After shopping, she always walked a bit down Avenida Presidente Masaryk, where Maceo Encarnación shopped at all the chic, highend designer boutiques. Seventeen years ago, just after Anunciata had been born, while she still lay in the hospital, Maceo Encarnación had arrived with a jeweled Bulgari bracelet for her. For weeks afterward, she was terrified to try it on, though she fondled it every day and slept with it on her pillow every night.
That morning, after peering in some heavily fortified windows, she had abandoned Avenida Presidente Masaryk for her real destination, the Piel Canela boutique, at Oscar Wilde 20. She stopped in front of the window, staring at the butter-soft handbags, gloves, clutches, and belts that reminded her of the beautiful serpents she used to dream about in her youth. Her eyes slowly filled with tears as desire burned in her heart and lungs like the fire from which the phoenix once rose. There, in the center of the window, was the handbag she coveted and, half wrapped around its double strap, the elegant gloves. Both were the color of dulce de leche. Maria-Elena wanted them so badly her throat itched. But she knew she would never buy them. Tears leaked from her eyes, making rivulets down her cheeks. She wept and wept. It was not that she didn’t have enough money. She had been in Maceo Encarnación’s employ long enough, and he had been generous enough with her, that she could afford both items. But she was a girl of the streets; she could no more buy these high-priced items for herself than she would ever leave Maceo Encarnación’s employ, even after what had happened.
The final stop on her early morning excursion had been La Baila, on the Paseo de la Reforma, just four blocks south of Lincoln Park. The beautiful restaurant, lined in colorful Mexican tiles, turned out delicious and authentic food. In fact, over the years, Maria-Elena had been able to inveigle the recipe for the amazing thirty-ingredient mole de Xico from the owner-chef.
As the morning was mild, she had sat at an outside table, ignoring the fumes from the hellacious traffic on the Reforma. When Furcal, her favorite waiter, arrived at her table, she ordered her usual, atole, a boiled maize drink, flavored today with nopal, empanadas de plátano rellenos de frijol, and a double espresso cortado.
She had time now all to herself when, for the moment, she was free of obligations to Maceo Encarnación, when her mind could be itself, much as it was each night in the moments between the time she got into bed and the time she fell asleep. Except even then, within Maceo Encarnación’s compound, where his will could stretch out its hand and reach her any time of the day or night, she wasn’t truly free. Not like now, anyway, sitting by herself in a familiar restaurant, the sooty air of the city rushing by her on mysterious errands from the great volcano, Popocatépetl.
A female waiter she didn’t know had smiled warmly at her as she set down Maria-Elena’s atole.
“I hope the drink is to your liking,” she had said.
Maria-Elena, always polite, thanked her, took a sip, then another, deeper one, and nodded, allowing the waitress, whose name was Beatrice, to depart.
She wrapped her hands around the hand-thrown mug. She had time now to consider the implications of what she had read in Anunciata’s diary. Last week she had come across it by accident when she was cleaning her daughter’s room. It had been kicked, no doubt inadvertently, under the bed. Maria-Elena recalled with perfect clarity the moment, holding the book in her palms, when she had become aware that it was a diary. She recalled in vivid detail the fateful moment before she opened the diary, when everything was as it had always been. She almost didn’t open it. In fact, she had bent down to return it, unread, to its place beneath Anunciata’s bed. What would have happened then? Reality would not have been ripped and reshaped.
But curiosity had crawled through her like an evil serpent. Even then she had extended her arms, about to drop the diary under the bed. But something—the serpent of desired knowledge?—had stopped her, and she saw herself withdrawing her arms until the diary came back into view.
She did not stand up, and she wondered at that now. On her knees, as if in prayer, she opened the forbidden book, and read what she should never have read. Because in there, near the end, were lines of fire that seared her brain. She would have cried out then if she hadn’t immediately jammed her fist into her mouth.
Anunciata—her daughter, her only child—had been taking herself regularly to Maceo Encarnación’s bed. In horrific detail, the words of fire recounted the first time and every time thereafter. Maria-Elena slammed the diary shut. Her mind was aflame, but her heart, mortally wounded, had already fallen to ash.
She took a sheet of paper out of her handbag, unfolded it, and with a careful, cramped hand, began to write. As she did so, tears slid down her cheeks, staining the paper. She did not care. Her heart overflowed with shame and sorrow, but that did not stop her. Grimly, she kept writing until she came to the dreadful end. Then she folded the sheet away without looking at what she had written. Why bother? It was seared into her heart.
Once again, possessed by the evil serpent and having drained her atole, leaving the rest untouched, she threw some bills on the table and rushed down the sidewalk. Returning to the Piel Canela boutique, at Oscar Wilde 20, she pushed through the door, and, egged on by the serpent inside her, pulled out the credit card with which she purchased the food for Maceo Encarnación and bought her longed for purse and gloves. She ran her hands over them as the saleswoman rang up the charge, then she asked for them to be gift wrapped, watching as they were buried in layers of pastel-colored crepe paper, carefully interred in a thick box with the name of the boutique embossed in gold ink on either side. The lid was placed on and all was wrapped with a pink-and-green bow.
On the card the saleswoman handed her, she wrote the name of her beloved daughter. And below it, she wrote, “This is for you.”
Accepting her altered desire, she exited the shop into sudden blinding sunshine. She stood on the sidewalk, unable to take another step. Her legs refused to work, and now a sharp pain pierced the left side of her chest. Dios, what was happening to her? A terrible taste in her mouth. What had been in her drink?
Vertigo overcame her, and she fell. Shouts and the sounds of running feet came to her as far-away echoes, unattached to her or what was happening to her.
As she lay, staring up into the dusky sky, tears came again, along with a sob torn from the depths, where the evil serpent coiled and uncoiled, flicking its forked tongue. Her mind, encased in amber, flickering on the edge of a lethal unconsciousness, retreated to the only thing that mattered: the moment of the revelation a week ago.
The catastrophe was her fault. If only she had told Anunciata, but she had wanted to spare her daughter the sordid details of her origin. Now the mother had read those same sordid details in her daughter’s diary, knowing, God help her, that both mother and daughter had shared the same colossal bed, the same monstrous, all-powerful man, the same defilement. Maceo Encarnación was Anunciata’s father. Now he was her lover as well.
That was her last thought before the poison she had ingested at the café stopped her heart completely.
Martha Christiana sat brooding on the flight back to Paris from Gibraltar. Beside her, Don Fernando leafed through the latest Robb Report. She stared out the Perspex window at the infinite blue sky. Below her, the clouds looked so billowy that she imagined she could lie down and rest on them.
Rest is what she desired most now. Rest and the deep, untroubled sleep of the righteous, neither of which, she knew, were available to her. Don Fernando had astonished her at every turn. Now, after visiting her father’s grave, after seeing what her mother had become, how could she continue on the same path she had been traveling for years? How can I not? she asked herself.