What’s this? The inquisition?”
When she gets off the elevator that opens onto her grandmother’s apartment, she finds Nini and Juan Carlos sitting in the living room. Waiting for her. Obviously.
Gabriella is annoyed and guilty and angry and defensive, even before the speech starts, because she knows what the speech will be about.
“Gabriellita, no one wants to put you on the spot, but we want to make sure you know what you’re getting into,” says Nini firmly, but her voice is trembling with barely suppressed outrage. “This boy you’ve been going out with, he’s Luis Silva’s son. We’re talking about a very dangerous man. You should have told me who he was.”
“Nini, Luis Silva is in jail, and anyway, Angel is not in his father’s business,” says Gabriella, not sitting down, retaining the advantage of height and stance over her diminutive grandmother.
“Gabriella, don’t pretend to be silly. It doesn’t suit you. Of course, he’s involved,” says Nini impatiently. “And even if he weren’t, what do you suppose he’s going to do if you no longer want to go out with him? If you meet someone else? Gabriellita, this is just not advisable—”
“Do you remember the story of the girl a couple of years ago?” interrupts Juan Carlos. “She was dating some little mafioso, and he whacked her new boyfriend! This is no joke. Gabriella, this isn’t a good thing.”
“I…” Gabriella’s voice trails off. How to explain when they don’t know him. “If you spoke with him, you wouldn’t say what you’re saying,” she says helplessly. “Maybe you should get to know him. Invite him to dinner or something,” she adds with a shrug, ignoring Juan Carlos and looking at her grandmother instead.
Her grandmother looks at her stone-faced, and for a ridiculous moment, Gabriella stifles a giggle.
“I can’t believe this!” shouts Juan Carlos, affronted at Gabriella’s lack of respect. “What are you, deaf or just plain stupid?”
“Juan,” says Nini warningly.
“Oh, please. All you care about is what people will say about you, Juan Carlos,” interrupts Gabriella, folding her arms angrily in front of her.
“Okay, I do,” Juan Carlos answers, pounding the sofa with his fist, nodding vehemently. “I do care what people say about me. I live here. This is my city. And I care. And you should be considerate of that, because in a few weeks, you’ll be gone again, and you can pretend this didn’t happen, while we have to live with the consequences of your little fling.”
Juan Carlos stops to catch his breath. Gabriella has never seen him like this, and she feels just a twinge of guilt. Just a little.
“I honestly think you’re overstating this,” she says. “Nini,” she says, turning again toward her grandmother, her palms turned up in entreaty. “Angel is not that way. I’m not embarrassing you. I’m not going to embarrass you. I don’t do that, Nini.”
“But this is more than that,” says Nini. “At this point, I’m worried about your safety, and frankly, about my safety and the family’s safety.”
Gabriella pauses. She hadn’t considered that her family could possibly be in any danger. But, she rationalizes, the only one who’s a target is Angel, and he is too zealously guarded to instill real fear into her. And the idea of Angel himself being dangerous simply doesn’t factor into her equation. For a brief instant, she sees his face above hers, feels his hand stroking her stomach, and involuntarily she closes her eyes.
“He is not going to hurt me. Or you,” Gabriella says, decision imparting firmness to her voice. They are trying to make her feel like an obtuse teenager, which she isn’t, and she wants them to understand that, despite everything they may think, they’re simply mistaken. “I know where he comes from. I know who he is. But, he’s not in that life. He’s—he’s normal! He can’t help who his father is. But he’s not his father!”
It doesn’t sound right, she knows.
“I like him. I like him, Nini,” she says earnestly. “And why, why can’t I be with someone I like? I’m not married. It’s my right.”
Nini stares, the skin around her mouth pinched and tight.
“It’s your right,” she says finally. “But not in my house. I’m going to have a talk with your father tonight. And I’m going to have to tell him about this. It’s my responsibility.”
Gabriella feels a hole opening in the pit of her stomach. Her father, whose calls she’s ignored, who she can’t bring herself to speak to. He will come personally and get her, she’s sure. He is not going to let this one go by.
“You tell him,” Gabriella says carefully, “and I’ll tell him that you knew about this Juan José character and my mother. I’ll tell him how she had an affair while staying in your house, and you let it happen. And that, you didn’t have a problem with.”
The words spill out before she can stop them, and she’s appalled at how awful they are.
She wants to grab them back, but now they hover in the hushed room and she can see them poisoning the air, physically attacking her grandmother, who suddenly and for the first time looks to Gabriella like an old woman.
“What the hell?” says Juan Carlos, confused.
But it’s Nini whom she sees looking at her with an expression of bafflement and profound hurt. Nini so taken by surprise she doesn’t even scold Juan Carlos for the language.
All these years she has kept silent, thinks Gabriella. She knew all this time. But I couldn’t. It’s been only three days of secrets, and yet, it was killing me.
“Tell him,” Nini finally says in a tiny whisper. “Go ahead and wreck his life, and wreck what’s left of mine. Will that make you feel better?”
Gabriella can’t bring herself to speak.
She shakes her head no, looking beyond Nini, because she can’t bear to look at her face now, she feels so ashamed.
“Who told you?” Nini asks.
“No one,” she answers, almost under her breath. “I read it. I read it in her diary.”
For a few seconds, no one speaks, and Nini resists the urge to stand up and put her arms around her granddaughter.
“Ay, mamita,” says Nini finally, shaking her head with sad disdain. “It was nothing. It wasn’t important.”
“That’s not what she wrote, Nini,” says Gabriella quickly, wanting to give details but profoundly ashamed of repeating the intimacy of her mother’s words.
Nini pauses and sighs heavily.
“I am telling you, Gabriella,” she says finally, recovering a sense of decorum. “That it was not important. That it might have seemed important to her at the time—and that was a shame—but it wasn’t. And the last thing I would have done was to tell your father about it,” she says, looking Gabriella in the eye, the warning tacit between them.
“You don’t ruin good marriages over a little”—Nini will not use the word “affair,” so she goes for a mild alternative—“flirtation. And you don’t spread rumors, either. Gossip is the worst enemy of relationships.”
No one says anything for a few moments, not even Juan Carlos, who’s found himself in deeply uncharted territory.
Gabriella wants to leave but doesn’t dare make the move now.
Nini is afraid to ask, but she feels compelled. Helena was part of her, too. “Can I read it?” she says, and there is pleading in her voice.
“Nini,” says Gabriella, uncomfortable. “I… I can’t. She wrote it to me. I can’t dishonor that.”
The air in the breezy room is suddenly heavy. No one speaks. No one moves. The ticking of an antique clock is all that can be heard.
“She was infatuated, not in love,” Nini says after a long silence. “Just like you are now with this Angel. And I think that if she hadn’t died, she would have ripped those pages out. If she hadn’t died, she would have written a very different book.”
Juan Carlos is in the room, but she is speaking only to Gabriella now, all her energy zeroed in on her, on making her see what she sees, what she would like to be true.
But now Gabriella shakes her head no.
No.
“No, Nini,” she says, and there’s a sad bitterness in her voice. “I think she would have written the same book. I think,” she continues, looking straight at Nini, because she feels that somehow she can reach her, “I think she had a chance. And she took it. And now I have my chance. And I’m going to write my own book. And you have to let me, Nini. I think you owe me that.”