“I thought Leonora would be home, but if she isn’t that explains her phone call. Oh, Lord, I hope she hasn’t done something stupid.”
“What do you mean?”
“You probably already know what my sister is like.”
“We talk and such, yeah. We’re not great friends,” Maite replied cautiously.
“I wouldn’t know her friends these days,” Cándida said, shaking her head. “That’s the problem. I mean…not you. You look respectable.”
Respectable. It wasn’t an insult, but somehow Maite bristled at the description. Respectable meant dull. Though she supposed she did look dull in her cheap suit and her cheap shoes.
Cándida wandered toward a shelf that had pictures in silver frames. She was staring at one photo. It was Leonora and Cándida with a gray-haired man. The man looked very solemn; the women were smiling tentatively. Leonora wore a flowy pink dress and had a flower pinned to her shoulder. It might have been a high school graduation picture.
“That’s our uncle Leonardo.”
“Leonardo and Leonora?”
“Yes. She’s named after him. This was three years ago, before she started changing. She’s an artist, you do know that, yes?”
The man appeared in another picture, dressed in a military uniform, looking younger. His resemblance to Leonora and Cándida was rather striking in that photo: same eyes, most definitely. Other pictures showed a couple she assumed were the parents of the girls, and there was a bridal photo of Cándida.
“I’ve seen her paintings.” Technically this was true, since she’d been inside Leonora’s apartment.
“Our uncle never thought that was a great idea, but he still agreed to pay for her apartment and bring her here. I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was…Mexico City is different than Monterrey, I guess. One moment she’s happy, she’s painting, then she’s not. She’s wasting all her time, going to parties, dating boy after boy. There’re drugs, of course, there’s alcohol, and awful, awful people.
“You know she hangs out with all those students who are always protesting and going to rallies? God, I can’t remember the name of the organization she’s been with lately, that stupid art collective. At any rate, I think some of them went to that rally. The one that’s been in all the papers.”
“Yeah, I saw some stuff about that,” Maite said. She had skimmed the headlines, avoided the secretaries as they spoke about dangerous pinkos or government agents. All that talk of secret groups of hired thugs and communist plots made her nervous. Yet she had an idea of the magnitude of the altercation: Zabludovsky had interviewed the president, and the president had said those responsible for the attacks would be brought to justice. He’d said that students shouldn’t demonstrate in aggressive ways, that he condemned both irresponsibility and repression. Maite understood little, but she grasped this: that beneath banal phrases and appeals to the good of the nation something dangerous simmered.
“Leonora is not bad, but sometimes she gets these silly ideas in her head and, well…she phoned me today in the morning asking for money. I thought maybe she wanted to bail people out. You have to understand, she’s done that before. Her friends make some sort of fuss, get arrested, and she bails them out. Or…well, drugs and booze are another big-ticket item. But she said it wasn’t for that and she said…she said June tenth had changed everything.”
“Did you give her the money?”
“I can’t,” Cándida said. “It’s not because I’m stingy. My husband has me on a modest allowance. I have some savings, but the last couple of times, I asked our uncle for the money. Of course, I couldn’t tell him what it was for. He’d never agree to bail out a bunch of mischief-makers or pay for drugs. It’sbribemoney, really. Notbailmoney. Just so they’ll let them go.”
Now that the baby had been soothed and once again had a pacifier in his mouth, Cándida deposited him back in the plastic playpen and switched the TV back on, turning down the volume. The baby held on to the railing of the playpen and stared at the images. The coyote was chasing the road runner.
“She told me she was heading away for a while. Do you know who she’s staying with? Maybe there’s a friend I can call. She wanted her cat and her papers,” Maite said. “Could she be with Emilio Lomelí?”
Maite was hoping Cándida would say that might be the case. That way she would have an excuse to phone him. But the young woman shook her head.
“I don’t see why she would be. They broke up a few months ago.”
“Could she be at your uncle’s?”
“Uncle Leonardo pays Leonora’s bills, but they don’t see eye to eye lately.”
“I guess I should leave the cat with you, then. I’m not sure what else to do with it.”
“The cat?”
“Yes, the cat. She also promised she’d pay me for the cab I took and the days I watched over it. You could settle her account and I could leave it here,” Maite asked, trying not to sound too eager. She definitely did not relish the thought of becoming the permanent nanny of that furball.
Cándida touched her throat and reached toward the box of cigarettes resting atop a glass coffee table and lit one. “Oh, never! I wouldn’t be able to keep a cat. You do know what they say about cats? They asphyxiate babies.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“My husband wouldn’t like it.”
