This absence that is a presence. This silence that seeks voice. This portrait forever trapped in childhood. .
Chapter 3
To put things another way, when we sit for breakfast, we’re already dressed for work. I offer these details about our formal appearances to contrast them with our nocturnal passions. At night in our marital bed, Asunción is like the salamander of myth; cold that shall burn, burning that shall freeze; fleeting like mercury and stable as a precious pearl; devoted, mysterious, surprising, flirtatious; imagined and imaginative. . No talk, all action. In the morning, we take our breakfast, and we assume our professional roles, still holding onto the memory of a passionate night and feeling the desire for the next night while experiencing both the happiness of having Magdalena and the hurt of having lost Didier.
When I told Asunción about the lawyer Zurinaga’s request, she was as pleased as I that this assignment would bring us together through work.
“Zurinaga’s friend is looking for a remote house on a lot with yards on all sides, easy to defend against intruders, and get this, with a ravine out back.”
“No problem,” said Asunción, smiling. “What’s with that look, huh? You don’t believe me? There are tons of houses like that in Bosques de las Lomas.”
“There’s more,” I went on. “Our client stipulates that all the windows in the house be blacked out.”
Her surprise gave me pleasure.
“No windows?”
“That’s right. No windows. We have to block them, brick them up, however you say it.”
“He wants to live in the dark?”
“Apparently he can only stand artificial light. He has a problem with his eyes.”
“Maybe he’s albino.”
“Nope, I think it’s called photophobia. And there’s one more thing. He wants us to dig a tunnel between his house and the ravine.”
“A tunnel? Our client is a little eccentric.”
“A tunnel that connects his house to the ravine so he can go out without having to step foot on the street.”
“Make that very eccentric. So do you know him?”
“Know him? No, he isn’t in the country yet. He’s waiting for the house to be ready before he moves here. You find the house, and I’ll write up the contracts. Zurinaga gets the bills for the rehab and the furnishings.”
“That’s odd. That must mean they’re pretty close friends.”
“Seems like it. But it wasn’t just odd, it was a little creepy: when Don Eloy said good-bye to me. .”
“Creepy how?”
“He said good-bye, but he didn’t so much as look at me.”
“He did what? Don Eloy?”
“He was looking down at his lap the whole time.”
“Darling, you’re making too much of that. It sounds like nothing,” she assured me. “So tell me, is our client going to live all alone?”
“No, not all alone. He has a manservant and a daughter.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know about the manservant,” I smiled, “but Don Eloy said the girl’s ten years old.”
“She’s ten. That’s great. She could be a playmate for Magdalena.”
“We’ll have to see about that. Does it strike you as odd that our client is the same age as Don Eloy, almost ninety-years old, and he has a ten-year-old daughter?”
“She could be adopted.”
“Or the old guy is popping Viagra,” I joked.
“Don’t worry so much,” said my wife in a professional tone. “I’ll talk to Alcayaga, the engineer, about the tunnel. You remember, he’s Chepina’s dad, you know, Magdalena’s little friend?”
Afterward we went our separate ways to work: Asunción to her real estate agency in the Polanco area and I to the ancient office that Zurinaga’s practice had always occupied, and would always occupy, on Cinco de Mayo Avenue in the historic downtown of our even more ancient Hispano-Aztec city. Asunción’s schedule was flexible enough to allow her the luxury of picking up Magdalena from school at five. I’d be back home by seven. Asunción ate alone at her desk, a coffee and a sandwich, never kept company by any clients with whom she might share some familiarity. I, on the contrary, granted myself the Mexican national luxury of a multi-course two-to-three-hour lunch with my friends at the Danubio on Uruguay Street, if I stayed downtown, or otherwise at one of the establishments in the Zona Rosa, preferably the Bellinghausen. At night, at eight sharp, we would put our little girl to bed, listen to her account of the day, tell her bedtime stories, and only when she was asleep, Asunción of my soul, the night was ours, with all of its doubts and its debts. .
Chapter 4
The steps for finding our client a home were duly undertaken. Asunción located an available house matching the client’s specifications in the mountainous neighborhood of Lomas Heights. I drew up the contracts and presented them to Don Eloy Zurinaga, who in turn, and contrary to his usual practice, took charge himself of ordering the furniture for the house in a style that was the opposite of his own antiquated taste. Free of Victorian or Neo-Baroque bump-outs, very Roche-Bobois in décor, the Lomas mansion evoked a modern monastery, all right angles and views without clutter. Large empty spaces — floors, walls, ceilings — and comfortable, svelte chairs and couches in black leather. Opaque tables of leaden metal. Not one painting, photo, or even a mirror. The house was built for light, in keeping with the principles of Scandinavian design, designed for environments where great openings were required to let in even a little light, but rather out of place in the sunny reality of Mexico. It’s no wonder that a great Mexican architect like Ricardo Legorreta builds protective shade into his houses to allow for a cool interior, light in color. But I digress: my boss’s client had exiled natural light from this glass palace; he wanted to wall himself in as though in one of his mythical Central European castles, of which Don Eloy had spoken.
Coincidentally, the day that Zurinaga ordered the windows blocked, a veil of clouds had left the house in shadows, and the sparseness of the furnishings was revealed as a necessary deprivation — the better to allow a person to walk around in the dark without tripping over and bumping into everything. A strange detail caught my attention then, because it seemed to compensate for the otherwise stark decor: a great number of drains ran along the walls of the ground floor, as though our client was expecting a flood any day now.
The tunnel was dug from the back of the house to the steep ravine, in accord with the future resident’s instructions, and part of the latter’s slope stripped bare, harvested of its ancient willows and Montezuma cypresses.
“In whose name should I make out the contracts, sir?” I asked Don Eloy Zurinaga.
“In my name,” he said, “as proxy.”
“The power-of-attorney document seems to be missing.”
“Then draft it, Navarro.”
“Fine, but I’ll still need the name of the legal tenant.”
The lawyer Eloy Zurinaga — so forthright but so cold, so courteous but so distant — now hesitated again, the second time he had ever done so in my presence. But no sooner had he lowered his head involuntarily than he collected himself, cleared his throat, tightened his grip on his armchair, and said in a calm voice: “Vladimir Radu. Count Vladimir Radu.”
“All my friends call me Vlad,” said our client, smiling, one night a month later, when, already settled into the house in Lomas, he had summoned me for our first meeting.
“I hope you can excuse my eccentric schedule,” he went on, courteously extending a hand, inviting me to sit down on a black leather sofa. “In wartime one is forced to live by night and to pretend that nothing is ever happening in one’s own dwelling, Monsieur Navarro: that it is uninhabited; that everyone has fled. One must not attract attention.”