Other People’s Houses (39 page)

“By the way,” I said, “if you’re really interested in pictures, maybe you would like to come up to the hotel where I live.”

Don Indalecio seemed to rally at this.

“There’s a Hungarian painter called Janos Kraus, who’s not bad. I could arrange for you to have dinner with him. Frau
Bader’s dinners, as a matter of fact, aren’t bad either.”

“Fine, fine,” said Don Indalecio and jerked his head so sharply away that I looked sidewise to see his profile with lips turned down, the fat, womanish old cheeks drooping sadly.

I kept talking about Janos—that he was talented, though derivative—until we arrived in front of the hotel.

Don Indalecio got out to say good-by. He held my
hand a moment. “Perhaps you and I could have dinner sometime. Maybe we can visit the Galería des Bellas Artes together and you can teach me about modern art. Then we could go to the Jaragua, or to your hotel, for dinner.”

“I should like that very much,” I said sincerely.

“You would?” said Don Indalecio, and he looked quite pleased.

By the time I returned from the ambassador’s lesson next morning,
the maid, Julia, had a message for me from Doña Piri, who had called on the telephone. She was prevented from coming to her class, but would I have dinner with her and Don Indalecio tonight, or the night after. I wished the good woman would let up and let things take their course. Before I left I said, “Julia, if that lady calls again, tell her I will return her shawl when I see her.”

But as
I walked up the Malecon toward the house of Señora Ferrati, my next pupil, it occurred to me that Don Indalecio might have asked Doña Piri to arrange another meeting. He must really have liked me. I began to wonder if I might be more charming than I had any idea of. I began to smile. I smiled at the sleek black diplomatic cars gliding past and at the skinny black children watering the cosseted lawns.
Even the Ferratis’ silly, pastel-green castle with its stucco battlements looked engaging in this holiday world, this perpetual summer light.

The Ferratis were refugees, too, but they were Spanish and rich. I was shown up to the señora’s cool, shuttered bedroom, where she was busy with herself in front of the dressing mirror. “Ah, the señorita! Would you mind if we only had half an hour this
morning? I have Doctor Levy coming to do my feet. And let’s just have conversation.”

“Then speak English, please.”

“Oh, I forget. I go to canasta (is right?) to Señora Ambassador of X. Is awful bore. This night we go to ’otel Jaragua. Is too much. Makes me nervous.”

The señora did not look at all nervous to me. With her ample body and warm skin color, dressed in a beautiful, elegant suit of
white piqué, on the way to some party, Señora Ferrati was living my daydream, except that I had met her husband on the stairs, a dull, dapper little man with a precise military mustache. Yet the señora had about her a look of enjoyment. I used to study her.

“I will ask you a question, and you answer in English. Do you happen to know someone called Indalecio Nuñez Aguirre?”

Señora Ferrati looked
up from her nails, which she was painting a hot pink color. “You have new boy friend, is it?”

“No. No, no! He is a gentleman I met at the house of a mutual acquaintance. He is Spanish, too, and I just thought you might have met him. I think he is the president of some big movie distributor.”

Señora Ferrati furrowed her brow and thought she recalled having met such a person once, and she looked
at me with such a pleased, nosy expression that I told her all about last night.

“Dear Señorita, he is interested in you,” she kept saying. “He must be immensely rich, and he is interested.”

“But he is an old man,” I said. We had both forgotten about speaking English.

“How old?”

“Fifty, or sixty, maybe.”

“So? How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Oh. Well anyway, then what happened?”

“Nothing.
We had dinner. We sat on the veranda. He’s quite a cultured man. He has some good pictures by a girl, a painter called Juanita Rivera, in his cottage in the country.”

“You went inside his cottage?”

“Why not? There were some papers he had to pick up,” I said, and colored.

“Well,
then,
” asked the señora, “what happened?”

“Then he took me home to the Parisienne.”

“Oh, my dear. Yes. And then?”

“He went home.”

“My dear Señorita, you have made a conquest! Do you know a man like that can make your fortune?”

I shook my head fastidiously, but I saw a house of my own on the Malecon, a salon consisting of all the prettiest and brightest people on the island. In a mental letter to my English friends, I described my husband, a businessman, it was true, but witty and cultured. And all the time
I knew that this was not for me.

The señora was flapping her hands to dry her nails.

“I was saying to my husband only yesterday, I said the Señorita would be one of the best catches in town: She is white, and she is pretty, and she is educated. If the señorita had a fortune she could get anybody.”

I pushed my glasses up on my nose and said, “I am not pretty.”

“I think you are pretty!” the
señora said in a sincere tone. “As I said to my husband, the señorita is so spiritual-looking.”

“Oh, that,” I said, and my heart dropped.

“I often wish I looked more spiritual,” said Señora Ferrati, putting a handsome cross on a heavy silver chain around her throat.

“Besides,” I said, remembering the things in the air yesterday that I had not understood, which still vibrated like false notes
in my mind, “he might be married for all I know. He looks sort of settled.”

The señora folded a square of hot pink silk between the white of her suit and her olive skin. It gave her a sudden brilliancy. “Oh my dear Señorita! Don’t talk to me about married men!” She rose. The lesson was over. “You know what I shall do at the canasta party?” I thought for a moment that she was about to invite me
along, but she said, “There’s sure to be someone there who knows your Don Indalecio. I’m going to find out all about him. I’m going to be your detective.”

On the stairs I met “Doctor” Levy, who would have passed me with a bow, but I stopped to ask him how he did. He thanked me for the recommendation which had introduced him to Señora Ferrati. It was a pleasure, I said. I asked him if he had ever
come across a Don Indalecio Nuñez Aguirre. He said, no, the gentleman he had never met, but he did the señora’s feet regularly.

“You mean Señora Aguirre? The wife of Don Indalecio?”

Indeed yes, and sometimes he was called to do the feet of her older, married daughter who had two little girls, and he would be glad to recommend me as an English teacher next time he was there.

The hotel was deserted
after lunch. The guests, even Frau Bader herself, had crept into their rooms to hide from the full blast of the midday heat. A turkey screamed in the next yard. Of course I had known all along! Had I not told Señora Ferrati that Don Indalecio was probably married?

The maid knocked at my door.

“Señorita, that lady called again.”

“Oh, she did, did she. You gave her my message?”

“Yes, Señorita.
She said, ‘Damn and blast the goddam shawl, what I want to know is when she’s coming to dinner again!’”

“Oh. Thank you, Julia.”

Julia still stood in the doorway on her splayed feet, her skimpy dress pulled tight over her swollen stomach like the women I had seen yesterday in the doors of their shacks.

Julia said, “Señorita, you remember you said you would teach me how to write?”

“So I did.
You mean
now?
Oh! All right. Sit down here.”

I gave her a pencil and the notebook I had bought (thinking I was going to write a story I had in mind about a girl in a refugee hotel on a tropical island) and I said, “All right. Open it. No, no! Why in the middle? On the first page. Here: I will draw you a line of loops, like small e’s. Now you copy them here. No, Julia! Start on the
left
-hand side.
I will lie down on my bed and you call me when you have finished.”

It was beastly hot. The turkey was crying and Julia sat with her nose within three inches of the pencil, which she held painfully in a cramped fist.

“Why are you turning over, Julia? You can’t have finished the page. Let me see.”

Julia had done three loops where I had shown her, and she had done a giant loop in the middle and
two more and now she was turning over. I stood and looked at her: I was trying to empty my mind of the concepts “page” and “book”; to imagine what it was like not knowing pictures, not having lived in England—it was as difficult as trying to imagine knowing what I did not know—the passionate life that Julia must know, behind those black doorholes of her home. I said, “Julia, where do you live?”

“Way out, Señorita, in the country.”

“The other side of town, near the airfield, isn’t it?”

“Oh no, Señorita. Near the airfield is where the bad women live.”

“No, I mean beyond the army barracks.”

“Beyond the army barracks, this side of the airfield, is where they live.”

“No, no. Where there is a new road, and buildings going up.”

“That’s where they are building a sporting house and houses
for the girls, and a new road for the gentlemen’s cars.”

“Ah, I see …”

I saw in one of those backward revelations—as if I were watching the replay of a movie I had seen before—Don Indalecio’s chauffeur bending over the back of the car; only this time I saw that he was removing a small blank shield that had hung over the number plate.

“There goes the telephone again, Señorita.”

It was Señora
Ferrari, for me, calling from the middle of her canasta party. “My dear, I have such a thing to tell you, you have no idea. I must see you. It’s so terrible I can’t tell you over the telephone!” Señora Ferrati sounded happy.

“Wait,” I said. “You are going to be at the Jaragua tonight? I can come and meet you there.”

“Oh, dear Señorita, meet me there! I have to fly back to my table. What an absolutely
awful thing! Good-by.”

“Good night, Señorita,” said Julia out of the darkness as I left my hotel that evening. I looked around and could just make out her cotton dress a shade lighter than the night bushes. Julia was leaning over the hedge, watching the people go by; and I knew with a shock that black Julia’s Saturday evenings were as lonely and her poor nights as innocent even as my own.

The
new girl behind the glass counter of the cigarette stand wore a deep décolletage and shoulder-length hair. On Saturday nights, the lobby was full of well-to-do Dominicans who came to dance in the open-air patio, skinny men in light, loose-fitting suits with padded shoulders, and their well-fleshed women, in tight skirts and draped bosoms, wearing flowers in their hair.

I stood in embarrassed
solitariness, wearing the mask of one who watches life tumbling about her, and was so glad to catch sight of my ambassador standing at no great distance that I waved enthusiastically. He came over to shake hands, smiling horribly with his teeth only. “Ah, you come here! You say you not come!” Now Señora Ferrati, in a gay, grand, flowered gown, was coming toward us. The ambassador bowed over her hand.
He kept saying, “My wife is somewhere around. Ah, you know the Señorita! She is my English teacher. Won’t you and Señor Ferrati join my wife and me in the patio.”

The señora promised to join him, but first she walked me away to the ladies’ room, and under pink neon lights, sitting on beige leather stools, surrounded by walls of mirror, we put our heads together.

“Dear Señorita, you will never
guess. This Señora Lopez at the canasta party has known the Aguirres forever and, my dear, he has a wife and two grown-up daughters.”

“I know. I even told you this morning I thought he must be married. You remember I told you that?”

“Wait! It seems there is this woman, Pilar Cruz, who was his mistress, my dear, for fifteen years! Can you imagine?”

“You know something! That’s what I thought
at first, that Don Indalecio and Doña Piri were lovers, but now I am
sure
she planned for him to meet me.… I mean, you don’t mean
my
Doña Piri?”

“Doña Piri. Piri Cruz. Everybody knows her. It seems he kept her for fifteen years,” said Señora Ferrati with her happy greedy eyes.

“Maybe they were in love!” I said.

“Oh, Señorita! Anyway, it seems since she has got too old she makes a living getting
girls for him. Señora Lopez told me her husband told her that Don Indalecio told him that the girl he had now was getting difficult, crying all the time and demanding …”

“I know,” I said, “a painter and a very sensitive one. You remember I told you about the painter.”

“Well, anyway, Don Indalecio promised this Doña Piri this house, or she asked him for a house, I forget which, if she got him
a new girl. Isn’t that just awful? I mean, can you imagine? I have to run. My husband will be looking for me.”

“Are you going to sit with the ambassador?” I asked, hoping she might ask me to join them.

“Yes, and I want to look for Señora Lopez. She said she might be here this evening and she was going to try and find out more from her husband. So? What kind of a detective do I make?”

I went
and stood in the door of the patio. The
merengue
band was playing at the far end of the dance floor. Waiters in white coats passed among the tables, under the colored lanterns. A group of English people I knew from the Café Madrid sat at a table so near me I could see the whisky glasses between their elbows and hear the clipped, precise accents just like my own.

“Hello Ticher,” said the three
young girls in chorus.

“Why, hello! How do you do?” I said to their stout mother, hovering and smiling behind them. In the semidarkness their sweet, pale dresses gleamed and rustled, and their six black eyes watched me.

“Good-by, Ticher,” they said.

“Hey, hello!” called Janos, the painter. “Come and join us.” He was sitting with “Doctor” and “Madame” Levy, Frau Bergel, the piano teacher, and
her daughter Lilli, lately come from New York, who had begun to give English lessons like me, but with an American accent. I saw them for a dreary group of foreigners, professionals, like latter-day courtiers living off the city’s dogeared aristocracy.