Lilia's Secret (11 page)

He let himself think about Lilia. He remembered lying in his boyhood bed, imagining her with one green eye and one brown one. The idea of those eyes disturbed him, but not entirely in a bad way, which disturbed him even more because she was the bad one who had stolen his father away.

He told himself it was harmless, this thinking about her; it was only because he was so tired. He pictured her in the kitchen, doing what women did. She would come out with a glass of lime juice, and when she gave it to him he would smell her hair. He closed his eyes and shook her out of his head. She was a dead woman, one who'd murdered his father.

He hurriedly packed away his lunch wrappers and walked to the barn door. As he pulled, it scraped open along the ground. Inside, the quiet gloom was cavernous. He walked around the barn waiting for his eyes to adjust and knocked on one of the few barrels still there, but the sound came back empty. Just about to leave, he spotted a torn photograph tucked behind an iron bar holding up one wall. It was covered in a thick film of
dust and slightly curled at the edges. Bill wiped it on his T-shirt. The photograph was of a woman sitting on a high-backed chair. The person standing beside her had been torn away, but there was a disembodied hand resting on the back of the chair. A man's hand, with a ring gleaming on his finger. Bill squinted to get a better look. Perhaps it had been his father's. He bit his lips – if it were, his father was absent here as well.

The woman's hair was wound around her head like a crown, her face a perfect oval. She had a faint beauty spot just below the corner of her right eye and, while she wasn't young, her face was unlined. She looked steadily into the camera.

This must be her.

When he'd thought of her he hadn't pictured a beauty spot and he hadn't imagined it could look so perfect. He wiped the photograph carefully and put it in his pocket.

A gaggle of children were playing a catching game outside the house when he arrived back at the village. He tried to pat one or two of their heads, but they ducked away without acknowledging him.

The next morning as dawn broke into Bill's sleep, he slowly made his way to the surface. Groggy, he pulled the photo from under his pillow and looked at it. Lilia was beautiful in a before-time-began way. Maybe that's all there was to it? His father had fallen in love.

Bill had never looked at another woman after he married Carole, but now, looking at Lilia, he felt an unexpected
empathy for his father. Still, understanding his temptation didn't excuse his weakness. You either had backbone or you didn't. Leaning against the bedhead, the sheets at Bill's waist, he felt sure that he already had the answer he'd come to find. His life had been destroyed by Bill's father's lust. But beneath the rational skin of his mind, he knew this was not enough. He would not go home yet. There must be more to know.

After breakfast he rubbed his sore muscles with a soothing cream Teresa had given him and trudged west out of town towards the cemetery, to his father's grave. The patches of angry red flowers around the head-stone were now punctuated by bald spots where he'd pulled out weeds on his earlier visit.

Bill still didn't know where Lilia was buried. The only company his father had here was his friend George, whose death he'd come to investigate in the first place. A terrible irony. Bill hadn't noticed at first because the name on George's headstone had been changed to Jorge. But the headstone was identical to his father's. These two men were buried side by side in this foreign place, bound for eternity by their lust for the same woman.

Bill murmured a few prayers for the pair, asking God to forgive his father, even if he couldn't. When he finished he sat under the big tree at the side of the cemetery; he was beginning to think of it as his tree. He pulled Lilia's photograph out of his pocket. He was sure he could make out one eye darker than the other. Then he wandered among the graves. And, smack in the middle of the cemetery, there she was. The angel's wings above her headstone were so large that they spread across other sites. Bill couldn't understand how he'd missed her
before. Lilia's ostentatious grave was an insult to his father's humble one.

He kicked at the polished marble. His father may have fallen for a beautiful woman, but the beautiful woman couldn't have felt much for him. Maybe he hadn't been clutching at straws after all when he'd set his course to find out whether his father had been entrapped or not.

Suddenly, Bill decided to dig his father's body up and find out how he'd died. He'd take the body back to Boston where it belonged, with the woman who'd loved him to the end: Bill's mother. With renewed purpose he headed out of the cemetery, almost running back to town to the municipal offices, despite his aching muscles. It was the same boy behind the desk.

‘No, I don't speak English,' he said clearly before Bill had greeted him.

‘Is there somebody who does?'

‘No, I don't speak English,' the boy replied, with the same smile.

The smile disappeared as Bill tried to explain what he wanted in Spanish. The boy went into the back of the office and ten minutes went by. He called out, ‘
Pardoname
.' The boy angled his head out and smiled at Bill, making a placating gesture.

The June page of the calendar on the wall was of a lush green English hill dotted with sheep. Bill considered counting the sheep but there weren't enough to make a difference to his state of mind. He kept tapping his fingers – the drrum, drrum comforting him.

Another ten minutes went by and he was about to call out again when an older man emerged, striding to the counter.

‘Can I help you, Señor?' he asked, as if he hadn't been discussing the matter for the last twenty minutes with the boy in the back office.

Bill explained again as best he could what he wanted and the man scratched his moustache. ‘You must fill out forms to get right forms from Mexico City.'

‘Why can't you just ring up to get the right forms?' The bundle of papers the man was thrusting in his direction was an inch thick.

‘That is not the proper way. They may take some time to complete so
por favor
take them home and come back tomorrow.' The man gestured towards the door.

‘How long will it take to get the right forms?'

‘You bring back documents, we send them to department in Mexico City and then …' The man spread his hands in a ‘who knows' gesture.

Bill spent the rest of the afternoon at the table in his room, consulting his large dictionary and filling out the forms.

Just before dusk he began writing his second letter to Carole and the girls. From Mexico City he'd called them and spoken to Carole, but there wasn't much to say down a phone line. He'd put the receiver down and sat on the bed looking at the handpiece sitting snugly in its cradle, as if it belonged there and nowhere else. He'd also sent a couple of short emails, feeling as if he were reporting from the front-line in a tele-movie, all businesslike and informative. So at first he'd been relieved that contact with the outside world in Aguasecas was difficult; before he'd sat down to write a letter. Having nothing to say in a letter was more obvious than in an email or down a phone line.

In this letter he told them how hot and sweaty he was, and about his father's grave. It hadn't taken up much space telling them about his effort to get his father's body dug up. How many times could he talk about the donkeys delivering wood, and how hard it was to eat at three in the afternoon and at ten o'clock at night? He'd even invited them all down in the last letter, just to fill space.

Despite all that blank white paper, he didn't mention finding the photograph of Lilia. He'd thrown it into the back of the desk drawer and locked it. It was satisfying to consign her to darkness to punish her for burying his father so poorly: but the satisfaction was mixed in with the fear of how real she was becoming to him.

Everything was small in Juan's village. The houses were square boxes, the dusty streets were narrow and even the people were short and squat. Poverty compresses everything. I walked from the bus stop to Juan's house, hope draining from me. So many of my friends admired poverty as noble and unsullied. They'd all grown up in nice, safe middle-class homes. I knew what pain gnawed at the heart of poverty; the only thing noble about poverty was escaping from it. Here it crowded in on me and fed the terror I was trying to keep at bay. Ever since Matías, I was determined to find another way to keep it down. Children peered out of their front doors at me; I tucked my head in and kept my eyes on the ground.

By the time I got to Juan's house, I had spooked myself so much that I was wondering if I had done the right thing by coming. I checked the address. His place was three times larger than any other house in the village. The whitewash seemed fresher and there were wooden shutters on the windows.

I rang the doorbell and waited. No response. I hadn't thought about that possibility. I stood scratching my wrist for a few moments, then rang the doorbell and knocked again. No sound.

I'd passed a place on the way with yellowed flystrips at the open door and a table inside. Picking up my pack I set off, hoping it had been a café. The easy bravado I'd had with Gabriela and Lupita had evaporated and I wondered what I had hoped to achieve by seeing Juan. By all accounts, he wasn't a talker. Perhaps I should have gone straight to Aguasecas.

I found a place to stay, lodging with Señora Estrada, a woman whose face had taken so much sun it was like a softened map. She stood in the doorway of my room and told me that she had lost her husband thirty years before and two of her four children since. They'd brought her husband home in the back of a pick-up truck after an accident cutting trees. She hadn't even got his wages from the work he did the day before he died, so she had to bury him in a small way and that still played on her mind at night.

Everybody has their story, but some were worse than others.

I went back to Juan's house three times before I saw the blind move slightly. I dropped my head a little and stared at the ground so he could have a good look at me. After all, despite our civilisation, we're still animals.

The door opened a crack and he peered out, blinking in the late afternoon sunlight. I had prepared a small speech about being part of the family, but it faded away under his glare.

‘Hello. I know you probably don't want to talk to anyone right now but I have a message from your nephew, Andrés.' I stood there for what I'm sure was a minute, longing for the solidness of my husband at my side. ‘My husband.' It was the first time for a while that the idea of having a husband had had appeal. Finally Juan released the door and stepped back. He
shut the door after me and stood in the middle of the room. Beside him was an oversized armchair and on the wall opposite was the largest television screen I'd seen.

‘
Agua
?' He jerked his head towards the kitchen, which was through an arch. There was a water filter beside the sink and some glasses on the draining board. I got two and put his on the floor beside his chair, where he was now sitting with the remote control in his hand. A game show was on television. He was taller and lankier than Andrés, with greying hair. He looked way older than his fifty or so years. There was nowhere else to sit so I squatted on the floor.

I felt as if I'd gone down a rabbit hole and arrived in a place where I didn't know the rules. The room was bare except for a phone, the chair and the TV screen, not even a picture on the wall or a photo on the kitchen bench. You don't notice how much of a presence these things have until you go into a house where they're missing.

I waited for him to speak and was beginning to wonder if he was going to talk to me at all when he took his eyes off the TV screen and asked, without a smile. ‘What is it?'

‘What?' I asked.

‘The message.'

The message that I'd decided five minutes ago existed.

‘Andrés sends his love.'

He grunted but I thought this time that there may have been a glimmer of a smile.

‘You his woman?'

‘He's my man,' I smiled, pushing away the guilt of my betrayal of Andrés.

‘Where is he?'

‘Australia.'

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Long way.'

‘Very,' I replied.

‘What do you really want?' he asked.

‘I want to know about Lilia.'

He looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time.

‘Those witch nieces of mine sent you, didn't they?' he bellowed at me, in a surprisingly loud voice given his skinny frame. ‘Nobody says that name in my house. Better that you'd asked for money. Get out.'

I was shaken, but I didn't want to show it. ‘I didn't realise … She's been dead so long …'

‘She's not dead.' He glared at me.

‘Not dead?' I looked around the room.

Chuckling, he eased back in his chair. ‘Scared that she might come after you with her little packets of poison?'

I smiled tightly.

‘The tequila's in the cupboard above the fridge. Bring two glasses.'

By the time I returned he'd found another chair. I don't like tequila, but I sat on the chair and sipped from the tiny glass, taking the burning liquid into my mouth so that it curled and smoked its way down my throat. The gameshow host screeched at us as we contemplated the screen.

‘I won't use her name, OK?'

‘Doesn't help,' he said.

We sipped again, and he kept his eyes on the screen.

‘What's your name?'

‘Maddy.'

‘Maddy, short for?'

‘Madeline. Maddy Maquire.' I thought he'd notice that I hadn't used Andrés' family name.

‘Maddy Maquire, all the way from Australia. Why do you want to know about Lilia?'

Since I wasn't sure myself, I wasn't going to try to explain it to Juan. ‘Getting to know my new family.' I smiled. ‘Who was she? What kind of a woman was she?'

‘A monster.' He slurped a mouthful. ‘My mother was a monster.' He fixed his stare at the television, pushing grey-streaked hair back from his eyes.

There was nothing more for a while. A large woman with a shiny face threw her arms around the game-show host.

‘You get cable here?' I asked.

He nodded.

‘Did she kill those husbands?'

He shrugged, his eyes still on the screen. ‘That's what they say.'

‘Your father?'

‘Not my father. He went out for tobacco one afternoon and never came back. Can't blame him.' He took another swig and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. ‘The only one to get away.'

‘Do you remember him?'

‘Nope. Never knew him.'

‘How old was your brother, Javier?' I held my breath, worried this would be one question too many.

‘He was a couple of years older than me. He didn't remember him much either.'

‘What about her other husbands? What were they like?'

‘Never met them.' Juan's fingers worked at the armrest. He
glanced at me. ‘They say she got wealthier with each husband, though she was rich already. Business activities.'

I raised my eyebrows.

He drained his glass and put it on the floor where it tinkled against the tiles. ‘Once a month big men would turn up at our place. The kind people in the street would shrink away from.' He held his arms out in a parody of size. ‘They'd stand under the tree out the front of the barn, smoking, ammunition belts over their shoulders. She'd sit on a high stool in the barn, like a bird of prey, counting the sacks of money they'd poured on to the table. Half a day she sat making small countable piles. Nobody left until she finished.' Juan looked at me. ‘We thought it was drug money. Either that, or something to do with the army.' He leant down to the floor and prodded a pack of tobacco out from under the chair, looking at me as he rolled himself a smoke.

‘Running drugs doesn't make her a monster,' I said, holding his gaze.

‘Especially not here. Whole villages are in the business. Makes her one powerful woman though. Anybody who can scare those lawless bastards is somebody you need to take care around.' He took a drag of his cigarette and sucked in his already hollow cheeks. I smiled at the pleasure that crept into his eyes.

‘One time she took a horsewhip twice the size of her, and cracked it in the air and around them. I think it was because they'd come a week earlier than normal. She liked order.'

The music signalling the end of the game show hyped up the television audience, and money rained on their heads.

‘Obsessed with order,' Juan went on. ‘Washed her hands at
exactly the same times every day. Made Javier and me sit beside her in exactly the same position every Thursday morning at apple-peeling time. I was maybe four, five.' He stopped for a moment. ‘We weren't allowed to move, not an inch. She didn't look at us but she saw everything, every twitch.' He held out his wrist, showing twists of white skinned ridges. ‘This is what happened the worst time she caught me. I'd been scratching my knee under the table, trying to do it without moving.'

I could imagine the supple-skinned child he'd been.

He paused. ‘I'm not used to talking much,' he said finally.

‘Why not?' I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Talking's overrated.' We lapsed into silence again.

‘Why are you telling me these things then?' I asked. The next game show got underway to applause on the screen.

‘Don't know. I haven't spoken for months.' He shrugged. ‘Maybe I wanted to know I still could.'

‘What about your shopping and stuff?'

‘I've got a woman who does that.'

‘You must speak to her though.'

He smiled. ‘I arranged it seven years ago. She comes in every other day for a couple of hours when I'm in my garden. I write down what I need and leave her money and she writes back to me if she needs to.'

I tried to keep the shock off my face. ‘If you don't speak, why do you have a telephone?' I jerked my head towards the telephone on the bench.

‘I talk to my children. I have four. I make sure my wife has enough money through them.'

‘You never talk to your wife?'

‘Nope.' He blew air out of his cheeks. ‘We don't like each other.' He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘As I said, I don't talk much, so stop wasting time.'

I smiled. ‘OK, but I'm starting not to believe you don't talk much.'

He opened up his hands. ‘I talk, then you leave.'

‘So she was strict,' I prompted.

He nodded in the direction of the door. ‘You saw those coloured flags in the street?'

I nodded. They were strung in lines between the buildings all through the town. Señora Estrada had told me the feast of the Virgin was coming up.

‘I was six,' Juan said. ‘I knew I'd never get real flags, so I made some. I didn't have any paper and couldn't ask for any, so I cut up three of my old shirts that were too small. I was scared, also excited, and I strung them up in my tree. I was so happy with my hidden flags. I knew she knew, though, at dinner. I could smell it on her.' Juan rubbed his throat. ‘She never said anything. Gave me rice and a dry tortilla, while she heaped beans and meat on Javier's plate. The next day, when I climbed into my tree, my flags were gone.'

The room had darkened while he spoke.

‘Why was she like that?' I asked feebly.

He shook his head. ‘It's late.' He waved his hand at me. His fingernails were bitten back savagely. ‘You have to go now.'

‘You told me she was still alive.'

‘I said,' he stretched his lips to exaggerate each word, ‘she's not dead. And less dead now that you've come digging up her bones.'

‘I'm sorry—' I began.

‘It's like she's got her hands here,' he said, thrusting his towards his throat.

I gasped because at that moment I saw a line of colour like dried blood throb at his throat.

‘What?' he asked.

‘Nothing,' I jumped in.

‘You saw something.' He narrowed his eyes.

I shook my head. My hands were shaking. I'd seen blood around Juan's throat – I was hallucinating. My mouth was dry. I took a swig of the tequila as a tonic.

‘She was evil,' he said, stubbing out a cigarette and taking out his pouch to roll another. The stretch of pain back through the years seemed visible on Juan's face. He smoked silently for a minute or two as the light through the window leaked quietly from the sky. ‘But, you know, she birthed every baby in town.'

‘What?'

‘She kept her big black bag by the kitchen door ready and she used it often. There wasn't one baby born in that town that didn't have her to thank for its arrival.'

‘She was a midwife?'

‘And the only healer in the village. She was constantly growing and drying herbs, and mixing them up into different jars. She knew things.'

I couldn't say a word. A midwife, a healer, a drug-runner, a murderess. Who was this woman?

‘Evil. Pure evil,' Juan pronounced, as he stubbed the dead match head again and again into the leather of the armrest.