“It’s because his feet are smelly,” Diana told her when they were leaving the office. “He could put on talcum powder, but he forgets at least once a week. Whenever he takes off his shoes, the stench is unbearable. I’ve got to tell you, old man Garza would never have taken off his shoes in the office.”
It had been six months since Fernando Garza’s father had retired, and Diana was still talking about how the old man would have never done this thing or another. She obviously missed the wrinkled bastard. Maite didn’t think she’d miss Archibaldo if he retired. Not that she wanted him to leave. She’d spent five years at Garza precisely because she wasn’t built to withstand change.
Maite didn’t like her job, but she refused to look for something else. Her office, not far from the Chinese clock at Bucareli, wasn’t the finest one in the city by far, but the pay was steady, and she had learned to gauge the temperament of the workers there and comply with the expectations of the bosses. A few times a year, especially during the rainy season, she would grow restless, and instead of solving her daily crossword puzzle, she surveyed the help wanted ads in the paper and circled a few of them with a red pen, but she never phoned. What was the point? Before Garza she’d worked for another lawyer, and it was much of the same.
“What do you think, should we get together this Friday to celebrate your birthday?” Diana asked.
“Don’t remind me about that,” Maite said. “I’m supposed to visit my mother, and my sister will probably make an appearance.”
“Go to see her, and then we can have dinner. My sister is serving ate con queso for dessert.”
“I don’t know,” Maite said, shrugging.
Diana was three years older than Maite, more outgoing, less nervous. She knitted on the bus and lived with her two older sisters, mother, and grandmother in a cavernous casona that was damp and dark. The women all looked like each other, one a little more weathered than the next. Diana’s grandmother had no teeth and spent her days napping in the living room under two blankets. Maite knew that in a few years Diana would sit in that chair, that her face would be the withered face of the grandmother, her hands hidden under the heavy blankets.
Maite imagined herself older, as old as her friend’s grandmother. She wasn’t beautiful, not even pretty, and the thought of her meager charms disappearing filled her with dread. Maite’s mother had probably been right all along, about marriage. About Gaspar. But he’d been so dull, and Maite had still been filled with hope, with expectations, and despite her mother’s nagging she wanted more than a man who didn’t inspire the least bit of sentiment in her.
Most of her acquaintances had married and had children by now. They didn’t have much spare time to spend with her anymore and a simple arrangement to go to the movies became a monumental task because they had to find someone to take care of their babies. Diana, however, was a stalwart presence there. Diana was the one person she truly liked at Garza.
She wondered what she’d do if Diana also abandoned her, if she married and stopped working at the office, and once again she felt miserable and old.
She should have married Gaspar. She would have if it hadn’t been for Cristóbal.
Cristóbal. Cristóbalito. Her first love. Her one love.
As the most junior of the secretaries at a newly inaugurated law firm, Maite’s duties had been simple: sorting letters, opening correspondence, and addressing envelopes, among other tasks. It was only her second job. Before that she’d worked at a department store, but she’d quit that to attend secretarial school in the hope of bettering herself. The secretarial classes had lasted for a year, during which she learned some typing and a little about the world.
That spring of 1961, Maite was nineteen, and when a young man smiled at her in the elevator she blushed. It turned out they sometimes boarded the elevator around the same time in the morning, and Maite began to time her arrival so it always coincided with his. After a few of these coincidences he introduced himself: he said he was Cristóbal, but she could call him Cristóbalito. He was an accountant working on the floor above hers.
She stopped responding to Gaspar’s phone calls and instead focused her attention on Cristóbal.
At first their interactions were limited to having an ice cream or watching a movie, and all the things young couples are supposed to do. Eventually, though, he wanted more than hand-holding or the quick squeezing of her leg at the cinema. He arranged for them to visit cheap hotels for quick fucks. Maite, who was afraid of sinning, cringed each and every time they walked into one of those places, but once he was kissing her and taking off her clothes it was another story.
In between lovemaking sessions she told him about her passion for music, her many records, her acquisition of classic books, her vocabulary lessons by mail. She wrote him love notes and bad poetry. She could not express her feelings, nor render the beating of her heart upon a page; she poured herself into every smile and every touch, attempting to clutch an ocean of passion between her hands for him.
He did not understand a single thing she told him.
It lasted almost a whole year, their relationship. He dumped her near Christmastime for a different secretary on a different floor because Maite had begun to talk marriage, and quite frankly Cristóbalito found her a boring fuck.
Maite quit the job. She pretended she was sick so she could stay home, and then she really felt sick and spent most of the summer and quite a bit of the autumn of 1962 dragging her feet around her mother’s apartment, without a purpose nor much thought. Eventually her mother forced her to get a job at an office supply store, which she loathed. And eventually, too, she stumbled upon an issue ofLágrimas y Risas. Before that, she had readSusy: Secretos del Corazón, which contained many romantic stories, but it wasLágrimas y Risasthat enraptured her. Then came her current obsession:Secret Romance.
The latest storyline concerned Beatriz, a young nurse sent to a distant tropical island to care for an ailing old woman, who is torn between her passion for two brothers, Jorge Luis, a chivalrous doctor, and Pablo Palomo, a dissolute playboy nursing a broken heart.
She lived for those stories. She woke up, fed her parakeet, went to work, came back, put on music, and pored over each panel in the comic books; she gnawed at each word like a starving woman. She loved the characters she found between the printed pages, and she suffered bitterly with them, and somehow that suffering was like a sweet balm erasing the memory of Cristóbalito.
And now Jorge Luis had been in an accident and must have surgery. It almost didn’t matter, her upcoming birthday, compared to that. The car, still at the repair shop, didn’t matter. She concentrated on the problem of injured Jorge Luis, on trying to imagine whether Beatriz would learn the truth about his disappearance or Jorge Luis’s evil mother would keep his medical condition a secret. The story was a pink cloud that blotted reality away.
Until Friday. On Friday the rains came and scrubbed clean the pastel colors that had intoxicated her. Friday, and the next issue of the magazine was finally there, finally between her hands. She saved her reading for the evenings, when she could sit in her old green chair and play Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, or Nat King Cole. She had bought a set of records to teach herself English and dissect the lyrics of songs but couldn’t be bothered with them. If she really wanted, she could have bought the Spanish language covers that were much more affordable and easy to find, although in many cases she realized these didn’t resemble the original lyrics by a long shot. She didn’t mind the mystery the songs posed. In the end, she liked the music even if she couldn’t understand the words. Sometimes, she penned lyrics to go with the tunes. TheIllustrated Laroussewas handy, helping her find new words she could rhyme with “love” and synonyms for “misery” to sprinkle inside spiral notebooks.
Maite was so nervous she made an exception that morning, and she read throughSecret Romancebefore lunch, leafing through it while the other secretaries were busy typing or proofing documents.
On page twenty-five Jorge Luis fell into a coma. Maite was aghast. She rushed to the bathroom, locking herself in one of the stalls, and went over the last pages again. But there it was. Jorge Luis was in a coma! There was no mistake.
Maite wasn’t sure how long she stayed in the bathroom, but by the time she walked back into the office, the secretaries were putting their money in the collection box. She stared at Laura as she held up the box and shook it in her face.
“Laura, I forgot.”
“Maite, youalwaysforget. This is not how it works,” the woman said, and the other secretaries shook their heads.
