Cándido blushes, embarrassed, but Perla remains impassive. She’s known this is her fate for a long time and she does not fancy the young lawyer with the shabby coat. The Sotomayors haven’t fared much better than the Incláns, and though the possibility of greater fortune may lie ahead for him, it’s still many days away. Besides, like Perla, Cándido is imprisoned by the needs of his family. He has a mother and a sister to support.
There are few other eligible men in Puerco Ahogado, and even fewer who are not betrothed already to girls with better prospects or greater beauty. The ones in search of lucre dismiss Perla with a shrug. Why take on the maintenance of a rambling old house and the debts of the Incláns when there is no clear profit in the near future? Her father is not going to share the revenue that trickles in from renting rooms with a son-in-law.
The men who care more for looks or charm than a bank account also find little to recommend Perla. She’s not ugly, but her frayed old dresses hide her best features, and she conducts herself with such rigidity that any thoughts of romance are quickly dismissed.
She has been trained to be a great lady and, like an organism that has evolved with a singular purpose, cannot fathom an existence that deviates from her original progression. Her proud tilt of the head and her lofty bearing intimidate the less audacious suitors, while the lowlifes of the town simply mock Perla behind her back.
Besides, she’s grown old. Not unbearably, impossibly old, but old enough in a town in which girls of good families are married at twenty-one. Old enough that people click their tongues and think that if no one has come courting Perla Inclán, there must be a good reason for it.
Sometimes Perla envies the girls from the lower classes, girls who have no surname to protect, whose honor has been violated in half a dozen ways, who laugh loudly during the town’s festivities and flirt shamelessly with strangers while she stands at her window, scowling and waiting for her father to yell a command. Perla, see about your mother! Perla, what’s for dinner! Perla, Perla, Perla!
Though, she supposes, they suffer too, and their shamelessness is eventually punished. After all, the new maid, Rita—hired now that the guesthouse brings a bit more income and they must sweep and clean and air many rooms—is working with them because her brothers beat her bloody and tossed her out of the house when they found out she was seeing a coconut vendor who came to their town on market days. Poor Rita, the beating left her with a broken nose and missing teeth; everytime Perla’s father yells, she begins to tremble from head to toe. It probably reminds her of one of her brothers.
Yet Perla dreams sometimes that a handsome man is going to come to town and take her away from the dull task of feeding her father and combing his hair. She’ll never have to help her mother get dressed or listen to her delirious mutterings about her baby boy. She won’t have to stomach the simple dishes the cook makes for the household or share her table with the lowly workers who come to Puerco Ahogado for a season or two.
Sometimes she wishes to scream so loud they’ll have to drag her to a madhouse, and sometimes she simply wishes she had someone to talk to. The priest at church is no good—during confession he recommends that she pray the rosary—and her friends, even Sarita Novo, would not understand if she spoke with complete honesty. No, Sarita would be aghast; she would never look at Perla the same way again.
Therefore, Perla swallows all her bile, all her anger, and all her frustrations and goes about her daily chores. She buttons her mother’s dress, brushes her father’s suit because they don’t have a houseboy, argues with the guests when they’re late with their rent, and marks off another day on the calendar.
—
Twenty-six years old, then twenty-seven. Time passes. It’s a boiling hot day in Puerco Ahogado and to withstand the temperature Perla drags one of the wicker chairs by the fountain and fans herself under the shade of the lemon trees in the hopes of catching a bit of the faint breeze that doesn’t seem to reach the windows of the house.
Perla fans herself and in the stupor of the afternoon closes her eyes. She slips into a half dream about a faceless man who holds her in his arms, but the more she tries to concentrate, to make him vivid, to give him features—a mouth, eyes—the more he dissolves like a watercolor left in the rain.
She hears the clanking of the front gate and mutters under her breath.
“Perla,” a voice says, soft like the petal of a flower.
She snaps her eyes open and stares at her sister, who stands in front of her holding a suitcase in one hand. Hiding behind Encarnación’s skirts there is a girl with black curls.
11
The house had changed,but merely a tad. It had not been as monumental a change as they had imagined. Perla asked everyone to call her “Perla Inclán Arnao de Linares” and Fito was assigned to fulfill the role of Ulises’s manservant.
Grandfather Osorio had a manservant back in the day, Perla said. But Fito was ill-prepared for the role. He could water plants, drive a car, and fix leaky faucets, but he was not the sophisticated valet Perla dreamed of. She desired a servant who could make cocktails, mull claret, take off Ulises’s shoes and put them away as soon as he walked into the sitting room. Most of the time Ulises simply smiled at Perla’s ridiculous requests and waved Fito away, to the relief of the young man.
Ulises now sat by Perla’s side at the dinner table, he accompanied her to whatever lunchesor dinners or social functions she was invited to, and on occasion he received pocket money from his wife.
That everything should remain practically the same did not initially bother Ulises or Inés. They made bawdy jokes about Perla when they were alone, wasted time playing with the dog, shared useless tidbits of information—his favorite ice cream flavor was pistachio, hers strawberry. Yet the days gathered, one after the other, like a bouquet of flowers that wilts under the sudden onslaught of summer.
They began to fret, to drum their fingers nervously at the table and realize they were no closer to achieving their goal than before.
“Nothing works,” he said one day. “Nothing at all.”
“You need to try harder,” Inés insisted.
He paced back and forth inside his room while Inés busied herself changing his bedsheets.
“As if I haven’t been trying. She’s as hard as iron. I now have less money than I had when I arrived. She won’t budge.”
She brushed a strand of hair away from her face. “What if you falsified a power of attorney?”
“I don’t know how to falsify documents.”
“Whatcanyou do?” she asked, exasperated, balling the dirty sheets in a fury.
He took out a cigarette and lit it, then he tapped his foot. “You said she has money in that desk in her room.”