What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(7)
—
ON THE MORNING of St. Jordi’s Day, before work began, Montse climbed the staircase to the third floor. To Lucy from her Aphrodite. The white walls and window frames wound their patterns around her with the adamant geometry of a seashell. A book and a rose, that was all she was bringing. The Se?ora wasn’t at home. She must be in her garden with all her other roses. Montse set her offering down before Se?ora Lucy’s apartment door, the rose atop the book. And then she went to work.
—
“MONTSERRAT, have you seen the newspaper?” Assunta called out across the washtubs.
“I never see the newspaper,” Montserrat answered through a mouthful of thread.
“Montserrat, Montserrat of the key,” Marta crooned beside her. The other maids took up the chant until Montse held her needle still and said: “All right, what’s the joke, girls?”
“They’re talking about the advertisement that’s in La Vanguardia this morning,” said Se?ora Gaeta, placing the newspaper on the lid of Montse’s workbasket. Montse laid lengths of thread beneath the lines of newsprint as she read:
ENZO GOMEZ OF GOMEZ, CRUZ AND MOLINA AWAITS CONTACT WITH A WOMAN WHO BEARS THE NAME MONTSERRAT AND IS IN POSSESSION OF A GOLD KEY ONE AND ONE HALF INCHES IN LENGTH.
Without saying another word, the eagle-eyed Se?ora Gaeta picked up a scarlet thread an inch and a half long and held it up against Montse’s key. The lengths matched. Se?ora Gaeta rested a hand on Montse’s shoulder, then walked back up to the front of the room to inspect a heap of newly done laundry before it returned to its owner. The babble around Montse grew deafening.
“Montse don’t go—it’s a trap! This is just like that episode in Lightning and Undetectable Poisons—”
“That’s our Cecilia, confusing life with one of her beloved radio novellas again . . . so sordid an imagination . . .”
“Let’s face it, eh, Montse—you’re no good at laundry, you must have been born to be rich!”
“Montserrat, never forget that I, Laura Morales, have always loved you . . . remember I shared my lunch with you on the very first day?”
“When she moves into her new mansion she can have us all to stay for a weekend—come on, Montse! Just one weekend a year.”
“Ladies, ladies,” Se?ora Gaeta intervened at last. “I have a headache today. Quiet, or every last one of you will be looking for jobs in hell.”
Montse kept her eyes on her work. It was the only way to keep her mind quiet.
—
THE SOLICITOR ENZO GOMEZ looked at her hands and uniform before he looked into her eyes. Her hands had been roughened by harsh soap and hard water; she fought the impulse to hide them behind her back. Instead she undid the clasp of her necklace and held the key out to him. She told him her name and he jingled a bunch of keys in his own pocket and said: “The only way we can find out is by trying the lock. So let’s go.”
—
THE ROUTE they took was familiar. “Sometimes I go to an art gallery just down that street,” Montse said, pointing. He had already been looking at her but when she said that he began to stare.
“You sometimes go to the Salazar Gallery?”
“Yes . . . they exhibit paintings by—”
“I don’t know much about the artists of today; you can only really rely on the old masters . . . but that’s where we’re going, to the Salazar Gallery.”
Gomez stopped, pulled a folder out of his briefcase, and read aloud from a piece of paper in it: Against my better judgment but in accordance with the promise I made to my brother Isidoro Salazar, I, Zacarias Salazar, leave the library of my house at 17 Carrer Alhambra to one Montserrat who will come with the key to the library as proof of her claim. If the claimant has not come forth within fifty years of my death, let the lock of the library door be changed in order to put an end to this nonsense. For if the mother cannot be found, then how can the daughter?
Enzo put the folder back. “I hope you’re the one,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of Montserrats in this capacity today, most of them chancers. But you—I hope it’s you. Are you . . . what do you know of the Salazar family?”
“I know that old Zacarias Salazar was a billionaire, left no biological children but still fathers many artworks through his patronage . . .”
“You read the gallery catalog thoroughly, I see.”
A gallery attendant opened the main gate for them and showed them around a few gilt-wallpapered passages until they came to the library, which was on its own at the end of a corridor. Montse was dimly aware of Enzo Gomez mopping his forehead with a handkerchief as she placed the key in the lock and turned it. The door opened onto a room with high shelves and higher windows that followed the curve of a cupola ceiling. The laundry maid and the solicitor stood in front of the shelf closest to the door. Sunset lit the chandeliers above them and they found themselves holding hands until Gomez remembered his professionalism and strode over to the nearest desk to remove papers from his briefcase once again.
“I’m glad it’s you, Montserrat,” he said, placing the papers on the desk and patting them. “You must let me know if I can be of service to you in future.” He bowed, shook hands, and left her in her library without looking back, the quivering of his trouser cuffs the only visible sign of his emotions.