The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman (8 page)

Asunción had been suspicious of her husband's frequent stopovers, two a week, but he had explained that he was opening
a new branch in Ciudad Condal and asked her to be patient. Because until the office was up and running, he would have no choice but to fly back and forth like a boomerang.

And then, after twenty years of cuddling up to her in bed, he started acting strangely.

Until one evening, at eight o'clock, the doorbell rang. Asunción went downstairs to answer it. She was already wearing her pajamas, slippers, and woolen dressing gown. She had made a cup of tea and was halfway through reading
The Red and the Black
in French with her feet up. The kids were about to come home from soccer practice, the chicken was in the oven, the table was set, the romantic music was on, and the vanilla-scented candle was lit.

At the door stood a tall, tanned woman squeezed into an Iberia uniform. If this had been wartime, it would have been a military uniform and she would have been bringing Asunción the news of her husband's death in active service. But this was peacetime, unfortunately, and the woman came bearing no more and no less than her family's death certificate.

“Can I come in?” she asked with the sickly sweet air of someone accustomed to dealing with the oddities of the human race.

“It depends.”

“You're Asunción, aren't you?”

“That's me.”

“I'm your husband's lover.”

The soul weighs nothing. A Hollywood producer pretended it did for a good film title. It doesn't weigh anything because it isn't of this world, like love or pain. It holds the qualities that draw human beings a little closer to God.

All the same, Asunción clearly heard the sound her soul
made as it thumped to the floor. It sounded like a stainless-steel pan bouncing down the kitchen steps.

“Come in. Have a seat.”

The flight attendant told her how everything had started with an innocent game of “Could you bring me another Coke, please? Could you bring me a pillow, please? I'm cold, can I have a blanket?” How there was a magnetic force of attraction that had destabilized the flight. How they started to meet in secret, in hotels and on beaches, until they decided to buy a flat together. How that secret would have to come out in a couple of months because, she told Asunción, “I can't zip my skirt up anymore and I'm going to go on leave, because flying is dangerous for the baby.

“I've come because he can't bring himself to tell you,” she said, lowering her eyes. “He says you're going to get divorced, that he doesn't love you anymore. That it can't go on any longer. But at this rate the baby will be born without a father, I can tell. Or his bigamy will mean we'll both end up in the news. He's capable of marrying me without divorcing you.”

Then came the shouting, the weeping, and the gnashing of teeth. The hell. The kids suffered, did badly at school, and got into trouble. The house fell apart, the rent became too much to pay, and Asunción had to look for somewhere else. She lost control. She withered.

Until one Sunday, the sixth of May, at ten in the morning, those two problematic teenagers had the bright idea of spending their money on a set of automatic digital, solar-powered scales to give to their mother, who hadn't gotten out of bed in six months. Said inanimate object became a tiresome conscience that stared at her with its plastic eyes from the bathroom floor. “Weigh yourself,” it taunted her, “weigh
yourself and you'll see how being abandoned, on top of everything else, makes you fat.”

So when she plucked up enough courage to lug her spare tires onto the contraption and confirmed her suspicions that she was closer to 150 pounds than the 130 she'd weighed all her life, and she confronted the disheveled, aging woman who stared back at her from the mirror, she finally decided to take control of the situation. Stupid scales, stupid mirror.

She rewrote her CV, explaining that she had been out of work for the last fifteen years due to family circumstances beyond her control, and went to get a reference from her old boss, whom she found looking as worn out as she felt but still sitting at the same desk in the same office as fifteen years ago, when Asunción became pregnant for the second time and they said goodbye with tears in their eyes.

“There's an Englishman who's getting a team together for a literary magazine. You might be interested. It pays next to nothing.”

She dyed her hair, painted her nails, went along to Mr. Bestman's casting, and passed the exam with flying colors. She had spent fifteen years totally dedicated to literature; she'd never studied it formally, she admitted, but she was a voracious reader. As hooked on books as she was on sweets. A real bottomless pit for authors and genres. She didn't mind if it was García Lorca or Ezra Pound, the Brontë sisters or the Brothers Grimm. “It all goes down the same way, Mr. Bestman. Ask me what you like, because I've got it all covered.”

So she got the job as staff writer for
Librarte
and returned to the land of the living twenty pounds heavier. She slowly became less afraid, left her insecurities behind her, regained her hope, and banished her insomnia. The only thing that remained, to her
dismay, was that cruel, accusing, tenacious, and cellulitic excess weight that there was no way of shifting, however many fad diets she went on and however much soy milk she drank.

“Look, Asunción,” the doctor had said. “It's down to your metabolism. It'll pass, don't worry, it's a result of menopause. You'll also notice hot flashes, loss of libido, high pulse rate, vaginal dryness, incontinence, irritability, joint pain, digestive problems, and changes to your body odor, among other things.”

“What am I going to smell of?” asked Asunción, terrified, contemplating her own Kafkaesque transformation from woman into cockroach.

But faced with such an awful diagnosis, Asunción, who had become a veritable Joan of Arc in her battle against her recent emotional ebb, decided to fight tooth and nail against the extra weight.

She didn't manage it. She lost the battle. She wept inconsolably. Her mascara ran. She looked at herself again in the mirror, a weeping monstrosity with hair like a mop, and shouted, “That's enough!” She reminded herself of the old nanny she and her brothers had as children, who came from Málaga and used to scream just as forcefully whenever they pushed her too far.

She lifted the scales above her head and threw them against the bathroom mirror. Bloody scales, bloody mirror.

That day she was cured, definitively. She became a happy plump woman who, thanks to menopause, smelled of motorcycle oil unless she drenched herself in perfume; she hoped this was only temporary. She helped find work for immigrant women in the parish. She cooked for her sons. She considered her boss, Berta, to be her best friend, and was capable of saying things like, “I've already been married and divorced, thank God,” without tears betraying her apparent bravery.

So when Berta called at nine in the morning that Sunday in May, six and a half years after her first living death, Asunción was reminded of the day the flight attendant rang the doorbell. She felt the floor trembling beneath her feet and heard the clang of her soul falling down the kitchen steps. She went to church for ten o'clock Mass, crossed herself, knelt, and used all five senses to pray. She sent a distress flare to the Lord.

“Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from me. Don't let me lose my job, dear God, please, I beg you. Let Your will be done, but please could that will not be to leave me in the street, if possible. I understand that wars, famine, and all that take precedence. If You're too busy, ask one of the saints to help me. One who doesn't have many devotees. San Pantaleón or San Lamberto or San Vito who, with a name like that, will surely get me out of this fix.”

Once she had placed her trust in God, Asunción crossed the street and ordered a dozen croissants, some
tortel
cakes, and five
ensaimada
buns, because, as they say in Spain, bread helps you swallow your sorrow. She guessed that Berta would have already put the coffee on.

CHAPTER 13

W
hat took place at exactly quarter past eleven that Sunday morning in the
Librarte
office wasn't a meeting among five civilized women but rather a coven of merciless witches who resorted to the dark arts and black magic in an attempt to dodge the misfortune that was set to descend upon them.

They arrived one by one, in the usual order: Berta, Soleá, María, Asunción, and Gaby. All terrified, all trying to disguise the extent of their anxiety with exaggerated gestures. They normally greeted one another with a simple “Good morning,” but that Sunday they hugged and kissed as if they were at a school reunion and hadn't seen one another for twenty-five years. They breakfasted on Berta's coffee and Asunción's pastries, and talked about children, books, and theater opening nights to pass the time until the awful moment when they had to confront reality.

In the end, Berta had no choice but to talk. She explained that she had called them at such an ungodly hour—sorry, girls—on a Sunday because she needed to give them some terrible news. It couldn't wait until Monday because, after thinking long and hard about it, she had arrived at the conclusion that, perhaps,
among the five of them, they might be able to come up with a way to sort things out and avert disaster.

“The disaster is the magazine getting closed down, right?” grasped María.

“It seems so.”

Sounding shriller than usual, Berta explained how Mr. Bestman himself had called the previous afternoon to inform her of Mr. Craftsman's imminent visit.

“The big boss? Marlow Craftsman?”

“No, my love. His son.”

“What son?”

Berta had to give the girls a rundown of the Craftsman family. She told them about the aristocratic grandmother; about Marlow, the managing director; about Moira, the elegant wife; about Holden, the rebel; and about Atticus, the designated heir, who at that moment must have been landing in Madrid with their termination letters neatly stacked in his briefcase.

“According to Bestman, the magazine's losses are inexplicable, enormous, and too great for the company to absorb,” Berta told them, devastated. “What's more, he says that
Librarte
hasn't managed to make a name for itself among Spain's literary publications, that it has no renown and no credibility. That hardly anyone reads it and that, instead of promoting Craftsman & Co.'s new titles, it has the opposite effect; in other words, it gives them a bad reputation.”

Their hearts sank. Gaby fanned herself with recycled paper. Asunción had a hot flash. Tears rolled down María's face, and Soleá exploded.

“He can go to hell!” she shouted with the combined fury of all her Gypsy ancestors lined up one behind the other.

Then the silence solidified, taking on the consistency of sticky jelly. It collected in the mouths of all five women and stopped them talking. They were suffocating.

“We have to think of something,” said Asunción, whose tongue was, miraculously, the first to work its way free.

“Otherwise, we can expect hard times,” said Berta.

“Or maybe great expectations,” replied Asunción with the last scrap of humor she was able to dredge up.

That reference to Dickens seemed to flick a switch inside Soleá. She stood up and drew a breath. She shouted, “I've got an idea!”

The others looked at her in surprise. The coven had been going for only fifteen minutes and they were already getting started on the witchcraft. Of course, the chemistry that united those five women made for an explosive concoction.

Soleá lowered her voice, as if it might have been possible for someone outside their office to hear her criminal plans, and made a gesture for her colleagues to move closer. She drew them into a circle around her and then talked about her beloved Granada and its old poets, and about El Albaicín, nights perfumed with jasmine and mint, the lime-white caves, families gathered around grandmothers, secrets that everyone knows but no one talks about, forbidden liaisons and broken hearts, traditions, settling of scores, Gypsy curses.