A Trip to the Stars (30 page)

The trio consisted of Deneb himself, playing his Atlantean flute, flanked by Labusi, who had fetched his cello, and of course Eboli, tinkling his keyboard on the highest octaves, eyes closed behind his glinting spectacles. It sounded as if the three of them must have rehearsed many times for just such an occasion as this. Yet Labusi told me later that, while he and Deneb had once in a while played together in the privacy of his rooms, neither had ever collaborated with Eboli. Their synthesis on such disparate instruments, its sinuous harmonies and rippling fugues, eventually configured itself into a waltz, and instinctively people wanted to dance to it.

Through the shifting silken shadows, I glimpsed Calzas dancing
with the wife of a visiting archaeologist from Kenya, and Sofiel the gardener moving stiffly with his wife, Kim-Yung, whom he towered over, though he was only five two, and Samax following a neat ellipse with a pretty French lawyer who had come for the weekend to negotiate the sale of some Corsican urns he wanted. I had never seen Samax dance before, and while not surprised by his nimbleness, I noted his pleasure and wondered why he didn’t dance more often.

Making a beeline for Desirée the moment her partner—the archaeologist—dropped her hand, I soon found myself holding her close while she instructed me in her throaty whisper in the fundamentals of the waltz step. The lights had been dimmed even further, and as Deneb and Labusi traded off solos, and then Eboli offered up a great waterfall of sound, we wheeled around the ballroom and I hoped they would never stop playing. It was the closest I had ever been to her, feeling her body up against mine, her breasts, hips, and shoulders, her arms wrapped around my back and her long fingers resting lightly on my spine. We were the same height at that time, so I looked directly, frankly, into her dark faraway eyes while inhaling the fragrance of her jet hair. The most exquisite moment for me, though, came just before she laid her cheek against my shoulder, when I felt her breath, warm against my own cheek as I turned her slowly on the black marble dance floor. The piece of music Zaren Eboli was playing on the piano was one I would never forget, and when I inquired afterward he told me it was called “Stella by Starlight.”

For several weeks I had been dreaming of Alma, and her image in my dreams often conflated with the image of Desirée. Near the end of each dream, in a room with a domed ceiling, Alma glided up alongside me before a full-length mirror, but it was Desirée’s reflection that stared back at me. Alma still looked as she did the last time I saw her, wearing a long black coat, and it wasn’t difficult to figure out that the domed ceiling in my dreams was the planetarium of my memory; Desirée meanwhile appeared in my dream exactly as she did at that moment, in a long black dress with her hair swept back. But as we glided along the marble dance floor, my dream and my memory seemed to merge: the woman in my arms was as much Alma as she was Desirée. It had struck me long before that Desirée and Alma were the same age. On that night in October, 1971, Desirée was twenty-six years old, and wherever she was, Alma was the same. I knew, too, that
it was not just mirror images, or planetariums and ballroom ceilings, that were merging, but that my sexual longing for Desirée was mingled with my yearning, which had intensified over the years, to see Alma again, to hold her close as she had held me on that last night we spent together at my grandmother’s house; if not to initiate intimacy, I wanted at least to effect closure where instead there had always been something like a severed wire crackling in the background of my life.

My arms around Desirée in the near darkness, the desert stars twinkling in the distance, she put her lips to my ear and whispered, “Enzo, I need you to do me a favor. Will you come to my rooms?”

My heart was beating fast against my rib cage.

“It concerns my cousin Dalia,” she went on, “who’s visiting for the next two weeks.”

I was surprised. “Your cousin? I didn’t know that you had a cousin visiting.”

“A very distant cousin. She just arrived this morning.”

“Is she here?” I said, looking around.

“No, she doesn’t care for parties. But I think you’ll like her.”

The waltz was fading away and one by one the musicians fell silent, Labusi first, then Deneb. Only Eboli played on, slower and slower, for about a minute, as the lights came up and Desirée took my hand and led me to the door. We stepped into the cool silence of the lobby, the thick glass door closing behind us with a hush.

Smiling faintly, she squeezed my hand. “You’ve never been to my rooms, have you?”

We both knew I hadn’t. Stepping off the elevator on the ninth floor, Desirée led me to her door, and as she unlocked it, said, “I want you to take something to Dalia for me. It’s a map and she’ll need you to identify some points on it for her. I know you’re good with maps.”

“A map of what?”

“Oh, a piece of the desert.”

I followed her across a bare white foyer, through another, leather-padded door, into her living room. It was pitch-black, silent except for our breathing. Desirée switched on a pair of lamps and any other questions I had for her—and there were a few—evaporated at that instant.

The large room was sparsely furnished, but the furniture itself was plush: a long white sofa flanked by black lamps and a pink marble coffee table inlaid with topazes cut in the shape of suns. The thick, soft rug was also white. The room was centered by a gleaming baby grand, which surprised me because I had never heard Desirée play the piano downstairs. But what surprised me even more was the room’s truly central, and overpowering, element: not the piano or the furniture, but the dozens of photographs that adorned the place.

The photographs had two things in common: they were all 8×10, black-and-white, glassed within identical black lacquer frames, and they were all of men. Most were posed head shots, some were full-length portraits, and a few were blowups of snapshots: a young man in a train station with a suitcase, another sitting on a wooden terrace gazing at the sea, another smiling with a towel around his neck. The photographs were hung on three of the walls, covering about half the available space. The fourth wall was covered with taut silk with an oval mirror at the center.

My mouth must have been open, because Desirée didn’t wait to hear my obvious question.

“These are friends of mine,” she said simply, brushing the hair back off her cheek.

“Oh.”

“Excuse me a moment, I’ll get the map,” she said, and disappeared into the bedroom.

I studied as many of the photographs as I could. Could these all be her lovers? The youngest looked about twenty, the oldest no more than forty. They were all good-looking, but were not of any one type. Some looked athletic and outdoorsy, others bookish and brooding. It was clear to me from their style and perspective that all of the photographs had been taken by the same photographer, and that was Desirée. And they had been shot in many different locales: in some, there were bits of furniture and wall hangings in the background; in others, beaches, forests, and mountain lakes were visible through windows or doorways. In the lower right-hand corner of each photograph a date was inscribed in white ink. Just the year, in tiny numerals. I ascertained that the earliest year was 1962, when Desirée would have been seventeen.

As she returned from the bedroom, I saw a desk in there on which her typewriter was perched. Beside it was a stack of those yellow pages, maybe two feet high. More than ever now, I wondered what it was she was writing.

“Sorry I took so long,” she said.

She had changed into black pants, lizard boots, and a leather jacket. She had changed her earrings, too, from teardrop pearls to silver rings. In her left hand she carried a handbag and a set of keys, in her right a rolled-up sheet of thick paper.

“Going out?” I said, disappointed that my visit was to be so short.

“After one last turn at the party,” she replied. “Here’s the map. Dalia is in Room 512 and she’s expecting you.”

“Desirée, I didn’t know you played the piano.”

“I only play when I’m alone.”

“You’ve never played for Uncle Junius?”

She shook her head.

“Or for your friends?” I said, indicating the photographs.

“Not even for them.”

When I got off the elevator on the fifth floor, she held the door and said, “See you at breakfast.”

“I won’t be having breakfast with Uncle Junius. I’m flying to Acoma with Calzas at dawn.”

“Ah. Then I’ll catch you after dinner.” She waved. “And by the way, you’re a wonderful dancer.”

Room 512 was at the end of the corridor. I heard flute music from within, and I had to knock twice before the door was thrown open onto a room bathed in red light. It was like looking into a photographic dark room, or a furnace, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust.

“You must be Enzo,” the girl before me said. “Come in.” She had a strong Spanish accent.

She was tall and fair and very pale, as I could see even in that light. And very pretty. She had wide slanting eyes, a small nose with flaring nostrils, and thinly curving lips. Her platinum-blond hair, pulled back off her broad forehead, was long and curly, and she had thick eyelashes and pencil-thin eyebrows. Her long fingernails were painted bloodred. She wore a sleeveless shift of white silk and a pair of red silk
slippers. On her left shoulder she sported a tattoo of an iceberg among whitecaps radiating fire.

She saw my eyes were drawn to the tattoo. “Where I come from, the icebergs look like that, at sunrise and sunset.”

So I knew she didn’t come from Spain or Mexico—but where, then?

“I’m Dalia,” she said, rolling the
l
hard, just as she lisped her
s
’s. “I heard so many nice things about you.”

“Here’s the map Desirée said you wanted.”

“Oh yes. Thank you.” Without opening it, she tossed the map onto an end table stacked with old and battered books. “Like some tea?” she asked, arching one eyebrow. “It’s maté with hibiscus buds. Very stimulating.”

I didn’t need much more stimulation, I thought, watching her cross the room to a hot plate on the dresser. She snapped her small hips rhythmically from side to side, the white silk gently riding her buttocks with every step; from the back, at least, she seemed to be wearing nothing under the shift.

I had met all kinds of people in my nearly six years at the hotel, but never anyone like Dalia. Eighteen going on thirty, she seemed light-years older than me, though I considered myself someone who had been around a bit in my short life.

“Honey?” she called over her shoulder, drawing out the word on her tongue, so that for a moment I thought she was addressing me. Well aware of this, she laughed. “In your tea.”

“Sure.”

I had never been in that particular room before. Aside from the lighting—red bulbs in all the lamps, red candles burning on the desk and dresser—it was no different from the typical room Samax kept for the shorter term guests: a bed, divan, the dresser, some chairs, and an alcove with a well-stocked writing desk and shelves. For someone who had just arrived, Dalia seemed to have settled in rapidly: two of the shelves filled with more old books; a reel-to-reel tape recorder on the bedside table; discarded clothes draped over the chairs; a red attaché case filled with makeup spilled out on the dresser; and several pairs of shoes strewn over the divan. Bringing me my tea, she knocked the shoes to the floor with a deft sweep of her foot.

“Please, sit.”

The tea was also bloodred. “It’s delicious,” I said, sipping while the steam ran up my nose.

Dalia sat beside me, crossing her legs so that the shift hiked up well above her knee. Like everything else about her, her legs were long and streamlined. Her stomach was flat, and she had full, prominent breasts. She cradled her teacup delicately within her palms.

“So,” she said, “did Desirée tell you what I was doing?”

“No.” I was still trying to discern the color of her eyes. In that light, it was difficult to say if they were brown or blue.

“I am translating a lost book,” she went on, and the way she said “book,” it rhymed with
spook
. “That is, it was lost until very recently. Originally, it was written in Catalan, with some Latin thrown in, though the author was a Spanish speaker. Later he translated it into pure Spanish.”

“And you’re translating it into English.”

“Yes. What’s tricky is that he left a number of, how would you say it,
Catalanismos
—Catalanisms—in the text that I’m constantly untangling.” She paused. “I know it must sound confusing.”

“Not at all.” It sounded, I thought, like a perfectly appropriate project to undertake at the Hotel Canopus.

“The author was a Spanish missionary named Varcas, lapsed in his Catholicism. He stayed or traveled with other Spaniards, and he wrote in this mix of Catalan and Latin so they wouldn’t know his subject. If they did, he could have suffered terrible punishment.”

“He was a revolutionary?”

“Nothing like that.” She leaned closer to me, wetting her lips. “He was writing about vampiria—vampires—here in your Old West in the 1840s.”

My eyebrows must have gone up.

“Oh, there certainly were such creatures,” she went on. “Of that there can be no doubt. Let me read you something.” She hurried over to the desk and returned with a wad of pages. “I just finished this section. I’ve been working on it since I left Santiago.”

“Oh, is that where you’re from?” I interrupted her.

“I am a student at the University of Chile. With this project, I will receive my degree, and maybe even publication. Who knows?”

“And the icebergs?” I
was
good with maps, and I knew that Santiago was a landlocked city.

“What about them?”

“You said you have them in the place you come from.”

“That’s right,” she said. “I come from Tierra del Fuego. I was born on
Los Estrechos de Magellanes
—the Strait of Magellan. Do you know where that is?”

Of course. I had read about the Land of Fire, and the Strait, in Captain Cook’s
Journals
.

“I see you do. We have tremendous icebergs in the Strait,” she said, raising her arms over her head and joining her fingertips, “as tall as the mountains that overlook them. I grew up traveling with my father among the islands of the Strait: Gilbert, Dawson, Lennox, Nuñez, Navarino—they got their names from Spanish and English navigators. This music you hear I recorded on the Isla Cook. It’s a shaman who played on the winter solstice.” She took a deep breath. “Any more questions?”