“I don’t think you like work at all.”
“Are you going to give me a sermon about the dangers of easy living? That’s hypocritical, coming from a girl who is willing to rob her aunt blind.”
“I have no choice, I told you. I’ll never have the money to get out of here if I don’t—”
“You could leave without a peso and beg, and that would be more honorable, no? But it would be incredibly foolish and you’re no fool. Neither am I.”
She stiffened and was silent, while he threw her an exasperated look. How dare she judge him? What did she know about anything? This provincial nothing of a girl.
“And yes, I want to taste something different. That’s precisely why I’m here. I want a real score, and with the money I make, I want to buy myself a real life,” he said. “Same as you, a fucking real life, which is damn expensive. More than you can imagine. Once I have that, I’ll never do this shit again.”
He was speaking too much, too openly. He didn’t even understand why. But it had been ages since he’d had someone to talk to. His confidant had been his father, and he was dead. He had no friends, couldn’t depend on crooks like Moisés. Lovers, when he took them, were brief, nameless affairs.
Trust no one,his father had warned him. The mantra had served him well so far.
“We should get back to business,” he said, since that was the whole point of their secret meeting. “It sounds like what your aunt wants is passion, something you’d find in pictures, isn’t that right?”
“I suppose so.”
“I can fake it. But I want to know more about her. Tell me her phobias, her favorite books, anything that comes to mind.”
The girl spoke, she rattled off facts. A half hour passed, and he considered it prudent to bid her good night. As she was about to leave the room he was struck with a question.
“How did your mother die?” he asked.
“An accident,” Inés said, quickly and stiffly, but she did not walk out, both hesitant and curious as she stood in the moonlight and looked up at him. “What about your father?”
“An illness.”
But he hadn’t just been ill. He’d been terribly sick, slowly wasting away, until the strong, clever man that Ulises had admired so much was nothing but a skeleton who could barely slur a few words.
Ulises had used the cash they had left to pay for a good casket, a great wreath of white flowers, and the extravagance of a perpetual plot in the Panteón Francés. He didn’t have money to waste, but he couldn’t bear the idea of his father’s corpse being hauled out after a few years, his body disturbed, his bones mixed with the bones of a stranger.
His father wanted to end his days in the Panteón Francés and Ulises used all his money and wheedling and several bribes to obtain a precious lot and pay the priest from the nearby Convento de los Carmelitas Descalzos to say a prayer for his father’s soul.
After the funeral, he dragged himself to a cantina and drank and wept until he vomited and his eyes were dry.
I’m an orphan,he thought afterward. Which was a funny thought tohave at his age—he’d been twenty-six when his father died—and yet he supposed it was true. He was utterly alone.
—
He wished he had more than the information that Inés had given him, but he supposed it was a start. He realized now the mistakes he’d made. Like Inés had said, he’d been too much like Cándido, limpid and lukewarm. If Perla wanted a roaring cauldron of passion, he could give her that. She wanted moody and mysterious and intense? Fine. All in a day’s work.
Two more weeks. A tight deadline, but one that could be achieved.
He went looking for Perla and found her in the office. She tucked papers aside and stood to greet him.
“Good morning, Mr. Linares,” she said, with a crisp formality.
“Good morning to you too. I need a minute of your time,” he said.
“What is it?”
“I’m trying to determine the answer to a baffling question. Why am I here? You wrote to me and invited me to spend a few days at your guesthouse, so that we might get to know each other, but we never speak alone, we do not spend time together. Perhaps you find me annoying, or unsuitable, or flawed in a terrible way. Yet I would appreciate the decency to tell me so to my face.”
She seemed surprised by his tone of voice, which was insolent and sharp. He’d never spoken to her like this; probably few people had. He recognized her kind. She belonged to the old families that had fallen on leaner times, yet they still clung to the power their names once wielded, and the people in small towns tended to remember their might and history and bow their heads out of habit.
“I’m not used to having rude demands on my attention or my time,” she said.
