The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman (16 page)

Berta burst out crying.

“That too, what a mess. I swear to you, Gaby, I've been careful, I've never spent more than the magazine can handle. You know yourself the sacrifices we've all made to keep the business going. We haven't allowed ourselves a single luxury, we've been honest, we've tried so hard. And, all the same, it turns out we've done everything wrong. It's horrible. Mr. Craftsman spoke to me about debts, ruin, failure in every sense. He says no one reads us, we've got no credibility, no name for ourselves, no prestige. That
we're a stain on the Craftsman & Co. brand and we're hemorrhaging money.”

Gaby went to get the tissues. The box was white as well.

“I don't get it, Gaby,” Berta confessed. “It doesn't make any sense.”

“Well, if your conscience is clear, that's the main thing. You'll see it's not such a big deal. It might just be a question of tightening our belts on certain expenses, asking Craftsman to delay his decision, and putting our thinking caps on. I can do unpaid overtime, if you like.”

“Thank you, sweetie, you're a gem,” Berta managed to say through her tears. “The awful thing is I didn't come to talk to you about work. It's something even worse.”

Gaby was taken aback. Her boss didn't usually share her personal problems with her. Their relationship was more like that between a niece and a favorite aunt who never forgets to say happy birthday or send a Christmas present. Berta was a protective, maternal person whom you could talk to about your problems but would never tell anyone about hers.

“Has something happened to Asunción?” Gaby worried, because she knew how close the two women were. If Berta had a personal problem, she would have gone to her best friend first.

“No. Asunción is fine, the poor thing, but I can't ruin her day with this. It's about María.”

“María?”

Berta took a large gulp of her wine to steel herself. Then she launched into the story of how she had caught María in the arms of another man four months ago, on Three Kings morning, to be exact, and how María had later justified her infidelity by saying that she felt trapped in a mundane, unhappy marriage.

“But she promised she would end the affair soon,” Berta said, screwing her face up. “She swore that the man meant nothing, emotionally speaking, it was only a bit of fun that would last a few days, maybe a month, but afterward she'd go back to her normal life with Bernabé and the kids, just like the character from
The Bridges of Madison County
, those were her words, as if her life was a film.”

Gaby said nothing. She squeezed Berta's arm. Sometimes it's better just to listen.

“And today I saw her with the same man again. Four bloody months have gone by, Gaby, and she's still with him.”

“Do you know who he is?”

How strange, thought Berta. No, she didn't know who he was. She had never actually seen his face and it had never occurred to her to ask María his name. She had simply believed what the adulteress said: He's no one, he doesn't have a name, he doesn't have an identity; he's a brief fling, not a real person.

“No.”

“Are you going to talk to her again?”

“Why? So she can lie to me again and tell me I'm seeing things? That what I saw isn't what it looks like and her marriage is back on track?”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Well, nothing, love, what can we do . . .”

The two of them drank in silence. Women, unlike men, are capable of talking about a problem for hours without trying to find a solution. Not planning the next move, merely talking until their mouths go dry, and their tears stop, and their eyes sting, and the time comes to go home. But they leave with only half the weight of the problem on their shoulders.

“Don't tell anyone,” Berta told Gaby when they said goodbye at the door. “Let's see what happens. Maybe we'll all be unemployed in a few days anyway, and this mess of María's won't be our business anymore.” It was then that Franklin arrived, carrying a bunch of orange tulips.

“Where's my princess?” they heard him shout up the stairwell.

CHAPTER 25

G
aby had never made a mistake in the six years that she had been designing pages for
Librarte
, but for a few days now she had been totally off her game. Exactly the same few days that had passed since her boss turned up at her house and told her about María's affair.

Asunción had noticed immediately that something had upset the normally levelheaded Gaby. Berta had to have words with Gaby several times, sometimes for silly mistakes like forgetting to send the bar code to the printers, rookie errors, and Asunción had caught her off guard, staring at María while she worked away obliviously. A couple of times, María had lifted her head to find Gaby staring at her. “What?” she had asked. “Nothing,” Gaby had replied.

On the other hand, Berta, who didn't usually take any notice of what went on outside her office door, now seemed to want to scrutinize everything. She left her door open and craned her neck over her computer, put on her glasses, and frowned. Sometimes she cleared her throat, as if trying to warn Gaby that she was watching her, and to tell her not to get distracted, to get back to her work if she didn't want to stay in at recess. She really did seem like a primary-school teacher.

Asunción watched Gaby, Gaby watched María, Berta watched all of them, and María watched no one. Some secret or other was hovering over the office, and Asunción, astute though she was, came to the wrong conclusion.

The following Monday, after spending the weekend feeling like her heart was melting, she arrived at the office with a small present wrapped in tissue paper.

“Congratulations, Gaby!” she said to her colleague in a shaky voice.

Berta tried to avert disaster by jumping up from her chair with the same agility a real primary-school teacher would have demonstrated had she felt the prick of a thumbtack on her bottom. But her effort was in vain. Gaby had taken the gift, was opening it, had already seen the soft ears of the teddy, the first bib, the first pacifier. She had already let it fall to the floor—if it had been porcelain it would have broken into a thousand pieces—and had already locked herself in the bathroom to cry. “But she wasn't even due yet,” said María, who had no idea what was going on, and the damage was already done. Asunción wanted to die of shame.

CHAPTER 26

A
ccording to Murphy's law, of all the women of childbearing age in the world, the one who most longs to be a mother will be the one who has the most trouble getting pregnant. If there had been one of those University of Wisconsin studies on the level of maternal desire, then Gaby would have come out on top, scoring much higher than the rest of the women interviewed, including a woman from Maryland who kidnapped a baby with the sole intention of raising it as her own and who would never repent for her actions even if she spent half her life in prison.

The worst thing was that there was no medical explanation for Gaby's infertility. Apparently, both she and Franklin were fully capable of conceiving numerous healthy babies. At least that's what the exhaustive medical tests to which they had both been subjected in recent years had shown.

Gaby knew the ceiling in her gynecologist's consulting room like the back of her hand. The doctor, with the good intention of distracting her patients during examinations, had decorated it with photos of the hundreds of babies she had helped bring into the world. As Gaby lay naked from the waist down with her legs akimbo, waiting anxiously for the results of
her latest test, she was scrutinized by Natalia with the chubby cheeks, the twins Rodrigo and Javier, Monica with the stick-up hair, little round Jorge with his fists clenched, Rosita with the big eyes, red-haired Pedrito, and fifty other pudgy little babies whom Gaby had seen so many times that she would instantly recognize them if she saw them on the street. But instead of calming her down, the portfolio of newborns made her feel incredibly, inexpressibly upset. Whenever she lay on the exam table, her heart raced, her muscles tensed, her eyes welled up with tears. She preferred to close her eyes and hum a song to distract herself.

“I can't believe you're still scared of examinations,” said the gynecologist, mistaking all those symptoms for fear of medical instruments.

“I don't mind external ultrasounds,” Gaby confessed, “but I can't stand the internal ones, Doctor, with that contraption that looks like curling irons.”

“Open your vagina.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Come now, Gaby, relax, there's no way we can do this if you don't relax.”

And in the end, she always reached the same conclusion: “Everything's fine. You've got a model uterus, sweetheart. Good enough to put on show, it's in such good shape.”

“Right. What a pity.”

“But it's lovely, really lovely,” said the gynecologist. “Your tubes aren't blocked, you don't have endometriosis, your periods are regular, your vaginal mucus—”

“Enough, enough.” Gaby usually cut her off when she couldn't bear to hear any more. “So why can't I get pregnant?”

•  •  •

Franklin Livingstone, on the other hand, would have been perfectly happy without children. For him, nothing compared to the happiness of being with Gaby, but he understood that his wife would never find peace until she had a baby in her arms. He had helped her to paint their future children's room and choose strollers, high chairs, pacifiers, and diapers from endless catalogs. He had sat next to her plenty of times while she waited for the negative results of the pregnancy tests she took when her period was more than twenty-four hours late, and had learned to console her with cups of hot chocolate and spoonfuls of ice cream. And he had managed to convince her that he was every bit as upset as she was, and reassure her that the baby would come in good time, like everyone said.

Out of love for Gaby, he had undergone hundreds of medical tests—some of them pretty unpleasant—and had learned to calculate the days in each cycle that Gaby was fertile, to rush home and love her completely, despite the fact that, sometimes, she forgot to love him back.