“To Acapulco.”
“Ah.”
“Max Monroy has a nice house there. On the way to La Quebrada. Here are the keys.”
She tossed them, with a contemptuous gesture though with a friendly smile, on the table.
It was a house on the way to La Quebrada, Asunta explained. It dated from the late 1930s, when Acapulco was a fishing village and there were only two hotels: La Marina, in the middle of town, and Hotel de La Quebrada, which came down from the hills and settled on a terrace where one could admire intrepid divers who waited for the right waves and then threw themselves into the narrow inlet of water between steep, craggy cliffs.
Now Acapulco had grown until it had millions of inhabitants, hundreds of hotels, restaurants, and condominiums, beaches polluted by the uncontrolled discharge from the aforementioned hotels, restaurants, and condominiums, and increasing sprawl to the south of the city, from Puerto Marques to Revolcadero and even as far as Barra Vieja, in search of what Acapulco used to offer like a baptismal certificate: limpid water, tended beaches, paradise lost…
I arrived at Max Monroy’s house at La Quebrada on a solitary Monday with one suitcase and the books I wanted to reread to see if one day I would present my lawyer’s thesis,
All this was in my knapsack. The indispensable commentaries. Above all, those of the statesman speaking to Machiavelli power to power: Napoleon Bonaparte feels he is the Machiavellian incarnation of the New Prince as opposed to the Hereditary one, but is anxious to endure in power: to be succeeded, as the New Prince, by his descendants, who will be the Heirs…
I say all the preceding so the reader can know my good-magnificent-intentions when I withdrew to Acapulco loaded down with Machiavellian literature and with a touch of melancholy, an inevitable residue of my recent personal history, not imagining that the true Machiavellianism wasn’t in my knapsack but waiting for me in the house at La Quebrada, which you reached by ascending the mountainous curves over the bay until you reached a rocky height and entered a mansion that rushed, with no distinction of style beyond a vague “Californian” from the 1930s, past the kitchens, bedrooms, and sitting rooms to the reward of a huge terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean and, farther down, the narrow private beach. In its entirety, it was like one of those white porcelain dinner pails my guardian Maria Egipciaca prepared for me with five little stacked plates, from wet soup to dry soup to chicken to vegetables to dessert… the works.
“Max Monroy built it for Sibila Sarmiento,” Asunta Jordan told me surprisingly when I reached the terrace and she came toward me, highball in hand, barefoot, dressed in palazzo pajamas I knew from rooting through her closet. Loose blouse. Wide pants. Black with gold trim and edges.
She offered me the drink. I feigned casualness. She didn’t tell me too much. It wasn’t the first surprise this woman had given me. She looked at the ocean.
“But Sibila Sarmiento never got to live in it. Well, in fact, she didn’t even get to see it…”
She saw me. She didn’t look at me. She saw me there: like a thing. A necessary but awkward thing.
Asunta laughed in her fashion: “Max had illusions that one day he’d be able to bring the mother of his three sons here, to Acapulco, and offer her a quiet life by the ocean. Well. What a hope!”
Her gaze became cynical.
One more of Max’s illusions. He imagined that one day Dona Concha would free him from the maternal dictatorship to which she kept him subjected.
“A man at once complicated and simple,” she went on, “it’s difficult for Max Monroy to digest. Everything takes him time. He never belches, you know? There are things he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want… And another thing. Between utility and revenge, he always chooses the useful.”
She raised her glass. She almost winked at me.
“I’m just the opposite…”
She laughed. “Then he strikes like a bolt of lightning.”
She indicated that I should sit in a wicker chair. I remained standing. At least in this I could rebel against what I felt was the implicit dictatorship of Asunta Jordan. She didn’t care.
“Max Monroy!” she exclaimed as if she were invoking the sunset. “A civilized man, right? A reasonable man, don’t you think? He always asks for suggestions. He’s open to suggestions. Ah, but not to criticism. Suggesting is one thing. Criticizing is another. Criticizing him means thinking he can’t think for himself, that he requires orientation, another’s opinion… False. The suggestions should stop halfway between two hateful extremes, Josue, my good Josue: flattery and criticism.”
She told me she would criticize, for example, this useless, uninhabited house… a mansion for a ghost, for a madwoman. Or for a ghostly madwoman.
She smiled. “Imagine Sibila Sarmiento wandering here, not knowing where she is, not even looking at the ocean, distant from the moon and the sun, prisoner of nothingness or of a hope as crazy as she is. The hope Max will return and rescue her from the asylum. Or at least make her another son. Another heir!
“Thank me, Josue… I flew here to prepare the house for you so you’ll be comfortable. It was sealed tight, as if with a cork. And in this heat? Air it all out, dust off the furniture, smooth out the sheets, put out towels and soap, just look, everything to receive you as you deserve…”
Who knows what she imagined in my gaze that obliged her to say: “Don’t worry. All the servants have gone. We’re alone. All, all alone.”
She caressed my cheek. I didn’t move.
She said not everything was ready.
“Look. The pool is empty and full of leaves and trash. There’s an air of abandon in spite of all my efforts. The grass is uncut. The palm trees are gray. And Max always said things like ‘I want to be buried here.’ How curious, don’t you think? To be buried in a place he never visited…”
“Nobody looks forward to the cemetery,” I dared to say.
“How true!” the voice declared. “Didn’t I always tell you? You’re smart, you asshole Josue, you’re really smart, good and smart.”
And she threw the contents of the whiskey glass at my chest.
“Just don’t get too smart.”
I maintained my calm. I didn’t even raise my hand to my chest. I looked, distracted, at the setting sun. She resumed the air of a tropical hostess.
“I don’t want neighbors,” Max had said.
She made a panoramic gesture.
“And he did it, Josue. There’s nobody here. Only a high mountain and the open sea.”
“And a beach down there,” I added, not to leave anything out, and I sensed Asunta becoming uncomfortable.
“Don’t expect anyone to stop there,” she said in a rude tone.
I tried to be frivolous. “Your company’s enough for me, Asunta. That’s all I ask.”
The shirt stuck to my chest.
“You can have champagne for breakfast,” she said in a tone between diversion and menace. “In any case,” she sighed and turned her back on the sea, “enjoy the luxury. And think of just one thing. Luxury is acquiring what you don’t need. On the other hand, you need your life… Right?”
She laughed. Her soul was being laid bare, little by little. Not all at once, because I had been observing her since I first met her, disdainful and absent, walking through cocktail parties with her cellphone glued to her ear,
