She was not, however, an idle woman, as might be inferred from my description of her, and she earned a modest salary, compared, that is, with what Muriel brought in (as well as being modest, it was probably unnecessary as a contribution to their household expenses and she spent it on other things). She taught English at a school three mornings a week and, on a couple of afternoons, gave a few private lessons at her students’ homes, or at least that is the version she gave. I don’t think she had ever studied English systematically, but, born in Madrid towards the end of the Civil War, she had been taken, when still very young, to the United States and had spent part of her childhood, adolescence and early youth there, alternating periods spent in America with time spent in Spain, under the guardianship of an aunt and uncle (who were on good terms with the regime), and in close fraternity with her cousins. She was, out of laziness really, not completely bilingual, but very nearly. Her father, who had not been active during the Civil War and was not initially pursued by the franquistas (although in the 1930s and 40s and even in the 50s, this could change from one day to the next, all it took was some neighbourhood enmity, some old insult or affront to one of the victors, some arbitrary, false accusation, or people desperate to curry favour with the authorities), had succeeded in leaving the country a few months before Madrid was taken by Franco’s troops. A man of moderately Republican, secular views, aware of what the country could become in the hands of the rebels (who would now have a free, unfettered hand), he had been filled with distaste and fear, if not horror and panic, and had made the most of his sudden solitude to leave for France, taking his young daughter with him, despite all the difficulties this would involve and the potential risk to such a small child. From there Ernesto had managed to travel to Mexico with the support of the Foreign Office of that generous country (they cushioned the fall of many who fell at the time), where he stayed for almost a year, until — possibly thanks to the poet Salinas or the poet Guillén, both of whom he had known and admired in Madrid, or directly through Justina Ruiz de Conde — he was given the post of Spanish teacher at Wellesley College in Massachusetts or at Smith or Tufts or Lesley or some other institution near Boston (or perhaps he did the rounds of them all, but who knows in which order), which was considerably steadier and better paid than the sporadic work he found in the insecure world of publishing in a Mexico plagued with compatriot competitors. He had graduated in Philosophy and Literature shortly before the War broke out and, in Spain, had taught at a language school and translated books from German and English, works by Joseph Roth and Arthur Schnitzler, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, among others. He had an excellent grasp of English, although he had never spoken it much and, according to his daughter, even after all his years in America, he never lost his Spanish accent.
She had never quite understood what I described earlier as his ‘sudden solitude’. According to the version she was given as a child, her mother had died shortly after giving birth to her in the midst of a bombardment or when a shell had fallen on the house, leaving a huge hole in the next-door apartment, so they had, all things considered, been very lucky. Her father never went into detail when she asked him about it, sometimes changing the story or contradicting himself, as if he had invented the whole thing as well as the circumstances surrounding it and had never bothered to fix the lie in his imagination or his memory. He rarely spoke about his wife and when he did, his tone was rather cool and indifferent; he wasn’t one of those young widowers who are devastated by their loss and find it terribly hard to recover. On weekends, he would hire a babysitter and go off to Boston, returning late at night. He clearly adored his daughter and cared for her, but with a kind of inherent negligence, after all, he was a man on his own, fairly young and inexperienced, doubtless distracted by his own youth. And so he found it relatively easy to send her off to her aunt and uncle, who often paid for her fare: Beatriz spent nearly every summer and sometimes a whole school year in Spain and, during those stays, she picked up certain comments and insinuations, which escaped — either deliberately or by chance — the lips of those relatives on her father’s side, the only ones she knew or had seen, and who seemed vexed with their brother or brother-in-law, and this had led her to think that perhaps her mother hadn’t died, but had either left her husband shortly after she was born and chosen not to keep the child of a man she bitterly resented or found repulsive or, because of political differences that proved insuperable at the time, had refused to accompany him on his journey into exile and allowed the child to go with him instead of demanding that she remain in her care in Spain. In short, she had either given up her child or the child had been snatched or stolen by her father. It wasn’t until much later that Beatriz dared to ask openly what had happened, in fact, it wasn’t until shortly before her wedding, she was never in much of a hurry to find out. There are some things about which it’s best just to have your suspicions, as long as these are not pressing or unbearable, rather than pursue some disappointing or painful certainty that, as Muriel had more or less said, would oblige you to go on living, meanwhile having to tell yourself a different story from the one you had lived with up until then, always supposing it was possible to cancel out or replace what you had already lived. Or even cancel out or replace what you had believed, if you had believed it for a long time.
Needless to say, I gleaned most of these facts from Muriel or Beatriz or from third parties later on, and some facts (for example, the translations Beatriz’s father had published) I learned more recently thanks to the Internet and its boundless but not always accurate information. Anyway, Beatriz spoke English almost like a native, and although many years of barely leaving Spain had made her accent a little rusty and corrupted her syntax (she sometimes made mistakes), this nevertheless meant she could be something more than a mere housewife and earn a little money. Not that she was entirely inactive or idle when she wasn’t teaching; she appeared to do her best to fend off her underlying unhappiness by filling her days, at least in fits and starts. On her free mornings or afternoons she would leave the apartment without saying where she was going and without Muriel asking her — well, why would he, given how estranged they were from one another? Sometimes Rico would come and pick her up when he was in Madrid, and sometimes it was Roy or a female friend, of which she had several, but two of whom were particular favourites, although I liked neither very much. However, she would always try to be back in time for the children’s supper, if not before, just in case they needed help with their homework or to tell her their troubles, especially the two younger ones (troubles at school, I mean, the kind that can still be talked about openly).