“We don’t.”
“You could buy one.”
“What a waste, when we can send Fito or Rita to fetch ice.”
“Refrigerators come in handy.”
“I bet you want an electric coffee maker, like Inés asked for last summer. She saw it in a magazine. That is what a maid is for. To make you a good cup of coffee.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right,” she muttered.
She shifted her gaze from her father’s painting to the blue dress, which had been pressed and hung from a hook that dangled from the top of the massive double-door wardrobe. It looked almost like a victory flag. A beautiful, pure shade of blue. The skies of Puerco Ahogado looked like that when the rain didn’t mar the view.
She’d wear it with the pearl necklace and pearl earrings and her whiteshoes with the large buckles. Her father had always said bright colors were for young girls. A spinster like Perla had to stick to browns and beiges when she wasn’t in mourning. But not anymore.
“What happened to the boy?” Ulises asked.
“What boy?”
“Salvador.”
“Why do you care?” she asked, eyes narrowing.
Ulises and Inés were not particularly chummy, yet something about the way they talked to each other at times, a furtive gesture here and there that she’d detected, annoyed her. Like that day when her husband kept looking in Inés’s direction, or an occasion not long ago when she’d observed them having an animated discussion as the girl finished setting the sheets out to dry. She hadn’t heard a word they said, yet the sight of them talking gave her pause.
“I’d never heard of this Salvador, that’s all,” Ulises said with a shrug. “I realize Inés doesn’t have your deportment and good manners, but I thought she’d be a bit wiser.”
She perked up at his words, for it was true, her niece lacked poise and refinement. “So did I, and yet what can one do? I blame my sister for her lax ways when Inés was small. Anyway, I don’t know what happened to Salvador. He went away,” she said.
Though she did know. But she didn’t want to remember her niece’s terrible accusations, the awful fight they’d had that day, her father’s furious eyes. And still she’d kept the girl in the house. Perla hadn’t kicked her out, although she ought to have. What had Perla earned in exchange for her magnanimousness? Nothing but scowls and bitterness from her wayward niece.
“She was always a terror, Inés. When she was a child, she didn’t talk. She was like a mute, not a word from her. Then when she did talk, I often wished she’d go quiet again. I fantasized I could sew her lips shut with black thread, and she wouldn’t say another word.”
She realized she’d spoken out loud. Her husband looked at hercuriously. Perla ran a hand through her hair. She felt rattled, out of sorts, almost feverish. It was the excitement of the festival.
The dog was barking again. Perla rubbed her hand against her temple and turned to her husband. “Will you tell them to quiet that mutt down? How is anyone supposed to rest when it’s making a racket?”
“I’ll go see about it,” he said.
He left and she fanned herself and looked at her father’s portrait. At last, unable to stay in the wicker chair contemplating the old painting, she stood up and walked toward the hallway. Her body felt leaden, heavy from the alcohol she’d imbibed.
She reached the top of the stairs, and she looked below and saw Inés. She was carrying a bundle of sheets in her arms, and she chanced to look up at Perla.
Inés barely glanced at her, busy heading in the direction of the garden, but the look terrified Perla. She felt a choking fear.
Inés did not resemble Encarnación. Except in the eyes. Those dark eyes that made her think of her sister.
Perla had meant for this to be a joyous day. A day of new beginnings, of life, but death seemed to gnaw at her happiness. She went back to her room and threw herself back into the wicker chair, where she waited for her husband to return.
—
Perla’s mother dies a long, agonizing death. The doctor walks in and out of the house each day, takes the woman’s pulse, utters inanities while she lies delirious, clinging to life. At last, her mother expires, and Perla makes sure she is buried in a beautiful black dress, with her rosary between her hands.
She takes a steady lover the summer her mother dies. Plutarco is a salesman who stays at the guesthouse every few months. At first, she sleeps with him out of terror. The terror of the stench of death hugging the walls, raking her skin. She’s spent so much time in a sickroom,tending to a frail madwoman, and she fears the life has leached out of her body while she was sitting at her mother’s bedside.
She also fears the noises of the house. Her father’s loud commands, the tapping of his cane against the floor. Her niece jumps rope and sings a song, and it’s like nails on a chalkboard, it gives her migraines. Now that the child has regained the capacity for speech, she seems intent on making as much noise as possible as she rushes up and down the stairs, stumbles through the gardens, and laughs in the kitchen with the servants.