What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(2)

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THERE WERE A FEW more cultured types who shared Montse’s admiration of La Pedrera, though—one of them was Se?ora Lucy, who lived on the second floor and frequently argued with people about whether or not her home was an aesthetic offense. Journalists came to interview the Se?ora from time to time, and would make some comment about the house as a parting shot on their way out, but Se?ora Lucy refused to let them have the last word and stood there arguing at the top of her voice. The question of right angles was always being raised: How could Se?ora Lucy bear to live in a house without a single right angle . . . not even in the furniture . . . ?

“But really who needs right angles? Who?” Se?ora Lucy would demand, and she’d slam the courtyard door and run up the stairs laughing.

—

SE?ORA LUCY was a painter with eyes like daybreak. Like Montse, she wore a key on a chain around her neck, but unlike Montse she told people that she was fifty years old and gave them looks that dared them to say she was in good condition for her age. (Se?ora Lucy was actually thirty-five, only five years older than Montse. One of the housemaids had overheard a gallery curator begging her to stop telling people she was fifty. The Se?ora had replied that she’d recently attended the exhibitions of some of her colleagues and now wished to discover whether fifty-year-old men in her field were treated with reverence because they were fifty or for some other reason.) Aside from this the housemaids were somewhat disappointed with Se?ora Lucy. They expected their resident artist to lounge about in scarlet pajamas, drink cocktails for breakfast, and entertain dashing rascals and fragrant sirens. But Se?ora Lucy kept office hours. Merce, her maid of all work, tried to defend her by alleging that the Se?ora drank her morning coffee out of a vase, but nobody found this credible.

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MONTSE FOUND WAYS to be the one to return Se?ora Lucy’s laundry to her; this sometimes meant undertaking several other deliveries so that her boss Se?ora Gaeta didn’t become suspicious. There was a workroom in Se?ora Lucy’s apartment; she often began work there and then had the canvases transported to her real studio. Thirty seconds in Se?ora Lucy’s apartment was long enough for Montse to get a good stare at all those beginnings of paintings. The Se?ora soon saw that Montse was curious about her work, and she took to leaving her studio door open while she etched on canvas. She’d call Montse to come and judge how well the picture was progressing. “Look here,” she’d say, indicating a faint shape in the corner of the frame. “Look here—” Her fingertips glided over a darkening of color in the distance. She sketched with an effort that strained every limb. Montse saw that the Se?ora sometimes grew short of breath though she’d hardly stirred. A consequence of snatching images out of the air—the air took something back.

—

MONTSE ASKED SE?ORA about the key around her neck. It wasn’t a real question, she was just talking so that she could stay a moment longer. But the Se?ora said she wore it because she was waiting for someone; at this Montse forgot herself and blurted: “You too?”

The Se?ora was amused. “Yes, me too. I suppose we’re all waiting for someone.” And she told Montse all about it as she poured coffee into vases for them both. (It was true! It was true!)

—

“TWO MOSTLY PENNILESS WOMEN met at a self-congratulation ritual in Seville,” that was how Se?ora Lucy began. The event was the five-year reunion of a graduating class of the University of Seville—neither woman had attended this university, but they blended in, and every other person they met claimed to remember them, and there was much exclamation on the theme of it being wonderful to see former classmates looking so well. The imposters had done their research and knew what to say, and what questions to ask. Their names were Safiye and Lucy, and you wouldn’t have guessed that either one was a pauper, since they’d spent most of the preceding afternoon liberating various items of priceless finery from their keepers.

These two penniless girls knew every trick in the book, and their not being able to identify each other was one of the downsides of being an efficient fraud. Both women moved from town to town under an assortment of aliases, and both believed that collaboration was for weaklings. Lucy and Safiye hadn’t come to that gathering looking for friendship or love; they were there to make contacts. Back when they had toiled at honest work—Lucy at a bakery and Safiye at an abattoir—they’d wondered if it could be true that there were people who were given money simply because they looked as if they were used to having lots of it. Being blessed with forgettable faces and the gift of brazen fabrication, they’d each gone forth to test this theory and had found it functional. Safiye loved to look at paintings and needed money to build her collection. Lucy was an artist in constant need of paint, brushes, turpentine, peaceful light, and enough canvas to make compelling errors on. For a time Lucy had been married to a rare sort of clown, the sort that children aren’t afraid of: After all, he is one of us, you can see it in his eyes, they reasoned. How funny that he’s so strangely tall. Lucy and her husband had not much liked being married to each other, the bond proving much heavier than their lighthearted courtship had led them to expect, but they agreed that it had been worth a try, and while waiting for their divorce to come through Lucy’s husband had taught her the sleight of hand she eventually used to pick her neighbor’s pocket down to the very last thread. The night she met Safiye she stole her earrings right out of her earlobes and, having retired to a quiet corner of the mansion to inspect them, found that the gems were paste. Then she discovered that her base metal bangle was missing and quickly realized that she could only have lost it to the person she was stealing from; she’d been distracted by the baubles and the appeal of those delicate earlobes. Cornered by a banker whose false memory of having been in love with her since matriculation day might prove profitable, Lucy wavered between a sensible decision and a foolhardy one. Ever did foolhardiness hold the upper hand with Lucy; she found Safiye leaning against an oil lantern out in the garden and saw for herself that she wasn’t the only foolish woman in the world, or even at that party, for Safiye had Lucy’s highly polished bangle in her hand and was turning it this way and that in order to catch fireflies in the billowing, transparent left sleeve of her gown. All this at the risk of being set alight, but then from where Lucy stood Safiye looked as if she was formed of fire herself, particles of flame dancing the flesh of her arm into existence. That or she was returning to fire.