Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

—

BUT THESE WEREN’T the paintings that sold. It was Señora Lucy’s lost woman paintings that had made her famous. The lost woman was thought to be a representation of the Señora herself, but if anybody had asked Montse about that she would have disagreed. She knew some of these paintings quite well, having found out where a number of them were being exhibited. Sunday morning had become her morning for walking speechlessly among them. Safiye crossed a snowy valley with her back to the onlooker, and she left no footprints. In another painting Safiye climbed down a ladder of clouds; you turned to the next picture frame and she had become a gray-haired woman who closed her eyes and turned to dust at the same time as sweeping herself up with a little brush she held in her left hand.

“And the garden?” Montserrat asked.

Lucy smiled. “Still mine. I go there once a year. The lock never changes; I think the place has been completely forgotten. Except maybe one day she’ll meet me there.”

“I hope she does,” Montse lied. “But isn’t there some danger there?”

“So you believe what she said?”

“Well — yes.”

“Thank you. For saying that. Even if you don’t mean it. The papers said this Señora Fausta Del Olmo was stabbed… what Safiye described was close enough…”

—

MONTSE THOUGHT that even now it wouldn’t be difficult to turn half-fledged doubt into something more substantial. She could say, quite simply, I’m touched by your constancy, Señora, but I think you’re waiting for a murderer. Running from the strangeness of such a death was understandable; having the presence of mind to take the key was less so. Or, Montse considered, you had to be Safiye to understand it. And even as herself Montse couldn’t say for sure what she would have done or chosen not to do in such a situation. If that’s how you find out who you really are then she didn’t want to know. So yes, Montse could help Señora Lucy’s doubts along, but there was no honor in pressing such an advantage.

“And what about your own key, Montserrat?”

Lucy’s key gleamed and Montse’s looked a little sad and dusty; perhaps it was only gold plated. She rubbed at it with her apron.

“Just junk, I think.”

—

ALL THE SHOPS would be closed by the time Montse finished work, and the next day would be St. Jordi’s Day, so Montse ran into the bookshop across the street and chose something with a nice cover to give to Señora Lucy. This errand combined with the Señora’s long story meant that Montserrat was an hour late returning to the laundry room. She worked long past dinnertime, wringing linen under Señora Gaeta’s watchful eye, silently cursing the illusions of space that had been created within the attic. All those soaring lines from ceiling to wall disguised the fact that the room was as narrow as a coffin. Finally Señora Gaeta inspected her work and let her go. Only one remark was made about Montse’s shamefully late return from lunch: “You only get to do that once, my dear.”

—

MONTSE WENT HOME to the room and bed she shared with three other laundry maids more or less the same size as her. She and her bedfellows usually talked until they fell asleep. They were good friends, the four of them; they had to be. That night Montse somehow made it into bed first and the other three climbed in one by one until Montse lay squashed up against the bedroom wall, too tired to add to the conversation.

—

WHILE MONTSE had been making up her hours the other laundry maids had attended a concert and glimpsed a few of La Pedrera’s most gossiped about couples there. For example, there were the Artigas from the third floor and the Valdeses from the fourth floor, lavishing sepulchral smiles upon each other. Señor Artiga and Señora Valdes were lovers with the tacit consent of his wife and her husband. Señora Valdes’s husband was a gentle man many years older than her, a man much saddened by what he saw as a fatal flaw in the building’s design. The lift only stopped at every other floor; this forced you to meet your neighbors as you walked the extra flight of stairs up or down, this was how Señora Valdes and Señor Artiga had first found themselves alone together in the first place. It was Señor Valdes’s hope that his wife’s attachment to “that popinjay” Artiga was a passing fancy. Artiga’s wife couldn’t wait that long, and had made several not so discreet inquiries regarding the engagement of assassins until her husband had stayed her hand by vowing to do away with himself if she harmed so much as a hair on Señora Valdes’s head. Why didn’t Artiga divorce his wife and ask Señora Valdes to leave her husband and marry him? She’d have done it in a heartbeat, if only he’d ask (so the gossips said). Señor Artiga was unlikely to ask any such thing. His mistress was the most delightful companion he’d ever known, but his wife was an heiress. No man in his right mind leaves an heiress unless he’s leaving her for another heiress. “Maybe in another life, my love,” Artiga told Señora Valdes, causing her to weep in a most gratifying manner. And so in between their not so secret assignations Artiga and Señora Valdes devoured each other with their eyes, and Señora Artiga raged like one possessed, and Señor Valdes patiently awaited the vindication of an ever-dwindling hope, and their fellow residents got up a petition addressed to the owners of the building, asking that both the Artigas and the Valdeses be evicted. The conserje and his wife liked poor old Señor Valdes, but even they’d signed the petition, because La Pedrera’s reputation was bad enough, and it was doubtful that this scandalous peace could hold. Laura, Montse’s outermost bedmate, was taking bets.

—

ON THE MORNING of St. Jordi’s Day, before work began, Montse climbed the staircase to the third floor. To Lucy from her Aphrodite . The white walls and window frames wound their patterns around her with the adamant geometry of a seashell. A book and a rose, that was all she was bringing. The Señora wasn’t at home. She must be in her garden with all her other roses. Montse set her offering down before Señora Lucy’s apartment door, the rose atop the book. And then she went to work.

—

“MONTSERRAT, have you seen the newspaper?” Assunta called out across the washtubs.

“I never see the newspaper,” Montserrat answered through a mouthful of thread.

“Montserrat, Montserrat of the key,” Marta crooned beside her. The other maids took up the chant until Montse held her needle still and said: “All right, what’s the joke, girls?”

“They’re talking about the advertisement that’s in La Vanguardia this morning,” said Señora Gaeta, placing the newspaper on the lid of Montse’s workbasket. Montse laid lengths of thread beneath the lines of newsprint as she read:

ENZO GOMEZ OF GOMEZ, CRUZ AND MOLINA AWAITS CONTACT WITH A WOMAN WHO BEARS THE NAME MONTSERRAT AND IS IN POSSESSION OF A GOLD KEY ONE AND ONE HALF INCHES IN LENGTH.

Without saying another word, the eagle-eyed Señora Gaeta picked up a scarlet thread an inch and a half long and held it up against Montse’s key. The lengths matched. Señora Gaeta rested a hand on Montse’s shoulder, then walked back up to the front of the room to inspect a heap of newly done laundry before it returned to its owner. The babble around Montse grew deafening.

“Montse don’t go — it’s a trap! This is just like that episode in Lightning and Undetectable Poisons —”

“That’s our Cecilia, confusing life with one of her beloved radio novellas again… so sordid an imagination…”

“Let’s face it, eh, Montse — you’re no good at laundry, you must have been born to be rich!”