(1978)
what the butler said
For Domitilla Cavalletti
‘ON A RECENT brief stay in New York, one of the two things that Europeans most dread happening to them happened: I was trapped for half an hour in a lift between the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth floors of a skyscraper. I don’t, however, want to talk about the fear I felt nor the more than justified claustrophobia that made me shout out (yes, I admit it) every few minutes, but about the man who was riding with me when the lift stopped and with whom I shared that half-hour of confidences and terror. He was immaculately dressed and extremely circumspect (in that difficult situation, he only shouted once and stopped when he realised that we had been heard and located). He looked exactly like the butlers you see in films and, as it turned out, he was a butler in real life. In exchange for a little incoherent, disparate information about my country, he gave me the following account of his life while we waited in that large vertical coffin: he was working for a wealthy young couple comprising the president of one of the largest and most famous American cosmetic companies and his recently acquired European wife. They lived in a five-storey mansion; they travelled around the city in an eight-door limousine with smoked-glass windows (like the one belonging to the late President Kennedy, he added), and he, the butler, was one of their four servants (all of them white, he said). The butler’s hobby was black magic, and he had already managed to obtain a lock of his young mistress’s hair, having cut it off while she was taking a nap in an armchair one very hot, very sleepy afternoon. He told me all this quite calmly and despite my own panic, I managed to listen to him relatively calmly. I asked him why he had so cruelly cut off that lock of hair. Had she perhaps mistreated him?
‘”Not yet,” he replied, “but sooner or later she will. It’s a precautionary measure. Besides, if something does happen, how else could I exact my revenge? How can a man avenge himself these days? Besides, the practice of black magic is very fashionable in America. Isn’t it in Europe?” I told him that, with the possible exception of Turin, it was not and asked if he couldn’t use his black magic to get us out of that lift. “The kind of magic I practice can only be used for acts of revenge. Who do you want us to take our revenge on, the lift company the architect, Mayor Koch? We might succeed, but that wouldn’t get us out of here. Besides, it won’t be long now. “It wasn’t long in fact, and once the lift was moving again and we had reached the ground floor, the butler wished me a pleasant stay in his city and vanished as if our half hour together had never existed.’
Thus began an article which, under the heading ‘Vengeance and the Butler’, I published in the Spanish newspaper El País on Monday; 21 December 1987. Then the article lost sight of the butler and turned its attentions to the subject of revenge. It was not, therefore, the right place in which to transcribe in detail everything that my travelling companion had told me, indeed, on that occasion, I altered one fact completely and said nothing about the rest. Perhaps I did this because the queen of the cosmetics company was also Spanish. She might, I thought, be a reader of El País, or perhaps, if I stuck too closely to the facts, some acquaintance of hers in Spain might recognise her and pass on the article. I confess that I was guided more by the desire not to get the butler into trouble than by any desire to alert the queen to some hypothetical danger. This is perhaps the moment though, now that my gratitude towards the former has somewhat faded and the chances of the latter ever reading this story are infinitely fewer. Not that I have any other means of alerting her, not at least discreetly. While she may read newspapers, I doubt very much that she reads books, certainly not stories written by a compatriot. But that won’t be my fault: the books we don’t read are full of warnings; we will either never read them or they will arrive too late. Anyway, my conscience will be clearer if I give her the possibility, however remote, of taking precautions, but without my feeling that I have also betrayed the butler who so kindly reassured me and helped make that wait in the lift more bearable. The one fact I had changed in my article was that the marriage was not so very recent and so the butler was not, as I had him say, awaiting any possible future affronts from his mistress: he was in fact, according to him, already a constant victim of such affronts. What follows are his words, insofar as I can now remember and set them down, although not in any very orderly fashion, since I no longer feel able to reproduce that conversation accurately, and can only recall a few of the things he said.
THE BUTLER SAID:
‘I don’t know if all Spanish women are the same, but the one example I’ve known is truly horrible. She’s vain, rather dim, and very rude and cruel, and I hope you’ll forgive me speaking like this about a woman from your country.’
‘That’s fine, feel free, say anything you like,’ I replied generously, although without paying much attention.
The butler said:
‘I realise that what I say will have little authority or value, and could simply be interpreted as my getting something off my chest. I wish the world was made in such a way that there could be some direct confrontation between us — between my accusations and hers, or between my accusations and her defence — without grave consequences for me, by which I mean dismissal. There aren’t that many families who can take on a butler, not even in New York — there aren’t a lot of jobs out there — very few people can afford one servant, let alone four, as my employers can. Things were pretty much perfect until she arrived, for my boss is very pleasant and hardly ever at home, and he was single when I started working for him five years ago. Well, he was divorced actually, and that’s my one hope really, that he’ll end up divorcing her too, sooner or later. But it might be later, and it’s best to be prepared. I’ve finished my course in black magic now. Most of it was by correspondence initially, and then I had a few practical lessons. I have my diploma. Not that I’ve done much with it. We get together occasionally to kill a chicken, very unpleasant, as you can imagine — you get covered in feathers, the bird puts up quite a fight, you know, but we have to sacrifice something now and then, because, if we didn’t, our organisation would lose all credibility.’
I remember that this last comment worried me briefly and made me listen much more closely, and that’s why, hoping my fear might be dissipated by another greater fear, I banged on the lift door again, pressing the alarm button and the buttons for all the other floors and shouting out several times: ‘Hey! Listen! We’re still trapped in here! We’re still in here!’
The butler said:
‘Take it easy, nothing’s going to happen to us. It’s a big lift, there’s plenty of air, and they know we’re here. People may be pretty callous these days, but they’re not likely to forget two people trapped in a lift, and besides, they need to get it working again. Now, my mistress, your compatriot, she really is callous, she mistreats everyone, or, worse, ignores them. She has the ability, which is perhaps more common in Europe than in the United States, to talk to us as if we weren’t there, without looking at us, without noticing us, she speaks to us without actually addressing us, exactly as if she were talking about us to a friend. A little while ago, an Italian girlfriend of hers came to stay, and although they were talking in one of their languages, neither of which I understand, I could tell that a lot of their conversations were about us, and about me in particular, because I’ve been there the longest, so I suppose in a way I’m in charge of the other servants. She can make a remark about me in my presence without giving the slightest hint that she’s talking about me, but her friend, lacking that talent, couldn’t help shooting me the occasional furtive glance with her green eyes as they chatted away in their Latin languages, whichever one it was. On the other hand, during the weeks that her friend was in the house, she did, at least, have other things to think about and took less notice of me. Let me explain, she’s been here for three years now, but she still speaks English really badly, with a very strong accent, so much so that sometimes I find it hard to understand her, and this irritates her of course, because she thinks I do it on purpose to offend her, which is partly true, but I can assure you that most of the time it’s simply because I don’t always make the necessary effort to understand her, that effort of comprehension and listening, or sometimes guessing. The truth is that after three years, even a city like New York can become wearisome and tedious if you have nothing to do. My boss goes to work every morning and doesn’t get back until late, until the Spanish time for supper, which she has imposed on him. You may not realise it, but cosmetics are a complicated business: like pharmaceuticals, you constantly have to research and perfect them, you can’t just settle for a fixed range of products. According to him, there are incredible advances made every year, every month, and you have to keep up to date, just like with drugs. Anyway, he works for twelve hours or more, and is only home at night and on the weekends, and that’s about it. Naturally, she gets pretty bored, because she’s bought just about everything she can buy for the house, although she still keeps an eye out for any novelties: any new product or gadget or invention, any new fashion, any new Broadway show or exhibition or film, she immediately homes in on them, more quickly than even a city like this can cope with.’