What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(9)
The master has a husband, Pasqual Grec. Not that they were married in church, but that’s the way they are with each other. Some of the other servants pretend they’ve no eyes in their heads and say that Pasqual is just the master’s dear friend, but Fausta Del Olmo says that they definitely share a bed and that since they are rich they can just do everything they want to do without having to take an interest in anybody’s opinion. Your key doesn’t seem to want me to talk about it, but I will. I will. The master is not an angry man, but he’s argumentative in a way that makes other people angry. And Pasqual is an outdoorsman and doesn’t like to wait too long between hunts; when he gets restless there are fights—maybe three a week. The master retires to the library for some time and takes his meals in there, and Pasqual goes out with the horses. But when the master comes out of the library he’s much more peaceful. I thought it must be all the books that calmed the master down. Millions of books—at least that’s how it looks when you just take a quick glance while pretending not to be at all interested. And the day after I made my wish the key to the library fell into my hands. The master had left it in the pocket of a housecoat he’d sent down to me in the laundry. Of course it could have been any key, but it wasn’t. The key and the opportunity to use it came together, for the master and Pasqual had decided to winter in Buenos Aires. I was about four months pregnant by then, and had to bind my stomach to keep you secret and keep my place in the household. I went into the library at night and found peace and fortitude there.
I didn’t know where to begin, so I just looked for a name that I knew until I came to a life of Joan of Arc, which I sat down and read really desperately. I read without stopping until the end, as if somebody were chasing me through the pages with a butcher’s knife. The next night I read more slowly, a life of Galileo Galilei that took me four nights to finish because his fate was hard to take. I kept saying, “Those bastards,” and once after saying that I heard a sound in another part of the library. A library at night is full of sounds: The unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious. But the sound I heard wasn’t the sound of a book. It was more like a suppressed cough or a sneeze, or a clearing of the throat, or some convulsive, impulsive mix of the three. Everything became very still. Even the books shut up. I looked at the shelf directly in front of me; I read each title on it, spine after spine. There was a gap between the spines, and two eyes looked out of it. Not the master’s, or Pasqual’s, not the eyes of anybody I could remember having met.
I found the courage to ask: “What are you doing here?”
“What are YOU doing here?” asked the man. I could hear in his voice that he wasn’t well, and then fear left me; I felt we both had our reasons.
“Can’t you see I’m reading?” I said. “Maybe you should read too, instead of SPYING on people.”
“Maybe I should,” he said. “It’s just that I thought you might be like the other one.”
“The other one?”
“Yes. But don’t tell her you’ve seen me.”
“Why not?”
“Because then she’d know that I’ve seen her . . . and I don’t want her to know that until I’ve spoken to my brother.”
“Your brother?”
“Too much talking, pretty thief. I have to rest now. But promise you won’t tell her.”
He didn’t need to describe her; it had to be Fausta he was talking about. I didn’t even want to know what she’d been up to.
“I’m not a thief,” I said. “And I won’t say anything to her. I haven’t seen you, anyway. Only your eyes.”
“Well? What do you think of my eyes, pretty thief?”
“They are an old man’s eyes,” I answered, and I held the Life of Galileo up in front of my face until I heard him walking away. He walked all the way to the back of the library, and up some stairs—I hadn’t known there was a staircase in the library until I heard him going up it—look, Montserrat, and you’ll see that there is one, built between two shelves, leading up to a door halfway up the wall. Through that door is a wing of the main house that only a few of the servants were familiar with, though we all knew that Isidoro Salazar, the master’s younger brother, lived in that part of the house. Lived—well, we knew the man was dying there, and did not wish to be talked to or talked about. A special cook prepared his meals according to certain nutritional principles of immortality that a Swiss doctor had told the master about, and Fausta had told us how she laid the table and served the meals in Isidoro’s rooms. He waited in the next room while she did it, and no matter what he ate or didn’t eat he was still dying. When I thought about that I worried that my words might have added to Isidoro’s troubles.
The next day, after Fausta had brought him his lunch, I wrote: “I should not have been like that to you—Rude and thoughtless maid from the library” on a piece of paper, ran up to his rooms and pushed the note under his door. And I stayed away from the library for a while, only returning when the chatter of the books reached me where I slept in the maids’ dormitory on the other side of the house. He wasn’t there that night, but when I went to my shelf of choice to take down Galileo, I saw a slip of paper sticking out of the neighboring book. The slip read: “To the pretty thief—read this book, and then look for more.”