What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(10)
I loved some of the books he chose, others sent me to sleep. I turned his slips of paper over and wrote down my thoughts. One of the books he chose was a slim pamphlet of poetry that didn’t make much sense to me: I dismissed it with a line borrowed from other poems he’d introduced me to: It may wele ryme but it accordith nought. He responded with a really long and angry letter—I think he must have been the author of those poems I didn’t think were good.
Isidoro wouldn’t come near me, even when I began to want him to. We’d spend nights reading together, on separate sides of a shelf, not speaking, listening to the books around us. According to Stendhal it takes about a year and a month to fall in love, all being well. Maybe we fell faster because all was not well with us: every day it got harder for me to keep you to myself, and he could not forget that he was dying; he fought sleep until the nightmares came to take him by force. He fell asleep in the library one night—he had done this twice before, but out of respect for him I had left using a route that meant I could pass him without looking at him. But when I heard him saying: “No, no . . .” I went to him without thinking and leaned over him to try to see whether I should wake him. He was younger than the look in his eyes suggested. I don’t know what his sickness was—it had some wasting effect—even as I saw his face I saw that its beauty was diminished. You can read character in a sleeping face, and his was quite a face. The face of a proud man, vengeful and not a little naive, a man with questions he hadn’t finished asking and answers to some questions I had myself. He opened his old man eyes and took a long, deep breath, as if breathing me in. It must have looked as if I was about to kiss him. Our faces were very close and curtains of my hair surrounded us; if we kissed it would be our secret to keep. I kissed him. Then I asked if it had hurt. He said he wasn’t sure and that we’d better try it again. And he kissed me back. I didn’t want to leave him after that, but I had to be back in bed by the time the other maids began to wake up.
Montserrat, I wrote that being in love with your father was nice, but being in love with Isidoro Salazar was like a dream. Not because of money or anything like that—! The man loved foolishly and without regard for the time limit his learned doctors had told him he had; he made me feel that in some way we had always known about each other and that he would be at my side forever. When Fausta Del Olmo took me aside and asked: “Is there anything you want to tell me?” my blood should have run cold, but it didn’t. After all she could have been asking about the pregnancy.
Beyond Isidoro’s staircase is a door that connects to a walled garden. The garden is Isidoro’s too: he planted all the roses there himself and took care of them until he got too sick to do anything but just be there with them of an evening. We were often there together. It’s a long walk from the top of the garden to the bottom, and I’d carry him some of the way. Yes, on my back, if you can imagine that. He was drowsy because of his medication—he had to take more and more—but even through the haze of his remedies he remembered you. “The baby!” I told him you didn’t mind (you don’t, do you?) and that his weight was balancing me out. He grew more lucid when we lay down on the grass. He was so fond of the roses; one night I told him that he wouldn’t die, but that he would become roses.
“I wouldn’t mind this dying so much if that were true,” he said, slowly. “But wait a minute . . . roses die too.”
“Well, after that you’d become something else. Maybe a wasp, because then you could go around stinging people who don’t like your poems.”
It was around that time that I kept finding gifts on my bed. Little gifts, but they got bigger and bigger. A mother of pearl comb, a calfskin purse, a green cashmere shawl. I told Isidoro to stop giving me gifts. The other servants were asking about them. Isidoro simply smiled at first, but when he asked me to show him the gifts I saw that he was perplexed and that they hadn’t come from him.
“Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?” Fausta Del Olmo asked, and maybe it was just a beam of sunlight that struck her eye, but I thought she squinted at my stomach. She added that the master would return in two weeks’ time. I didn’t even answer her. Suddenly she pushed me—if I hadn’t clutched the stair rail I would have fallen—and as she passed me she hissed: “Why should it be you who sees him?”
That afternoon I found the last gift under my pillow. It was a diamond ring. I put the box in the pocket of my apron and kept it there until nighttime, when I went to the library. I showed the ring to Isidoro and asked him what I should do. He said I should marry him. He had instructed Fausta Del Olmo to put the ring beneath my pillow; he was sure that she had been responsible for the other gifts, even though they were nothing to do with him. She was planning something, but it didn’t matter, or wouldn’t if I married him.
“Time is of the essence,” Isidoro said. All I could do was look at him with my mouth wide open. And then I said yes. He said I must fetch a priest at once, and I didn’t know where to find a priest, so I went and woke Fausta Del Olmo up and asked her to help me. She gave me the oddest look and said: “What do you want a priest for?”
“I’m marrying Isidoro Salazar tonight,” I said.
“Oh, really? And I suppose he’s the father of your child too?” she whispered, her eyes glinting the way they do when she gets hold of a secret at last.