Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Montserrat, I wrote that being in love with your father was nice, but being in love with Isidoro Salazar was like a dream. Not because of money or anything like that—! The man loved foolishly and without regard for the time limit his learned doctors had told him he had; he made me feel that in some way we had always known about each other and that he would be at my side forever. When Fausta Del Olmo took me aside and asked: “Is there anything you want to tell me?” my blood should have run cold, but it didn’t. After all she could have been asking about the pregnancy.

Beyond Isidoro’s staircase is a door that connects to a walled garden. The garden is Isidoro’s too: he planted all the roses there himself and took care of them until he got too sick to do anything but just be there with them of an evening. We were often there together. It’s a long walk from the top of the garden to the bottom, and I’d carry him some of the way. Yes, on my back, if you can imagine that. He was drowsy because of his medication — he had to take more and more — but even through the haze of his remedies he remembered you. “The baby!” I told him you didn’t mind (you don’t, do you?) and that his weight was balancing me out. He grew more lucid when we lay down on the grass. He was so fond of the roses; one night I told him that he wouldn’t die, but that he would become roses.

“I wouldn’t mind this dying so much if that were true,” he said, slowly. “But wait a minute… roses die too.”

“Well, after that you’d become something else. Maybe a wasp, because then you could go around stinging people who don’t like your poems.”

It was around that time that I kept finding gifts on my bed. Little gifts, but they got bigger and bigger. A mother of pearl comb, a calfskin purse, a green cashmere shawl. I told Isidoro to stop giving me gifts. The other servants were asking about them. Isidoro simply smiled at first, but when he asked me to show him the gifts I saw that he was perplexed and that they hadn’t come from him.

“Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?” Fausta Del Olmo asked, and maybe it was just a beam of sunlight that struck her eye, but I thought she squinted at my stomach. She added that the master would return in two weeks’ time. I didn’t even answer her. Suddenly she pushed me — if I hadn’t clutched the stair rail I would have fallen — and as she passed me she hissed: “Why should it be you who sees him?”

That afternoon I found the last gift under my pillow. It was a diamond ring. I put the box in the pocket of my apron and kept it there until nighttime, when I went to the library. I showed the ring to Isidoro and asked him what I should do. He said I should marry him. He had instructed Fausta Del Olmo to put the ring beneath my pillow; he was sure that she had been responsible for the other gifts, even though they were nothing to do with him. She was planning something, but it didn’t matter, or wouldn’t if I married him.

“Time is of the essence,” Isidoro said. All I could do was look at him with my mouth wide open. And then I said yes. He said I must fetch a priest at once, and I didn’t know where to find a priest, so I went and woke Fausta Del Olmo up and asked her to help me. She gave me the oddest look and said: “What do you want a priest for?”

“I’m marrying Isidoro Salazar tonight,” I said.

“Oh, really? And I suppose he’s the father of your child too?” she whispered, her eyes glinting the way they do when she gets hold of a secret at last.

“Please just hurry.”

Fausta Del Olmo put on her coat and slippers and ran out to fetch a priest, and the man of God arrived quickly; he was calm and had a kind face and took my hand and asked me what the trouble was. “But didn’t you tell him, Fausta, that this is a wedding?”

Fausta shrugged and looked embarrassed and I began to be frightened of her all over again. Something was wrong. I took the priest to the library, and Fausta Del Olmo followed us. Isidoro wasn’t there, but when I opened the library door, a door at the far, far end of the room slammed shut. Isidoro had seen Fausta and escaped into the rose garden. I went after him, but Fausta and the priest didn’t follow me — they were talking, and Fausta was pointing at something… I now realize it was the door to Isidoro’s rooms that she was pointing at.

Isidoro wasn’t in the garden; after searching for him I went back into the library, which was also empty. I could hear a lot of noise and commotion in the rest of the house, footsteps hurrying up and down the wing where Isidoro’s rooms were. I saw his rooms, the inside of them, I mean, for the first time that night. The priest Isidoro and I had sent for was praying over a waxen body that lay in the bed. When the priest finished his prayers he said that I must not be afraid to tell him the truth, that no one would punish me, that I’d done well to send for him.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“This man has been dead for at least a day. No, don’t shake your head at me, young lady. See how stiff he is. He’d been very ill, poor soul, so this is a release for him. You came here this morning and found him like this, isn’t that what happened? And your master is away, so you worried all day about who to tell and what you would say until the worry made you cook up this story in your head about a wedding. Isn’t that so?”

All the servants were listening, but I still said no, that he was wrong. I put my hand in my pocket to take out my ring and show it to him, but the ring was gone too.

“My ring,” I said, turning to Fausta Del Olmo, who replied in the deadliest, most gentle voice: “What ring, Aurelie? Be careful what you say.”

After that I stopped talking. I looked at the body in the bed and told myself it was Isidoro and no one else. This was a truth that I had to learn, things would go very badly for me if I refused to learn it, but the lesson was very hard indeed.

The priest left, promising to write to the master as soon as he got home, and all we servants went to bed. Fausta was the last to leave Isidoro’s room, closing the door behind her as quietly as if he was just sleeping. Then she took my arm and dragged me downstairs to the maids’ dormitory, where judge and jury were waiting. Was I mad or was I simply a liar? They’d already taken out the little gifts I’d received and were talking about them: Now Fausta told them where the gifts had come from. I’d taken the key to the library from the master’s laundry, she announced, and I’d been selling off a number of his valuable books. I inferred from this that this is what Fausta herself had been doing before I’d interrupted her with my library visits.

“But how stupid, to spend the money on things like this,” the cook said, flapping the green shawl in my face.

“Some people just don’t think of the future,” Fausta Del Olmo said. A couple of the other maids hadn’t joined in and looked as if they didn’t entirely believe Fausta Del Olmo. Perhaps they’d had their own problems with her. But then Fausta announced that even Isidoro Salazar had known I was a thief. She showed them some of the slips of paper Isidoro had left for me in the library, slips he must have left that time I stayed away. The words “pretty thief” persuaded them. The master is a generous man and stealing from him causes all sorts of unnecessary difficulties. Now that some of his books are gone he may well become much less generous. The servants drove me out of the dormitory. They went to the kitchen and took pots and pans and banged them together and cried: “Shame! Shame! Shame!” I stayed in my bed for as long as I could with my covers pulled over my head, but they were so loud. They surrounded my bed, shame, shame, shame, so loud I can still hear it, shame, shame, shame. I fled, and Fausta and the servants chased me through the corridors with their pots and pans and screeching — someone hit me with a spatula and then they all threw spoons, which sounds droll now that it’s over, but having silver spoons thrown at you in a dark house is a terrifying thing, you see them flashing against the walls like little swords before they hit you. It would’ve been worse if those people had actually had knives: they’d completely lost their minds.