Skylight (29 page)

“We all get annoyed sometimes,” Adriana would say.

“I know, I'm the same, but don't think you can deceive me.
You
still talk and smile, but Isaura doesn't. You'd have to be blind not to see it.”

She gave up trying to coax from them the reason behind the coldness between them. She could see they had made a kind of pact to delude both her and her sister. However, while Cândida might be taken in by appearances, Amélia would only be satisfied with hard facts. She began, quite openly, to observe her nieces. She forced them into a state of tension verging on panic. They only had to make some slightly obscure comment for Amélia to come out with an insinuating riposte. Adriana made light of the matter, and Isaura took refuge in silence, as if afraid her aunt might draw unwarranted conclusions from even the most innocent of words.

“Cat got your tongue, Isaura?” Amélia would ask.

“No, I simply have nothing to say.”

“We all used to get on so well here. Everyone talked and everyone had something to say. We've gotten to the point where we don't even listen to the radio anymore!”

“That's because you don't want to, Auntie.”

“What's the point when our minds are all on something else!”

If it hadn't been for Isaura's behavior, she might have abandoned her idea, but her niece still seemed cowed and tormented by some hidden thought. Amélia decided not to bother with Adriana and to focus all her efforts on Isaura. Whenever Isaura went out, Amélia would follow her. She would return disappointed. Isaura spoke to no one and never once diverged from the path that led her to the shop she worked for, and she neither wrote letters nor received them. She no longer went to the library from which she used to borrow books:

“You've stopped reading, Isaura.”

“I don't have time.”

“You have just as much time as you had before. Was someone at the library unpleasant to you?”

“Of course not!”

When her aunt asked Isaura about her sudden indifference to books, Isaura blushed. She bowed her head and avoided her aunt's eyes. Amélia noticed her embarrassment and thought that therein lay the root of the problem. She went to the library on the pretext of inquiring about its opening hours, but what she really wanted was to see who worked there. She left no wiser than she had entered, for the staff consisted of two bald, toothless old gentlemen and a young woman. Her suspicions vanished into the air like smoke. Feeling all doors closing on her, she turned to her sister, but Cândida pretended not to understand.

“There you go again, you and your ideas!”

“Yes, and I won't give up either. I know you're acting as a cover for your daughters. When you're with them, you're all sweetness and light, but you don't fool me. I've heard you sighing at night.”

“I'm thinking about other things, old things.”

“The time for sighing over those ‘old things' is long gone. You have the same griefs as me, but I put them away, as did you. Now you're sighing over new things, over the girls . . .”

“You're obsessed, woman! You and I have fallen out time and again and made up time and again too! Why, only the other day—”

“Exactly. We fell out with each other and we made up. They haven't fallen out, you're right, but you won't convince me that there isn't something wrong.”

“I'm not trying to convince you of anything. If you enjoy making a complete idiot of yourself, then go on, but you're ruining our lives. We were all getting along so nicely . . .”

“It's not my fault everything's gone wrong. I'm doing my best to make everything go right again, but”—she blew her nose hard to disguise her emotion—“what I can't bear is to see the girls like this!”

“Adriana seems cheerful enough. Why, only the other day, when she was telling us about how her boss tripped on the carpet—”

“Pure pretense. Would you say Isaura was cheerful too?”

“We all have our off days . . .”

“Yes, but she has an awful lot of them. You've come to some agreement, haven't you? You know what's going on!”

“Me?!”

“Yes, you. If you didn't, you would be just as worried as I am.”

“But only a moment ago you said you'd heard me sighing at night.”

“Aha, caught you!”

“Oh, very clever. But you're quite wrong if you think I know anything. You and your silly ideas.”

Amélia was indignant. Silly ideas indeed! When the bomb went off, then she'd see how silly—or not—they were. She changed tactics. She stopped tormenting her nieces with questions and insinuations. She pretended to have lost interest, to have forgotten about the whole business. She noticed at once that the tensions eased. Even Isaura began to smile at her sister's tall tales of the office, but Isaura's attitude only convinced Amélia that there was still some hidden mystery. Free from the pressure of suspicion and persecution, Isaura was able to relax a little; she seemed to want to help her aunt to forget. But Amélia did not forget. She merely took a few steps back in order to be able to jump still farther.

While maintaining her pose of indifference, she listened out for every word, but without reacting to them, however strange they were. She believed that, bit by bit, she would untangle the whole sorry plot. She began to rummage around in the past for anything that might help her. She tried to remember when “it” had all begun. Her memory had grown weak and vague, but helped by the calendar, she battled on until she found the source. “It” had begun on the night when she'd heard her nieces talking and Isaura crying. Just a bad dream, Adriana had said. So the bad dream must have been Isaura's. What could they have said to each other? She knew that girls tell each other everything, at least that's how it was in her day. There were two possibilities: either Isaura was crying about something Adriana had told her, in which case the problem lay with Adriana, or she was crying about something she herself had said, which would explain why Adriana had tried to cover it all up. And if it was Adriana's problem, how had she managed to stay so cool and collected?

These thoughts caused her to turn her attention back to Adriana, whose cheerfulness had always rung false to her, had seemed merely a brave front. Isaura kept silent, and Adriana disguised her feelings, unless that disguise was intended to act as a cover for Isaura. Trapped in this blind alley, Amélia despaired.

Then it occurred to her that Adriana was gone almost all day, out of sight, but Amélia couldn't simply drop in at the office as she had at the library. Perhaps the office held the key to the mystery. But if so, why had the problem only arisen after two years of working there? This thought, of course, made no sense: sometimes things do just happen, and the fact that they didn't happen yesterday doesn't mean they won't happen today or tomorrow. She decided then that the “problem” lay with Adriana and had to do with the office. If it turned out she was wrong, then she would try another tack. Provisionally, she put Isaura to one side. Except that she still couldn't understand Isaura's tears. Something grave must have happened for her to cry as she had on that night and for her to remain so sad and silent ever since. Something extremely grave . . . Amélia could not or preferred not to think what it could have been. Adriana was a girl, a young woman, and the only grave thing in a woman's life, the only one that could make that woman's sister cry, was . . . But no, the idea was absurd and she tried to drive it from her mind. Now, however, everything was conspiring to make that idea seem more probable. First: Adriana spent all day away from the apartment; second: she occasionally worked late; third: every night she shut herself up in the bathroom . . . In a flash of insight Amélia recalled that, since that night, Adriana had stopped doing that. She always used to be the last to bed and always took her time. Now, while she wasn't always the first, she was rarely the last to use the bathroom, and when she was, thought Amélia, she didn't spend much time in there. Everyone knew that Adriana kept a diary, a childish whim of no importance, and that she wrote her diary while in the bathroom. Was the explanation for this whole muddle to be found in that diary? And how could she go about getting the key to the drawer in which Adriana kept it?

Each of the four women had a drawer that was for her use alone. All the others were left unlocked. Living as they did, using the same bed linen and the same towels, it would be absurd to lock those drawers, but each of them had her own particular drawer in which to keep her private mementos. For Amelia and Cândida these were old letters, the ribbons from their wedding bouquets, a few yellowing photographs, the odd dried flower, perhaps a lock of hair. When they were alone and the past called to them, those private drawers became a kind of sanctuary where each could go to pay homage to her memories. Amélia and Cândida, knowing what their own mementos were, could each have said, with a fair degree of accuracy, what the other's drawer contained too, but neither of them had any idea what Adriana and Isaura kept in theirs. Adriana kept her diary in hers, that much was certain, and Amélia was sure she would find the explanation she was looking for in there. Even before she considered how she would gain access to the diary, what weighed on her was the thought of committing such an act of violation. She wondered how she would feel if someone were to discover her own rather pathetic secrets, which were, besides, only the remnants of facts the others all knew about anyway. It would, she thought, be a terrible abuse. On the other hand, having promised to uncover her nieces' secret and being only a step away from honoring that promise, she could not now draw back. Whatever the consequences might be, she had to know. It would not be easy. Quite apart from Amélia's deep conviction that their respective secrets should be inviolable and that none of them would dare to open any drawer other than their own, a further problem was that Adriana always had the keys to her drawer with her. When she was at home, she kept them in her purse and it would be impossible to get hold of them, open the drawer and read whatever there was to read without Adriana knowing. And it was highly unlikely that Adriana would forget her keys. Unless Amélia stole them from her and managed to persuade Adriana that she had lost them. That would be the easiest way, but Adriana might get suspicious and try to block the keyhole with something. There was only one solution: to get another key made, but to do that she would have to make a copy, and that would involve taking the key to the locksmith. Was there no other way? A tracing might work, but how to get hold of the key?

Amélia racked her brain. It was a matter of finding the right opportunity, the few minutes necessary for her to make a drawing of the keys. She tried several times, but at the last moment someone always came into the room. All these obstacles only increased her desire to know. The locked drawer made her tremble with impatience. She had lost all scruples now. Regardless of the consequences, she had to know. If Adriana had committed some shameful act, it would be best to find out before it was too late. It was that “too late” that frightened Amélia.

Her persistence soon paid off. The cousins from Campolide came to visit them, a return visit for the one made sometime before by Cândida and Amélia. It was a Sunday. They spent all afternoon there, drinking tea and chatting. The usual memories were trotted out, always the same ones, which they all knew by heart, but to which they listened politely as if hearing them for the first time. Adriana had never been so lively and her sister had never made such an effort to appear to be contented. Cândida, deceived by her daughters' gaiety, forgot all about the “situation.” Only Amélia did not. At an opportune moment, she got up and went to her nieces' room. Heart pounding and hands shaking, she opened Adriana's purse and took out the keys. There were five. She recognized two of them, one for the street door and the other for the door to their apartment. There were two other medium-sized keys and a smaller one. She hesitated. She didn't know which of them was the key to the drawer, although she felt it must be one of the medium-sized keys. The drawer was only a few steps away. She could try one of the keys in the lock, but was afraid that any noise might attract her nieces' attention. She decided to make a drawing of all three, which she did, although not without some difficulty. The pencil slithered from her fingers and refused to follow the exact shape of the keys. She had sharpened it to a long, sharp point to make the drawing more faithful, but her hands were shaking so much she almost gave up. From the next room came the sound of Adriana's giggles: the story about her boss tripping on the carpet, which the cousins had not heard before. They all laughed uproariously and their laughter drowned out the tiny click of the purse closing.

That night after supper, while the radio was murmuring a Chopin nocturne—the radio having been turned on in the warm afterglow of that jolly afternoon—Amélia said how pleased she was to see her nieces getting on so well together.

“You see, it was all in your imagination,” said Cândida, smiling.

“Yes,” said Amélia, “it must have been.”

With her monthly allowance safely stowed away in her handbag, the notes neatly folded up inside her greasy purse, Lídia's mother was drinking a cup of tea. She had placed on the bed the knitting with which she occupied her evenings. She always visited twice a month, once to collect her money and again in order to show a friendly interest in her daughter's life. Familiar with Paulino Morais's habits, she appeared only on Tuesdays, Thursdays or Saturdays. She knew she wasn't wanted, on those days or any others, but she turned up nonetheless. In order to “live decently” she needed that monthly subsidy. Given her daughter's good financial position, it would seem wrong simply to abandon her. And because she was sure that Lídia would not, of her own volition, go out of her way to help, she felt it wise to remind her regularly of her existence. And so that Lídia would not think that she had purely venal reasons for coming to see her, she would call again about two weeks after receiving her allowance to inquire after Lídia's health. Of the two visits, the first was the more bearable because it had a real objective. The second, despite that display of affectionate interest, was tedious for both mother and daughter.