Gaudi Afternoon (2 page)

I
was
thinking. Thinking about the dim shabby streets and pouring rain outside, thinking about Cristobel and Raoul waiting for me in my little upstairs room, thinking about the thin blue letter I'd received a week ago from my friend Ana in Barcelona.

“Who's ‘him'?” I asked. “And why me?”

“My husband, Ben.” Frankie sighed significantly, tossed her auburn corkscrews and lit another Camel with her silver lighter. “It's so complicated. You see, we've been separated for about five years, but we're still close. We married in college. I didn't know then he was gay and I didn't know he was from a wealthy family. Ben persuaded me to move to San Francisco and that's where he came out. He didn't want his family to know, so we agreed to stay married. At first it was hard on me, but eventually I accepted it. I'm an actress, you see, and both my freedom and Ben's economic support are important to me.”

“You're an actress?” I said. I'd always had a weakness for girls behind the footlights.

“A stage actress,” she smiled. “Unlike most of my friends, when I'm between roles I don't have to waitress. I'm so spoiled really!” She wrinkled her nose again, and rounded her bright hazel eyes. I could imagine her playing the gamine on stage, the saucy soubrette with the husky voice.

“What's the problem then?”

Frankie frowned. “The
problem
is that Ben is such a free spirit. He's never had to work and sometimes he just takes off for a month or two without telling me. Which is usually fine, but this time I happened to get a call from the family lawyer saying Ben needed to sign some important papers. I stalled as much as I could while I tried to find Ben, but after a few days I realized he'd simply disappeared.”

Frankie paused and leaned over the table conspiratorially. “The papers are terribly important of course, but it's far worse if his father gets wind of the fact that I, his
wife
, don't live with him anymore and that I have absolutely no idea where to find him. His family is very traditional. They might cut him out of the will or something.”

“What makes you think he's in Barcelona?”

“I started going through his phone bills,” Frankie said without embarrassment. “I have a key to his apartment of course, so I just went through his desk, found the phone bills and started calling some of the numbers. There were quite a few to a number in Spain, in Barcelona. Whoever it was who answered only spoke Spanish, but when I said, ‘Ben? Is Ben there?' they panicked and said in English, ‘There's no Ben here,' and hung up the phone. So you can see why I think that's the logical place to start.”

“And money's no object?” I asked.

“And time is of the essence.” She smiled and placed her bangled hand on mine. “I hope you'll help me. You see, I ran into your friend Lucy Hernandez—who I knew years ago—as I was leaving Ben's apartment in the Castro. I told her that I was thinking of going to Barcelona but that I didn't know any Spanish and it would be a real problem for me. So she suggested you since you're a translator. I flew to London to persuade you. I plan to leave in a few hours. I'm hoping you'll follow me as soon as you can.”

I was more than persuaded, but some last remaining shred of caution made me hesitate. “The thousand is up front, then, no strings attached?”

Frankie took out a red leather purse from inside an enormous glossy black shoulder bag. She pulled out an envelope and put it on the table in front of me. I'm sure the rest of the tea room thought we were doing a drug transaction or an IRA arms deal.

“Your airline ticket on Iberia is inside, and ten hundred dollar bills.”

“What made you so sure of me?” I asked, taking the envelope.

Frankie gave the charming smile of a woman who has always gotten what she wanted. “Feminine intuition?”

T
HERE IS A WINDING STREET
here is a winding street in the Barri Gòtic or Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, not far from the cathedral, where you can pass one antique and curio shop after another. Whenever I find myself in Barcelona I invariably end up on Carrer Banys Nous, drifting by plate-glass windows through which you can see heavy wooden chests, rococo paintings in gold leaf frames and opulent tea sets and ceramics. Because I travel so much I rarely buy anything—but I still like to look.

But on one occasion, seven or eight years ago, I found myself with an impossible, irresistible desire to buy a ship's figurehead in one of the small shops. Long in the torso, with bright gilded hair and slightly parted roseate lips, the figurehead leaned forward through enormous pink- and purple-striped conches and blushing open scallops in the display window as if she could feel the Caribbean air still fresh on her painted cheeks.

Never before had I gone into any of the shops, not even to inquire a price. I'd been content to window shop, not to possess. But that day, almost without thinking, inflamed by desire, I rushed into the dark shop interior.

It was a tiny place, packed neat as a ship's cabin. On the walls were paintings of ships at sea and worn old maps; from the ceiling hung lanterns and finely detailed model ships. At the back of the shop the owner and a customer were just beginning to negotiate a purchase—of the ship's figurehead in the window.

I begged, I pleaded, I said that I thought my family had owned the figurehead, that I had been a sailor in a former life, that I would die if I couldn't have this lovely carved wooden lady. I offered to pay anything the owner wanted. He tried to play us off against each other, obviously seeing a profit whichever way he turned. But the other customer was adamant—and disarming. With great logic and single-mindedness she talked me out of my desire. Then invited me for dinner in one of Barcelona's best restaurants. We'd been friends ever since.

Now I sat in Ana's enormous apartment at midnight, drinking tea with her in the kitchen. It hadn't taken me long to rush home from the British Museum, throw a few things into a bag and scribble a hasty note to Nicky. At the last minute I grabbed
La Grande y su hija
and threw that in too.

Ana, tall and slender, was wearing her usual: jeans and a white long-sleeved shirt rolled up over her thin wrists, cowboy boots that she had probably picked up in Italy. Her dark chestnut hair was pulled away from her oval face in a heavy braid down her back. She always looked beautiful, and never any different.

“When I wrote you two weeks ago I never dreamed you'd respond so quickly,” she was saying.

I tried to think what her letter had said. Lots about her work, something about being lonely…. I put on a sympathetic look. “It's been hard for you since Lydia went back to Argentina, hasn't it?”

“Lydia was a mad woman,” Ana shrugged. “It's not Lydia so much. But this apartment can sometimes seem very big. It needs more life in it. Cassandra,” she fixed me with her soft brown eyes, “I'm so glad you're here.”

“So am I,” I said warily. This didn't sound at all like my independent friend Ana, who mocked Relationships almost as often as I did. “Of course I'll be busy a lot, but I still hope we can get together for good long chats.”

She winced slightly at the word chats. I hoped she didn't really think… no… she knew my character, she couldn't possibly….

I changed the subject. “Why don't you show me what you've been working on?”

When you asked her, Ana said she had always wanted to be an architect, she didn't know why. But her ideas for buildings had proved so flighty and improbable that no architectural firm would hire her after university, and she had been reduced to creating fantastic houses for the small children of the wealthy. These houses were shaped exactly to the child's fantasies. After consultation with a child who said, “I want a house like a cat,” for example, Ana would create a house curved like a sleeping Siamese from stuffed almond and brown velvet. If a girl fantasized about trains, Ana would build her a cardboard locomotive and sleeper, with a rear car for her baby sister; if a boy imagined a jungle, Ana's house for him would be painted with lianas and tiled with orchids and monkeys.

All the rooms and closets of this enormous apartment were filled with construction materials and curios that Ana had picked up from dumpsters as well as antique shops. The living room, because of its huge dimensions, was her workroom, and at the moment it contained three projects in various stages.

The first house under construction was built on a wooden frame, a stuffed chambered nautilus five feet high with large and small compartments and a spiraling corridor. It had appliquéd designs of fish and shells all over its striped fabric exterior.

The second was a giant jewelry box made of wood and covered in blue plush. It had two drawers, the top one for sleeping in and the bottom for playing in. It even had a life-size ballerina on top, made of padded cotton with a stiff net skirt and a blue velvet bodice. If you pushed a button, she spun around to the strains of the Blue Danube waltz.

“I'm still working on the speed,” Ana said absent-mindedly. “If you make it too fast her skirt will rip off the child's face; but if she goes too slow she looks crippled.”

The third project was in unassembled pieces of gaudy papier-mâché all over the floor. I saw what looked like a painted woman's thigh and a colorful single breast.

“This is a house for a woman giving birth,” Ana said, picking up the thigh as if that would explain something.

We curled up on some pillows and I told her about Frankie, trying not to make it sound as if that were the only reason I'd come.

Ana said, “I don't know, it sounds like a wild goose chase. Barcelona is enormous. And even if you find this husband of hers, is it as simple as Frankie is making it out to be? What if she's out for revenge for some reason and plans to kill him?”

“Frankie seems absolutely harmless. A little dramatic, but after all, she's an actress. Her real story may be different than the one she's telling me, but I hardly think she's a murderer.”

“It's you I'm worried about,” Ana said with an embarrassment she tried to mask as severity. “Remember the last time you were here. That business with Carmen.”

“Carmen,” I mused, remembering. “I'll definitely have to get in touch with Carmen.”

“I hope you'll have time for
me.
”

“I always have time for you, Ana,” I said. “What's wrong, anyway?”

She looked at me wistfully. “I want my life to change, that's all.”

Oh god, next she'd be talking about babies.

“I want a child.”

“I think we should sleep on this, Ana. Let's talk about it tomorrow, okay?”

She sighed and got up.

“Just don't plan on spending all your time with Carmen,” she warned.

“Ana, really. I'm here to work.”

But before I went to sleep I looked at the ship's figurehead that Ana had thoughtfully placed in my guest bedroom, and I remembered the single-minded expression of Ana's that day in the antique shop. She had something on her mind that had to do with me.

Babies.

Frankie and I had agreed to meet the next morning at ten. I woke early and went down to the Café Zurich across from the Plaça de Catalunya. Even though it was only seven-thirty the streets were lively. Spaniards get up early and go to bed late, and I do the same when I'm in Spain. It must be all that coffee. But it also has a lot to do with the heat. Barcelona on this morning was cool and fresh, the sidewalks newly washed, only a light buzz of car exhaust in the air. I sat down at a table at the Café Zurich and thanked god I was here. Unlike London, where the most you could hope for in the morning on your way to work was a slop of milk in a weak brown stew, snatched in some horrid tea shop with linoleum tables and greasy windows, in Barcelona you could sit outside at your own table and the waiter would appear before you with a cup and two pitchers on his tray. From one pitcher he would pour a shot of black coffee, from the other a stream of hot milk. With a flourish: “
Señora
.”

And it was spring in Barcelona too, real spring, not drizzly on-and-off spring. England could have its lilacs under gray skies; I was relieved to be here where I could see plane trees overhanging the Ramblas and women going to work dressed like movie stars. I'd exchanged my leather bomber jacket for a printed Japanese wraparound shirt, and on my head I'd wound a purple and black turban.

I read
El País
and
La Vanguardia
, watched the bustle around me, had another coffee and two croissants and finally set off down the Ramblas, the long street that is Barcelona's heart. It's really made up of five separate streets, but they all flow into each other. The central tree-lined walkway is almost always crowded and the kiosks sell rabbits, canaries and roses as well as postcards and newspapers from all over the world.

I walked midway down to the Plaça Boquería and turned into a side street to reach the three small squares around the church of Santa María del Pi. I had suggested a small hotel off the Plaça del Pi to Frankie and was meeting her at a café outside a nearby bar.

She was waiting for me, more fragile than when we'd parted at the steps of the British Museum, less jaunty and more querulous. My heart sank a little as I approached her table and she turned accusing eyes on me.

“They put me in a room by the elevator shaft, I couldn't sleep a wink all night for the noise, and the bed was too soft. The man at the desk doesn't speak a word of English so I couldn't complain to him. I'm feeling absolutely ragged.”

It was true, she didn't look her best, even though she had made an effort. She had on her bangles and her red red lipstick and her silly little pointed shoes. But in the bright morning sun her pale skin looked sallow and slightly scarred with acne. Her ashtray was already full and she coughed between her words.