In the Midst of Winter

  Once again Richard found himself excluded from the female world where his wife was languishing. He could not even get near her to try to explain what had happened and beg for forgiveness, even though forgiveness was impossible. Although no one accused him of it to his face, he was treated like a murderer. And that was exactly how he felt. He lived alone in his house while the Farinha family kept Anita with them. They’ve kidnapped her, he would tell his friend Horacio whenever he called from New York. To his father though, who also called regularly, he never confessed what a disaster his life had become. Instead he reassured him with an optimistic version according to which he and Anita, with help from a psychiatrist and the family, were getting over their grief. Joseph knew that Bibi had died after being run over but did not suspect it was Richard who had been driving the car.

  The maid who had previously done the cleaning and looked after Bibi left on the day of the accident and never returned, not even to claim her wages. Garota also vanished, partly because Richard could no longer buy the drinks, and partly out of a superstitious fear: she thought that Richard’s tragedies were the result of a curse and that usually this was contagious. Meanwhile, the mess around Richard grew and grew. Rows of empty bottles littered the floor; in the fridge produce that had lost its original identity became covered with green mold, while dirty clothes seemed to multiply as if by magic. His unkempt appearance scared off his English pupils, who quickly stopped coming. For the first time, he found himself without funds; the rest of Anita’s savings had gone to pay the clinic. He began drinking cheap rum at home on his own because he owed money at the bar. He spent his time sprawled in front of the television, which was never switched off, trying to avoid silence and darkness, where his children’s transparent presence would float on the air. At the age of thirty-five he considered himself half-dead: he had already lived half his life and the other half was of no interest to him.

  IT WAS DURING THIS DESPERATE PERIOD that Horacio, by now the director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, decided to devote more attention to Brazil and coincidentally offer Richard a helping hand. They had been friends since their bachelor days, when Horacio was just setting out on his academic career and Richard was writing his doctoral thesis. Back then, Horacio had gone to visit him in Rio de Janeiro, where his friend received him with such generous hospitality despite his meager student budget that he stayed for two months. They took their backpacks and traveled to the state of Mato Grosso to explore the Amazon rain forest, forming one of those male friendships that has nothing sentimental about it but proves immune to distance and time. Later on, Horacio again visited Rio to be the best man at Richard and Anita’s wedding. They did not see much of each other over the following years, but their mutual affection was safely stored in their memories. They knew they could count on each other. When he heard what had happened to Pablo and Bibi, Horacio started calling his friend a couple of times a week to try to raise his spirits. Over the phone, Richard’s voice was unrecognizable. He slurred his words and repeated himself with the mindless insistence of a drunkard. Horacio understood Richard needed as much help as Anita.

  Horacio was the one who told Richard about the vacant post at the university even before it appeared in the relevant journals, advising him to apply right away. The competition for the job would be intense, and he could not help him with that, but if Richard got through the necessary steps and had luck on his side, he might end up at the top of the list. His doctoral thesis was still referred to, and that was a point in his favor, as were the articles he had published. But since then more time had gone by than was customary; Richard had wasted years of his professional career lying about on the beach and drinking caipirinhas. He sent in his application without much hope, but to his great surprise two weeks later a letter arrived summoning him for an interview in April. Horacio had to send him the money for the airfare to New York. Richard prepared for the journey without telling Anita, who was still in the German clinic at the time, and convinced himself he was not doing this for selfish reasons. If he was offered the post, Anita would be much better looked after in the United States, where she could rely on the university’s health insurance to cover her care. Besides, the only way to reclaim her as his wife was to rescue her from the clutches of the Farinha family.

  Following an exhaustive interview process, Richard was offered a university contract starting in August. He calculated there was time enough for Anita to get better and to organize their move. In the meantime he had to ask Horacio for another loan to take care of all the necessary expenses. He promised to pay him back out of the proceeds from the sale of the house, provided Anita agreed, as the property was in her name.

  Thanks to his family fortune, Horacio Amado-Castro had never lacked money. At the age of seventy-six, his father still exercised a patriarchal tyranny from Argentina in the same steely manner as ever, although he was resigned to the misfortune that one of his sons had married a Protestant Yankee and two of his grandchildren did not speak Spanish. He visited them in New York several times a year, refreshing his vast love of culture with outings to museums, concerts, and the theater, as well as supervising his investments in several banks there. His daughter-in-law detested him but treated him with the same hypocritical politeness as he did her. For years the patriarch had wanted to buy a house that would do Horacio proud. The cramped Manhattan apartment where the family lived, on the tenth floor in a development of twenty identical redbrick buildings, was a hovel unworthy of a son of his. As soon as he was in his grave, Horacio would of course come into his share of his fortune, but everyone in the family went on to a ripe old age and he personally intended to live to be a hundred. It was stupid for Horacio to wait until then to live a comfortable life when he could do so beforehand, his father would say, clearing his throat and puffing on one of his Cuban cigars. “I don’t want to owe anything to your father. He’s a despot and he hates me,” said the Protestant Yankee, and Horacio did not dare contradict her. Eventually though, the old man found a way to convince his stubborn daughter-in-law. One day he arrived with an adorable little dog for his grandchildren, a ball of fluff with sweet eyes. They called her Fifi, little imagining that the name would soon be far too small for her. She was a Canadian Eskimo, a sled dog that grew to weigh over a hundred pounds. Realizing it would be impossible to deprive the children of her, his daughter-in-law gave in and the grandfather made out a substantial check. Horacio looked for a house with a yard for Fifi near Manhattan, and ended up buying a brownstone in Brooklyn shortly before his friend Richard Bowmaster arrived to work at NYU.

  Considering his wife to be in no shape to grasp the situation, Richard accepted the post in New York without consulting her. He was sure he was doing what was best for her, quietly getting rid of almost all their possessions and packing up the rest. He found it impossible to throw away Bibi’s toys or Pablo’s baby clothes. Instead, he put them into three boxes, intending to entrust them to his mother-in-law shortly before leaving. He prepared Anita’s suitcases quite ruthlessly, knowing it was all the same to her. For months now she had only worn her gym clothes and had hacked off her hair with a pair of kitchen scissors.

  His plan to find some excuse or other to rescue his wife and leave Rio without any melodrama failed when Anita’s mother and sisters guessed his intentions the moment he turned up with the three boxes. They sniffed out his plans like trained bloodhounds and were determined to prevent the journey. They pointed out how fragile Anita was: How was she going to survive in that dangerous city, with that complicated language, without family or friends? If she was depressed surrounded by her own family, how was she going to feel among American strangers? Richard refused to listen; his mind was made up. To avoid offending them he made sure not to say as much, but he thought it was time for him to consider his own future and not pay so much attention to his unreachable wife. For her part, Anita showed complete indifference toward her fate. It was all the same to her
what she did, or where she was.

  Armed with a bag containing her various medications, Richard led his wife to the plane. Anita boarded meekly without looking back or making any farewell gesture to her family, who were all standing in tears behind the airport’s glass wall. During the ten-hour flight she stayed awake, refusing to eat anything, and never once asked where they were going. Horacio and his wife were waiting for them at the airport in New York.

  Horacio did not recognize his friend’s wife. He remembered her as beautiful and sensual, all curves and smiles, but the person who appeared before him had aged ten years, dragged her feet along the ground, and looked furtively from left to right as though expecting an attack. She did not return their greetings or allow his wife to accompany her to the restroom. God help us, this is much worse than I thought, Horacio murmured to himself. His friend did not look good either. Taking advantage of the free alcohol on board, Richard had been drinking for most of the journey. He had a three-day growth of stubble, his clothes were in tatters, he stank with a drunkard’s sweat, and without Horacio’s aid he would have probably been stranded in the airport with Anita.

  The Bowmasters installed themselves in a university apartment that Horacio had arranged, intended for members of the faculty. This was a real find as it was in the center of Greenwich Village, had a low rent, and had a waiting list. After dropping their suitcases in the hallway and handing over the keys, Horacio shut himself in one of the rooms with his friend and gave him some advice. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for every vacant academic post in the United States, he told him. The chance to teach at New York University did not come up twice, and so he needed to make the most of it. Richard had to control his drinking and create a good impression from the outset. There was no way he could turn up in the filthy, messy state he was in now.

  “I recommended you, Richard. Don’t make me look bad.”

  “Of course I won’t. I’m half dead from the journey and leaving Rio, or rather, the escape from Rio. I’ll spare you the Farinha family tragedy over our departure. Don’t worry, in a couple of days you’ll see me at the university as good as new.”

  “What about Anita?”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s very frail, I’m not sure she can stay on her own, Richard.”

  “She’ll have to get used to it, like everyone else. She doesn’t have her family here to spoil her. I’m all she has.”

  “Then make sure you don’t let her down, brother,” said Horacio as he left.

  Evelyn

  Brooklyn, 2011–2016

  Evelyn Ortega began to work for the Leroy family in 2011. The house of statues, as she always called the family residence, had in the 1950s belonged to a Mafia boss and his numerous relatives, including two old spinsters and a Sicilian great-grandmother who refused to come out of her room when naked Greeks were brought into the garden. Frank Leroy was amused by the property’s murky past and the weather-worn statues covered in pigeon droppings. His wife, Cheryl, would have preferred a modern apartment to this pretentious mansion, but her husband was the one who made all the decisions, big and small, and they were never open for discussion. The house of statues had many conveniences the mobster had installed for his family’s comfort. There was wheelchair access, an internal elevator, and a two-car garage. It was also well situated on a quiet street in a neighborhood that had become respectable.

  It took Cheryl Leroy no more than five minutes with Evelyn Ortega before she offered her the job. They urgently needed a nanny and could not worry about details. The previous one had left five days earlier and never returned. She must have been deported; that’s what happens when you employ people without documents, Cheryl told herself. Normally it was her husband who dealt with hiring, paying, and firing staff. Through his office he had many contacts and could find Latino and Asian immigrants ready to work for next to nothing, but he made it a rule not to confuse work and family. And anyway, his contacts were hopeless when it came to finding a trustworthy nanny; they had been through several dreadful experiences. This was one of the few things the couple agreed on, and so Cheryl had begun looking for nannies through the Pentecostal Church, which always had a list of reliable women eager to find employment. This young girl from Guatemala probably had no papers either, but for the moment Cheryl preferred to ignore that fact: there would be time for that later. She liked her honest face and respectful manners. She sensed she had found a gem, someone very different from the others who had passed through her house. Her only doubts were about her age, because she seemed barely an adolescent gone through puberty, and her size. Cheryl had read somewhere that the indigenous women of Guatemala were the smallest people on earth, and now she had the proof right before her eyes. She wondered if this tiny scrap of a girl, with a quail’s bones and a bad stammer, would be able to manage her son, Frankie, who must have weighed more than she did and was uncontrollable when he had one of his fits.

  For her part, Evelyn thought Señora Leroy was so tall and blond she must have been a Hollywood actress. She had to look up at her as if she were a tree. Cheryl had muscular arms and calves, eyes as blue as the sky above Evelyn’s Guatemalan village, and a yellow ponytail that bounced with a life of its own. She was tanned an orange color Evelyn had never seen before and spoke with a faltering voice like her grandmother Concepcion, although she was not old enough to be short of breath. She seemed very skittish, a foal ready to bolt off.

  Her new employer introduced her to the rest of the domestic staff. These were the cook and her daughter, who did the cleaning, the two of them working from nine to five on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She also mentioned Ivan, whom Evelyn would meet another day as he was not part of the household but did jobs for them. She explained that her husband, Mr. Leroy, had only minimal contact with the staff. She showed her up to the third floor in an elevator, convincing Evelyn that she had ended up with millionaires. The elevator was a birdcage made of wrought iron in a floral design, wide enough to fit a wheelchair. Frankie’s room was the one the Sicilian great-grandmother had occupied half a century earlier. It was spacious, with a sloping roof and a skylight as well as a window shaded by the top of a maple tree in the garden. Aged about eight or nine, Frankie was as blond as his mother and as pale as a consumptive. He was strapped by the waist to a wheelchair in front of the TV. His mother explained that the straps were to stop him from falling out or hurting himself if he had a convulsion. He needed constant supervision as he had a tendency to choke, and if that happened someone had to shake him and hit him on the back to help him recover his breathing. He wore diapers and had to be fed but never caused trouble and was a little angel who immediately made himself cherished. He suffered from diabetes, but this was carefully controlled; Señora Leroy herself checked his blood sugar levels and administered the insulin. She explained all this to Evelyn in a hurry before she ran off to her gym.

  Confused and tired, Evelyn sat beside the wheelchair. She took one of the boy’s hands, trying to straighten his clawlike fingers, and told him without a stammer in Spanglish that they were going to be good friends. Frankie responded with grunts and spasmodic flaps of his arms that she took to be a welcome. This was the start of a relationship of peace and war that was to become all-important for both of them.

  IN THE FIFTEEN YEARS they had been together, Cheryl Leroy had grown resigned to her husband’s brutal authority. She stayed with him because she had become accustomed to being unhappy, because she depended on him financially, and because of her sick son. She had also admitted to her psychiatrist that she put up with him since she was addicted to comfort—how could she give up her spiritual growth workshops, her reading group, and the Pilates classes that kept her in shape, although not as much as she would have liked. She hated it when she compared herself to successful, independent women as well as the ones who paraded around naked in the gym. She never took all her clothes off in the changing room and was expert at wiel
ding her towel going into or out of the shower or sauna so as not to show the welts on her body. However she looked at it, her life was a failure. It pained her to take stock of her shortcomings and limitations. She had not lived up to her youthful ambitions and now, as the signs of aging became more pronounced, she often found herself in tears.

  She felt very much alone, and the only person she had was her beloved Frankie. Her mother had died eleven years earlier, and her father, with whom she had always gotten on badly, had remarried. They lived in Texas and had never invited Cheryl to go and visit them, or made any attempt to come to see her in Brooklyn. Nor did they ask about their grandson with cerebral palsy. Cheryl had only seen her father’s wife in the photos they sent her each Christmas, in which they both appeared wearing Santa Claus hats, her father smiling smugly and his wife looking dazed.

  Despite her efforts, everything seemed to be slipping away from Cheryl: not just her body but her future. Before reaching forty she had viewed old age as a distant enemy; at forty-five, she felt it lurking in wait for her, an obstinate, implacable foe. She had once dreamed of a professional career, had hopes of rescuing her marriage, and was proud of her physique and beauty. Now all this was in the past. She was a broken, defeated woman. For several years she had been taking drugs to treat depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Her psychiatrist, the only man who had not made her suffer and listened to her, had prescribed a wide variety of palliatives over the years. She had obeyed him like a well-brought-up little girl, just as she had meekly obeyed her father, the transitory boyfriends of her youth, and her husband.