Tell Me Something True (28 page)

The lobby here is long and dark. A single guard sits behind a lonely desk whose one stab at high technology is the buzzer
that allows people inside. It’s a stark contrast with Nini’s foyer of white marble ampleness, stretching toward the mountains
and the pool and the sky with one gesture.

But upstairs, in Elisa’s seventeenth-floor apartment, the views are as grand as Nini’s, the light as bright, the easel in
the dining room optimally placed to receive it from both windows all through the day.

Elisa is a divorced painter. In her heyday as one of the city’s reigning doyennes, she could entertain here with aplomb. Now
that her moment has gone by and her ex-husband has remarried, her monthly allotment hasn’t allowed her to move to different
living quarters. But her status as an artist frees her somewhat from societal expectations; she is eccentric, unique. She
can live where she pleases.

The elevator may be dinky, but the maid who opens the door for Gabriella is uniformed, and the tea set that awaits her is
antique, sterling silver.

“Gabriellita!” cries Elisa, walking toward her, arms outstretched, wearing jeans, starched white cotton shirt, and red espadrilles.
When she hugs Gabriella, she smells of Chanel mixed with turpentine. Her hair is cut very, very short and highlighted just
so. Her figure is trim and fit. She speaks in short, good-natured gusts of energy that often end in exclamation points and
question marks. Everything about Elisa is fluffy and intense at the same time, a disarming combination that has allowed her
to survive despite her frequent missteps.

Gabriella used to come here regularly. When she was little, Elisa made a point of having her over, setting up a little easel
and crafts for her to do during afternoons, her small way of making up for the death of her best friend.

She looks at Gabriella now, and her eyes light up. The girl is beautiful, and Elisa has an artist’s appreciation of beauty.
“You are stunning,” she says matter-of-factly. “You don’t look a bit like your mother,” she adds happily, the same words she’s
told Gabriella for the past five years. “But stunning nevertheless.”

Gabriella smiles. She’s used to Elisa’s blunt appeal and she enjoys it. That’s why she accepts these annual invitations for
afternoon tea. It used to make her feel close to her mother, this reliving of her afternoons in this very place. When they
were little girls, Elisa has told her, they would come here after school, lock themselves up in her bedroom, and listen to
Journey and Billy Joel. They were avid fans of everything American—the music, the books, the TV shows and films. Her mother,
Elisa told her, always said she would marry a tall, blond gringo, preferably one with a name that ended in a II, III, or IV.

“And she found exactly what she wanted. The perfect man. Gorgeous? Smart? Oh, I love your father,” Elisa would say, nodding
her head in appreciation as she tipped the silver pitcher, the hot water tinkling down, over the little lattice tea-filled
basket and into her white china cup.

The perfect man. The perfect man. The words come back to Gabriella almost as a rhyme as she watches the routine she’s watched
so many afternoons. That’s how she always thought of her father. The perfect man. Why, why would her mother risk losing the
perfect man? She looks at Elisa expectantly now, a recurring name in her mother’s writings. How much does she know? Gabriella
wonders. How much has she shielded all these years behind that happily smooth facade?

“Elisa,” she says softly, and something in the tone makes her mother’s friend set the pitcher down carefully, put her cup
gently on the saucer, and look at her fully. It seems to Gabriella she’s anticipating questions she’s expected for nearly
two decades.

“Elisa, you always said my father was the perfect man, do you remember that?”

“Of course, mi amor,” Elisa says quickly, the slightest of furrows marring her Botoxed brow. “He is, in my book. Your mother
was lucky!”

“If she was so lucky, then why did she have an affair with Juan José Solano?”

Whatever Elisa was expecting, the question still takes her by surprise, her mouth literally drops open. She looks at Gabriella
steadily, weighing the options, considering what to shield from her.

“I know about it,” Gabriella intercedes, before Elisa can slather makeup over the reality. “I found her diary. She wrote about
it in great detail.”

“A diary?” repeats Elisa automatically. “I didn’t know she kept a diary.”

“She didn’t,” says Gabriella. “She wrote it for me. But then, she started writing it for herself.”

Elisa sighs involuntarily. This isn’t a place she wants to be in, telling secrets to her best friend’s daughter. Especially
this
secret. She’s always felt a pang of guilt, for having tacitly accepted Helena’s choices and setting up the chain of events
that led to her death.

An accident, an accident, her own mother told her over and over when it happened. “What could you possibly have done?”

But Elisa knows she could have been more adamant in condemning Helena’s betrayal of Marcus, because that’s how Elisa had always
viewed it; not as an affair but as a betrayal. For a second, she has a vision of Helena, dancing with Juan José the night
that set it all off, the purple scarf twirling around and around, like a Chinese flag flying over the torches that circled
the dance floor.

Everything had looked surreal, almost enchanted.

“I don’t know, nena,” she says helplessly. “I didn’t judge her, because I was in no position to judge.” She shrugs, waving
her arm. Her reputation as a flirt is notorious; there are at least two substantial affairs attached to her. “I just listened.”

“And what did she tell you, Elisa? Because no one wants to tell me,” Gabriella says urgently. “No one will tell me, and I
need to know. It’s eating me inside.”

“But, baby, what is it that you need to know so badly?” Elisa says gently. “She’s dead now. So what does it matter anymore?”

“It matters. To me it matters. I want to know…” Her voice trails off. She’s starting to feel like she’s on a merry-go-round,
asking the same question and never hearing what she wants to hear.

Elisa looks at her Gabriellita, all grown up now. When the girl was little, she regaled her with endless stories of her mother—how
they connived to get extra recess time, how Helena gave her the answers to the algebra quiz that would have made her fail
the class, how they played hooky from gym class because they both abhorred basketball, how they were caught smoking in the
bathroom and almost received a suspension, how Helena—the brightest, most articulate girl in their senior class—delivered
the class speech during their graduation ceremony.

What stories should she tell her now? Elisa wonders, because in her mind Helena is still her luminous Helena, and she can’t
bear the tarnishing of this beautiful—if defective—soul.

When you’re young, everything is so black and white, she thinks. When Elisa was twelve years old, her father left her mother,
didn’t give her a dime for the rest of her life.

Elisa never spoke about him again, not even to Helena. But when she turned eighteen, she was the one who sought him out, who
went to look for her own answers, and found them, imperfect as they were. He took Elisa in, sent her to college, redeemed
himself—never entirely—but enough to walk her down the aisle when she got married.

No story, she knows, has only one side to it, and because she knows this, she takes a sip of tea—of tea that has been languishing
untouched for the past ten minutes—and tells Gabriella what she knows.

“She always felt constrained by Cali, your mother. It was too small for her, too narrow-minded. For me, too, come to think
about it.” She laughs. “But I really didn’t care. She did, though. She always worried about what was said about her—who knew
what. She so badly wanted to go to the States. ‘I’m going to fulfill my potential!’ she would say. Not in an arrogant way,
because your mother was stubborn and sometimes irrational, but she was never arrogant. She wanted to leave and just do her
thing and not worry about appearances.

“It baffled me that she would go for Juan José. He was diametrically opposite to her, represented everything she had run away
from. And maybe, maybe that’s why I never took it seriously. I thought it would be a passing thing, inconsequential? And that
is what you should think, too. Because that’s what it was. You’re tying yourself up in knots over something that was a hiccup
in your mother’s life.”

“Elisa, we’re talking about deceit here,” says Gabriella, and even to her own ears she sounds prim, judgmental.

“Nena,” says Elisa, with an edge and more than a touch of condescension creeping into her soft voice. “Infidelity is overrated!
I should know, I’m an expert on the subject, or didn’t you know that?”

Gabriella blinks because, of course, she knows about Elisa’s travails, so talked about in this city, but also, in typical
Cali fashion, overlooked and swept under the rug; trifling peccadilloes. So many women here sleep with each other’s husbands
during the day, and at night, they sit together at the club—kiss, kiss, you look fabulous!—pretending everything is okay until
someone gets bored and things return to normal.

“My honest opinion, as awful and crass as this may sound, is Helena was away, she saw something in this man, and she slept
with him—rightly or wrongly, I’m not going to get into that debate—and she returned to your father and to you. End of story.”

“Then, why did she come back, Elisa? Why? Why was she on the plane?” Gabriella asks with urgency in her voice. “
That’s
what I want to know now. She had unfinished business. What was it?”

Elisa sighs. “Ay, baby, I don’t know. I really don’t know. I didn’t even know she was coming. But I imagine,” she says pensively,
“that she just wanted to say good-bye. If I had been in her shoes, maybe I would have done the same thing as well.

“Whatever it was,” Elisa continues evenly, “it isn’t right for you to attack her when she’s no longer here. Everything that
happened that year was horrendous. And now, after all this time, to bring it up and make it worse.”

“And how do you think I feel, Tía Elisa, about all this?” Gabriella questions, feeling tears well up in her eyes. “I hate
it, too! That’s why I want to understand what happened.”

“Gabriellita.” Elisa leans toward her and takes her two hands in hers. “Think about it—dispassionately for a minute. Had she
lived, you would have never known. Your parents would still be married, and you would have never known about this one thing.
I’m not asking you to forget, but at this point, I have to ask you to forgive.”

Gabriella looks away, clearly uncomfortable, then abruptly changes the subject. “Can I see what you’re working on?” she says.

“Of course! Come, come,” says Elisa, relieved at the change in subject, getting up and leading Gabriella to the dining room.

It’s an oversize oil depicting a tropical rain forest, where branches weave in and out and in and out in endless waves. The
two bright eyes are barely visible in the back of the foliage—eyes that follow you wherever you step in the room.

“It’s one of a set,” explains Elisa. “I’m working on them in blue, burnt yellow, and orangey-red. Really bright, bright hues.
They’re for the new Bank of Bogotá building, which is all white, so they wanted some contrast.”

“I thought you didn’t do corporate work,” says Gabriella, puzzled.

“Ah, well!” says Elisa dismissively, waving her hand at the inconsequentiality of the question. “Times change. The perception
of those kinds of commissions is very different now. I’ve become flexible at my old age!

“But enough of this talk,” Elisa says, putting her slim arm around Gabriella’s waist, taking her back to the living room,
looking straight ahead as she questions her. “Is it true what I’ve heard, that you’re dating Luis Silva’s son?”

Now it’s Gabriella’s turn to be caught off guard. “Okay, how did you know?” she asks, half annoyed, half relieved to get it
out of the way.

“Oh, nena, everybody knows! And if they didn’t,
now
they do, after today’s newspaper!” she adds conspiratorially.

“What, what do you mean, today’s newspaper?” asks Gabriella with alarm.

“You haven’t seen it!” says Elisa, a statement, not a question, as she realizes Gabriella truly doesn’t know. “Wait one moment,
baby,” she says, reaching over the tea set still laid out in the living room.

She delicately rings the silver bell on the tray and the maid appears at the kitchen door.

“Ruby, get me today’s edition of
Cali Buena Nota,
please,” says Elisa firmly, requesting the photo tabloid that accompanies the daily newspaper,
El País
. It’s a feria specialty, printed only this one week, and chock-full of photos featuring the hip and the beautiful.

Ruby returns with the magazine, neatly folded to the right page, which is dominated by a picture of Angel kissing Gabriella
and, only she knows, trickling aguardiente into her mouth, minutes before she was almost thrown from the horse. The faces
are in profile, but it’s clearly her and him. If there were any doubts, the caption below dispels them: “Angel Silva y Gabriela
Ricard (her name, misspelled) celebran la cabalgata con tremendo beso!”

Maybe Nini didn’t see it, she thinks. Maybe no one of consequence has seen it, buried as it is on page four. Gabriella suppresses
an incomprehensible urge to laugh at the irony.

Yesterday she wanted everyone to know that they were lovers. Today, she’s worried over public record of a kiss. Here she is,
photographed kissing the man she slept with less than twenty-four hours ago, and there is no one she can happily share the
photo with. She feels like burning the damn newspaper.

Elisa looks at her with frank interest, her eyes shrewd in her placid face. “Are you doing this to get back at your mother
and Nini, Gabriella?” she asks.

“Of course not!” says Gabriella, pulling her hair back with both hands.

“Of course not,” she repeats accusingly, although now she knows. She knows she could have said no on that very first phone
call, and Angel, so resolutely proud, would have never called again. After all, you can’t say no at the end. You have to say
no at the beginning, before it even starts. “He’s a great guy,” she says quietly. “This has
nothing
to do with Nini.”