Patricia Ratto - Proceed with Caution - Stories and a Novella

I remember I was in the upstairs bedroom, changing the sheets on Señora Andrea’s bed, when the intercom buzzed. I flew downstairs; the house is big, and the señora doesn’t like it when people keep buzzing; it makes her nervous. A peaceful household is very important to her. I answered the door, of course, and I could see him through the peephole: he had come to offer his services as a gardener. He was nice-looking, and said, in a kind of strange accent, that he had references. I asked him to wait while I went to ask the señora.

I don’t know what they talked about a little later, when the señora had finished bathing and received him, or what kind of reference papers he showed her, if, in fact, he showed her any, but she told me that Ennio would come back that same afternoon to start working on the garden. I was to let him in through the garage entrance, which was the one I used for coming and going, as did the dog walker, the seltzer man, and the supermarket delivery boy.

He slept with me, it’s true, in the room where I sleep, because I’ve been a live-in maid here for years. Well, not really all that long in this place because Señora Andrea moved here two years ago. But I had already been working for her at the apartment. At first the señora didn’t know that Ennio spent his nights here. It’s just that when he told me the things that had happened to him and that he had nowhere to go, I couldn’t refuse, and so I let him stay. It was so nice to listen to him, with his strange way of speaking. Besides, he told me things that were so… and he looked at me in a way that’s hard to explain, but later I found out why Ennio was the way he was, with that strength he had in his whole body and that wild sort of smell that made me think about nothing but taking him to bed with me. He would brush against me as he passed by, and the rest of that day I couldn’t think of anything else. I wished with all my soul that the hours would pass quickly and soon it would be time for him to go, so that Señora Andrea would see him leave, and later that night, I would secretly open the door for him so he could come in and stay. Together we ate whatever I brought up to my room, and when we were done we’d climb into bed.

Later on we stopped pretending that he was leaving, and he stayed behind in my room. Till one day Señora Andrea found out, got very angry, and called him over to have a talk with her. I don’t know what explanation he gave her, because in the end Señora Andrea made me take everything out of the little room where she used to store boxes of photos, boxes of her films, and cut-out articles from old magazines and trophies and plaques for the prizes she’d won, carry the boxes up to the attic and make up a bed for him in the emptied space. He accepted the offer, but in fact he always stayed and slept with me.

At first I didn’t even pay attention to what was wrong with Ennio; he made me so hot I couldn’t think, he made me blind, he had a way of touching me that even now I can’t think about it without wanting him here, close to me, again. It must have been about a week later that I woke up needing to pee and then I saw him and realized that he had gone to bed in his sneakers. They were sticking out from under the slightly lifted sheets. It seemed strange, of course, but I thought he had collapsed after working all day among the plants, with the shovel, the pruning shears, climbing up and down trees, lugging rocks in the wheelbarrow for some new flower beds, and, on top of it all, everything we’d done in bed. But honestly I didn’t say anything to him because I didn’t want him to feel uncomfortable and go away. My life had changed so much since he arrived… Why would I want to ruin everything with my big mouth?

He had a passion for plants and trees that I’ve never seen in anyone else, not even a gardener. He would grab handfuls of earth and smell them like they were a bottle of perfume. He would climb trees so quickly and gracefully that he didn’t seem to weigh an ounce. But he wasn’t scrawny; in fact he was pretty muscular, and I liked to feel all his weight on me, his chest, his arms, run my hands over his hairy back. In bed he was like an animal.

Señora Andrea’s dogs loved him, the poodle and the Afghan; sometimes they fought over who would play with him. He got them to do whatever he wanted: fetch things for him, play dead, bury bones, or fight with one another. I told him: they’re going to wear themselves out; if Señora Andrea sees you, she’ll be angry. They’re dogs, Ennio would reply, sometimes they’ve got to act like dogs. And besides, Señora Andrea never gets angry with me.

He could also do anything with plants: he shaped them, he made them burst with flowers, he could take one that at first glance looked dry and dead and make it bloom again in no time at all. The same with people. He stripped away my willpower; all I wanted was to please him and for him to keep doing everything he did to me in bed, even though he never took off his sneakers, and sometimes, for that very reason, he left me with bruises or scraped legs.

After a while he started to change a little. And he would disappear in the middle of the night. I walked over to his room and opened the door carefully to see if he was asleep. Since he was never there, I would look out the window that faces the garden and sometimes I’d see him, up in the walnut tree, staring at Señora Andrea’s room, or at the moon. Other times he wasn’t in his room or in the garden, and I didn’t see him anywhere. I started to suspect that he had left the house. Sometimes I heard him whispering on his cell phone. He seemed a little more distant, and certain things I did began to annoy him.

On one of those nights when I looked out to see where he was, I thought I saw a shadow climbing up to the balcony outside Señora Andrea’s room. But how could I be sure when we’d had some liquor, a yellow liquor, like gold, that Ennio had brought, according to him, to celebrate. To celebrate what? I asked, thinking he was going to propose something. To celebrate life, he said. And after a glass, he pulled down my panties and fucked me against the wall just like that, half-dressed. When I woke up he wasn’t there. I looked out the window, and that was when I thought I saw the shadow. I waited for Señora Andrea to scream, turn on the light, or make some sign or call for help, but I heard nothing and saw nothing, so I went back to bed.

One day we had an ugly fight. That afternoon a guy with a face I didn’t like at all showed up at the door. I told the guy that Ennio wasn’t there, that he’d gone out; to Ennio I didn’t say a word. We had been drinking a little again, and I asked him why the fuck he never took off his sneakers. Yeah, that’s exactly how I said it, why the fuck, very rudely, because the fact is I felt slightly jealous. And that’s when he told me the secret, he told me it was something he kept hidden and that nobody needed to know, because when people found out about it they stopped loving him, or else they wanted to take control of him, of his life, and he couldn’t belong to anyone. He had a problem with his feet, he said; he’d been born that way, and it wasn’t really a problem for him, but for everyone else it was. And that he’d gotten used to nobody seeing his feet. Whenever his secret came out in the open, sooner or later he had to leave wherever he was. That’s how his life had been, he told me. He went over to the little dresser, stuck his hand in his jacket pocket, took something out, and then he came closer and showed me a picture of a lovely fountain in Italy, in Florence. I didn’t catch the name of the place, something that sounded like plaza and like señora or señoría. He said that he had come from there, traveling from town to town, from one country to another, looking for a place to stay, to settle down. That he was like the one in the fountain, and he pointed to a statue that looked a lot like him, a whole lot; then he went on talking in another language that I guessed was Italian because I couldn’t understand a word anymore. I was going to ask him so very many things… but he grew pale and he looked so awful that I decided to keep quiet.