“Well, deep down, yes, but daily life, you know…”
“So, in other words, it was not.”
Eidinger retreated in search of solid support for his married life.
“That’s not what I meant to say. Don’t get me wrong. Frida and I didn’t know each other well. We had to get used to one another after we married, and we didn’t have long,” he concluded painfully.
He had abandoned the good-natured attitude of earlier in their conversation and was now a man ready to bristle bad-temperedly in defence of his private life. This made him easier to attack.
“How old was your wife, señor Eidinger?”
“Thirty-two.”
“At that age a woman has a past. What can you tell us about that?”
“Frida was very discreet,” the widower said, poking at the tobacco in his unlit pipe. “She didn’t talk about herself.”
The living room door creaked slightly. In poked the whiskery, rectangular head of a fox terrier. The animal ran to Ericourt’s feet and began to lick his shoes.
“Stop that, Muck!” Eidinger ordered. The dog raised its snout and ears then went back to doing just the same.
“He’s Frida’s dog,” Eidinger explained. “He does that to anyone he sees for the first time.”
Ericourt had stood up. Blasi patted the animal’s back affectionately.
“Could you show us the letters you mentioned, señor Eidinger?”
“Of course. They’re in Frida’s bedroom. Would you like to go with me or should I bring them down?”
“We’ll follow you.” Ericourt shot a sidelong look at Blasi.
The pretentious decor of señora Eidinger’s bedroom contrasted with the rest of the house. As if he ought to apologize for things that were not his responsibility, Eidinger explained that his wife had insisted on decorating the room that way. The walls were hung with finely striped, black-and-white paper. The furniture was made from white sycamore and the bed, a wide divan pushed against one of the walls, had a black satin cover. The dressing table was a simple stand under a rectangular mirror, and on it, carefully arranged, were an ivory-handled manicure set and a matching powder compact, eau de Cologne bottles and a lipstick case all made from glass and black enamel.
On two small bedside tables stood a pair of standard lamps with white parchment shades, the bases of which were female torsos sculpted in ebony. The room’s centrepiece, however, given its size and colour, was a picture of the zodiac symbol for Scorpio that hung above the bed.
Muck had followed them, and was rushing from one side to another looking for the presence that caused currents of cold and sorrow to circulate around the room. Entering that room, now abandoned once and for all, was like opening a box of memories.
Ericourt pointed to the picture and turned to Eidinger.
“Very interesting.”
“Frida brought it with her from Switzerland. She frequently redecorated her room when she spent a lot of time in the same place, but she never got rid of the Scorpio picture. It was her star sign, she was born in November.”
“I take it she believed in astrology.”
“Absolutely. It was her religion.” Eidinger took a packet of letters out of a drawer. “Here’s what you asked for.”
On the envelope was a name, nothing more: Gustavo.
“May I take them?” Ericourt asked. With a brief glance he had checked there were no other papers in the drawer.
“If you could read them here… There aren’t many, since Frida didn’t write very often. I’d rather not part with them.”
He must have given them back to his wife reluctantly, now they were his again. The small victories of death.
“My secretary speaks German. He can read them.”
Ericourt held the packet out to Blasi.
“Gustavo,” he began to read out loud. “I feel like the happiest woman in the world to know I shall soon be there, in your country. I want to be there so much that now the mountains bear down on me like a cage. I wander through the landscape we so enjoyed together ‘with eyes rendered heavy by a mournful regret for vanished illusions’ like in ‘Gypsies Travelling’.” Blasi stumbled over the words, and his pauses and corrections stripped the reading of any emotion. “I feel troubled by how lonely my life has become since I have been dreaming of our home in peaceful Villa Devoto, which now holds for me the same charm I once found in the Swiss lakes…”
Then the tone of the letter shifted.
“…I went to see my cousin Carlos to ask him to represent you at the ceremony. I have all the documents now. It will be funny to make my vows to him. But I am not sentimental and I can do without a traditional wedding, holding my fiancé’s hand and gazing into each other’s eyes as we say ‘I do.’
“I shall see you soon, Gustavo. It will be so sweet to live together all that way away. ‘To love at will, love and feel in the country that resembles you!’ Your Frida.”
The next letter had been written during the journey. Frida described how happy she was to be aboard the ship that would bring her to Buenos Aires. She shared details about the weather and very little about the passengers, since she gave the impression of being a discreet girl who talked with her fellow travellers as little as possible “to avoid their questions”. She asked Gustavo to tell her about the changes he was making to the house and ended abruptly by mentioning the long hours she was spending on deck, looking over the water, her heart “distracted at times from its own clamouring by the sound of this plaint, wild and untamable”.
“That’s Baudelaire, from his poem ‘Man and the Sea’, explained Gustavo modestly. “All the quotes in the letters are from Baudelaire.”
“A favourite poet of hers?”
“I imagine she had Baudelaire’s poems to hand at the time. Frida was very straightforward.”
Blasi was skimming through the third letter.
“She refers to some photographs here, señor Eidinger.”
“Ah, yes,” Eidinger said very seriously.
“Read it out,” Ericourt ordered.
“I have done as you wished and brought with me the fewest possible keepsakes. You said you wanted nothing of my past, but I have not been able to part with my beloved Scorpio or some of my favourite photographs. I do not believe you will object to having at home the Frida from a while ago, before you knew me. It would be very silly to argue over that, my dear. Silly and unworthy of our reasonable love.”
Gustavo was chewing the end of his unlit pipe.
“Nonsense between fiancés,” he explained. “Retrospective jealously. Frida found that sort of thing amusing.”
“Could you show me the photographs if you still have them?”
“Of course. They’re in my studio. I wanted to enlarge them. Frida was right to bring them. They’re all I have left of her now.”
Once again the painful aftermath of death, the definitive abandonment made clear.
What Gustavo called his studio was up in the eaves, an attic room normally used for storage. It had been equipped to serve as a dark room. The window was boarded up with only a rhomboidal opening to let light in, which could be covered up with a specially shaped block of wood.
The photos of Frida were on the table, three in total. She wore the same stereotypical smile in all of them. In one she was wearing a swimsuit that showed off her attractive curves. The second was a portrait. The kindest comment one could make about the third was that it had surely been taken in a nudist camp. Her husband’s misgivings were made sufficiently clear.
Blasi smiled to himself as he considered how the puritanical Ericourt would react. The photo had to have come from some “student body”. In the background you could make out the emblem on a building. Surely the group’s insignia.
The three men returned to the ground floor in silence. Muck ran down at Blasi’s heels.