To die like you, Horacio, of sound mind,
And just as in your stories, isn’t so terrible;
A timely thunderbolt and the festival is over . . .
Let them talk.
(. . .)
’Every hour wounds us’ so it goes,
’but the end is what kills us.’
A few minutes less . . . who can blame you?
Let them talk.
Fear rots far more, Horacio, than the death
That goes behind people’s backs.
You drank well, and then you smiled . . .
Let them talk.
(. . .)
“To Horacio Quiroga,” Alfonsina Storni

PART ONE

London

A Lunch Date at Drones

They had given him a table shoved into a corner by the staircase, shrouded in a profusion of greenery. When he leaned to the left, the branch of a kentia tree lightly caressed the nape of his neck as a motley assortment of aromas—
chile con carne,
gnocchi with four-cheese sauce, mandarin soufflé—wafted up the shaft of the spiral staircase. At least they had not condemned him to the arctic zone, the downstairs dining room, or, in other words, the shadowy underworld where the maître d’ normally sends pariahs.

Molinet leaned back a bit in his chair. He had arrived ten minutes early, as was his habit, and he allowed his eyes to wander about the restaurant in search of a familiar face. There wasn’t a single one. It had been years since he’d last lunched at Drones, and he was pleased at how little the place had changed. The same black-and-white-tiled floor, the same red chairs, even the maître d’ seemed familiar—an old waiter. The walls were the same as ever, which was just as well, since they were, after all, the main attraction at Drones. Years earlier, when David Niven, Jr., had taken over the restaurant, he had decided to decorate it with a rather curious collection of photographs. The photographs’ subjects looked like nothing more than a bunch of anonymous children, but the waiters were quick to explain that the youthful faces were actually those of actors, starlets, well-known beautiful people, and many of old Mr. Niven’s Hollywood colleagues and cronies. There were large photos, small photos, color photos, and black-and-white photos, and they all served as entertainment for the neophytes, who would either study them and try to guess who was who or else use them as conversation fillers when the chitchat waned. Molinet gracefully unfolded his napkin. He had never fallen prey to that temptation, not even with the dullest of companions. He considered himself a sterling conversationalist, and even when desperate, he never permitted himself to stop something so trite.

Now it was different, however, for he was alone, and so he decided to take a look at the photographs closest to him. He couldn’t identify a single person in them until, finally, he thought he could make out . . . was that Sophia Loren in her First Communion dress? Yes, that just might be her, a homely little girl whose lovely eyes were not quite able to distract the viewer’s attention from her rather disproportionate-size mouth.

Seven years. Seven long years away from this world,
thought Molinet. Too long, he thought, to have been so far removed from all this. It was a relief to see that all these worldly things had remained more or less the same—pleasures, after all, change very little. That was precisely what he admired about London: A man could really believe in a city where five, ten, even fifteen years could go by and the same restaurant would still be in fashion. This thought, however, was just a momentary digression, and Molinet immediately decided to abandon this line of thinking. The last few years had been a parenthesis, a black hole to which he did not wish to dedicate even five minutes of his luncheon, for he had returned to the land of the living—in fact, he had even organized a little excursion to celebrate his return, and right then his only concern was Fernanda and her imminent arrival. It was one-thirty on the dot and he was beginning to get hungry.

He realized that at least twenty years had gone by since he’d last heard from his niece. He had been quite surprised when she had called him. Could this possibly be Fernanda’s first trip to London, in all this time? Probably not, but it might very well be her first trip without her husband, which would explain why she had come to call upon her old uncle.

For certain women, he mused to himself, traveling alone always begins with a little flip through the date book: charter flight, budget hotel, and then a glance through the very last pages of the book, which is where the old addresses pile up. These old addresses—obsolete as they may be—are copied down year after year, from date book to date book, on the off chance they might be useful sometime. As on this occasion.

Molinet wondered if he would even be able to recognize his niece’s face, for she belonged to a scattered, foggy past that he generally referred to as “my relatives in Madrid”—family members he felt connected to by an affection that was, in all honesty, more abstract than real. But they nevertheless shared a bond, one that translated the occasional seasons greetings over Christmas and inspired them to write occasional letters that kept everyone abreast of only the most essential news, such as deaths, marriages, and the obligatory scandal.

Molinet signaled to the maître d’, who chose to look directly through him with that selective blindness so typical of restaurant employees. Finally, after a very long while, Molinet managed to catch the attention of a young waiter passing by as he performed a balancing act with a tray piled high with plates and spoons that clinked away against the china. At long last, he ordered a sherry.

“I’d soooooo love to see you,” Fernanda had said to him over the phone. His reply had been very cautious so as to avert the possibility that she might invite herself to stay with him.

“Darling, I would simply love it if you could stay with me at Tooting Bec, but things aren’t quite the way they were when Mama was alive,” Molinet had replied. “You see, I’m dreadfully far from the center of London, and in fact I’m going away on holiday. Morocco, if you can believe it, a little vacation.” He didn’t think it necessary to offer any more details: that he had spent seven long years taking care of his mother day and night, for example. That after she died he had spent a month and a half in a hellhole, a terribly expensive hellhole at that, called the Cedars of Lebanon Mental Hospital. That he now rented two miserable rooms in a neighborhood on the outskirts of town. That the last thing he wished to ponder was exactly how he was going to get his life on track, and that the very first thing he had done was reserve a hotel room in Morocco for two weeks. After that, God would provide for him. Why bother going into all of it? Surely his niece knew at least half of the story—the hospitalization, the depression . . . sordid tales do travel the fastest, after all.

“Don’t you worry about a thing,” Fernanda had said to him, adding that she was coming to London on business and had no intention of staying at his house, even though she would “be thrilled to see you even if it’s only to have lunch. You know, I would have come with Alvaro-husband, but at the last minute he didn’t come through, as always, and no . . . no, don’t worry about me, really, I’m perfectly happy at the hotel, it’s an adorable little place, right in the center and everything . . .”

And so they had agreed to see each other on Friday. Fernanda would be through with her professional appointments by around twelve-thirty, and she could take the Tube to be at Pont Street at about one, one-thirty.

“Yes, yes, it would be really grand if we could meet straight at the restaurant. I’m here for the Ideal Home Exhibition, you can’t imagine how boring it is—for the past two days I’ve talked about nothing but casserole dishes. But, well, what’s the use complaining? This is what has become of my life ever since I decided to become a domestic worker . . .”

Molinet hadn’t had the easiest time understanding some of Fernanda’s ironic turns of phrase. His visits to Spain were very infrequent. It had been years since he’d last been there, and his childhood summer vacations in San Sebastián, at the home of his maternal relatives, were vague memories. Also, he considered himself neither Spanish, like his mother, nor Uruguayan, like his father, who was also from no place in particular, having lived here, there, and everywhere. For this reason Molinet spoke Spanish with the ambivalence that comes from feeling no particular claim to any one nationality; he was the kind of person who had learned so many different languages that he peppered his speech with words and expressions from all of them, stealing and adapting them to fit his own, very idiosyncratic kind of Esperanto. Rootless people such as he, people who have learned to speak in the family home and not out in the street, at work, or in school, end up speaking in the most outmoded fashion, using expressions that have long since become obsolete, and are always ignorant of newer, more contemporary terms.

Even so, after his telephone conversation with Fernanda, it hadn’t been too terribly hard to figure out that his niece belonged (as did he) to that illustrious social class known as the New Poor. From what little she had said, he was able to deduce that she had been forced to supplement a meager household budget (“Alvaro-husband is a landscape architect, so you can just imagine how this little recession is treating us”) with the help of a personal catering business.

“To put it bluntly, darling, I am what you might call a high-class maid,” she had explained to him. “I’ll do anything from a cocktail party for two hundred people to some rich old lady’s afternoon tea party, with watercress sandwiches and mango infusions. That pretty much sums things up for us right now.”

By the time the waiter finally brought him his sherry, Molinet was already thinking about other things. It was fifteen minutes past the hour they had agreed to meet, and though he was more than accustomed to female tardiness, he nevertheless had the limited patience of a man who was not terrifically charmed by the opposite sex. After another sip of his Dry Sack he patted about the inside pocket of his jacket, to make sure that the plane ticket he had just picked up was still there. Yes, giving himself that little gift had been a truly marvelous idea. “Relaxation,” the advertisement had proclaimed, drawing him in like a spider weaving a web: “Relaxation, silence, and nothing but pure luxuriant bliss.” Truth to be told, it was a vacation that was far beyond his financial means, but two weeks in Morocco—at L’Hirondelle d’Or, a magnificent hotel according to
Tatler
magazine—couldn’t possibly make him any more bankrupt than he already was. Such an extravagant Eden seemed to be the perfect place to visit after seven long years of (somewhat) voluntary captivity.

All of a sudden, this last thought reminded him that he should not drink another drop of alcohol if he didn’t want to disobey the recommendations—or orders, depending on how you looked at it—of his shrink. This was how he referred to Dr. Pertini, a psychiatrist who had studied at the University of Chicago and who also happened to be a somewhat rootless Latin American. Dr. Pertini insisted that Molinet call him his “therapist,” but Molinet figured that if Woody Allen (and every other rich New Yorker, for that matter) could call his therapist a shrink, so could he.

As Molinet took a long sip of sherry, he looked through the goblet and the golden-colored liquid in it and his eyes were met by the vision of his niece Fernanda. From the very first moment he knew it was her. In reality, he realized this not because they shared any kind of family resemblance but because of the clothing she wore.

During the long, dark years of tending to his mother (and also during the last month and a half, as the occupant of a very tranquil room at the Cedars of Lebanon Mental Hospital), Rafael Molinet Rojas had developed a special talent for guessing the nationality of certain people based on the way they dressed. It was all in the details—things that would be missed by the casual observer but highly revealing to someone like him, who had so many hours to kill in a day. During his stay at the mental hospital he had become quite adept at examining the many photograph-laden magazines he regularly purchased—
Paris Match
and
¡Hola!
primarily,
Tatler
and
Der Spiegel
only when a copy somehow found its way into his hands. This was how Molinet had honed his very peculiar talent for recognizing people—and not just famous people. For Molinet, star-watching was a pastime for doormen and chambermaids. No, no. His particular gift was an uncanny ability to identify the origins of the incidental characters who appeared in those gossip-magazine photographs—the person standing behind Luciano Benetton at a regatta, for example, or some random person laughing away next to Arnold Schwarzenegger at a hotel in Gstaad. Over here, for example, an English-born Greek shipping tycoon; over there, a third-rate actress from Texas trying to rub shoulders with the rich and famous; and just a bit further down, a Milanese financier. Very rarely did he make a mistake.

This talent was precisely what helped Molinet recognize his niece at first glance, and he stood up to greet her like a father welcoming home his prodigal son.

“Fernanda darling, it’s you . . . I’m here, right over here. My, how lovely it is to see you!”

On this typically drizzly October day Fernanda had dressed up like a real English lady, complete with gabardine raincoat and cashmere scarf draped rakishly across one shoulder—only her bulky Loewe purse, misshapen from overuse, gave her away as unmistakably Spanish. Of course she would never have guessed how her Uncle Rafael had managed to pull off that bit of extemporaneous long-lost-relative identification.

How Would You Like to Hear the Story of a Murderess?

Molinet and Fernanda tacitly decided to dedicate the appetizer period of their lunch to a discussion of family members. Old relatives. Dead people. Children. And in the final fifteen minutes, once all blood relations were exhausted, Fernanda did her best to stretch, as far as she possibly could, the topic of casserole dishes, thermal blenders, and other startling innovations she had just learned of during her visit to the Ideal Home Exhibition.

Good girl,
he thought, duly noting her efforts to be sociable. Even so, he was not too concerned about livening up the conversation, simply because he was not the kind of person who felt the need to maintain constant small talk. And anyway, a perfunctory conversation had its advantages: He could let his mind wander off, do a bit of idle speculation, concentrate on other things. On her, for example.

The first thing that occurred to him was that Fernanda most definitely was something of a health nut. That much was obvious from the food she had ordered: lots of herbs, sprouts, and watercress, not to mention the collection of pills that she very quickly arranged in a little line on the tablecloth. But then again, who knew? Nearly everyone had become some kind of health-food addict these days. In anticipation of more significant hints, Molinet decided to review her external appearance, which was much easier to classify.

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