Once again, the words flew out of his mouth. She scoffed in response. “Are you jealous? There’s no proper relationship between you and me. I’m not your sweetheart.”
“No, I don’t think you’d ever be anyone’s sweetheart,” he said darkly.
“You’re one to talk.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know,” she said, and her eyes narrowed. “If someone knows about flirting to get what he wants, it wouldn’t be me.”
“Go back to him, go.”
“Sure. By the way, I laid my aunt’s negligee on her bed this evening. She’ll be needing you tonight,” she said with a delicious brutality.
He glared at her as she walked away, then paced in circles before quickly storming back the way he’d come. Later, he glimpsed Bartolo and Inés standing in the courtyard chatting again. She tossed her head and smiled at the policeman.
He wanted to punch the young man in the face and contented himself with muttering a curse under his breath as he returned to the living room. They were beginning to hand out conchas and coffee. He was irritated, couldn’t swallow a morsel.
He did not understand why he was angry, or the reason for his outburst. As she said, there was no relationship between them. Yet he felt awfully hurt, awfully raw.
That night, as he knelt by the bed and serviced Perla, kissing and nipping and licking her cunt, he thought about the ridiculous, servile nature of his position. What had he obtained out of this whole marriage? Not one cent.
He closed his eyes, thought about Inés while he was fucking Perla. He cursed the girl in his mind because she was an awful, mean creature, like a wild animal you can’t hold in your arms. A wolf that will gnaw off a hand, or else a jewel-colored frog from distant swamps, the sort that poisons if you touch it.
Nevertheless, when he came on the sheets, pulling out quick, he thought of Inés, and her image lingered in his brain, like staring at a negative, all the shadows turned into light.
The next night at Lulú’s house they served sandwiches cut into triangles and Bartolo’s mother showed up, ostensibly to pay her respects and join the round of prayers, but everyone knew she was there to keep an eye on her son. Someone must have tattled and informed her that Bartolo and Inés had spent much of the previous evening chatting.
Inés was not considered a suitable prospect for the policeman, and his mother was there to ensure the girl maintained her distance from her boy.
Ulises smiled, pleased with this development, pleased with the small, silent humiliation heaped on the girl as Bartolo’s mother walked around the room with her hand on her son’s arm and he looked down at the floor, at the ceiling, anywhere but at Inés.
Yet as much as he was secretly amused by this social snub, thisreminder that Inés was a bastard child kept at her aunt’s house as an act of charity, he also felt a pang of sympathy, and if he could have, he would have taken her in his arms, held her tight.
Each night they went to Lulú’s house and he stood among the circle of smoking men, or wandered to his wife’s side, smiling weakly, or mouthed the words of a prayer, and all the while his eyes strayed toward the girl. He realized he was in deep trouble. Not trouble with the law, though he still feared discovery, even if the policeman was forgetting his crusade to launch a proper inquest and placidly seeming to consider that it was better if the death was wrapped up and forgotten.
No, the trouble, the fear that crept down his spine at nights while the mourners bent their heads and clasped their rosaries between their hands, was the fear that he was letting himself be caged.
He did not have the money he had hoped to obtain from this venture. He was not a prince fromThe Arabian Nights,not a man-about-town in good clothes and fancy shoes, but a useless idiot caught in a snare. He was, frankly, a prostitute who had been bought cheap.
He was starting to dream again about cities bombarded by the Luftflotten, that irrational fear of death assaulting him in his bed. There was of course that other fear, of ending up in the streets, just a dirty pauper begging for a coin.
I killed a man for nothing,he thought, and tried to convince himself it had not been for nothing, that there were still riches to be mined.
21
The last night of thenovenario, Bartolo approached her again. He’d been keeping his distance, but his mother wasn’t accompanying him that evening, and he ventured toward Inés, smiling. On the other side of the room stood Ulises, who pretended to ignore her, but she felt his eyes like daggers as soon as Bartolo spoke to her. She gently steered the young man outside.
“I do not believe Cándido had an accident,” he told her, leaning down close to her ear, as if someone might overhear them, though they were the only ones standing in the courtyard.
She looked not at him but at the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe resting in its niche. Panic bubbled up her throat, but she forced herself to keep silent and maintain a neutral face.
“I’m thinking…and here is where I need your help, Inés, to understand what happened,” he said, and he licked his lips. “I spoke to Lulú, and she said something that I can’t get out of my head. Apparently Cándido told Lulú that your aunt Perla needed to know a few important things about Ulises; he said her husband was a phony. He said it right before he passed away.”
“Did he?” she muttered, and rubbed her hands together, willing herself to remain in place, to keep looking at his face.
“Yes. And now I must ask you something delicate. Something that may offend your sensibilities. Did you ever think there was something between your aunt Perla and Cándido?”
She blinked, confused. “Perla and Cándido?”