Part 9 (2/2)

For the first few years they would travel abroad together in connection with the wine business. Then he started saying that one of them should stay home and oversee, as he put it, ”domestic operations.” These trips were boring, anyway, he said. You stay here, and we'll go someplace in the spring. Paris, or New York. So he stopped taking her with him. From the rumors she began hearing of his travels, she surmised a wife would have been an enc.u.mbrance. She surmised. Listen to the coolness of that, the hard-won worldliness. When she first learned of his infidelities, she was shattered. But eventually she came to feel that as long as his dalliances were conducted while he was away, they had nothing to do with her. She even felt a dim sense of grat.i.tude at his discretion, seeing it as a mark of his respect and tenderness for her (and seeing at the same time the self-abas.e.m.e.nt inherent in such grat.i.tude).

I can stand this, she thought.

But then he fell for someone at home, one of the maids. Her personal maid, as it happened. Or maybe it didn't just happen. Maybe that was part of the attraction: trying to do it right under her nose, seeing just how close to her nose he could get.

So now the chase was happening right in front of her, scampering buffoonishly through her own bedroom as if she, herself, were not there at all. The maid wasn't interested, thank G.o.d. She was loyal to Rosina, and told her everything. The count wanted to sleep with her. He wanted it more than he'd ever wanted anything, that's what he'd said.

He must believe it too, Rosina thought. From the maid's account, it sounded as though he was becoming almost a bully about it, which was against his character, or at least against the character he generally presented to the world. That character, the man he wished and professed and most of the time managed to be-admirable, considerate, courtly-must be like a too-tight s.h.i.+rt that had finally ripped at the seams. Now he'd pulled it off and left it lying on the floor, for someone else to pick up.

He was growing careless. He was grabbing at the maid in pa.s.sageways, trying to pull her into corners. Starting out in a whisper, then raising his voice when she resisted. He bargained, threatened, pleaded. His eyes filled with tears. He bellowed. Everyone knew. He must have realized that Rosina knew too.

For several weeks she didn't leave her room. The household was swarming with hazards. Trysts, confrontations, conspiracies, exchanges of gossip. If she had gone out she would have seen things, heard things. She found it easier, though certainly not easy, to stay in her room, staring at the trees in the garden and at her own tired face in the mirror. She was sick of her own dignity, sick of pretending to be calm while the maid told her the latest incident, and sick with missing her husband-in the middle of all this, she missed him. It felt as though something were awry in him, some physical piece that had shaken loose, and if she could just get in there and tighten it up, he would be himself again, recognizable, and he would recognize her again too; he would shake his head and look at her and put his arms around her.

But she couldn't get anywhere near him. He addressed her formally, about estate and household business, on the rare occasions when they were alone together. He slept in a different part of the house. On nights when there were no dinner guests, she had a meal brought to her room on a tray, and he ate downstairs, watching soccer on TV.

Besides, what would she have said? ”Please”?

He would have looked back at her and said blankly, ”What?”

They were at an impa.s.se.

What broke it, bizarrely, was that he accused her of having a lover. What? What? She would have laughed, if she hadn't been so tired and heartsick and also afraid of him. He was furious-she'd never seen him so enraged. (He was projecting, the psychiatrist she began seeing several years later would say. He wanted someone else, so he a.s.sumed you did too.) The purported lover was a young man, a kid, really, who worked in the house. He did have a crush on Rosina. Once when he came to her room to change a lightbulb, he gave her a poem he'd written: a wistful charting of the symptoms of love. He was so sweet; he could barely look at her. He came back to regrout the tiles around the tub. The railing on her balcony needed attention. ”Am I in your way?” Rosina asked. ”No, no, stay,” he said. All right, she liked it; it was flattering and comforting to be wors.h.i.+pped a little bit. But that was as far as it went. ”He's a child,” she told her husband, when the startling accusation burst out of him.

”He's eighteen. He's a handyman. You're a married woman carrying on with the handyman.”

And you're a married man who wants to f.u.c.k the maid, she could have said.

Oh, this was sordid, humiliating. It went on for weeks. In the end he said, ”Rosina, please, I've been a complete jerk.” It was his use of her name that melted her; she couldn't remember the last time he'd said her name. Everything got cleaned up; everyone was bundled off. The handyman joined the army. The maid married her fiance, who also worked on the estate, and the two of them were given the capital sum they needed to start a beauty salon and day spa in Seville.

Rosina had her husband back-but she didn't, not really. They were very careful. They had gone from ”I love you” to ”You see? I love you.”

They went on a trip together to India. They came back and tried again to have a baby. He had a thing with one of the gardener's daughters, and possibly something with the graphic designer who did the labels for the wine. He told Rosina she was overreacting. ”None of this means anything.”

”I can't stand it,” she said. ”I may have to leave.”

”You shouldn't,” he said. ”But it's your choice.”

He was so patient. She, with her grievance, was so wearying. This is crazy, she thought, or else I'm crazy. She really wasn't sure anymore. He was calm and reasonable, and she was shaking, crying, listless, unable to eat or sleep. That's when she started seeing the shrink in Seville. He put her on an anti-depressant and told her she was sane.

3.

Elvira wasn't even interested in Johnny. He seduced her. He came to Burgos to scout for a movie. She was painting, working as a waitress. ”My G.o.d,” he said, when he came into the cafe with a couple of other guys for lunch. ”You're amazing. What a face. Would you like to be in the film I'm making?”

She'd rolled her eyes at him and asked him what he wanted to eat.

”Food?” he'd said. ”Who could think of food at such a moment?”

She laughed. She got suddenly that he was performing, making fun of this kind of scene. ”I know,” she said, writing on her pad. ”You'll have an order of ambrosia, with nectar of the G.o.ds to drink.”

”You got it, sweetie,” Johnny said.

After lunch, when his cronies were leaving, he stayed behind and asked if he could see her that evening. She said, No, thanks. He came back that evening anyway. She said, No, really, please. He asked if she'd meet him the next morning, before the cafe opened- ”Don't you have to work?” she said.

-so that he could see her paintings, in daylight.

”How do you know I paint?”

”I bribed a guy in the kitchen to tell me all about you.”

She laughed. He made her laugh. It was a sad time for her-her mother had died a couple of months before, of breast cancer, at fifty-two. Elvira had lived at home for the last four months of that, and then had wanted to get away, anywhere. A friend from art school who was working in Burgos said there was plenty of work and it was a great place to paint. Fine, Elvira said. She was feeling dazed, unhinged. Burgos was fine. She could tell already that this was a period of her life she'd look back at someday and not remember; the days didn't feel real, each one was erased as soon as it was over. She couldn't remember last week. Her work was going badly: diligent, correct charcoal studies of stonework. She told herself to have faith, this at least was work, maybe these studies would coalesce and inspire something else, or would turn out to mean something in themselves. But she knew they stank. She would keep them, she kept all her work, but she would never want to look at them again.

This man, this skinny dark weather-beaten intense manic guy in the cafe, was like a giant mosquito suddenly buzzing around her face. She kept trying to swat him, but he kept buzzing, and for some reason this made her laugh. So she went out with him-which felt like something else she was doing now but wouldn't remember later. He asked again about her paintings, and she said they were lousy.

”I know what that's like,” he said.

They were lying in bed at his hotel, smoking. With his free hand he was stroking her head, over and over; it was very soothing. ”Don't you like your movie?” she asked.

”I like my movie very much. It's going to be a wonderful movie. And we've definitely decided to shoot here. So: You want to come to Barcelona for a few months, while we do the preproduction stuff, or you just want to wait for me here?”

She laughed again.

”I'm serious,” he said.

”No you're not.”

”I am.”

”Well, I'm not.”

”Elvira,” he said, ”I'm falling in love with you.”

”Stop it.” She got up out of bed and started pulling on her clothes. ”I just don't have the patience for this right now. I don't think it's funny.”

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