Gaudi Afternoon (10 page)

“Come on,” I said.

Ana giggled. “I'm drunk,” she said.

“Get a grip,” I told her. “You've only had a couple of beers.”

Carmen took Ana's arm. “Pretend you're my man,” she said. She wiggled her behind.

“I thought I was your man,” I protested.

“No, you walk more quickly. Catch up with her. See if you're right.”

“All right.” I shot forward while trying to look inconspicuous. I hunched my shoulders together and pulled my neck down into my bomber jacket. The crowd increased. At the next corner were a police wagon and an ambulance; medics were bringing a man out from a doorway on a stretcher. His face was covered with a white cloth and he had lost a shoe. Neon lights rained down on us like blood. The gutters were choked with garbage, there was a rank sweaty smell in the air. The police told us to move along, but the crowd heaved intractably. I got pushed up against a building. A hooker said, “How about it?,” then saw my eyes and backed away. At the edge of the crowd I saw Ana and Carmen looking worried. The red-haired woman was nowhere in sight.

The last time I thought I saw Frankie was much much later, at a barnlike gay bar in a residential district that was the last place we visited that night. It was so thick with smoke that it was hard to breathe, and there were two big bouncers outside the door and two inside who only let Carmen in because she was with two men.

We had heard that there was a “show” of female impersonators there, but it wasn't on that night. Instead platoons of men, working men, not the trendies of the upscale bars, danced disco and smoked and stood around.

“Most of them live with their mothers,” Carmen said tenderly. “They come here to relax once or twice a week.”

We had given up on finding Frankie and were in the dulled but open state of mind that comes with a late evening and too much to drink. We had another beer each and discussed all manner of things in a corner of the big smoky room. Carmen, filled with Andalucían
duende
, recited lines from Lorca poems and sang snatches of
cante jondo
, while Ana, with a somber depth of feeling, told us stories of her late mother's life in exile in France after the fall of Barcelona.

I was holding forth on the subject of translation.

“Every author has a vocabulary and once you understand that half your job is done. The last writer I translated had a very mechanical way of phrasing ideas; his book was full of pistons and levers and drills and pumps and so on. Gloria's vocabulary is romantic: heart, jungle, loin, flaming, river, lust—I could make a list of a hundred words and that would be her novel, the same words over and over.”

I had a sip of beer and a potato chip. “Architecture has a vocabulary too. And hairstyling.”

“Poof, frizz, tease, sculpt, trim,” said Ana brightly.

“Curve, buttress, tower, skyscraper, gargoyle,” said Carmen, not to be outdone.

The disco music blared loud and violent, until suddenly it shifted into the familiar notes of the Sevillana. As the three of us watched, transported, two long lines of men arranged themselves opposite each other and lifted their arms in the classic curve of that graceful, ubiquitous Spanish dance. They twisted their wrists, flourished their palms, snapped their fingers, moved forward and back and around each other, caught each other by the waist and twirled each other quickly around and around. Those who weren't dancing gathered together and clapped their hands in a regular beat.

That's when I thought I saw Frankie again. Across the smoky room, her brown hair tied back in a ponytail, dressed in a suit but looking like a man rather than a woman, I thought I saw her triangular face and bright hazel eyes, her hands lifted, clapping. But it was so cloudy in that room, so crowded, so hectic that I couldn't be sure. I thought our eyes met, I took a step towards her, and then I lost her again.

“What is it, Cassandra?” Carmen said, catching me as I stumbled. “Are you trying to dance?”

I was drunker than I should have been, or more confused. For a second I had lost the sense of who I was—what sex, what gender, what age, what city and what country. In the instant I saw the man or woman who may or may not have been Frankie I had one of those odd, powerful, and probably alcohol-induced revelations that seem to last forever and wind backwards and forwards into history and infinity.

Afterwards I could never say what it was I experienced just then. But it was as if I were at a masquerade ball and everyone, at the very same moment, lifted their masks, and I saw gender for what it was, something that stood between us and our true selves. Something that we could take off and put on at will. Something that was, strangely, like a game.

Behind me I heard Carmen and Ana conferring worriedly.

“Is she sick, is she going to be sick?”

I wanted to reassure them that I was fine, but I couldn't remember what language we'd been speaking and which one they understood.

“We'd better get her out of here,” they decided and dragged me away from my epiphany, and from the person who I later decided could never have been Frankie.

The taxi dropped us off at three in the morning, at a time when the streets were still ablaze but there was little traffic and only a few people walking along the enormous boulevards. There was a message on the answering machine.

“It's for you,” said Ana, and we ran it through again.

“Sorry about the misunderstanding, Cassandra,” said Frankie in that cheerful, throaty voice. “I can explain everything tomorrow. Meet me at that big Gaudí cathedral around one o'clock.”

T
HERE WAS NOT MUCH POINT
in going to sleep so I spent the morning taking aspirin and working on the translation, as a kind of expiation for my sins.

The plot of
La Grande y su hija
was not as complicated as one would think at first from the narrative style of dashing and drifting back and forth in time between María's own life (what she knew she had experienced) and Cristobel's life (most of it imagined by María). The plot was rather simple actually, in spite of the extraordinary number of coincidences and mysterious circumstances, starting with the disappearing plague in the first chapter. María's life began at the moment she knew her mother had vanished, but Cristobel's life had begun some twenty-five years before, and it was that life which was the primary subject of
La Grande.

So far María had traced her mother's story back to the time when Cristobel was six and had first appeared floating down a vast river in a barrel. She was plucked to safety by the captain of a barge, who was unable to get from her the story of the barrel, but who took her home to his childless wife. The woman, Pilar, of course hated little Cristobel on sight and kept her ignorant and half-starved for years, until she finally married her off, a few weeks after the kindly barge captain disappeared into the river (I suspected his eventual reappearance), to a suspicious salesman named Raoul. But here perhaps I should let María imagine Raoul.

No one knew for sure what it was that Raoul sold from his shabby black leather bag. He kept it locked and the key on a chain next to his heart, so that when he forced himself on his young wife, which in the beginning was as often as six or eight times a day, she saw the key, shiny as the blade of a knife, dangling above her, untouchable, like a prisoner's vision of freedom.

Raoul was a travelling salesman and by rights he should have left Cristobel at home when he set off on a sales trip, but because he knew that she would bolt as soon as he took his eyes off her, he was compelled to take her with him. It was in this way that Cristobel visited every inhabited corner of her country, every river village, every mountain hamlet, every mining town, every isolated outpost on the
pampas.
And yet, even after months of following Raoul, she still did not know what it was he sold.

When they came to a village or a farmhouse, Raoul would gather the men of the place together in a room by themselves and lock the door. Outside the women of the village or ranch would stand anxiously, listening to their men laugh and snort and gasp, and they would pelt Cristobel with questions: what was in that bag, what had he come to sell, her husband?

But Cristobel did not know.

And, as a matter of fact, I did not know either, not having come to Gloria's explanation. I suspected something to do with sex, something rather nasty and small (because he could travel long distances without replenishing his bag). Aphrodisiacs or vials of something that would ensure potency.

But back to the plot, which continued with Raoul's death, perhaps at the hands of Cristobel, or perhaps Eduardo. I had come to suspect that Raoul was attached to a right-wing paramilitary organization led by former German Nazis, and that Eduardo first seduced Cristobel in order to spy on Raoul, but I wasn't sure.

María was the daughter of Eduardo and Cristobel, but the disappearing plague had forced Cristobel to give María up as a baby. María had been raised by a kindly woman named Raquel who had told María stories about her mother and her two men. When María was seventeen Raquel died and María set off to find her mother. The narrative was both the story of her search and her imaginary reconstruction of her mother's life, which took María all over the the nameless Caribbean country in the grip of cataclysmic events. Yet Cristobel, witness to so much history and madness, was essentially passive. She spent most of her time waiting for Eduardo to turn up and when he did he would say things like, “My love, you'll never understand. Let's not talk politics,” before fleeing back into the jungle.

And there were far too many passages like this:

Theirs was a love that had existed for centuries in the genes of those who had come before, the exiled Spanish grandee first casting eyes on the Indian servant girl, reading mystery in her eyes, the mystery of a new continent….

I worked until twelve-thirty when I took some more aspirin and set off to meet Frankie.

The unfinished cathedral of Sagrada Família was Gaudí's masterpiece and the building to which he'd dedicated the better part of his life; still, it always gave me an uneasy feeling. Sometimes it looked like a giant hand had been playing on the beach and had dropped wet sand, layer after layer, to form a series of towers that began lumpishly and ended in filigreed elegance. Sometimes it looked like a mud-brown excrescence worming its way out of the earth into all sorts of elongated gothic excesses.

Sagrada Família was dedicated to St. Joseph and the Holy Family, and was meant to symbolize the stability and order of family life. Perhaps that was what gave me such a queasy sensation when I looked at the cathedral; it was monumentally, phenomenally bizarre, like the Christian notion of family itself, a combination of organic and tortured form.

I found Frankie at one of the main entrances, the façade of the Nativity, which was dripping with figures of angels, animals and of course the Holy Family itself. She was in white and pink today, fresh and virginal in a big candy-striped shirt over a mini-skirt, and accessorized with white sandals, a dozen bangles and the usual enormous handbag the size of a small refrigerator. She had her auburn curls back and they looked more festive than ever; her skin shone and her lipstick was a fun pink. She appeared far too healthy and well-rested to have spent the evening in the Barri Xines. Unlike me—a walking spectacle of over-indulgent remorse.

I realized that I didn't know whether to think of her as a “she” or a “he” now. She looked the same to me as she had the last time I saw her, but now that I “knew” she had been born a male, I could see that she still resembled a man in slight ways. A certain boniness around the chin, larger hands and feet, perhaps the muscularity of her legs. Still, I'd met plenty of women who were bigger, stronger, bonier and more muscular than Frankie.

In what did her masculinity reside then? Her voice was low, but I'd thought that came from smoking. She had breasts and hips and the gestures and movements of a woman. She was more feminine than I or many of my women friends. It wasn't only surgery that had changed her sex, or hormones, it was a conscious choice to embrace femaleness, whatever femaleness is.

Frankie's reaction to my hesitation was to sweep me up in a cloud of L'Air du Temps perfume and to kiss my cheek. “Don't think I'll ever forget what you've done for me, Cassandra. Leading me to my little daughter who I missed so terribly.” And she held out a check for $2500. “Now don't say no to the bonus. Just something to make up for my having had to mislead you a tiny bit.”

I suppressed the suspicion that by the time I deposited the check in my bank account in London it would have been cancelled or would bounce. After all, we'd never said cash. “I'd say you misled me more than a tiny bit,” I said mildly. “In the first place you never mentioned a child, and in the second place ‘Bernadette' is hardly your ex-husband, much less your husband.”

Frankie started. “Oh, I see you've talked to Ben then?”

“I raced Hamilton to the park and found out you'd just tried to kidnap Delilah.”

She ignored that. “Well, if you've talked to Ben you can understand why I think of her that way, as an ex-husband.” Frankie waved her hand airily. “She's so
butch.
She's always been so much more of a man than me. How could I have told you the real story, about my baby Delilah? You'd never have come with me then.”

“That's true,” I admitted. “But I don't understand why you had to come to Barcelona at all. According to Ben they're just here for a vacation.”

“You don't quit your job just to go on a vacation,” said Frankie. “Do you? You don't sublet your apartment in San Francisco for a year, do you? You don't buy an open-ended ticket, do you?”

Frankie fixed me with an accusing look, as if I had personally arranged for Ben's flight.