1923 on the back. I knew Lilia was born in 1905 so if this were her she would have been eighteen at the time. Could the toddler be her first child, the one who had disappeared? In that case the baby must be El Tigre. I looked closely at the little girl, but I could hardly make out any discernible characteristics, the photo was so faded. Was she the one whose feet I'd seen under the bush downstairs? I was spooking myself, so I pushed the photo into a book in my backpack to show Bill and Padre Miguel.

I escaped down the stairs, locked the door of Lilia's house behind me, and set off back through the heat into town.

The creak of Lilia's gate set Bill's blood pumping hard. He went up the path and took the key from where Maddy had told him it hung.

Pushing open the front door, he held his breath all the way to the kitchen. He felt too exposed to linger in the marvel of the courtyard garden. He needed walls close around him, and the kitchen contained him. He liked the way the table gleamed from one end of the room to the other, but he realised it wasn't a gleam that had lasted twenty years. He looked around, suddenly expecting to see somebody. Steady, he commanded himself.

Bill knew the risk of coming here. Being in Lilia's house meant giving her a chance to burrow deeper into him. He'd tried to explain how Lilia was seeping into his skin to Carole in a letter, but his words never came out right.

Deeply unsettled now, he left the kitchen. The courtyard garden repelled him with its succulent chaos. For a moment he longed for the order of his own garden. He headed for the stairs. The bannister, under his hand, was good, solid. There were four paintings on the wall, but counting to four wasn't enough to calm him. As he went up the stairs he searched for something more, but there was nothing.

At the top he steeled himself to open the door Maddy had said was Lilia's. Crossing the room fast, he folded back the shutters, letting the light drink up the darkness. If he reached out his hand he could touch the tree branches outside. He leant on the windowsill to count the leaves and once he'd counted 254 he felt firmer inside.

Inside the room the bed was the biggest thing. It was cream and lace, although it wasn't the kind of lace that hung softly; it was stiff and starched.

The bedspread was loud and colourful and too busy. Lilia deserved better than this.

His father would have lain in this bed. Bill took the pillow and smelt it. There was only a faint musty smell.

He looked around the rest of the room. No photos, no knick-knacks, no signs of his father.

What had he expected? He closed his eyes and sank to the floor. A memory of his father kneeling with clasped hands beside Bill's childhood bed came back. Every now and then his father would stop by to say Bill's prayers with him before sleep. Bill had loved the solidness of the big man beside him, so serious in prayer and so quick to laugh straight after. Bill's mother was always saying how his father could charm anyone he pleased. He could certainly make his son smile just by being in the room. His mother had not kept their wedding photographs after they'd moved to the apartment, but Bill remembered the large one above the mantelpiece in the drawing room of their first home. It was mounted in a mahogany oval frame and was soft in sepia brown. Unlike the usual photographs of the time, when people stared fixedly at the camera, his father smiled. It was the joy that Bill had
missed the most when his father had gone. It was as if the light had been switched off.

He searched the rest of the house and, finding nothing of his father, went back to Lilia's room. There was a handkerchief in the top left drawer of the dresser with her initials. It was soft against his cheek. He forced himself to throw it back in the drawer. It was time to leave; to close up the windows. But as he did so he froze – a figure was approaching the house. The man waved to him.

‘
Buenos tardes
, Señor,' he shouted.

It was Ramiro. Bill raised a hand back. He took the stairs two at a time and made it to the kitchen by the time Ramiro was in the house. Bill spoke first, trying to keep the upper hand, although it was difficult in his broken Spanish-English. ‘We were to meet later,
a el café
, no?'

Ramiro raised his hands in the air. ‘And look, God brings us together here instead.'

Bill stood head and shoulders above Ramiro but nonetheless he felt at a disadvantage. Ramiro's white suit was perfectly starched and pressed, just as it had been at the wedding. ‘I thought you told Maddy that you never came here,' he said.

‘Never when she was alive,' Ramiro replied, waving a handkerchief like a fan before his face. ‘Now I come all the time. I feel her here.'

Bill's spine tingled. Ramiro's eyes were wild.

‘No, Señor, I'm not mad,' Ramiro said. ‘Just dedicated.' He made his eyes round like tortillas. ‘She's my life's obsession. When she died I had a dream that told me to watch her house. So I do, and I'm as happy as when she was alive.'

So that accounted for the cleanliness and order. Bill didn't say anything. He considered the position of the closest exit.

‘You've walked a long way for a man your age. Would you like some water?' Bill offered his flask.

‘The donkey did the work!' Ramiro said, waving the idea away, his eyes darting around. ‘You have found what you were looking for?'

‘No. It's as if my father was never here,' Bill replied, inching backwards towards the door.

‘Oh, he was here. They all were,' Ramiro said, his eyes darting into every corner.

Bill ducked his head to hide his thoughts. ‘Did you know my father? I thought you didn't know her husbands,' he said.

Ramiro looked at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Your information is good,' he said, narrowing his eyes. ‘I didn't know her husbands but I knew they were here.'

‘I guess it was hard for you seeing them here, where you should have been?' he said. It was a bit far from town to be having this conversation. But if the worst came to the worst, how strong could an old man like Ramiro be?

Ramiro didn't reply.

‘You're lucky nobody sold this place, hey?' Bill made a note to deepen his voice the next time he spoke.

‘Nobody wants to touch it. Too scared.'

‘Why's that?'

Almost at the door, Bill was positioned to flee. He wondered whether the front door was still open.

‘You're not so bright, Bill,' said Ramiro.

The temperature in the room went down.

‘If you say so,' Bill said in his deepest voice.

‘I feed everyone on little morsels of fear as if they were tiny birds. It's my gift. Everyone remembers her,' Ramiro said, now speaking Spanish.

‘Is that what she'd like?'

Ramiro stared unblinkingly at Bill. ‘You think you know what she'd like? A couple of weeks here and you think you know her?'

Bill's shook his head vigorously from side to side.

‘No, no. Not at all. I'm just here for my father,' he said.

‘Then why all her colour? Every time I see you there's more of her colour about you. Stronger and stronger.'

‘Look, I don't know about colour, I just want to find out about her and my father.'

‘Some things are better left unknown.' Finally Ramiro dropped his gaze and started rubbing at the table. ‘You are wasting your time. Go back to Boston.'

‘You know what?' Bill said. ‘You could be right.' He turned and walked quickly through the corridor to the front door. He held himself in check until he reached the gate and then he didn't care what it looked like; he ran.