The Last Resort (25 page)

The smoke from her Gitanes wafts across the
muguet
wall, forming a rather uninteresting hieroglyphic.

“What? Did she win some kind of prize, or something?”

“She doesn’t need it. Her book has already hit the
New York Times
bestseller list—didn’t you see the photo of her with Condoleezza Rice at the White House? She is a victim of intolerance, a woman who has been silenced.”

“Good writer?” Bea asks, thinking about how much this call is going to cost Bernardo.

“Darling, I am telling you that this is a writer who has been silenced, censored. A political refugee from Borrioboola-Gha. You’ve read Dickens, haven’t you?”

“I don’t think I made it past the back cover . . .”

“Well it’s a shame, because if you had, you might understand a little more about the plight of certain faraway, primitive countries like Borrioboola-Gha,” Bonilla replies. “Now, come on. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a photo of Harpic Arvhaubi. Thirtysomething, stocky, she’s been all over the world promoting her book—a titillating novel, erotic and scandalous.”

“No. What’s the big deal? There’s thousands, millions of books like that out there . . .”

“Right. But none of them were written in Borrioboola-Gha,” J.P. replies. “And that, my dear, has brought her plenty of trouble and more than a few personal inconveniences. You know what it’s like out there, darling—it’s a jungle, a godforsaken jungle. But anyway. The point is, this lady is going to be in Madrid at the end of the month, and I want to know if you would be interested in being her guardian angel, her hostess—take her under your wing, go wherever she goes, make sure she gets invited to your friends’ parties—you know the friends I mean, the ones who are so allergic to the paparazzi. What I want is for you to be her interpreter and her friend. Harpic Arvhaubi, you see, has chosen Spain for the European launch of
The Blue Midriff.
”

“Why blue?”

J.P.’s paddle-tennis teacher, José Carlos Fernández Santabárbara, has begun to practice a special forehand, which appears to require considerable agility of the elbow. Like Bea, he has never heard of Borrioboola-Gha. Nor does he understand the complexities of literary marketing, the lengths to which one must go in order to promote a book, or the great significance of Harpic Arvhaubi’s decision to launch the Spanish edition of her book in Madrid, a book which is currently number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list. And since José Carlos Fernández Santabárbara only reads the sports pages, he is also unaware of the fact that a group of anti-feminist fanatics have raised holy hell over the publication of
The Blue Midriff,
creating a scandal that has rocked the world—all the way from Borrioboola-Gha, thanks to CNN. Fernández Santabárbara couldn’t possibly locate Borrioboola-Gha on a map, nor does he have any reason to know that following the publication of the novel, its instantly famous author was forced to flee her native country and travel to a number of faraway places, including New York, Paris, and London, in the interest of averting the imminent danger she suddenly faced in her own homeland, where, they say, a group of fanatics have burned every last copy of her book—all three hundred of them. The Western world, of course, has rallied to her defense, calling the threats “barbaric,” since all she did was write a slightly shocking erotic novel. And J. P. Bonilla has managed to bring her to Madrid, where the heavily bodyguarded authoress has demanded the services of a guardian angel—a woman, a friend who might put her up and introduce her to important people.

Far away, in her bedroom at L’Hirondelle d’Or, Bea has taken note of all the information, including the very tempting fee Bonilla has proposed. After a quick bit of calculation carried out on the flowered wallpaper, Bea can safely say that this three-day affair will earn her more than most people make in a month.

“What do you say, sweetheart? I have to get back to my paddle-tennis class. If you want, I can call you back in half an hour. Give me the number.”

Bea and Bonilla agree to talk later on. They both need a brief respite—to save the battery power on Bonilla’s Nokia and to let Bea mull over the offer. After a bit of pondering, Bea decides that a little extra cash would definitely come in handy, because it has become increasingly difficult to support herself as a single woman without jeopardizing her social status. By the time she stubs out her Gitanes the decision is already made: She will accept the offer, partly for the money and partly because it sounds like an interesting new experience.

Writers are so odd,
Bea thinks.
Such mysterious people, so fascinating.
And now, as she waits around for Bonilla to call her back so that she can tell him she will be delighted to accept the assignment, her mind wanders back to another writer—a screenwriter, to be more precise. Right now he is somewhere on the grounds of this hotel—right downstairs, perhaps, or maybe in the garden. And suddenly she thinks of how lovely it would have been if J.P. had asked her to be the guardian angel and social ambassador to Santiago Arce. But of course people like Santiago Arce never need guardian angels or ambassadors of any sort.

“Back to reality,” Bea tells herself. “You’re lucky he asked you to take care of a writer from . . . wherever the hell that lady is from. After all, God only knows who will ever read an erotic novel by someone from a country like that.” The phone, however, does not ring, and time passes very slowly as Bea’s thoughts wander back to Santiago Arce. Strange, she hasn’t thought of him at all in the past few days. What good would it do, anyway? She has already given up any hope of becoming chummy with him. No longer does she dawdle at the mud baths, waiting for the moment to ask him the meaning of the word “baobab.” They may say hello in the hallways, of course, but she’d have to be an idiot not to realize that Arce has already taken an interest in someone else—Mercedes Algorta, obviously. She can tell it from a mile off, and she both understands and accepts this fact. She lights another Gitanes. Smoking is terrible for the skin, but she, as Scarlett O’Hara would say, will think about that tomorrow. For the moment, she smokes, thinks, and congratulates herself on knowing how to be such a good loser. Yes, she certainly knows how to lose with style—that has always been one of her great gifts.

Perhaps this is not the moment to analyze her past losses, but she does. Bea has lost many times in her life. She lost, for example, when she separated from her husband almost nine—nine!—years ago. She lost when she had to give him custody of their children, because when you fall in love with a ski instructor at Baqueira Beret and decide to go off and live on a mountaintop, it isn’t very fair of you to expect your kids to want to move in with you and grow up like a couple of characters out of
Heidi.
Her children were twelve and fourteen at the time, old enough to have an opinion about such a thing. Bea also knew how to lose when Rafa, her ski instructor, fell in love with an American heiress who for some bizarre reason was skiing in the Spanish Pyrenees when everyone in the world knows that all rich American girls ski in Vail and Aspen. But facts are facts, and seven years ago this past December, Kate Goldsmith decided to go skiing at Baqueira Beret and not Vail, where, incidentally, Rafa now lives, the part owner of a sensational restaurant called Ralph & Kate’s Den.

With Bernardo Salat, Bea has always been the loser. She always knew that he would never leave his wife, but at least he offers her a pleasant sort of a life—that much she has to admit. Nevertheless, every so often Bea does find it necessary to make him feel just a little guilty for all the promises he has made and never kept. But Bea is no longer thinking of Bernardo Salat or J. P. Bonilla, because her thoughts have turned back to Santiago Arce, whom she has seen sidling up to Mercedes, slowly and cautiously. It was a foregone conclusion, that relationship: two people, both alone, at the same hotel in the middle of Nowhere. Both of them attractive, wealthy, and single . . . Bea smiles.

Now it is Antonio Sánchez who comes to mind, reminding her of a rather incongruous story that her friend Ana Fernández de Bugambilla told her by the pool earlier that morning. She hadn’t paid much attention, because Ana has such a convoluted way of telling stories, but according to her, Sánchez was now spending several hours of his free time writing an article about Mercedes and Arce. What was this all about? What kind of a job was he going to do on them? Apparently, Sánchez was writing about what he thought was a perfect example of modern society’s lack of morality, and he supposedly had a true story to back up his claims: a rich widow, the object of much idle gossip, recently vacationing at a remote hotel in Morocco and cozying up to an attractive, fascinating, and highly popular writer. With these ingredients mixed together Sánchez-style, the result could only be . . . trash, most likely. Bea smokes her cigarette, and the smoke curls its way around a ray of light that falls in through the window. How boring. Her thoughts, as voluminous as the smoke from her Gitanes, continue down their spiraling path.
Sánchez has always been irresistibly drawn to stories of infidelity,
she thinks.
He can’t help it. Tales from the boudoir, adultery, especially if they involve what he calls Beautiful People. So what if he is the star of a radio show whose purpose, he claims, is to serve the
truth?
Sánchez is one of those people who talks himself blue in the face about upholding the truth.

Bullshit,
Bea thinks.
A leopard never changes his spots. Stories of blood and semen are what really turn him on, even though he may try and dress them up as serious news.
And Bea begins to recall all the sordid bedroom tales that Antonio Sánchez and his ilk have unearthed and transformed into issues of national concern: duchesses caught with their panties down, marital infidelities that have shaken the foundations of some or other financial empire, courtly maidens married, divorced, and remarried to the delight of the housewives who idolize them. Sex and money; sex and power. Bea yawns. Only someone as unsophisticated as Sánchez could possibly be capable of, or interested in, shaking that beehive of raw passion and turning people’s private matters into nationwide scandals. But the truth, Bea recognizes, is that he has done it. Somehow he has managed to turn the entire country into one giant, gossipy block party.

And Mercedes Algorta? As far as Bea is concerned, her story doesn’t have even half the sizzle of many other seamy tales that have been dredged up before. But who cares? Rich, beautiful, and famous: Those are all the ingredients necessary for cooking up a juicy article or radio show. Naturally, her friend Ana Fernández de Bugambilla fell for Sánchez’s version, and she wouldn’t be the only one to buy it, either. The more complicated the intrigue, the more people go for it. The idea that Valdés died as the result of a stupid accident is a bore—it’s much more fun to think him the victim of some evil plot. And then the idea that Arce and Mercedes bumped into each other at L’Hirondelle d’Or completely by accident—even more of a bore. Sánchez will dress it up a little and say that the two of them are lovers and that they agreed to meet here to begin their new and exciting, sexy life together with the dead guy’s money. It all fits so well, except for one thing: It’s a lie.

“If I didn’t smoke so much, I’d be a genius,” Bea says to herself, as if she had replaced her Gitanes with some kind of opiate, the kind that kills thousands of brain cells per minute. The point is, Bea considers herself pretty savvy—or at least not stupid enough to fall for Antonio Sánchez’s story, which is just a variation on the same theme of intrigue and unbelievable coincidences. He should be writing Venezuelan soap operas, for God’s sake. Bea doesn’t believe the radio announcer, not for a second, because his script is all wrong. Life can be a lot of things—crappy, ironic, bitter, whatever—but the script is never contrived. For this reason Bea is absolutely certain that Mercedes and Arce have never met before. Because aside from being a very good loser, Bea has another important virtue—a rather useless one, in the end, but a virtue all the same. Bea happens to be an expert at identifying the faces of people who have just met for the first time. It is a talent she has honed over the years, through a multitude of personal affairs that gave her plenty of experience in what one might call
beginnings.
Middles and ends she usually messes up, but beginnings are definitely her forte. She has savored thousands of incipient romances, and she can spot the signs from a mile off. She doesn’t need to hear a single word of what two newfound lovers might actually be saying to each other. The eyes of an expert like Bea need rely on nothing more than the faces of her subjects. And she has read volumes in the eyes of Mercedes and Arce—like last night, for example, when she bumped into the two of them before dinner. Or this morning, when she caught them in the hall talking about nothing in particular. Bea knows that their faces, not their words, are what count, and in their faces Bea has seen all the telltale signs of a romance just beginning to blossom. She can see it in their smiles, just a bit too elastic, as they widen with glee at the least little remark; their pensive expressions as they listen to each other’s first few confidences; the false security in their eyes as if they were sculpted in granite; their fleeting gazes; and their mouths that barely crack open as if to say, “Should I smile now or just separate my lips to form a little
o,
or should I run my tongue over them?” She sees the winks, the almost imperceptible trembling—she sees all the things that give them away, for faces take a long time to settle into the serenity of long-term relationships. Faces are like calendars to Bea.

Bea stops thinking about Mercedes and Arce for a moment.
For God’s sake,
she scolds herself. Why am I wasting so much time on them when I ought to be thinking about that writer from Borrioboola-Gha?

She thinks about how kind it is of Bonilla to think of her after so much time, how sweet of him to offer her such a simple, well-paid, glamorous little job that any one of her desperado women friends would die for. Because in addition to the handsome fee, it could be very interesting to be the hostess of a famous fat lady writer—the “fat” part is Bea’s way of interpreting Bonilla’s use of the word “stocky” to describe Harpic Arvhaubi. And suddenly she conjures up an image of the authoress enveloped in a giant sari that covers her head but reveals the rolls of coppery-colored fat around her waist. No doubt she is the spunky type, probably with a gold tooth stuck in there somewhere, emphatic body language, and rapid-fire English—the kind spoken by Pakistanis who sell gum and trinkets in markets all over the world:
Nicetomeetyou, miss, yesyes indeed
. . . Next, Bea pictures herself holding on to Harpic’s arm, introducing her to absolutely everyone at a party somewhere. Then she envisions herself standing next to the lady writer at the cocktail reception at the Hotel Villa Magna following the launch of
The Blue Midriff.
And then she pictures herself as she rapidly, seamlessly translates everything Harpic says in her English accent. “The world needs more women like her,” Bea muses. “Brave, because you have to have a serious pair of ovaries to write a book like that in a Muslim country.” Finally, Bea pictures herself waving good-bye at the airport as Harpic thanks J. P. Bonilla for all the hard work he has done promoting the book. There they are, kissing one another on either cheek:
muuua,
right,
muuua,
left . . . Then all of a sudden Bea hears, not in her imagination but in the here and now, something that she has heard so many times at L’Hirondelle d’Or: a call to prayer. It must be coming from some unwitting sound conductor in the room, because there is no mosque or muezzin anywhere near the hotel that might be the source of the chant she now knows by heart, thanks to one of the hotel waiters, who translated it for her. And she also knows that according to the rules of Islam, the muezzin is to repeat the verse five times:
“Allah akbar; God is the greatest . . .”