The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (14 page)

“You know, I'm sorry I gave you a hard time this morning. About what you said.”

“What did I say?

“About Jorge?”

“Oh. Don't worry about it.”

“You still want to say hello?”

This morning and what I'd wanted then already felt a few lives removed.

“Sure, of course.”

Of course. Right after I found the stupid letter I'd thrown away, and figured out a way to find the one Hector had taken before anyone read it and guessed I was M.E.

“Just hello, right?” said Gustavo. “I mean, two tenants lost in one week. I figure you could use a friend.”

I nodded absently, unable to concentrate on what Gustavo was saying because an idea had sprung in my head: There
was
something Jorge, and only Jorge, and his godmother, could help me with, being the only man in the world who knew my secret, and the only person I knew who could take me where I could get the answers I now wanted (No! Needed.) and trust that they'd be true.

“You know, Gustavo? You're right. I
would
like to see Jorge again.”

“That's all I've been saying,” he said as if I'd just confessed to the crime he knew all along I'd committed. “All right, I'll see what I can do. Right now, I'm going to make myself something to eat. Knock if you need anything, okay?”

I nodded and watched him until after he'd waved good-bye, his usually smiling mouth sad and elongated, as if his chin weighed so much it were pulling everything down. I kept watching him even after he'd turned to fish his keys out of his pocket, thinking about this old building of mine and how it would have to hold, comfort, and protect the three heartbroken souls that had somehow found their way to it and were taking refuge, alone yet together, under its roof that night.

Chapter 16

A
fter Gustavo left, I closed the door behind me and leaned on it, once more turning off the lights, closing my eyes, and bracing myself for what lay ahead: a long night of thinking about all the death I hadn't seen coming in this lifetime.

Then..

“Don't be afraid.”

I heard it. Or maybe I just felt it. Imagined it?

Hector had said, “Don't be afraid,” or rather
“eh-freid.”

I stood, frozen in place. (Had it worked after all?)

“Hector?” I whispered.

But all was silent, and suddenly, I
was
afraid. Afraid of talking, moving, or even breathing.

God! I
told
you I was a horrible clairvoyant. When was the last time you heard of a clairvoyant scared of dead people? I slithered to the floor, listening for the longest time, until I gathered enough courage to get up and turn on the lights again. Had I really heard him?

“Hector? That you?” I whispered again, looking around me, afraid of what I might see and terrified of getting an answer. I was also afraid of not getting one because I knew me and I wouldn't be able to breathe normally until I knew exactly what had happened to him and why. I had to see or hear him again, even if just once more. I had to know that he had gone peacefully to wherever it was he had gone to, to fight the notion of never, to say good-bye.

This need was so strong, it sent me crashing into the foyer closet as if propelled, opening old suitcases and boxes, almost emptying the entire space of its contents before I found what I was looking for: my great-great-grandmother's journal of clairvoyance.

“I give up!” I said to it out loud, when I held it in my hands. “I give up, okay. Here I am, but I can't do it alone.” I continued in a high-pitched quivering voice, declaring my intention of “turning on” my clairvoyance again and hoping it was like riding a bike, or like sex, something you never really forgot how to do, despite my failed attempts so far.

The journal was just a tattered old book, with none of the dignified air of family heirlooms, no faint smell of long-ago mystery, no sign of the sweetness of the sea air that misted the island where it was written and where the roots of my roots still lay, sewn by nature and draped around the trunk of a jagüey tree like an old woman's shawl.

On the first page that wasn't torn, or too faded to read, “Do not be afraid” appeared like the echo of my ghost's thought in the form of my great-great-grandmother's dainty handwriting.

 

Angel in transition? Hector? I would've laughed out loud if I hadn't been so damn frightened. But I was. I was run-out-of-and-back-into-
apartamento-uno
-screaming afraid. Makinga-cross-with-my-two-index-fingers-and-walking-around-reci ting-the-Holy-Father-prayer-over-and-over-again afraid.

So. Clairvoyance
was
like riding a bike.

And I'd just remembered how I'd almost broken my every limb the last time I rode it.

How all it had ever left me was death. And now it was doing it again. Not that Hector could ever be as important to me as my mother, but another person close to me had died, and I hadn't had a clue.

I opened the journal again. “Use what you have at hand. Everything is a vehicle for messages if you decide it is.” But what did I have besides a dead ex-lover and the risk of being implicated in his death? I asked myself, looking around the room at my red corduroy armchair, my books, and my handmade collage of fashion photos on the wall, Coco Chanel's red lips appearing to approve of a wet Kate Moss, lifting herself up and out of a pool in a black-and-white polka dot dress, like a mermaid in black boots.

What did I have besides this old book I now held, within its pages the memories of my great-great-grandmother, writing in it so carefully, of my grandmother Ana Cecilia talking to the dead in her kitchen, of my mother always feeling like less because she couldn't see the future, and of myself, now possibly holding in my hands the answer to becoming who I was meant to be all along?

I stood up and headed for the armchair, still unsure that the book would be able to undo what years of neglect had done to my clairvoyance, but convinced that I had to try again if I was ever going to find out how Hector died and why.

Chapter 17

“H
e used to say my breath smelled of apples, you know,” Olivia said as she poured scalding hot water into two mismatched china teacups with the most stable and precise of pulses.

She was standing next to the coffee table where she'd set the cups, so that the sound the water made while falling with precision from so many inches above its target resembled a steaming, rushing waterfall that unnerved me.

I'd spent the last two days since Hector's death holed up in my apartment, reading and rereading my great-great-grandmother's journal, gathering the strength to come see Olivia, to put compassion before shame, and worry before fear. Compassion because I knew what it was like to lose the person your life revolved around. Shame that I didn't have the dignity and the good sense to stay away from her like a good mistress, instead coming to give her my condolences on the loss of the very man I'd been nibbling from, behind her back, for months. Afraid she'd found the letter and knew everything, and too worried about the possible consequences to let pass the chance to know if she had.

“Yes?” she'd answered, wearing black ballet flats and a gray shift, the curled tendrils and ringlets I'd mocked, gone, her hair now parted in the middle and held within a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She looked younger, despite the brown-gray raccoon circles around her eyes betraying her lack of sleep.

“Sorry to disturb you. I just wanted to give you my condolences. To tell you I'm sorry . . . for your loss. Please let me know if you need anything. If I can be of help,” I finished, checking with myself to see if I'd gotten through all the sentences I'd rehearsed before coming up.

“You're sorry.”

She knew.

“Of course,” I said, my heart beating violently.

She sighed as if relieved.

“You're the first person to come up. Won't you come in?”

She
didn't
know, I realized, following her inside the apartment.

When she excused herself to go boil some water for the tea, I started inspecting everything in the apartment. It was a little crowded and obviously furnished with things bought for a much bigger house, little tables and chairs discreetly tucked and blended into nooks and corners everywhere like the pieces of an ill-fitting wardrobe someone had refused to part with. But, even with the clutter, the original wooden floors that looked scuffed and cheap in every other apartment in the building gleamed.

“Linseed oil,” she said then, as if I'd asked her about them, coming back into the living room with the teacups and napkins, then bustling back to the kitchen.

I looked around. Hector's energy, his scent even, was so strong in that room, it was like a bomb's expansive wave hitting me again and again and again.

“This is his little museum,” she said, shuffling back in with spoons and a porcelain bowl filled with coarse brown sugar. “He sits on his chair, puts on his headsets, and shuts it all out,” she continued, as unaware that she was talking about him in the present tense as she had to be about how seeing his things was affecting me.

When she started to head back toward the kitchen for who knows what, I thought I was home free. I needed those few seconds to blink back the tears threatening to undo me in front of her. But then she turned around as if she'd forgotten something.

“Please sit, wherever you feel most comfortable,” she said, and I could almost feel the knowledge of my affair with her husband hit her when she saw my face.

Shit. I turned away, focusing my gaze on the walnut bookcase that ran the length and width of the wall, every book, DVD, and vinyl record organized by genre and author.

“Oh, don't worry,” she said. “They were installed so as not to damage the wall. The bookcases, I mean. They'll be easily removed.”

“Are you planning to move now . . . now that—?”

“I don't know. I don't know what I'll do. There's so much I have to decide now, finances to sort—”

“Oh, I didn't mean you had to move. It's just you said they'd be easily removed and . . .”

She just nodded and waved her hand, as if saying I needn't concern myself, that she understood what I meant.

As she served the tea, I noticed that where the living room, his “little museum,” was tidy with a designated place for everything, the kitchen I could view from the sofa was a mishmash of colors and overflowing pots, pans, and cooking utensils hanging from hooks and crowding counters and windowsills. The kind of kitchen I would've had if it weren't just me, cooking for myself mostly, with the occasional treat for Henry.

“So, Mariela, tell me. What are they saying?” she asked before taking a sip of tea.

“What do you mean?” I said, also taking a sip in order to hide my discomfort with the question.

She looked at me as if to say, “Really? You've come up here just to play that game?” and I thought that she was more like Hector than I could've ever guessed.

“This is great tea. Did you grow it yourself ?” I asked to change the subject, even though it really was delicious.

“No, I order it from Colombia. It's a mix of leaves from aromatic flowers. But let's not change the subject. The police were here. Everyone knows it. People talk, right? They gossip. Hector and I, we've lived here three, almost four years. I'm wondering what they think. If they care.”

“Well, of course. Hector was very friendly. He talked to, you know, to everybody about . . . about books. People were used to chatting with him, seeing him at the store. He had become part of the neighborhood in a way.” I rambled, unable to stop sounding as if I were eulogizing him.

“Unlike me,” she said. “I feel it, you know. You're all friends, you know each other, you visit. You talk.”

The thought occurred to me that if she wanted people to talk to her, it would help if she talked to them, said hello even, once in a while.

“Everyone's different. I don't always feel like talking to people either,” I said instead.

“You're being kind. But, tell me, is that why you . . . liked him?”

She knew, I thought again, putting down the cup from which I'd been about to venture taking another sip.

“Everyone liked him,” I responded cautiously, remembering how my mother always said,
“del agua mansa líbreme Dios
,
”
which means pretty much the same as “still waters run deep.”

She nodded again, then said, “Speaking of apples, did you know they can be poisonous?”

I didn't. And we weren't. Speaking of apples, that is.

“No. I didn't know,” I responded, resolving not to take another sip of anything until I had a better idea of where this conversation about apples was heading.

“Yes, well, they are. Or their seeds are. But then these days you never know. It seems like everything is poisonous, isn't it?”

No. Not everything.

“You can't even . . .
eat an apple,
” she said, raising her voice so suddenly and with such feeling that I recoiled in my seat.

“I'm so sorry,” she said when she saw my reaction. “I was just . . . I needed to tell you . . . there's something I need to . . . You know? It doesn't matter. I didn't mean to startle you. I'm just . . . out of sorts, nervous, a little . . . angry.”

“I understand.”

“I've been trying to be calm, to settle down, to collect myself, but . . .”

I wondered if I should explain that she had just done the opposite, basically screaming at me. About apples. But I decided against it because if losing the person you've shared your life with for decades doesn't shock you into acting like the very opposite of your usual self, what would?

“Sometimes I feel it makes me appear threatening, being so quiet. I want to be more talkative, but I don't always know how, and when I try, I end up scaring people. You seemed so tense, and I've made it worse. I'm sorry. I'm terrible at making friends.”

After dismissing my protests that it was fine, she proceeded to go on and on about tea, about being unpopular in school, about never really feeling at home in Coffee Park despite the progressive sensibility she shared, and that's when I realized it: She needed me. She was scared of being alone with herself, and she needed me, or someone, to be there. She was trying to be my friend because she didn't have any and desperately needed one.

Suddenly, all I wanted was to make her feel better because while all I'd lost was an obnoxious lover, she'd lost the man she loved, and with him, her entire life as she knew it. I decided then that she didn't know. She couldn't and still be sitting here, chatting it up with me.

I was suddenly sure I was reading her right, and the unfamiliar feeling made me notice how ever since the day Hector began pulling away from me, I'd again begun to have episodes of sight, or what felt like sight. Still, I reminded myself, the increased sensation of assurance could just mean that the meditation sessions with my great-great-grandma's journal in hand were beginning to have an effect, and not necessarily that what I saw or felt was accurate. She could still be a killer, albeit one who was trying to make me feel comfortable and welcome, even serving me her imported tea.

“My mother always lowered her voice when she was angry,” I said then, wondering where this quirky but sweet, chatty woman had been all these years.

“Right.” She smiled, pleased. “Anyway, anything can be poison. Did you know a potato can kill you? A potato!”

I froze again, wishing she'd stop talking about poison so I could finish figuring her out, seal my notion of her and what she did or didn't know.

“You know, I'd scare him with it sometimes. I'd get very quiet and ask him if he wanted me to prepare him something nice, like some mashed potatoes, then tell him about their poisonous properties after he'd begun to eat,” she continued, shaking her head a couple of times, as if she couldn't believe the silly things she'd done once. Then on the last shake, she left her face turned away from me, becoming so quiet, it took me a minute to realize she was crying.

“I'm going to leave now,” I said after a few minutes. “But if you need anything . . . you can call me,” I said, meaning it this time, relieved that she obviously didn't know and could cry over the death of her husband in peace, without having to deal with the conflict of simultaneously missing him and hating him for cheating on her. He must have thrown that stupid letter away like I had the other one, thank God.

But then her lips were trembling again.

“That night . . . he called me a
loca de mierda
. What does that mean anyway, to be shit crazy?”

I'd never wanted to know something less in my life, but I smiled comfortingly and said, “Well, who knows why men say things? And Hector wasn't one to be careful about words if it was going to get in the way of a clever phrase, was he?”

I realized my mistake, but it was too late. Olivia seemed taken aback for a second, but then peered at me, obviously recognizing the level of familiarity implied in what I'd just said, her own level of familiarity with me retreating accordingly, just when she'd been about to share something important with me, I was sure.

“They're performing the autopsy today. They think there's a possibility he was murdered. I think they think I murdered him.”

I just sat there, mentally kicking myself, unable to speak.

“Anyway,” she continued. “What was I saying again? Oh, yes. Potatoes. You can unwittingly kill someone with potatoes if, and only if, they've begun to turn green, and you give them enough of them.”

I wondered how many would be enough, beginning to believe she really was trying to tell me something.

“I think I should go,” I said again, standing now.

“Then again, so can betrayal.”

I sat back down.

I'd come to find out what she knew, hadn't I?

“Marriage is so . . . fragile,” she continued. “One moment you're wondering if it's all it will ever be, missing the little thrills of being a single woman, being so angry at him you think you could kill him with your own hands and, then, before you know it, he's gone. It's over.”

She closed her eyes, lips trembling again, and I held my breath, waiting for it, without knowing what “it” was.

“Do you understand what I'm saying? How we betray ourselves when we marry, putting up with . . .” She remained silent for a moment and then added, “Did you know I couldn't have children?”

“I didn't know,” I said. He'd never told me.

“That's how I got into naturopathy and macrobiotics. I come from a family of farmers, and we believe all solutions come from the earth, from plants, from life.”

“I didn't know,” I repeated.

“And did you know he never let me forget it? He made me feel it, my failure, every day for almost twenty-five years. He wouldn't adopt, but he acted like, he made me feel like he missed it, not having a child, like it was painful to him,” she said, looking very angry now. “So I let him be, you know, him. I betrayed
myself
trying to make it up to him. I let him turn it all into a big lie,” she said, looking straight at me. “You're so lucky, Mariela. You're free. Your life is yours.”

“Olivia, I really think I should go now.” I stood again.

It was the first time I'd called her by her name.

She nodded, sat there for a moment, then held up her finger as if to say “one moment” before walking off toward the bedroom saying, “The police told me not to go anywhere, not to discard anything until they finish the autopsy, but . . .”