9
La se?ora Mu?oz was sitting back in the recliner, watching the novela she had recorded yesterday. Socorro took another shirt from the laundry basket and spread it across the ironing board. If she timed it right, she would finish with the clothes about the time it took them to watch this episode of Mi destino perdido. La se?ora liked to say the tragedies weren’t any less sad the second time she saw them. In today’s episode, for instance, poor Gabriela lies still in the hospital, thick gauze pads covering each of her eyes. What this beautiful young music teacher doesn’t realize is that the doctor who saved her life and with whom she now finds herself falling in love, desperately so, is also the man who caused the accident that robbed her of her sight. Gabriela caught only a glimpse of Dr. Hernan Lozano Ramos as he sped up to pass her and then inadvertently cut her off and sent her car swerving toward a ravine. She is lucky to be alive. The doctor reminds her of this as he stands along one side of the bed and caresses her hand. He says it as a way of pacifying her, as well as discouraging her from trying so hard to identify the person responsible for her condition. A young police detective, much closer in age to Gabriela than the doctor, stands on the other side of the bed. He has come around again to help her recall some detail of the driver who didn’t have the decency to render aid after causing this terrible accident. Eduardo, as the detective insists she call him, also has feelings for the victim. The fact that Detective Eduardo, as Gabriela prefers to address him, has been less than friendly and courteous toward the doctor has not set well with her. The doctor has stated, in no uncertain terms, that his patient should not in any way be upset. She is lucky to be alive. Of course, there is little for him to worry about as long as she cannot identify the other driver. And so the respected surgeon remains the only person who knows he was speeding with his unconscious wife in the passenger seat, sedated from the cocktail he prescribed to help relieve her latest case of nerves. Gabriela blames herself for the accident. Distraught from having just discovered her fiancé in bed with her half sister, she had been driving home in a confused and erratic manner that caused her to overreact when the other driver pulled out in front of her. She is lucky to be alive.
Socorro held up the dress shirt and sprayed starch on the back. She was about to start on the sleeves when she turned to glance out the window.
“Are you waiting for someone?” la se?ora asked.
“No,” she said, pulling away. “Why do you ask?”
She sprayed more starch on the shirt.
“Because already that’s the third time you look outside.”
Socorro could feel herself getting red and hoped this was from her ironing. “I just wanted to see who was driving by.”
“If you’re so curious, you should go over there.”
“Over where?”
“To check on my neighbor,” la se?ora said. “What else would interest you so much on this street?”
“We changed days, and tomorrow I need to clean the house for him.”
“You miss him?”
Socorro turned down the temperature on the iron until it reached the permanent-press setting, then a moment later turned it off completely but continued with her work all the same.
“Tell me,” la se?ora insisted, a little louder now. “You miss him?”
“I work for him.”
“And because of that, you can’t miss him?”
“Ay, se?ora, how can you say that?” She tried her best to laugh at the question.
“You think you would be the first woman to feel something for the man she worked for?”
“But he’s much older.”
“Men forget how to count when they see a young woman — look at the doctor with Gabriela,” she said, pointing the remote back at the television.
“Yes, but he would never be interested in me.”
“You want me to believe an older man like Celestino Rosales wouldn’t be interested in a young, attractive woman?”
“Maybe, but not me.” She pretended she was having problems with the pleat on the back of the shirt, so she pulled it off the board to flap it open a couple of times, enough to produce a tiny breeze.
“I saw that you came over two times last week.”
“Only because I didn’t finish all my work and then one of his daughters was coming to visit him. He wanted everything ready for her.”
“I want you to know you could tell me if he was,” la se?ora said, “or even if you were.”
Socorro chose to keep her eyes focused on her work and turned the temperature back up on the iron. “Thank you, but there’s nothing to tell.”
“And nothing has happened?”
“Like what?”
“You know, what happens between a man and woman when they are alone all day in a house.”
“Ay, se?ora.”
“You could tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Sure sure, or just a little bit sure?”
“Sure sure.”
La se?ora didn’t seem convinced, but she went back to watching the rest of her novela anyway. Socorro hoped that she wasn’t too obvious about her feelings. She could imagine the old lady spreading the news across the neighborhood. And then there were his children that he was always worried about. He said the youngest one talked about her mother as if she were still in the hospital and would be coming home soon. How would they feel if they learned their father had found someone else, and so soon? Her own mother had remained alone after her father died, which was part of what had made it difficult for Socorro to tell her what had really occurred between her and the man whose house she cleaned every week. How could she begin to explain this to a woman who had been without a man for more than twenty years?
Before her first afternoon with Don Celestino, she had never imagined doing such a thing: she used to look down on those women who cleaned houses only because they wanted to find a widower with money. Some of these women married and stayed with their husbands for a few years, until the old man died or grew so ill that his children took him to a hospital, where finally he died. It must have seemed a small price to pay in order to arrange their papers and from then on have a comfortable life. With a little luck the old man might leave them with some money, maybe a house or a car, depending on whether he had arranged this beforehand and his children didn’t claim it all. Other women remained unmarried but the old men paid them generously, as if spreading their legs was simply another chore they were doing, like mending a shirt button or replacing a spent lightbulb.
At least she knew that her interest in him had nothing to do with what he could give her. She wanted only what they could share as a couple, if he would let this happen. Since they had become intimate, her life had turned into two lives. One that she lived on the other side of the river with her mother and aunt, still cooking and cleaning and shopping and going to the pharmacy for these pills or that salve that her mother might need. And her other life, on this side of the river, where she rushed about her day trying to finish early so she could spend some time with him in the late afternoon, before she had to walk back across the bridge. Times like this, she tried to remember what she had imagined her life would be like if they ever got together, because surely this hadn’t been it. To live her life in secret? As if she were playing the role of the mistress, only the role of the married man was being played by a widowed man? Not that she didn’t enjoy her time with him, because she did, but it also seemed like some fantasy that lasted only as long as they were together and then ceased to exist when she wasn’t in his car or house or bed.
But after waiting for so long to find someone, she asked herself if she should be making demands of him or if she shouldn’t just be happy they were together and not care if these moments were fleeting at best. All these years of waiting, the men she knew had fallen into one of two categories: those who disappeared from one day to the next, and those who stuck around, but only because they were biding their time until something more promising came along, after which they disappeared from one day to the next. Maybe she was meant to be alone? It had crossed her mind again recently. Why else would God have sent her a husband who just wandered off like a mule without a rope? And then sent her an older man who wanted her but wouldn’t tell another soul about them, not even his own family? Was their friendship so shameful that he couldn’t at least tell his brother, the only one he had left? Neither one of them probably remembered what they had fought over. How much effort would it take him to at least do this for her?
“Ay, he wants to fool you!” la se?ora called out at one of the women on television.
Socorro hurried to finish the rest of the ironing so she could get paid and leave for the day. It was bad enough la se?ora was comparing her to these poor women in the novelas. She wasn’t mixed up with a man who was trying to deceive her or hurt her in some way. She wasn’t married to a man who got so tired of waiting for her to get pregnant that he found himself another woman. And she wasn’t involved with a man who wanted to run off on her. She didn’t have to figure out who was telling her the truth anymore. She knew the truth; she just couldn’t tell anyone.