At one point the younger police officer tried to speak to her, but he was a combination of shy and bumbling that would not permit much conversation, and she looked at him with an amused face that did not preface a romance.
The poor sap is sweet on her, but can’t manage to string two words together,Ulises thought, and wistfully remembered the one girl he’d loved, a beauty who’d been his neighbor for a year when he was seventeen. Atthat age, he’d had pimples and had not understood the proper way to romance a woman. He’d bought her a few boxes of chocolates and a bouquet of flowers, but she’d taken up with a loutish young man and thereafter ignored Ulises.
Not that the relationship would have flourished even if she’d liked him more. Ulises’s father would not have allowed it. There was no money in love. But he had fantasized for a few months about leaving their life of minor scams and petty thefts to live an honest existence, married to his sweetheart. Since that time there had been scant opportunities to practice the art of love as proper society demanded: to follow a girl home and look up at her balcony until she came to the window and signaled her interest, to write letters with elaborate cursive handwriting and copy lines fromEl Correo del Amor—that manual full of useful phrases suitors utilized when their own wit failed them.
Inés handed the young policeman a glass of brandy and drifted to a different corner of the room.
Ulises listened to Manuela and Eduviges as they explained how they had once been some of the most eligible ladies in Orizaba, and how on the Sundays when they went to the bullfights with their parents gentlemen would stare at them from afar and tremble if they smiled. They were serenaded every week, with guitars and mandolins and on occasion even a marimba.
Ulises suspected this was an exaggeration, since the sisters resembled two skeletal birds of prey and even in their youth must have had the appearance of starving buzzards, but he let them chatter to avoid another conversation with Cándido.
He strained to keep his smile plastered on his face. He wondered if he could last a full three weeks in this place, and whether it was even worth the effort. He didn’t think Perla was the big score he’d dreamed of. He’d been hoping for someone with real money. But who had real money these days? Prices kept going up and up, inflation was sky-high. It was all the fault of the damn war and the fascist pigs.
The guests began to depart, until there was only Lulú, left half asleep in a chair, and Cándido.
The lawyer turned to Perla. “Could we go into the office and talk a little business tonight?” he asked.
“We still have guests,” Perla said. “I can’t simply walk out of the room.”
She looked at Ulises, but he sprang to his feet and smiled politely. “Don’t worry about me. I’m eager to slip into bed. I’m still tired from traveling on the train, it drains you.”
He bid Lulú, Cándido, and Perla good night—though Lulú, with her eyes closed, didn’t show signs of having heard him—and stepped out of the room, pretending he was headed upstairs. After calculating that sufficient time had passed, he retraced his steps and crept toward the door of the office, carefully opening it a crack so that he might listen with more ease to the conversation taking place inside.
“But really, Perla, a photographer, of all things. That’s the same as tying a sign around your neck that says, ‘I’m useless and broke.’ You’ve always been a sensible girl; I’ve told you this many times. But there is a certain kind of male specimen who is on the lookout for a vulnerable woman.”
“You think I’m a foolish girl, Cándido? That men can take advantage of me?”
“No, no, no. You’re not foolish. But you are a woman and naturally tenderhearted, and less aware of the kinds of rascals that populate the world.”
Perla laughed. “I took care of my father when he was ill. Do you think a dozen rascals and thieves didn’t come around here trying to steal what was ours? After his business failed, they swooped down like vultures, pecking at our bones. But I made sure we never lost the house and managed to protect us as best I could.”
“And you did well. Ninety thousand pesos in the bank. That’s a tidy nest egg. I myself have—”
“I know what you have: a sister who will not move out of your house.”
“Perla, must we speak of her?”
“If you’re going to doubt my common sense and my choice of friends, we are going to inevitably have to talk about Lulú, yes.”
“I’m not sure I’d call a ‘friend’ someone whom you’ve known through epistolary exercises.”
“He’s here so that I may know him better.”
Quietly Ulises tiptoed away and to his room, where he fell upon the bed with laughter bubbling from his lips. A tidy nest egg indeed! He’d thought maybe he’d have to sneak out of the house with nothing to show but a few pieces of crockery in his suitcase, and here was a real score. As of late, Ulises was lucky if he made more than two hundred and fifty pesos a month, and he wasn’t the only one in a tough spot. Salaries were frozen in many industries, courtesy of the war efforts and manufacturing support offered to their northern neighbor. Why, the minimum salary in Mexico City was two pesos and fifty centavos a day, which was not enough to maintain any reasonable life.
Of course, when his father was alive, they’d lived well. They rented nicely furnished houses, dressed in good suits, and drank expensive wine. Precarity existed, at times, but his old man always found a new angle, a new mark, and they survived.
His thoughts flew from his father to his mother. His father had involved him in confidence games since he was a child, but she’d never joined in these scams, preferring to remain a stoic wife who quietly told Ulises that he must try to be a good boy. How disappointed she would have been to see him at twenty-nine, not only still earning his living through tricks and lies but rolling downhill. At this point, he should have been ready to leave the field.
God, what if he ended up like Moisés? His youth and good looks shriveling away, scrambling to catch the eye of a desperate tourist who might give him the chance to steal a few dollars from her wallet. Or else, eternally writing letters to lonely widows and old maids.
Dear heart, had you ever loved before we met?He wasn’t even that great at writing letters; his father had been the poet. Ulises relied on his looks, inherited from his mother. Minus his bewitching, feline eyes—which Ulises also possessed—his old man had been plain, even ugly. But he’d had a great voice and a gift for half-truths and romance. Ulises’s sentences were trite, weaker in comparison.
He wasn’t made for this life, he simply wasn’t. Besides, he felt tired. He was fed up with the dinginess of his surroundings, the damn sleaze and the cheapness of it all. He liked to imagine himself with a new name—not that he hadn’t had any number of names already, but he’d come up with something else, something dreamed up for the purpose—living a life of comfort and peace. He’d be an upstanding citizen, a fervent churchgoer, a kind and benevolent father. Nobody would ever suspect what he’d been before.
Perla Inclán was his ticket into a beautiful, fresh existence. And to think he’d almost thought about leaving at the first chance; to think he mistook the dated décor and faded draperies for genteel poverty when there was still a fortune to be had between these walls.
He needed to get his hands on that money. That damn nosy man, Cándido, was going to be a roadblock, he knew it. As for the niece…trouble. That’s what he felt when he looked at her, trouble like a blinking neon sign.