“That Conxa can’t seem to go anywhere without that pansy of a husband.”
Not wishing to take sides, Dorotea responded:
“They are an exemplary couple; he expresses his opinion on everything; la Baronessa doesn’t so much as baste a stitch without consulting him. They are madly in love, and bear in mind that he is no spring chicken.”
“Go on, woman, go on! The man is a dolt. He should be ashamed of himself. I assure you that if my husband came to me with this kind of nonsense …! I just don’t know what to think.”
“For the love of God, Donya Claudina, you’re being very mean! Quite a few ladies come here in the company of their husbands.”
“You’re talking about a different kind of ‘lady,’ now … But you have work to do, and I’m in the way … Everything must be ready the day after tomorrow, eh? I’ll be furious if it isn’t.”
“Rest assured, Donya Claudina.”
“Ah! And Isabel showed me that other matter. If you can’t bring it down, just cancel the order.”
“But we can’t, Donya Claudina. You know that was a special price for you only.”
“Always the same story. We’ve known each other too long for this, Dorotea.”
“For the love of God, Donya Claudina …”
“I’ll think about it.”
“At your service, Donya Claudina.”
Dorotea closed the door and stepped into the fitting room where the honorable couple awaited her.
“Have I kept you waiting? Please forgive me.”
“Is the room quite safe? No one will be able to hear us? There are so many girls here, and they can be such tattlers.”
“El senyor Baró can put his mind to rest.”
“Let’s get on with it, Dorotea. Is it the same one as the last time?”
“Yes, the same one. But with the leave of el senyor Baró, it can’t be done for less than a thousand pessetes.”
“This is unthinkable, Dorotea. Dealing as you are with a client of my wife’s category …”
“La Baronessa will understand perfectly. Look at the risk I’m exposing myself to …”
“You mean the risk we are all exposing ourselves to, surely.”
“Oh, no, sir. It can’t be done for less than a thousand pessetes. As el senyor Baró knows, I am under no obligation. What’s more, you have requested something that is quite dear and hard to find. I assure you that if the Baró and Baronessa didn’t have these qualms, another kind of person could be found, let’s say of a more decent class, more well-bred, a fine young man, in a word; and then the price would be more reasonable.”
“But Dorotea!”
“You must understand, there are many possibilities. But who could trust a person like that, a so-called fine young man? What I am offering you is foolproof. He can’t possibly compromise anyone, and what’s more, he’s authentic, the genuine article. This is the truth: it’s hard to find someone like this. You can’t imagine the repugnance one must face, the transactions one must engage in. All of this with kid gloves, for fear someone might have suspicions. What would the clients and even my staff think if they saw a character like that come in my door? I would do anything for the Baronessa, but for God’s sake, you must understand my position!”
“All right, Dorotea, not another word. A thousand pessetes.”
“Believe me, I would prefer not to earn this money. It burns my fingers, senyor Baró. If it were not for the esteem in which I hold you …”
“Enough, enough, let’s get on with it, Dorotea.”
“Just a moment. I am going to make sure everything is in order, and that the passage to the dining room is ‘free,’ so we won’t run into … You know …”
“Yes, yes, we know, Dorotea.”
The couple, now all by themselves in the fitting room, seemed stunned. The man’s features looked boiled, as if sucked in by an inexplicable inner fever. His cheeks had a grayish pallor and his eyes the soft dull stare of a dead hare. They didn’t dare look at each other or say a word, but their lips trembled with the rhythm of a mechanical toy.
In ethnographic museums you can often find those shrunken heads produced by Ecuadorean savages, in which the features appear to have been reduced by a strange force pulling from the center of the cranium, pressing and compressing the external muscles, sucking away the volume of flesh, until only a minimal, but horrifically expressive, amount remains. And there in Dorotea’s fitting room, his head and her head reminded you of those repugnant little heads, because there, too, it seemed as though there were a force pulling and shrinking their faces, making them more expressive. Surely what was reducing and impoverishing their features, minimizing their flesh, and injecting into them the sharp expression of a specter was the moral suppuration forged by their desire.
Her extraordinary beauty and extraordinary elegance vanished. Morality has its own aesthetic, and aesthetic catastrophes are implacable.
When Dorotea returned, the baron and the baronessa stood up, and both of them snapped to. With great effort — an effort perhaps akin to self-esteem — they swapped the grayish pallor on their faces for a more normal skin color. Dorotea ushered them to the “scene of the crime,” and softly closed the door.
If someone had caught Dorotea’s smile at the moment she closed the door, he would have been hard put to say whether it was the smile of an experienced mother-in-law leading the newlyweds to their bedchamber after the wedding dinner, or the smile of an imperial executioner who would sew a man into a sack with a rooster, a serpent, and a monkey.
An hour and a half later, the young man disguised as a ditch digger had taken off his costume and was soaping up his face and neck in Dorotea’s bathroom. Two steps away, Dorotea observed the young man’s bare arms and the soapy water that flowed off his cheeks with no little admiration, as she might contemplate Sinbad the Sailor at the moment he rose to the water’s surface still full of the mystery of an underwater cove. Because the service Dorotea had just provided was not exclusively out of love of lucre. In the woman’s penchant for gossip a series of elements well beyond the ordinary converged. Dorotea was a devotee, perhaps even a collector, of clinical cases. In her inner depths she must be harboring some unsuspected monster, and one of the consequences of that monster was probably the scene that had just taken place in that house of fashion. Dorotea was aware that these specialities and attentions to her clients could be the source of headaches that would truly compromise her, and it was precisely that little frisson of risk and danger that added spice to her original role as a go-between. Some claimed that Dorotea had rented an apartment for the resolution of certain peculiar transactions; this had never entirely been proven, but it was evident that by using her fashion house during regular business hours for that kind of secret, abnormal task, Dorotea gave her own twisted sexuality, or if you prefer, her perversion, an undulating vivacity that could shift from the pearly drape of a length of silk to the pornographic imagery of the “scene of the crime,” or from the vulgar rumor-mongering of a Donya Claudina — before whom Dorotea groveled and scraped with sadistic humiliation — to the conversation with a young man from a good family about to commit the imprudence of leaving a gold medallion hanging around his neck. This is why Dorotea, on seeing the bare arms and soapy hands of the young man, would have liked to have a needle in the pupils of her eyes able to penetrate the mystery. She wanted to hear the whole story, including the most unspeakable parts. So, a bit breathless with this desire, but pretending that nothing was amiss, Dorotea asked one question after another to which the young man responded with evasions and monosyllables, his voice muffled by the Turkish towel with which he was scrubbing his face.