IF HE COULD not make it, he always called. Often it was because of his work, sometimes because of his wife or children. ‘You’re not angry?’ he’d ask. ‘No,’ she’d say, and she was not angry. She was very understanding, she knew the pressures and difficulties of their arrangement. ‘Next time,’ he’d say, ‘I promise.’ On these days she did not leave immediately. She listened to opera on the radio, watched television or read magazines. She did not like to think that she was simply waiting for Jorge.
They had been meeting at the Hotel Mirabelle – Jorge and Luisa – twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, for eight months. Today, as always, she got there a little early; there were things to do before Jorge arrived. At the reception desk the manager came out to greet her. The first time she had come in he had recognised her, said he was a big fan, and she had signed in not as herself but as Mrs Echegary. The manager had liked the joke and she had done the same thing each time since. Now he watched her hands while she wrote in the book and he smiled, a smile that said he knew how to be discreet, assured her, once again, that it was that kind of hotel. He was young, she thought, almost handsome. He passed her the room key and she winked at him, a showy wink she had been using for years.
Upstairs she made herself a drink, whisky with a little water, and undressed in front of the full-length mirror. She applied more mascara and lipstick quickly, expertly. She brushed her hair and then sprayed perfume around her shoulders and between her legs. She pulled at the skin of her neck and watched it regain its shape. Luisa held her breasts in her hands, enjoying the new, still unexpected weight of them. For a second, in front of the mirror, she arched her spine and tilted her head back.
At the window she adjusted the blinds so that the sunlight lay in bands across the bed. There was something about meeting in this shady room in the bright, dead hours of the afternoon, something deliciously illicit that she thought she must be addicted to. Satisfied, she lit one of her vanilla-flavoured cigarillos and got into bed.
This was how Jorge liked it to be when he arrived. This, he said, was the thought that made him drive a little too fast across the city to the Hotel Mirabelle.
The operation was Jorge’s idea. It was their six-month anniversary and he said he wanted to buy her something special. The surgeon was a friend of his, his golf or tennis partner. Jorge made all the arrangements and went with her to the consultation at the clinic. There the two men and Luisa discussed the shape and size of the implants and Jorge paid in advance.
The day of the operation Jorge had been unable to be there because of his work. ‘Felipe will look after you,’ he told Luisa on the phone. The surgeon explained everything slowly and in detail, where the incisions would be made and how the implants would be inserted. He felt that she should understand exactly what would be happening to her. She listened to the pleasant, almost hypnotic sound of his voice but not to what he was saying. He made her hold the implants in her hands – cool, formless – and she could not connect them with the operation she was about to have.
The surgeon put her at ease. He had something of Jorge’s confident, relaxed manner. He said he and his wife had been watching her for years, that his daughter wanted to be an actress, but then didn’t they all? He was concerned that she would end up disappointed. Luisa watched him spread the plastic surgical sheet over her and thought that it would not be so different from being touched by Jorge. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is a difficult business. I have been lucky.’ She had been about to say something more but the anaesthetic had taken her under.
At their next meeting she was very sore – she had not expected to be so sore – but Jorge was very understanding. He said it made him happy just to look at her.
Luisa picked up the phone and called downstairs for a bottle of champagne, the Veuve Clicquot she and Jorge always drank. She sat at the dressing table in her negligee and began to paint her toenails a bright red.
Built into one corner of the room was a bar with a Formica counter. A mock chandelier hung from the centre of the ceiling. On two walls there were reproductions of Toulouse-Lautrec paintings. From the window there was a view of the hotel car park. Over the last few months the room had become extraordinarily familiar but she rarely allowed herself to think of it, or of Jorge, when she was not here. It was a fragile pleasure, hoarded away at the back of her mind, where she could be sure it would not escape or be used up.
She did not recognise the maid who brought up the champagne and she stopped painting her nails to look. The girl was slim and dark and her hair was pinned flat on top of her head. She was wearing the hotel’s black-and-white uniform and black lace-up shoes.
‘Where would you like the champagne, Mrs Echegary?’
Luisa pointed towards the bar with the nail brush. ‘What is your name?’ she asked.
‘Mariana.’ The maid took the bottle and two glasses off the tray.
‘Are you new, Mariana?’
‘I’ve been here for nearly a year, Mrs Echegary.’
Luisa beckoned her over to the dressing table.
‘Tell me what you think of this colour. Is it too much?’
‘It’s very nice, Mrs Echegary.’
Luisa smiled. She wanted to say: You know Mrs Echegary is not my real name? You understand the joke? She said: ‘But it doesn’t really matter what we think, does it?’
The maid shook her head. She picked up the tray and turned towards the door.
‘Wait,’ said Luisa. She went to her bag and pulled out her purse. ‘How old are you, Mariana?’
‘Nineteen.’
Luisa pushed a note into her hand. ‘Don’t say anything. I’m feeling extravagant.’
Aventuras del Corazon. She wondered how many televisions in the hotel were showing the soap opera now, the first episode of the day, if perhaps the manager was watching it in his office. Mrs Echegary: a household name, a national institution according to some. Passionate and ruthless, famous for her diamonds, her perfect hair, her immaculate appearance maintained whatever the circumstances. She had survived the death of two husbands, the delinquency of her sons, cancer and several car crashes.
Luisa put down the remote control without turning the television on, walked to the window and parted the slats of the blind to look out over the hotel car park. She had a momentary vision of herself from the other side of the room – holding the tall glass, the light streaming across her face – as if caught in a photograph or a painting, and she felt a terrifying instant of paralysis. She stood a little straighter to break the thought, and took a sip of champagne.
The car park was quiet. The parking valet was sitting on the kerb, shining his sunglasses with a handkerchief. In the far corner her Alfa Romeo was half hidden by a Mercedes jeep. She had had the car imported from Italy ten years ago at a time when she had left Aventuras del Corazon and just received admiring reviews for a role in an American film. The magazines carried photographs of her driving it around the city or filling it with petrol at garages. The car was a little battered and rusting now but there was a powerful sentimentality that stopped her replacing it. Recently the door on the driver’s side had broken and she had to get in through the passenger door, sliding awkwardly over the gearstick. It occurred to her again that she should get it fixed.
Three weeks ago Luisa saw Jorge in the Mall Mariscal Lopez. After the party where they had met and the consultation at the clinic it was only the third time she had seen him outside the room in the hotel. He was with two children, a boy and a girl, buying them drinks and hamburgers. They did not look like him, were pale where he was dark. They resembled their mother, Luisa presumed. Looking at them she had no idea how old they might be; Jorge had never said. It occurred to her that in some way she had doubted that they, or his wife, really existed, but were just figments of a game Jorge and Luisa played out in the Hotel Mirabelle.
The food the children had been waiting for was handed over the counter and the three of them turned and began to walk towards Luisa. Jorge appeared somehow different. Unshaven, casually dressed and loaded down with shopping bags, he seemed reduced, crumpled, physically shorter even. As they came closer she saw that he was wearing his wedding ring. Months before, as they were being introduced, she had searched his hand for the ring and not found it.
Jorge and his children were no more than ten feet away and she was preparing to speak to him, when she realised that he had not seen her. They walked past and his face registered nothing, except a certain weariness. She turned to watch them go and as they went he stooped down and said something to the children that made them giggle. A few moments later Luisa realised that a young woman was touching her sleeve and saying her name. She was asking for an autograph and Luisa was happy to be distracted by the ritual.
The next day was a Monday and in the afternoon Jorge and Luisa met in the room at the Hotel Mirabelle. She did not mention the mall. It was a month since Luisa’s operation but she was still too uncomfortable to have sex. Jorge had seemed tense but they drank and later he knelt beside her on the bed and masturbated over her breasts.
The champagne was finished. She would order more for her and Jorge later. Instead she poured herself another whisky. The stripes of sunlight coming through the blinds were softer now and had climbed up against the wall.
Luisa turned on the television. The second of the consecutive episodes of Aventuras del Corazon had just begun. The programme seemed to be full of the new young stars whom she barely knew but whose faces were always in the newspapers, their frantic and scandalous personal lives reported in endless detail.
Luisa disliked it when she heard other actors say that they could not bear to see themselves on the screen; she believed it was a pose, an affectation. She enjoyed watching herself in this role, which, after so many years – and despite the dull and insubstantial storylines she felt Mrs Echegary had recently been given – fitted her like a second skin.
Two years after Luisa left the programme she had come back. In that time she made several films but the moment had quickly passed and the parts were no longer offered. Mrs Echegary, who had been killed by a jealous lover in front of an audience of millions – so adamant had Luisa been that she would not return – was resurrected, as feisty and indomitable as before.
Luisa lit another cigarillo and watched the smoke hang heavily above the bed. She picked up the phone and listened to the dreary, insistent hum of the dial tone. When she finally looked back at the television the credits were scrolling up the screen.
‘I’d like another bottle of Veuve Clicquot.’
‘Of course, Mrs Echegary.’ Luisa put down the phone. She wondered if she had heard a different, perhaps a mocking emphasis in the manager’s voice.
In the bathroom she turned on the taps. Jorge would be surprised to find her in the bath, Luisa thought. Surprised and a little amused, the way he sometimes was.
Today was Friday and on Monday they had slept together for the first time since the operation six weeks ago. They had had sex twice and then lay in bed drinking and talking for the rest of the afternoon. Jorge told her that as a teenager he had fantasised about her, something he had never said before. Luisa told him about the house she planned to buy in the mountains which they would be able to use for their meetings. He told her how unhappy he was with his wife and they made love again.
The phone was ringing. If he could not make it, he always called. She did not hurry from the bathroom. She turned off the taps and as she passed the mirror she paused to move a strand of hair away from her face.
‘Yes?’
‘Mrs Echegary?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m afraid there is no more Veuve Clicquot. Only Moët. It is a little cheaper. Mrs Echegary?’
‘Yes,’ said Luisa, ‘please send it up.’
She turned on the hot tap and let it run until the water was steaming. Then, without testing it, she stepped quickly in. For several seconds she felt nothing, there was no sensation. Then the pain came, biting exquisitely. But she did not get out. Instead she lowered herself into the water, feeling the skin tighten and become raw as it hit the water.
She gasped out loud and thought, I can tolerate this.
She counted slowly to twenty, looking at her hands, red under the water. Then she turned the cold tap on and let the bath fill.
The operation had been painful too. There were only scars now, deep red lines etched into the skin which would not disappear, but they were concealed on the undersides. She saw that it was nothing really. Many women she knew, especially in her profession, had something done every year. In a way it was surprising she had waited so long; she supposed she must have been a little proud. But Jorge had been so taken with the idea, and then later, so pleased with the results. She could have paid for it herself but he would not have it and the money made no difference to him. ‘Now I own part of you,’ he had joked afterwards.
Her breasts floated just under the surface. She touched them and then held them with her hands, as if they were not part of her own body. She did not think they were absurd, as she had overheard one of the other actresses saying. She agreed with Jorge; they were beautiful. She took a deep breath and slid down into the bath, pulling her head underwater. She closed her eyes and felt warmed through.
There was someone standing in the bathroom doorway. For a moment she thought, Jorge. But it was not Jorge. Of course it was not. It was the maid, whose name she could not now remember.
‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Echegary. I knocked for a long time.’ She hesitated. ‘Are you all right?’ She looked at the bottle she was holding, the champagne Luisa had ordered and forgotten about. ‘I’ll leave it on the bar.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Luisa, sitting up in the bath. ‘What is your name?’ She was sober enough to notice that she was slurring her words.
‘Mariana.’
‘Yes. Don’t be silly, Mariana. Open the bottle. I need you to fill up my glass.’
The maid hesitated and then popped the champagne cork and walked across the room.
‘If you don’t look at what you’re doing you’ll spill it,’ said Luisa, smiling. ‘Now pour yourself a glass. There’s another one in the other room.’
‘I can’t, Mrs Echegary. I’m working.’
‘Luisa. Please call me Luisa. This is working. I am a good customer. You can have a drink with me. Otherwise,’ she said lightly, ‘I will complain about you.’
The maid got the glass from the bedroom. She sat on the edge of a chair by the sink and held the champagne rigidly in front of her.
‘How old are you, Mariana?’
‘I’m nineteen.’
‘How old do you think I am?’
The maid looked past Luisa at the mottled glass of the bathroom window. ‘I don’t know, Mrs Echegary.’
Luisa waved her hand in the air. ‘It doesn’t matter. You have a very nice figure, Mariana.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Jorge would admire you. He would like your body. It is a pity they make you wear that uniform.’
The maid stood up.
‘I have to go. The manager –’
‘Let him wait,’ said Luisa, with a sharpness she had not intended.
She lay back in the bath, not speaking, and for several minutes she watched the champagne bubbles race up the side of the glass and pop at the surface.
Then, still holding the glass in her left hand, she gripped the side of the bath with her right and began to pull herself to her feet. The water ran off her body in streams and again she felt the rawness of her skin. She felt terribly heavy but did not stop. She pushed away the hair that was plastered across her eyes and stood up as straight as she could manage. She held her arms out wide.
‘This is what Jorge likes,’ she said. ‘This is why he comes here.’
She felt dizzy. She staggered forward and the champagne slopped out of her glass into the water below. The maid stepped closer but Luisa held onto the window ledge and steadied herself. She turned to the maid.
‘We should have a toast. What should we have a toast to, Mariana?’
‘I don’t know, Mrs Echegary,’ said the maid, still poised halfway across the room. ‘To you?’
Luisa laughed. ‘Yes, of course. To me.’ She let go of the window ledge. She raised the glass in front of her and tilted it forward, knocking it against an imaginary other.
‘To me, then,’ she said.
Perhaps the light shed by the chandelier was less kind than the sunlight had been but, as she got dressed, it seemed to Luisa that in the months she had been coming here the room had become perceptibly shabbier. They had chosen the hotel because it was not ostentatious but now she noticed the thinness of the carpets and their old-fashioned floral pattern, the shiny vulgarity of the furnishings, the cheapness of the champagne flutes. There was a yellow-brown tobacco stain on the ceiling above the bed.
She took her time dressing, drying her hair and putting on make-up, and when she finally left the room she felt more hung-over than drunk. In the lobby she paid the bill and cancelled the reservations for the following week. She asked the manager to light one of her cigarillos and he gave her his card. Outside it was dark, not even dusky. The valet had disappeared so she walked across the car park to her car. She tried the driver’s door before remembering it was broken. She went round to the passenger’s side, climbed over the gearstick, and started the car.