Tell Me Something True (10 page)

Only the arrival of Edgar, competent, commanding, practical, reminds her that she’s not a player in this contest. “It’s nice
to see you, Angel,” she says demurely as she slides by him on her way to the register and out the door.

Later, many days later, he told her he’d had one of his bodyguards follow her home.

But that afternoon, he only sends the roses. Five dozen red roses that the doorman brings up through the back door with a
card inside a sealed envelope.

“Some things are really more beautiful up close. Angel.”

“Who is this Angel?” Nini asks when she comes home that evening and sees the outrageous bouquet.

“Just a boy I met, Nini. At the party,” Gabriella says shortly.

“Do I know him?” presses Nini. She always presses.

“I don’t know,” says Gabriella, deliberately evasive.

“I need to know who he is for you to go out with him,” says Nini, who thinks every stranger is a possible kidnapper.

Gabriella doesn’t remind Nini that she’s twenty-one years old and can go out with whomever she pleases. In this house, that
wouldn’t fly. And if Nini knew who Angel’s father was… Well, Gabriella truly can’t imagine what the reaction could be.

“Nini, I met him at the party,” she reiterates simply. “With Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos knows him.”

That night, she lies on her bed and looks at the roses, which she’s insisted on placing in her room. No one has ever sent
her five dozen roses before, and the extravagance of the gesture thrills her.

She turns on the light in her room and looks at the card once more.
Some things are really more beautiful up close,
it reads in bold, block letters, and she knows that he wrote it himself, that he can get anyone to do anything for him, but
that this, he’s done alone.

H
is face was framed by the lens of my camera.

He had black eyes and blacker hair that he combed straight back, exposing a widow’s peak he inherited from his Spanish grandfather.
From the passenger seat of his black Ford Explorer I trained my lens on him patiently, zeroing in on the thin nose that’s
very slightly hooked and haughty. But then he looked at me sideways and smiled, displaying a surprising dimple beneath his
mouth, and the arrogance of his profile dissipated. He drove with his elbow propped on the open window, steering with one
hand, smoking with the other, never taking his eyes off the road as he pushed in the cigarette lighter by the stereo, waited
until it popped out, lit the cigarette, and inhaled deeply.

He liked to talk. To pontificate. I liked it. I was lulled by his running commentary. How the endless row of tall acacias
that divide the road in two is the work of a group of radical, well-educated bourgeois women, who had raised the money to
plant the trees after countless accidents happened at night, because drivers were blinded by the bright lights.

He told me how the sugarcane is not cut by machinery, but by the hands of dozens of shirtless men wielding machetes relentlessly
under the Andean sun. How they were paid by the weight of their cut cane. How in their rush to cut more and more, accidents
frequently happened: lost fingers, slashed calves.

How, how, how.

From behind my lens, I wondered how it was that I’d lived here an entire childhood and never knew these things, never saw
them, and I inhaled his cigarette smoke with him, tuning into the cadence of his breathing, the rhythm of his words.

When I was a little girl, my mother would complain incessantly about cigarettes and the smoke, but now, I find it comforting.
When I’m in Los Angeles, it reminds me of my father, and I can picture him, smoking and reading in the library. When I finally
snapped a picture of Juan José, wisps of smoke clung to his hair as he talked and gestured with his glowing Marlboro.

G
abriellita, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Nini says over breakfast. “We’re tearing the old house down.”

“But why?” Gabriella says, stunned.

“I can’t rent it. It’s too big and in too bad a shape. I can’t afford to just have it lying there. Mi amor, I’m not going
back to live there again. Neither is your uncle. We’re going to tear it down next month. Your uncle is going to make a building,
and one of the apartments will be yours,” she adds comfortingly.

Gabriella looks at her cereal bowl, the milk stuck at her throat. She feels like crying, even though she’s never spent any
time in the house. By the time she started coming here, Nini had already moved to the apartment and the house had become home
to her uncle’s architecture firm. He would let Gabriella visit, and she’d play with the turtles and the fish in the garden
pond and go up and down the curved marble staircase that swept into the foyer.

“I’m going to live here when I grow up,” she would always tell Nini, because she always yearned for a house with a sweeping
staircase like this one. She had a picture of her mother descending the staircase on her wedding day, one hand on the balustrade,
the other holding the long train of her ivory wedding gown.

The dress was Nini’s, and Nini had promised Gabriella the dress would one day be hers, too. In Gabriella’s mind, the dress
went with the house, with the staircase, with the huge garden, with the fountain and the orchids that grew on the acacia branches.

“I’ll buy it from you,” she’d been saying about the house, even as a little girl. “And I’ll fix it up and I can sleep in my
mother’s room and you can sleep in your old room again.”

But the upkeep of the house had proven too much even for her uncle. He’d thrown in the towel when rain leaked in, for the
hundredth time, after a particularly big storm. That time it got into the electrical system, causing a short circuit and making
all the computers in the firm crash.

The house has been empty for five years. But now, for the first time, Gabriella realizes the difference between simply being
empty and not being there at all.

“Nini, can you give me the keys?” she asks. “I want to go and look around for one last time.”

“Of course, nena,” says Nini. She reaches across the table and brushes a stray hair from Gabriella’s face. “I know what you
mean. I cry every time I go in there and think of what it was.”

In the afternoon she walks slowly up the hill, the keys tucked in her jeans pocket. The house is only a few blocks away, but
farther up, on a street where stately homes have succumbed to luxury condominiums. The house is not the last one standing,
but it looks ready to go. The stone walls, now covered with moss, give it a haunted mansion air it never had in its haughtier
days of parties on the terrace staffed by white-clad waiters bearing silver trays. Even the grass on the curb is overrun with
weeds. But the house, windowless on its entrance side, seems impervious to the humiliation the years have brought. Gabriella
slowly turns the key to the top lock of the huge metal door—her grandfather had insisted on a metal door as a safeguard against
savvy thieves with God knows what kind of tools—then to the bottom dead bolt, and eases the door open.

She’s momentarily startled, as she is every time, by the sunlight that drenches the main room. It’s inescapable, pouring in
from the wraparound terrace on the other side of the house and the now blindless, curtainless windows that look out at the
park below. Every room has a view—that was such an object of pride and joy for the architect who built the house—but now the
tall-paned windows, so avant-garde in their day, look sadly dated; the paint is peeling from the wooden balustrades and the
wooden, barren bookcases, struck daily by the relentless, tropical sun. Even the staircase marble has faded under decades
of foot traffic and no polish.

Gabriella unlocks the top and bottom hinges of the glass double doors that lead to the terrace and pushes. The door is stuck.
How long has it been since anyone has swept the house? She pushes again and again, until the debris stuck underneath gives
way and the doors swing back.

She gasps out loud. The garden has practically eaten up the house; the vines have climbed from the garden below to the terrace
on the second floor, and the branches from the acacia tree hang over the balustrade, the leaves aggressively poking at the
bedroom windows. Down below, the grass looks like it hasn’t been cut in more than a year; if she were to go down, it would
reach her waist. Mango season has come and gone, and the rotting fruit is barely visible in the green tangle of weeds and
unruly plants. Even from upstairs she can smell its sweet, pervasive decay.

In a month, she thinks in wonderment, this will all be gone. Just getting rid of the acacia, which is monstrous and straining
against the boundaries of the stone wall, will alone probably cause the house to crumble; its roots have taken over the entire
garden, and Gabriella sees them, like knotted arms, extending into the fountain on the other side, lifting the tiles from
their foundation.

Even in its current condition, Gabriella loves this house. She’s convinced there are ghosts here, although she’s never seen
one. They are good ghosts, she always tells Nini, because only good people lived here.

One summer, when she was fifteen, Juan Carlos got a Ouija board, and they spent afternoons on end going from room to room,
trying to summon her mother. When it didn’t work with just the two of them, Juan Carlos brought in his friends; they needed
additional energy, he said, and they spent hours locked up in his grandfather’s library—her mother’s favorite room—asking,
“Are there spirits here? If there are any spirits here, please give us a sign!”

But the lights never flickered, a gust of wind never materialized, and their fingers on the Ouija board pointer stayed immobile,
even when they went up to Helena’s walk-in closet and huddled with the lights off.

“It means she’s at peace, Gabby,” Juan Carlos told her comfortingly. “It means she’s already left the world of the living.
Only spirits who have unresolved issues hang out.”

Now Gabriella walks around, taking in the view from her grandparents’ room—the biggest in the house. Looking for… what? Nothing.

Everything.

“Is there anything left there, Nini?” she’d asked before coming, because she loves to explore, sift through her grandmother’s
things, take home scarves and purses and old cocktail dresses from the ’70s that are way too short for her, but show off her
legs like a dream.

She’s never seen any clothes in the closets of this house, just boxes of stuff—papers and books and scores of business folders
dealing with transactions made decades before she was born.

“Oh, baby. I think I’ve taken everything out. Everything that was worth anything, you’ve probably looked through before,”
Nini said. “Some books and records, I think that’s all there is now.”

That’s all there is now.

Her mother’s room is right in front of her grandparents’.

How did she manage to sneak in nights when she came in after curfew? Gabriella wonders.

She swings the bedroom door back and forth. It creaks. How did she close it without making any noise?

Her grandmother never gets into this kind of detail about her mother.

She was beautiful. Artistic. Sensitive. She had so many boyfriends. Sometimes two at a time! This part she always accompanies
with laughter.

But Gabriella has never heard about where she went, what she wore, what books she read. When she comes inside her mother’s
space, she always wonders. Were those boyfriends good-looking? Nerdy? Did they look like her beautiful father? In her mother’s
arsenal of photographs, she has rarely found pictures of her mother with anyone else.

Helena saw the world through her camera, but she rarely photographed people. Her subjects were places, things. She made a
living of giving life to what was lifeless.

And what about her? thought Gabriella. Who was her confidante?

Elisa was her mother’s good friend; Gabriella has always regarded her as an aunt, always imagined she and her mother were
like sisters.

Imagines because as an only child she cannot fathom what it’s like to grow up with someone close to your age in the same house.