“They are an old man’s eyes,” I answered, and I held the Life of Galileo up in front of my face until I heard him walking away. He walked all the way to the back of the library, and up some stairs—I hadn’t known there was a staircase in the library until I heard him going up it—look, Montserrat, and you’ll see that there is one, built between two shelves, leading up to a door halfway up the wall. Through that door is a wing of the main house that only a few of the servants were familiar with, though we all knew that Isidoro Salazar, the master’s younger brother, lived in that part of the house. Lived—well, we knew the man was dying there, and did not wish to be talked to or talked about. A special cook prepared his meals according to certain nutritional principles of immortality that a Swiss doctor had told the master about, and Fausta had told us how she laid the table and served the meals in Isidoro’s rooms. He waited in the next room while she did it, and no matter what he ate or didn’t eat he was still dying. When I thought about that I worried that my words might have added to Isidoro’s troubles.
The next day, after Fausta had brought him his lunch, I wrote: “I should not have been like that to you—Rude and thoughtless maid from the library” on a piece of paper, ran up to his rooms and pushed the note under his door. And I stayed away from the library for a while, only returning when the chatter of the books reached me where I slept in the maids’ dormitory on the other side of the house. He wasn’t there that night, but when I went to my shelf of choice to take down Galileo, I saw a slip of paper sticking out of the neighboring book. The slip read: “To the pretty thief—read this book, and then look for more.”
I loved some of the books he chose, others sent me to sleep. I turned his slips of paper over and wrote down my thoughts. One of the books he chose was a slim pamphlet of poetry that didn’t make much sense to me: I dismissed it with a line borrowed from other poems he’d introduced me to: It may wele ryme but it accordith nought. He responded with a really long and angry letter—I think he must have been the author of those poems I didn’t think were good.
Isidoro wouldn’t come near me, even when I began to want him to. We’d spend nights reading together, on separate sides of a shelf, not speaking, listening to the books around us. According to Stendhal it takes about a year and a month to fall in love, all being well. Maybe we fell faster because all was not well with us: every day it got harder for me to keep you to myself, and he could not forget that he was dying; he fought sleep until the nightmares came to take him by force. He fell asleep in the library one night—he had done this twice before, but out of respect for him I had left using a route that meant I could pass him without looking at him. But when I heard him saying: “No, no . . .” I went to him without thinking and leaned over him to try to see whether I should wake him. He was younger than the look in his eyes suggested. I don’t know what his sickness was—it had some wasting effect—even as I saw his face I saw that its beauty was diminished. You can read character in a sleeping face, and his was quite a face. The face of a proud man, vengeful and not a little naive, a man with questions he hadn’t finished asking and answers to some questions I had myself. He opened his old man eyes and took a long, deep breath, as if breathing me in. It must have looked as if I was about to kiss him. Our faces were very close and curtains of my hair surrounded us; if we kissed it would be our secret to keep. I kissed him. Then I asked if it had hurt. He said he wasn’t sure and that we’d better try it again. And he kissed me back. I didn’t want to leave him after that, but I had to be back in bed by the time the other maids began to wake up.
Montserrat, I wrote that being in love with your father was nice, but being in love with Isidoro Salazar was like a dream. Not because of money or anything like that—! The man loved foolishly and without regard for the time limit his learned doctors had told him he had; he made me feel that in some way we had always known about each other and that he would be at my side forever. When Fausta Del Olmo took me aside and asked: “Is there anything you want to tell me?” my blood should have run cold, but it didn’t. After all she could have been asking about the pregnancy.
Beyond Isidoro’s staircase is a door that connects to a walled garden. The garden is Isidoro’s too: he planted all the roses there himself and took care of them until he got too sick to do anything but just be there with them of an evening. We were often there together. It’s a long walk from the top of the garden to the bottom, and I’d carry him some of the way. Yes, on my back, if you can imagine that. He was drowsy because of his medication—he had to take more and more—but even through the haze of his remedies he remembered you. “The baby!” I told him you didn’t mind (you don’t, do you?) and that his weight was balancing me out. He grew more lucid when we lay down on the grass. He was so fond of the roses; one night I told him that he wouldn’t die, but that he would become roses.
“I wouldn’t mind this dying so much if that were true,” he said, slowly. “But wait a minute . . . roses die too.”
“Well, after that you’d become something else. Maybe a wasp, because then you could go around stinging people who don’t like your poems.”