When I got home I found her sitting at the kitchen table. She had washed all the dishes from the night before, made coffee, and dressed and styled her hair so that she resembled a saint in a religious picture. Isabella, who was no fool, knew perfectly well where I’d been and looked at me like an abandoned dog, smiling meekly. I left the bags with the delicacies from Don Odón by the sink.
“Didn’t my father shoot you with his gun?”
“He’d run out of bullets and decided to throw all these pots of jam and Manchego cheese at me instead.”
Isabella pressed her lips together, trying to look serious.
“So the name Isabella comes from your grandmother?”
“La mamma,” sh
e confirmed. “In the local area they called her Vesuvia.”
“You don’t say.”
“They say I’m a bit like her. When it comes to persistence.”
There was no need for a judge to pronounce on that, I thought.
“Your parents are good folk, Isabella. They don’t misunderstand you any more than you misunderstand them.”
The girl didn’t say anything. She poured me a cup of coffee and waited for the verdict. I had two options: throw her out and give the two shopkeepers a fit or be bold and patient for two or three more days. I imagined that forty-eight hours of my most cynical and cutting performance would be enough to break the iron determination of the young girl and send her, on her knees, back to her mother, begging for forgiveness and full board.
“You can stay here for the time being—”
“Thank you!”
“Not so fast. You can stay here under the following conditions: one, that you go spend some time in the shop every day, to say hello to your parents and tell them you’re well, and two, that you obey me and follow the rules of this house.”
It sounded patriarchal but excessively fainthearted. I maintained my austere expression and decided to make my tone more severe.
“What are the rules of this house?” Isabella inquired.
“Basically, whatever I damn well please.”
“Sounds fair.”
“It’s a deal, then.”
Isabella came round the table and hugged me gratefully. I felt the warmth and the firm shape of her seventeen-year-old body against mine. I pushed her away delicately, keeping my distance.
“The first rule is that this is not Little Women and we don’t hug each other or burst into tears at the slightest thing.”
“Whatever you say.”
“That will be the motto on which we’ll build our coexistence: Whatever I say.”
Isabella laughed and rushed off into the corridor.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“To tidy up your study. You don’t mean to leave it like that, do you?”
11
I had to find a place where I could think, where I could escape from my new assistant’s domestic pride and her obsession with cleanliness. So I went to the library in Calle del Carmen, set in a nave of Gothic arches that had once housed a medieval hospice. I spent the rest of the day surrounded by volumes that smelled like a papal tomb, reading about mythology and the history of religions until my eyes were about to fall out onto the table and roll away along the library floor. After hours of reading without a break, I worked out that I had barely scratched a millionth of what I could find beneath the arches of that sanctuary of books, let alone everything else that had been written on the subject. I decided to return the following day and the day after that: I would spend at least a week filling the cauldron of my thoughts with pages and pages about gods, miracles and prophecies, saints and apparitions, revelations and mysteries—anything rather than think about Cristina, Don Pedro, and their life as a married couple.
…