“Possibly.”
“Now, Inés, how can I put it…if you were to discover anything of interest about this Mr. Linares, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“My aunt doesn’t like gossip, sir.”
“It’s not gossip. Think of it as a social service.”
“A social service that’ll get me a slap in the face if my aunt hears I’ve been blabbing to you. Then she’ll cut off my allowance, which is almost nothing already.”
“You greedy snake, what do you expect? Money?”
Inés shrugged. They’d reached the alleyway and the back door, and she pretended to look for the keys while Cándido tapped his foot.
“How much?”
“I don’t know, sir. My aunt gives me ten pesos a week,” she said as she turned the key in the lock and swung the door open. “If she cuts my allowance it’ll take a while to get it back. A month to be back in her good graces, maybe.”
“That’s an outrage.”
“Possibly. Good evening, sir.”
“Wait!”
Cándido grunted irritably, but he reached into his pockets and pulled out a bill, handing it to her.
“Have your money. You tell me everything you hear.”
“I will.”
She carefully folded the money and tucked it away. Then she retrieved her bags from Cándido’s grasp, dodged him before he could pinch her buttocks, and walked into the back patio, the door swinging closed behind her.
She smiled as she headed back toward the house. Her aunt didn’t give her ten pesos a week. She didn’t give her ten pesos a month, and this even though Inés helped with the washing, mended clothes, even made dresses for Aunt Perla. She doled out any money haphazardly, at whim, sometimes during festivities, although for Inés’s twenty-second birthday two months before the only present she received had been a greeting card.
It was one way Aunt Perla controlled her. If Inés had received a regular allowance, or if she’d been able to make a steady profit from her stitching and her sewing, she might have been able to save enough money to leave Puerco Ahogado, and her aunt had no intention of allowing her to do that.
She’d heard that in Mexico City a chauffeur could earn two hundred and fifty pesos a month, and a general maid could make a hundred. But that was Mexico City, where men bought jackets made of imported tweed and women owned mink coats.
She looked up at Mr. Linares’s window. His soiled suit jacket was lovely, made to order, not off the rack, and seemed to have been strategically chosen to complement his complexion. He didn’t really look like Tyrone Power. He reminded her of Arturo de Córdova, or of Errol Flynn. She’d seen him inThe Sea Hawk,that time she went with Salvador and Marisol and some others to the pictures.
That day, they rode the train to the city and caught a matinée, the motley group of six young people giggling and loudly chatting in the company of their chaperone. After the film was over, they took the tram to Villa del Mar, which had a large wooden dance hall. From one to four the wealthier young men and women of the area gathered there as the band played swing. But later in the evening, they played danzón.
When Salvador took off his jacket, sweat stained his shirt and he rolled up his shirtsleeves. She’d been unable to take her eyes off him as they danced.
As night approached, the chaperone thought it prudent to take their leave—before the women from the tortilla factories and the dockworkers made their appearance; before social classes mixed in unseemly ways; before Inés and the others danced too many dances to the sound of trumpets and trombones and clarinets—and they headed back to Puerco Ahogado.
And all the while, as they rode the train home, she looked at him, then looked away, and he looked at her and then looked away in turn. Shyly. But she hadn’t been shy when she’d slipped into his room later that night, and she didn’t blush when they tumbled into bed together.
Salvador had been gone for a long time now. He was off in Mexico City, and he’d been the one who’d told her a chauffeur could make two hundred and fifty pesos a month, which meant it was probably rubbish.
That man up there, that Mr. Linares, though, he probably made that and more. Whatever he did for a living. His suit jacket alone must have cost two hundred pesos, and his shoes were polished leather so fine you could see your reflection in them.
She cut a pink carnation from a flowerpot and drifted into the kitchen. After she stored her purchases away, Inés went back to her room and looked at the cutouts from magazines and newspapers she’d pinned to the walls. Pictures of movie stars in their beautiful gowns, looking over their shoulders, and shots of actors at premières. Here and there she’d also pinned a sketch of a dress or an ensemble she’d come up with. In a place of honor, above the tiny table she used as a vanity, there was a photograph of her mother, Encarnación.
She’d sewn fancy dresses, her mother, back when they lived in Puebla. Inés couldn’t remember the sights and sounds of the city, only the whirring of her sewing machine, the humming of songs as she stitched sequins onto gowns, the apartment where they lived together, whichsmelled of the mint her mother grew on the windowsill. Every week a man would stop by their house. Inés remembered being held up by this man, remembered his voice and his booming laughter, but she could not recall his face, though she had the impression she resembled him. This first phase of her life was like a watercolor, luminous and delicate.
Puerco Ahogado was like an oil painting. Her arrival at the house, her introduction to her grandparents and her aunt, the voices and faces of the lodgers at the guesthouse, these were clear and vivid, the colors vibrant and saturated.
There was one gap in her recollections: the spring her mother died. The days before and after her mother’s death were a blank. She did not even remember going to her funeral. It was as if someone had scraped off her memories with a palette knife. Though, sometimes, she dreamed of Encarnación’s face as she lay at the bottom of the stairs. It was Inés who had found her.