Other People’s Houses (38 page)

“How do you know I don’t?” I asked, blushing under their six black eyes.

“We saw you. Yesterday—
con los Ingleses
. In Café Madrid.”

“‘With the English. In
the
Café Madrid,’” I said. “I saw you, too, walking by with your mother.” I would have asked them to stop rocking, but their mother, who chaperoned the class at a small distance, sat in a rocking
chair, and she was rocking, too.

“Emanuela,” the mother called into the house, “turn off the music and get the front door. Hot, isn’t it?” she said to me, fanning her armpits with a palm leaf.

The maid showed in “Doctor” Levy. We greeted one another, and when Doña Maria was well insulated from the lesson, with her feet in water and with the
merengue
continuing into its hundredth chorus, I said
to the young girls, “Today we will have English conversation. We will talk about boy friends. If a boy friend asked you to come for a walk on the Conde, would you go?”

The girls looked prettily at me. They said, “Yes, and Mama would come with us.”

I said, “Supposing a lady you knew asked you to come to dinner, would you go with her?”

“Mama would go also,” they said.

“English girls go everywhere
alone,” I said. “Don’t you ever wish you could go out alone?”

“Oh yes, we do wish it,” they said out of politeness, but I could tell from the pretty roundness of their throats and cheeks and their bright giggling eyes that they dared more under their mother’s wing than I in the pride of independence.

I said, “Now we will have English dictation.”

“There’s a gentleman on the
galería
asking for
you,” said Frau Bader at my door that evening.

“A gentleman!” I said, and wished I had my mother here to go with me. I wished I were staying at home.

“Why don’t you ask him to dinner? You know I make a special price for you!”

The man standing at the head of the steps was small, fat, and old. He wore a very light, buff-colored suit open over his large stomach, upon which waved a loose, brightly
patterned tie. He gave me a remarkably delicate hand and said he was Indalecio Aguirre and that Doña Piri had asked him to give me a lift because it was difficult to find her house. He spoke English well. He appeared to be so nervous that I wanted to put him at his ease, and I said, “That’s kind of you, though I’m quite used to getting around by myself.”

“Wonderful,” said this Don Indalecio,
and he took my elbow to lead me down the steps to where an immense chauffeur-driven car stood at the curb. I was gratified to know that both Frau Bader and Julia, the hotel maid, were watching my man-accompanied departure. Don Indalecio got in after me and settled, I was relieved to see, well over to his side of the back seat as we drove off into the tropical sunset that turned the day into total
darkness within seconds.

“Is it a very long way?” I asked.

“Quite a way, the other side of town.” Don Indalecio told the chauffeur, in Spanish, to drive by way of the Boulevard Benefactor de la Patria. To me, he said, “I’ve not seen it since it was reopened last month. There, look: all widened, macadamized, planted with noble palms. As splendid a thoroughfare as you’re likely to see, leading
to absolutely nothing.”

I laughed appreciatively. Don Indalecio was pointing to the end of the thoroughfare, where two dilapidated huts stood, one closed permanently, the other housing a little ramshackle grocery lit inside with spirit lamps. Beyond lay open country.

“Those buildings on the right are army barracks,” Don Indalecio explained, “and over there you see the lights of the airport.”

“I’ve never been here before,” I said. “I like to see new parts of the town.”

A slight shift in the gentleman’s position alarmed me, but Don Indalecio had merely turned his head and seemed to be studying me. I found myself telling him about myself, that I was Jewish, came from Vienna, that my uncle had a grocery in Santiago, that I had a degree from the University of London and taught English.
Don Indalecio listened with a mannerly and benevolent interest, nodding his head and saying, “Very good. Aha!” from time to time, as if confirming what he heard. And it occurred to me that Doña Piri must have told him about me.

“I seem to be teaching mostly diplomats and their families,” I boasted.

“Ah yes, our local foreign corps! Have you noticed what a dog-eared lot of humanity they send
us out here? Do you happen to know the ambassador of X?”

“Oh, I teach him five mornings a week,” I said.

“Then you know he’s a near moron.”

“You’re so right! He is!”

“And the minister of Y, a good man, who had his insides shot up in the First World War. As for the consul of Z, he might have gone far if he hadn’t married his mistress.”

“What’s wrong with marrying your mistress?” I asked, to
show how broadminded I was, and noticed that Don Indalecio looked at me with increased satisfaction.

The car had begun to bump over the baked surface of a mud road. The headlights picked out a cactus hedge with clothes hung out to dry upon it and houses of slats and corrugated iron like the houses where Pastora lived in Santiago. Women with large bellies stood in their black door holes watching
the great car go by.

We passed into a new section, slithering and lifting across newly churned land, no longer field and not yet road. On either side stood little, new, modernistic stucco bungalows. On the veranda of one I could see Doña Piri looking out for us.

Doña Piri bustled around me, like a puppydog. “How you like?” she kept asking, as we walked inside the little house. The colors were
pastel and harsh; everything looked painfully new. Don Indalecio whispered, “Doesn’t it look like a stage setting? Look at the little window curtains, the sofa, the table set for three.”

It had already occurred to me that Doña Piri had indeed arranged this little scene for Don Indalecio and me, and I laughed, frowned, and shook my head at him. But Don Indalecio continued unabashed. “I feel, my
dear Piri, that as soon as the señorita and I have gone, this whole room will be carried away again.”

“Come now,” I whispered, as Doña Piri excused herself and went out to her kitchen, “she means
so
well.”

“Do you think so?” asked Don Indalecio, turning to look into my face as if for information.

“You know, she only moved into this house a few days ago.”

“Aha! That explains it.” He put out
a furtive finger to poke the pink wall. “It looks as if it’s hardly set in its mold.”

“Doesn’t it!” I laughed.

Don Indalecio was tapping the sofa for me to come and sit beside him, and he offered me a cigarette. He sat with one fat leg crossed easily over the other, cigarette held between the fore and middle fingers of his elegant right hand, and entertained me. Don Indalecio was a Spaniard,
but he, too, had lived in England; he had read books, even confessed deprecatingly to having written one. He spoke English with wit and grace. I crossed my legs and held my cigarette elegantly between fore and middle finger.

During dinner Don Indalecio continued to give me his attention, to the exclusion of our hostess. His shoulder seemed turned against her, and I kept wanting to redress the
balance by turning the conversation toward her. “I think this is going to be a very pretty place once it gets the feeling of being lived in,” I said to her.

“Of course, we don’t know yet,” said Don Indalecio, “whether it’s going to
be
lived in.”

“You’re not going to stay here?” I asked Doña Piri, puzzled.

She said, “Did you know that I owe this house to Don Indalecio?”

“You do?” I asked. There
seemed to be something in the air that I had not understood or had misunderstood.

“As I recall, my dear Piri, this was all your great idea,” Don Indalecio said, with such an edge in his voice that I thought they were quarreling, but as I looked from one to the other, they were both smiling at me.

Doña Piri said, “The señorita has beautiful taste, and she is going to help me arrange the furniture.”

“I don’t know why Doña Piri thinks I know anything about arranging furniture. I live in a hotel room, you know.”

“Some day soon, you shall have a house of your own,” said Don Indalecio, “and not a stage setting!” He smiled meaningfully at me. I frowned at him and glanced at Doña Piri, but her eyes were on me as if to make sure I was enjoying myself.

“Of course,” went on Don Indalecio gaily,
“I was speaking only of the décor. The cast,” he said, looking gallantly at me, “is delightful.”

Doña Piri beamed. She suggested that I might enjoy sitting out on the
galería
, but first I went to the bathroom, where I put on some more lipstick.

When I came outside, Doña Piri and Don Indalecio were sitting on two chairs close together and talking, but stopped politely when I joined them.

I said,
“How nice it is to see two old friends in conversation together.” The parallel smiles with which they were looking at me made me blush as if I had said something silly. I shivered and Doña Piri jumped up to fetch me a shawl.

It was a mean little wool shawl. It was a mean little
galería
, looking across the mutilated earth of the road to the constant blinking of the many-colored airfield lights.
There was the untidy clutter of a large unfinished building going up on a rise in the ground at the end of the road. I said I thought I must be going home.

Don Indalecio rose at once and signaled to his chauffeur, whom I saw, as I said good-by to Doña Piri, leaning over the back of the car as if he were adjusting the number plate.

Don Indalecio settled himself beside me in the back seat and
said, “I was wondering if you would mind my just stopping off for a moment at a cottage I have near here. I have to pick up some papers.”

“Fine,” I said.

I kept glancing sidewise at the bulk of his shoulder and the expanse of his soft, pendulous cheek, which seemed, in the half darkness, to be very close to my eye. He was breathing in an odd way, with sharp, quick heaves. I wondered if it was
asthma, and when he bent forward to speak to the chauffeur and his arm inside his jacket became pressed against mine inside the shawl Doña Piri had insisted on my taking, I would not move away for fear of offending him, but sat rigid, hardly breathing, with every nerve withdrawn from the contact and waiting deep inside myself for the arm to be removed.

The car turned into a side road that soon
became nothing more than a thickly wooded mud drive. We stopped. In the darkness outside was a house. Don Indalecio did not immediately get out. “You’ll excuse me, won’t you? I shan’t be a minute. Or would you like to come in and have a drink before we go on? Come and see my bachelor’s retreat.”

I could not think, under the stress of the moment, of a way to refuse the invitation without the immodesty
of seeming to presume that this man wanted what he had not even hinted at. And I wanted to be brave about life. I said, “I’d love to.”

The chauffeur held the car door. There was gravel underfoot. It was dark. Don Indalecio had gone ahead and seemed, by the sound of falling and creaking objects, to be making his way across a cluttered
galería
, groping for the light switch. The light came on inside
what appeared to be a quite small, ramshackle bungalow. Don Indalecio threw open the door, and in the sudden illumination I caught a glimpse of the chauffeur’s face, which appeared to me in that moment horribly, evilly awry, before I realized that he was grinning at me.

I walked into the lion’s den and then refused to sit down in it. “No, thank you. I don’t feel like sitting.”

“Let me take the
shawl.”

“Thank you, no. I’m a little chilly,” I said and shivered.

Don Indalecio excused himself and left the room, and I heard the lavatory chain pulled. It seemed to me that during the twenty minutes we were inside the cottage, Don Indalecio went out three times, while I kept walking around with my handbag held over my bosom and my arms wrapped around my handbag, remembering to hold my shoulders
straight the way my mother was always telling me.

The room was a crude, simple one, a bachelor’s country quarters. There was a big modern refrigerator right next to the front door, a shabby, comfortable armchair, and a handsome mahogany table cluttered with male objects: a pair of flannels, a gun, an old airmail edition of the New York
Times
. On the wall over a simple fireplace hung a landscape
painted with a fresh, loose stroke. When Don Indalecio came back in, I said, “Who did this? It’s good.”

“You think so?” He came and stood beside me. “It was done by a young friend of mine. Juanita Rivera. She exhibits in the Galería des Bellas Artes. I’m glad to have your opinion of it. I want to buy some more paintings, and I was hoping for your advice. My own taste is quite rudimentary.” He
grinned down at his terrible tie.

At that moment I liked him enormously. “Well, this is quite, quite good,” I said. “I like it.”

“I have another one of hers inside that I should like you to see.” Don Indalecio led the way into a smaller room with a bed, from which I averted my eyes, fixing them on the portrait that hung above it. It was Don Indalecio’s profile as I had seen it beside me in the
car when he had thought himself unobserved, self-absorbed, with the great cheek relaxed and loose. What the little portrait revealed with the impact of immediate conviction was that Don Indalecio looked like nothing so much as a sad, subtle, indecent old woman.

“It’s very good. A very sensitive portrait, but I think I like the landscape better still,” I said and turned on my heel and marched
back out into the front room. “This is somehow a bigger picture. It’s
her
advice you should get in buying paintings. Compared with her, I’m an amateur.”

“Yes. Well, yes, but that young lady, you see, is a little angry with me. She doesn’t give me her advice any more. Well,” he said, “let’s go.”

Don Indalecio picked up a roll of papers, took me by the elbow and walked me out, locked the door,
put out the light, and handed me back into the car, where he sat silently hunched into his corner of the back seat.