The Street of the Three Beds (19 page)

* * *

A note pinned on the door read: “We's on the roof.” On sunny afternoons Maruja aired the children, taking them as far as possible from the noxious street atmosphere. He climbed to the top of the stairs, where he found a door so low he had to duck at the waist to cross it. The motley crew shouted and ran on the uneven, red tiled floor, hiding in between sheets that hung from the lines under a furiously blue sky while Maruja sat on a chair sewing. At her feet, a big turtle painted in bright colors like a quilt peeped out of its shell with the ambition to sniff the universe.

“
Perentón
! Come here, sunshine, the gentleman's come see you.”

Obviously the boy remembered him, because after being asked his name a few times, he decided to answer, “
Patón
.” Maurici gave him the package he'd bought and in a matter of seconds a swarm of children fluttered around the toy horse.

Maruja smiled as he approached her, taking off his hat.

“Good afternoon. I've been meaning to ask you, do you know the doctor who takes care of Miss Pràxedes's girls?”

“Doctor, you say? Doctor or no doctor, he drinks like a sponge.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“No, sir. Hey, boy, leave Susanna alone! I only know him from seeing him in bars and taverns in the neighborhood . . . He drinks alone, he don't talk to no one. He's a thug, I tell you, it's a shame how he's ruined them girls. They complain too, specially Margarita, she's no milk toast, that one, but it don't do them no good . . . That Pràxedes, she might as well be deaf.”

“Is it true that woman owns property in the country?”

“Ha, ha! That's what she says, that she's an
heiress.
She ain't no more heiress than me a duchess. No, sir, Pràxedes did the streets, like all of us. Only she got lucky. Well, lucky, . . . that depends how you look at it. She married that puny Mr. Carlos, a hustler who lived like a king off smuggling goods, till they got hold of him and locked him up for a while. Soon as he got out, he was in a hurry to leave this world. Listen, Violeta's a nice girl, you know? If you could give her a hand . . .”

“That's what I'm trying to do. What about a wino called Proverbs? Do you know him?”

“Everybody knows that one. He talks a blue streak . . . Sometimes sells lottery tickets. He's shacked up with Gunpowder, meaner than the meanest dog. Do you know why she calls herself Gunpowder? She says she comes from the line of the woman who fired the gun against the French in Zaragoza . . . If you believe that, you'll believe anything. He ain't half that bad, though, just hits the bottle too much. Always walking ‘round here too, hopping from bar to bar. In the morning he's still standing; by the afternoon, he's smashed.
He's the one who found the dead girl, you know? There, in front of Violeta's place. I'm sure he knows the wretched doctor.”

* * *

Instead of one drunkard, now he was looking for two. Maruja's comment about Proverbs's relative sobriety in the mornings had stuck in his mind. Proverbs was the only one who'd seen the body before the police arrived at the scene and, for that reason, he was theoretically the most reliable witness. Having studied the only picture in the police file, the one that concealed Rita's lower body, he wondered if they might have covered it while she still lay in the street. It would take patience to wait until Saturday, his next free day.

The few nights he spent at home were those he didn't spend with Violeta. He declined invitations to parties and social events, with the exception of two trips to the Liceu opera house with his parents. As for the Equestrian, he occasionally showed up to have his hair cut with Albert. No matter how hard his cousin tried to pry secrets out of him, he kept an unbroken silence regarding his private life. At that point, his mother felt certain that a woman had gotten under his skin and taken hold of him. When from time to time she tactfully broached the subject, he slipped between her fingers with an elusive mumble, or tried to charm her like the former Maurici would; her Maurici, the one that had not yet been ruined. On the other hand, these absences didn't bother Roderic Aldabò as long as they weren't absences from work. On that account, he had no complaints.

Friday was a hectic day at the factory. Not only did he have to return a shipment of faulty equipment but also referee a fight between two workers who'd come to blows,
so he felt relief in the evening as he headed for the Street of the Three Beds with a small package under his arm. Recently he'd brought himself to ask Violeta if she'd like a pair of silk stockings. As usual, she'd begun by refusing the gift, but, at his insistence, she confessed that when it came to stockings nothing compared to silk.

When the door opened he came face to face with Mrs. Prat. At first, he feared her presence was a hallucination. The sphinx, on her part, opened her eyes wide with uncharacteristic surprise. There was no doubt she'd recognized him, even though she'd seen him only once several months ago. Making a quick recovery, however, she ordered him to identify himself like any stranger. He glared at her as he stuck the Fidelity card in front of her nose and asked for Violeta.

No sooner had he crossed the doorstep than he realized something was amiss. The French doors were open. Even though two hats hung on the rack, no voices came from the rooms other than Socrates's twittering. The clock had just struck seven and yet in the parlor the parrot's cage was already covered with the cloth reserved for night time. The door that had always remained closed let a shaft of light quiver through a crack. Inside, somebody moaned.

The sphinx stretched a hand to point at the half-open door. He walked in cautiously and found himself among a group of people surrounding a bed with a high, finely carved mahogany headboard. Miss Pràxedes's body heaved with each inhalation as if attempting to levitate, only to descend immediately under the weight of defeat. Blood had deserted her ashen lips to gather in the rest of her face, purple and grotesquely puffy. An oil lamp burnt on the marble top of the nightstand; another lamp cast a dim light from the back of the room. Shadows gnawed at the corners, the ceiling, and the top of the walls.

Violeta looked at him from the opposite side of the bed. Hortènsia, sobbing noisily, flung her arms around his neck as soon as she saw him come in. He extricated himself from her embrace, leading her to a chair a few feet away from the bed. Jaumet's eyes roamed around the room, sparkling with joyful incandescence and periodically coming to rest on the dying woman. When they rose to look at the other mourners, he smiled. Unfortunately, Maurici didn't see the person he was most interested in: Dr. Serra.

An unknown woman spoke. “Do you see how fat she is? That had to be a bad sign . . .”

“She isn't fat,” replied another woman. “She's swollen up. The doctor had told her a hundred times but she paid no attention . . . Eating candy all the time.”

“If it had only been candy,” Margarita added slyly. “She also smoked cigars when nobody was watching. This room always stank of tobacco smoke.”

Margarita stood between two men, presumably the owners of the hats, holding onto the arm of the one to her right. Maurici surmised he must be the jewel smuggler.

The other man began to moralize. “I'm telling you, you'll never find another landlady who loves you as much as she did. They don't make them like her anymore.”

Violeta riveted him with a glance full of scorn.

Hortènsia, on her part, offered a rejoinder: “You can say that again! Miss Pràxedes was a mother superior to us.”

“Shut up, you fool!” Margarita cut in. “Stop talking nonsense.”

The woman who'd spoken before said sententiously, “One day we're in the world and the next we're gone.”

“Don't be in such a hurry, Mercè,” the other one admonished. “Don't bury her before it's time. She isn't dead yet.”

“Just as good as she was, poor thing!”

He'd never felt as uncomfortable as he did in the mournful masquerade, the ghostly dance that circled the brothel's presidential bed. At the same time, he couldn't abandon Violeta to play her part in the farcical wake, watching the caricature of a mother struggle for her last breath. The moralizing customer, whose face seemed vaguely familiar, asked, “Has somebody called for the priest?”

“Father Ramon will be here any time now,” answered one of the women who, based on their comments, must have been neighbors.

“Which is your parish, ladies?”

“Our Lady of Mercy.”

“Ah!”

“Since when has she been like this?” the other neighbor asked.

“While she was fixing breakfast she had a coughing fit,” Hortènsia's words came out punctuated by sobs. “So I rush to her and slap her back real hard, like so, and I give her a couple of them pills. No use. She's choking, it gets worse and worse. Then Violeta comes out of her room and says we got to call the doctor. Meantime Miss Pràxedes has a seizure and drops on the floor. The three of us had a hard time to lift her up and put her in bed. We didn't think we could make it.”

“Has the doctor seen her already?”

“This morning,” Margarita answered. “He said she's got no more than twenty-four hours.”

Maurici wondered if the doctor was Dr. Serra.

“Oh, my God!” Hortènsia, in a flimsy, baby blue negligee, redoubled her cries.

“Go put something on,” Margarita ordered. “Don't let the priest see you in that getup.”

Five minutes later they heard a bell ringing, followed by two knocks. Hortènsia, in a sailor dress and holding a basinet of murky water against her hip, opened the door.

The priest cast a side glance at the basinet and the blond halo framing the heavily made-up face before he asked for the patient. He held the ritualistic paraphernalia in his hands and was accompanied by an altar boy of about twelve years old who waited in the foyer.

When he came into the room, the circle opened to make room for him by the bed. He set the cup and the host down on the nightstand and took a vial of ointment and a manual of liturgy from under his chasuble. Hortènsia, unburdened of the basinet and still sobbing, trailed in. Mrs. Prat stayed behind, detached from the rest.

The priest uncovered Miss Pràxedes's body. With mechanical repetition his anointed fingers drew crosses on every stronghold of sin, as he rattled off Latin formulas from the book he held in his other hand. Jaumet followed the proceedings with keen interest and gleaming eyes.

Just when it seemed that the crosses and the mumbo jumbo would go on forever, the celebrant produced a silver crucifix from his pocket and pressed it against the lips—already too stiff to kiss it. Undaunted, he took the cup and pushed the host inside the mouth as far as it would go. Hortènsia, crying all the while, leaned over to tenderly manipulate Miss Pràxedes's jaw and neck until finally they made the purely vegetative motion to swallow. Margarita followed the priest out of the room, gave him and the altar boy some money, and escorted them out.

The two men picked up their hats. Margarita's friend whispered something in her ear. The other one, dropping ad hoc exhortations to seek comfort and resignation, fled to his home base and family business uptown, on the other side of the border from the Street of the Three Beds. The neighbors lingered just long enough to reiterate their
offers of unconditional assistance. Mrs. Prat had to drag out Jaumet, reluctant to part with the fascination of death, and, looking askance at Maurici, she simply said to the girls, “Let me know when it's over.”

Mrs. Pràxedes's lungs kept pumping for no reason. Periodically, the panting crescendoed to a rattle that seemed to be the prelude of the end, but suddenly it would stop to restore the regular, wearisome wheezing. The young women decided to take turns by her bedside all night, if necessary. At Margarita's suggestion, Violeta would go first. Maurici, realizing his predicament was as absurd as it was inescapable, offered to replace her.

“Don't you understand that no one can do it for me?” she whispered. “I have to do it myself.”

“I thought you hated her.”

“Sure I hated her. But notice that you said it in the past. What you see lying in this bed isn't the monster I used to know. She can't do any more harm, and anything that can't do harm is pitiful.”

As was often the case, her argument persuaded him. With no further objections, he yielded the only armchair in the room to her and took the chair. Whenever his body cramped up, he went to stretch his legs in the parlor or down the hall. The thought of lighting a cigar—to watch the smoke, if nothing else—tempted him, but even in such unorthodox circumstances he couldn't forsake certain formalities. The next hours were uneventful. The ticktock of the clock and the breathing, as loud as that of a walrus, were the only sounds in the apartment. Time seemed to stand still. A thick silence, heavy with unpronounced words and paralyzed action, clung to the air. At last at midnight, when Violeta began to surrender to sleep, Hortènsia announced the change of guard.

Maurici and Violeta fell fast asleep in her room, to wake up later to an insistent rapping on the door. She got up and walked through the fog of slumber.

“She's dead,” Margarita stated, as she might have said, “It's five o'clock in the morning.” The dark circles around her eyes revealed nothing but sleep deprivation.

Hortènsia emerged from the next room clad in an open robe, her curls frizzier than ever, howling hysterically. Somewhat less harshly than usual, Margarita sought to calm her down.

“Why don't you fix her up a little? Meanwhile, we'll give notice to the neighbors and the funeral home.”

“Which funeral home are you thinking of?” Violeta, fully awake by now, gathered her hair together.

“The best in Barcelona: Neotafia. She had big notions about a first-class funeral. She was always giving me instructions. God knows she doesn't deserve it, but I want no debts with a ghost.”