A DECADE LATER, Lucy was still waiting. The waiting had changed her life. For one thing she’d left France for Spain. And the only name she now used was her real one, the name that Safiye knew, so that Safiye would be able to find her. And using her real name meant keeping the reputation associated with that name clean. She showed the book of roses she’d made for Safiye to the owner of a gallery; the man asked her to name her price, so she asked for a sum that she herself thought outrageous. He found it reasonable and paid on the spot, then asked her for more. And so Safiye drew Lucy into respectability after all.
Se?ora Lucy’s separation from Safiye meant that she often painted landscapes in which she looked for her. Se?ora Lucy was rarely visible in these paintings but Safiye always was, and looking at the paintings engaged you in her search for a lost woman, an uneasy search because somehow in these pictures seeing her never meant the same thing as having found her. Se?ora Lucy had other subjects; she was working on her own vision of the Judgment of Paris, and Montse had been spending her lunch breaks posing for Se?ora Lucy’s study of Aphrodite. Montse was a fidgeter; again and again she was told, “No no no no as you were!” Then Se?ora Lucy would come and tilt Montse’s chin upward, or trail her fingers through Montse’s hair so that it fell over her shoulder just so. And the proximity of that delightful frown clouded Montse’s senses to a degree that made her very happy to stay exactly where she was as long as Se?ora Lucy stayed too.
—
BUT THESE WEREN’T the paintings that sold. It was Se?ora Lucy’s lost woman paintings that had made her famous. The lost woman was thought to be a representation of the Se?ora herself, but if anybody had asked Montse about that she would have disagreed. She knew some of these paintings quite well, having found out where a number of them were being exhibited. Sunday morning had become her morning for walking speechlessly among them. Safiye crossed a snowy valley with her back to the onlooker, and she left no footprints. In another painting Safiye climbed down a ladder of clouds; you turned to the next picture frame and she had become a gray-haired woman who closed her eyes and turned to dust at the same time as sweeping herself up with a little brush she held in her left hand.
“And the garden?” Montserrat asked.
Lucy smiled. “Still mine. I go there once a year. The lock never changes; I think the place has been completely forgotten. Except maybe one day she’ll meet me there.”
“I hope she does,” Montse lied. “But isn’t there some danger there?”
“So you believe what she said?”
“Well—yes.”
“Thank you. For saying that. Even if you don’t mean it. The papers said this Se?ora Fausta Del Olmo was stabbed . . . what Safiye described was close enough . . .”
—
MONTSE THOUGHT that even now it wouldn’t be difficult to turn half-fledged doubt into something more substantial. She could say, quite simply, I’m touched by your constancy, Se?ora, but I think you’re waiting for a murderer. Running from the strangeness of such a death was understandable; having the presence of mind to take the key was less so. Or, Montse considered, you had to be Safiye to understand it. And even as herself Montse couldn’t say for sure what she would have done or chosen not to do in such a situation. If that’s how you find out who you really are then she didn’t want to know. So yes, Montse could help Se?ora Lucy’s doubts along, but there was no honor in pressing such an advantage.
“And what about your own key, Montserrat?”
Lucy’s key gleamed and Montse’s looked a little sad and dusty; perhaps it was only gold plated. She rubbed at it with her apron.
“Just junk, I think.”
—
ALL THE SHOPS would be closed by the time Montse finished work, and the next day would be St. Jordi’s Day, so Montse ran into the bookshop across the street and chose something with a nice cover to give to Se?ora Lucy. This errand combined with the Se?ora’s long story meant that Montserrat was an hour late returning to the laundry room. She worked long past dinnertime, wringing linen under Se?ora Gaeta’s watchful eye, silently cursing the illusions of space that had been created within the attic. All those soaring lines from ceiling to wall disguised the fact that the room was as narrow as a coffin. Finally Se?ora Gaeta inspected her work and let her go. Only one remark was made about Montse’s shamefully late return from lunch: “You only get to do that once, my dear.”
—
MONTSE WENT HOME to the room and bed she shared with three other laundry maids more or less the same size as her. She and her bedfellows usually talked until they fell asleep. They were good friends, the four of them; they had to be. That night Montse somehow made it into bed first and the other three climbed in one by one until Montse lay squashed up against the bedroom wall, too tired to add to the conversation.