Carlos Gamerro - An Open Secret

“She doesn’t say much does she,” I remark.

“Chesi? She’s a bit sparing with her words.”

Her sister’s body shakes with laughter like a pile of bags wrapped in cloth. “But it doesn’t matter, you know, your Auntie Porota does enough talking for the pair of us.”

“EVERYTHING HAS A LIMIT,” Don León Benoit would assure me that night. “The Ezcurrita affair let’s let it go shall we, but Doña Delia was a well-loved, well-respected member of the community, Don Alejandro Alvarado’s daughter no less. Never in our lives would we have agreed to let the police lay a finger on her, Superintendent Neri didn’t even dare dream of it because he knew. He knew all along what the result of such a preposterous plan would be. Later on of course circumstances changed, Doña Delia was no longer the person she had been and some of the things she did might even be considered illegal. But by then Neri’s opinion cut no ice here any more.”

“SO WE GO AND FETCH your grandmother and she says Do you think it’s wise and we say we do indeed she has great respect for you, she’ll listen to you, and you know your grandmother she didn’t get on with her at all but at a time like that I always say you have to put any pettiness to one side the way your grandmother did an example to us all that Delia couldn’t live up to when she opens the door to us we can’t believe what a mess she looks I swear it broke our hearts to see her and she looks at us with that faraway look and asks why we’ve come, what we’re doing here. And we have trouble persuading her to let us in but we sit down and she doesn’t offer us anything and her once such an attentive hostess with her fancy teas and her petits fours from Fuguet because she used to say the bakeries here in town weren’t up to much and then I can see she’s about to break down and I go over to her and take her by the hand and give it a pat Don’t get so worked up, you’re bound to get news soon you know Darío and that obviously touched something deep inside her she clung to my shoulder and began to cry inconsolably, you should’ve seen her it was obviously just what she needed to get it off her chest and Chesi and your grandmother came over too to comfort her there … there … and I can’t remember Chesi if it was you or me who says to Delia Please this has got to stop, you can’t go on like this think of your family and then she did react but not the way we expected, she stands up suddenly like this in a dressing gown I’d never seen her in before and posh shoes can you imagine what a clash I think she must have been drinking because she was unsteady on her feet and says to us What family! I haven’t got a family! You lot killed them! And for the three of us it was like a slap in the face Good Lord hand on heart Delia how can you say something like that we’re your friends you know you aren’t in your right mind and she says First you kill him and then you come to comfort me, as if we’d been the ones responsible, so there was clearly nothing to be done about it then she wouldn’t listen to reason a dreadful dreadful shame I tell you but the three of us got up to go and when we were outside on the sidewalk we turned round to say something to her but she was standing there like a statue in the doorway, and she says to us, listen because this one really takes the biscuit, she says to us The woman you came to see doesn’t exist any more, so you’d better not call again. Just like that she told us didn’t she Chesi. Can you imagine! She always had something … how can I put it … always had a flare for melodrama about her Delia did. But she went too far that time. The three of us and your grandmother had gone to see her with the best of intentions.”

“She suffered a lot,” I manage to say pathetically.

“Of course she did of course she did,” Auntie Porota concedes magnanimously. “That’s why we didn’t bear her any ill will. And the next day maybe on account of our visit it backfired on us the next day she goes and plants herself outside the door to the headquarters waiting for the chief of police and after that he used to drive straight in through the jailhouse gate, then Delia went off to the courts from which she’d also been banned, she used to pester Dr Carmona in particular what sainted patience that woman had anyone else’d’ve had her arrested and Delia was now spending all day on the streets almost always hanging around the headquarters, there were times she’d fall asleep on a bench and the maid had to come and wake her up and take her home, they say she had to help her get bathed and dressed a saint that girl died in childbirth she did a few years later, here in the little ward in the arms of Dr Lugozzi who could do little for her, it was thanks to her poor thing that Delia wasn’t wandering the streets looking like death warmed up but anyway word’d already got out I don’t know who started calling her that they say it was the Superintendent himself but I don’t think so he was very well spoken but because of the upset he’d already taken to the bottle and so in a moment of exasperation you can understand it he may’ve called her a mad hag and the name stuck. Goodness me, life’s full of little surprises as I sometimes say. From being the snootiest woman in town to this, when even the kids coming out of school would go past the bench outside the headquarters and shout mad hag, mad hag, and then your grandfather, must’ve been at the Superintendent’s request, had the bench taken away and Delia sat on the kerb, leaning against that sentry box that’s always there.”

“AND THIS ONE TIME it was throwing it down and I knock on the door of the Superintendent’s office with some papers for him and as I don’t hear anything I open the door and find him sitting at his desk with a half-empty whisky bottle and his back to the window staring into space,” ex-policeman Carmen Sayago would also manage to tell us the night we broke three of his ribs, “and without looking up he goes and asks Is she still there? And I stick my head out of his office window and I can see Señora Delia sitting on her bench as usual drenched she was hair all over the place crazier than ever she looked and I go Yes Superintendent sir and he nods and doesn’t say a word and I go out as I came in and take the papers to Greco.”

“YOU KNOW WHO SENDS THEIR REGARDS Auntie Porota?” Taking advantage of a lull in the story, I smile and delay my answer to see if I’ll get the few seconds of improbable silence the pronunciation of her dear name deserves. “Gloria. Remember Gloria?”

“Which one, Gloria Caramuto? Saw her only this morning I did. She’s going gaga poor woman, can’t remember a thing. The other day she went into the bakery three times running—”

“No, no,” I wave my hands incompetently in the air. “Gloria who’s my age, a bit older, who lived two doors down from Babil’s …”

“Ahhh I know, you mean Yoli’s daughter. Yes I ran into her in Buenos Aires one time I went, don’t know how she found out I was there but she came to see me, with a Remember me Doña Porota? Easy game that one used to be, had a loose streak she did. Used to come in summer and go through two or three from here or the other towns and then go back to her boyfriend or boyfriends who knows in Buenos Aires, no bones broken. I always said she’d come to a bad end and that she did, what an upset for her parents, so right-minded they were, and she a guerrilla, and then she was nabbed and doesn’t she end up marrying or shacking up I’m not sure with some high-ranking officer? I’m telling you she’s easy that one is. No beating about the bush. And her daughters the poor things turned out retarded tell me it’s genetic you can or whatever you like but you’re not telling me all that sleeping around didn’t have anything to do with it. And then she drops in to see me with her How are you Doña Porota, remember me? And me, Course I do my love, how could I forget?”