Tell Me Something True (23 page)

W
e hide. I hate to hide. But we do.

He took me home one day, out of necessity because he had left some papers at the house and, really, making me wait in the
car would have been a bit much.

But, as luck would have it, his mother was there. In a way, I was perversely happy to finally meet her face-to-face, to force
Juan José’s hand.

I could see all the questions in her expression, all the questions she would later ask Juan José: Isn’t this Cristina’s daughter
who married the American film director? Didn’t she have a little girl? Why are you bringing her home then?

But to me, she was just polite.

“Ah, I’m so delighted to see you!” she said, smiling brightly. “You look exactly like your mother; it’s the most incredible
thing. Don’t you think so, m’ijo?”

And Juan José, looking uncomfortable, looking guilty, as if such behavior weren’t cliché in this city where everybody has
a backstory.

Even in Los Angeles it isn’t like this, or if it is, I don’t hear about it. Perhaps I don’t because I’ve never been an insider,
just an appendix to Marcus’s social sphere.

Here, I’m part of it, and people talk. I see it in their eyes, in my mother’s surreptitious comments—“You’re going out with
JJ? Again?” Resigned. Hurt.

She always wanted me to marry someone like Juan José. A boy from Cali. From a nice family. A known family—una familia conocida.
Someone familiar. Predictable. And I would continue my life like hers: raise my children, prepare lovely dinners, and on the
weekends, play tennis at the club.

But now all that seemed frightfully provincial alongside Marcus and his blond, stately good looks and his money and his fame
and his mansion in Beverly Hills, for Christ’s sake, not in Cali, Colombia.

I saw this in her reproachful glance when I went out at night, again, to hide with him.

In the morning, she asked me about it directly, the one and only time that she did.

“I don’t understand, Helenita,” she said as she sipped her tea, looking away from me. “You never liked JJ, or did you?” A
small frown furrowed her creamy brow.

I looked at nothing, blanking out, as I did more and more often those days.

“You never liked boys from Cali,” my mother plowed on, relentless. “What does this one have?”

I was momentarily stumped.

What did this one have?

“I don’t know,” I said, not realizing I’d spoken out loud and startled by the matter-of-fact loudness of my voice.

“I don’t know,” I said more quietly, more to myself than to her, and I shrugged. We both finished our breakfast in silence.

G
abriella has made no more references about Angel to Nini since their argument, and the air has been charged with unsaid recriminations,
an enormous elephant in the living room that both of them steadfastly refuse to acknowledge. Nini hasn’t told Gabriella’s
father anything, either, simply because she’s uncertain how to proceed with this. She wants to believe Gabriella would never
be so cruel with Marcus as to reveal what she knows. But she doesn’t want Marcus to take her away from her if he finds out
who she’s dating.

It’s selfish, Nini knows, but she can’t help herself.

Bad things happen, but to other people, she tells herself at night, as part of her prayers. And as the days pass, she really
starts to believe it.

“Call me if you need me,” are her only words, religiously repeated every day, every moment that Gabriella goes to be with
him, which seems to be every moment of the day.

She has yet to bring Angel to her grandmother’s house. And he has yet to take her to any house at all that isn’t his own.
His father is in jail. His mother simply isn’t here; he’s never offered an explanation. There are grandparents that he visits,
but she hasn’t been invited.

Neither of them is ready to venture out of this delicate balance again. With him, Gabriella often feels like an orphan, ensconced
in a world of their making. All her friends who are Angel’s age are fresh out of college, living with their parents or in
little untidy apartments. At best they hold jobs on Wall Street or in film, and even when they make six figures, they are
just boys, really; boys who depend on other people, not just for money, but for love and comfort.

Angel, as far as she can tell, doesn’t depend on anyone. She has yet to see him ask for advice, has yet to hear him chat on
the phone about something that isn’t business.

He lives with Chelita, his childhood nanny, and in his same building, he’s bought a studio for Julio, his head bodyguard,
a man who used to work for his father and whose mission in life now is to make sure nothing happens to Angel. “Nada, pero
nada,” Chelita tells her one rare afternoon when Gabriella wakes up and finds Angel gone.

For the past three days, since her fight with Nini, Gabriella has spent the early afternoons here, playing the piano alone
in the living room while he listens from his bed, taking the music in with his eyes closed, allowing Bach to align his thoughts.
Gabriella prefers his listening from afar; his presence makes her self-conscious. But sometimes, he’ll stand silently at the
doorway, watching her play, oblivious to him as she hums, slightly out of tune, along with the melody. Singing out loud helps
her make the piano sing, too, she explains to him when he asks. He doesn’t quite get the concept, but he hears what she means;
under her hands, his piano does sing.

After he goes to work, Gabriella likes to feel his home without him, touching the edges of the tables and the textures of
his clothes, meticulously folded in the walk-in closet.

The phone doesn’t ring here like it does constantly at Nini’s, and the first time she sat down to play the piano after he
left, the quietness reminded her of the practice rooms of her conservatory days. She automatically started playing her warm-up
exercises, hands extended over an octave-long chord, each finger pressing a black key on the inside. The trick, her teacher
had taught her, was to isolate each finger in this excruciating position, to enable it to be relaxed even in the most uncomfortable
situation. Then, she launches into scales—C major, C minor, C sharp major, C sharp minor—going up the scale with the metronome
ticking in her head, the rote of it all soothing in its monotony.

She thinks of other things when she does this—of him, of the way he made love to her today, bunching her skirt around her
waist but not taking it off (“so you can smell of me when you’re alone,” he whispered in her ear), of what her father will
say when he finds out what’s going on—and she doesn’t hear Chelita quietly placing the tray with coffee and pandebono behind
her.

Only the smell of the coffee alerts her to turn around, and she’s surprised and delighted at the offering, because Chelita
hasn’t said a word to her since she’s been sleeping in his sheets in the afternoons.

Later, when Angel comes to pick her up, she takes the tray back herself to the kitchen, where she knows Chelita watches TV
in the afternoons.

“Gracias,” she says simply. “Estaba delicioso.”

“Con gusto,” Chelita says dryly, barely mustering a nod, but an agreement has been reached. Two days later when she brings
the coffee, she sticks around long enough for Gabriella to notice her.

“Can’t you play a real song?” Chelita finally says, frowning.

“You mean something that’s not classical?” answers Gabriella, who had been playing Bach.

“I don’t know,” says Chelita, shrugging. She’s a heavyset woman with a quiet air of injured dignity who is always reading
the newspaper with the TV on, tuned to an endless succession of afternoon soap operas. “I mean, like a normal song,” she finally
says helplessly.

Gabriella begins to play “Sabor a Mí,” but midstride switches to Arthur Hanlon, whose piano music she knows Chelita hears
on TV, the soaring melody lines flowing easily from her fingers.

“Eso sí,” says Chelita, smiling for the first time since Gabriella has met her and nodding emphatically.

“He’s a gringo, like me,” Gabriella says, with a smile, because she loves this music too, the blend of her two worlds. “That’s
why our Latin music sounds special.”

Chelita nods politely not fully understanding the parallel or the humor but sticks around until the end of the song, the melancholy
lines bringing a sad smile to her face.

“Play another of that Arthur,” she asks her when she’s done. “Please,” she adds, then retreats again to the kitchen. Gabriella
hates to be hovered over when she practices, and Chelita has tacitly acknowledged this. Because she has, Gabriella plays songs
especially for her, every afternoon before she goes back to Nini’s after Angel goes to work.

When she takes her breaks, they talk, small fragments of conversation that tell Gabriella the essentials: Her son, Giosvanny,
who is now in the States, sent to study there with Angel’s father’s money. He has since married and stayed there, a legal
resident who regularly sends money to his mother.

“He and Angelito were very close,” she tells her days later. “Like brothers.”

Her other son had died, killed by the guerrillas along with her husband when he was only eight years old. That was when she
went to work for Luis Silva, who heard about her through the grapevine of paramilitaries he employed to guard his coca fields.

They spoke about a Doña Chelita, a tough Indian woman who’d managed to shoot five guerrillas before the paras came to the
rescue on the day her husband was branded a traitor and shot to death in the fields.

They took her to Luis Silva’s house in Pance, and he hired her as a general helper around the house. She took it upon herself
to do two things: cook and jealously guard her own son and Angel. “That poor little boy that no one looked after,” she now
says, shaking her head.

“But I thought he was so close to his dad,” Gabriella says, confused.

Chelita snorts derisively.

“That boy,” she says. “That poor little boy,” she repeats. “His father would get drunk, and if Angelito got in the way, he
would punish him by sending him to sleep with the dogs in the kennels outside. We would slip him a blanket so he wouldn’t
have to sleep on the floor.”

Gabriella is stunned into silence. She’s never met people who these things happen to. A little boy in a dog kennel. She cannot
fathom the thought, so removed from her reality and from the hardness of the man she made love to earlier today that she can’t
reconcile the two.

“But… but how old was he?” Indignation, and just a touch of embarrassment—she doesn’t think Angel will appreciate her knowing
this—making her stutter.

“I don’t know exactly. Seven, eight?”

“Are you serious? Why did you let it happen? Why couldn’t you take him to your room or something?”

“Ay, señorita Gabriella,” Chelita begins to say, then stops herself, realizing she’s long overstepped her bounds.

“What, Chelita? What happened?” Gabriella asks urgently.

“You just didn’t mess with Don Luis’s orders,” Chelita finally mutters defensively. “Giosvanny went once, even though we all
told him not to butt in. He took Angelito to his room and had him sleep in the bed with him. The next day, Don Luis found
them and beat them both with his belt. For disobeying his orders, he said, and for behaving like a pair of maricones, sleeping
together in the same bed.”

Chelita shakes her head. “Giosvanny tried one more time, but Angelito wouldn’t let him, he was so scared for him. He just
took to getting really quiet when his father was in one of those moods, so he wouldn’t notice him. And then one day, when
he was about twelve—he grew really tall all of a sudden—he fought back. He said there was no way he was going to sleep with
some damn dogs and punched his father in the face. Well, Don Luis was so surprised, he took it. We were hiding in the kitchen,
thinking he was really going to beat Angelito up this time. But he didn’t. He laughed. And laughed. He said he had finally
turned him into a real man. He said he’d finally learned to stand up for himself. And Don Luis never messed with him again.
At least, he never lifted a hand against him anymore.”

Gabriella closes her eyes and tries to see Angel, because there were no family pictures in this house, so different from her
own, where frames litter the piano.

Angel, twelve years old, thin—because the way he looks now, he had to have been thin—squinting his eyes like he does when
he hits the punching bag that hangs in his room, and swinging at his father’s jaw. A little boy that no one took care of,
until he could take care of himself.

“And his mother?” Gabriella asks.

Chelita waves the notion of the mother away dismissively.

“The mother,” she grunts. “The mother was hardly ever there. And she was more scared of Don Luis than we were. That’s what
we thought anyway.”

“Why? Did he hit her?” Gabriella asks.

Chelita looks pained. “Ay, niña, don’t ask me these things. It’s hard to know what people do behind closed doors.” She looks
away momentarily, at nothing. “Don Luis was good to me. I owe my life to him, so whatever he did, it couldn’t be too bad.
Anyway, she had a choice. She could have walked away if she had wanted. And she chose not to, until they sent him to jail.