Guanagaspar.
“Madam say when they get back in Cassie’s apartment, Boss didn’t mention a word to Cassie, but he went in the bedroom and close the door. When she went in to pack his clothes for him, as he was to leave next morning, he tell her how all day everybody was contradicting him and making him feel like he was small and stupid. He tell her how you come up here and just because you could buy house with a view and because you can hire people to do your work, you think you rise up to their level. It didn’t please him one bit to be driving in your car all day. He say you don’t know your place, that you think money is all a person need to step out from a backward fishing village, and how you playing landscape man but you really nothing more than a yardman. He didn’t want you becoming a nuisance, thinking that because you living up there in Canada, you rise up in class. He didn’t want you thinking you could telephone or come and meet Madam and take all kind of liberties. Madam say she couldn’t wait for Boss to leave. He talk and talk, and she remain quiet and pack his clothes in the suitcase. She went in the bed with him and play she fall asleep straightaway, but soon as she hear him breathe like he sleeping, she open her eyes and all night she lie awake thinking about the flowers you plant and how you take care of that house and yard all by yourself. She say she wonder in truth if you had a madam of your own, hide away somewhere. She picture the mountains across from your house, a little snow on them, and she imagine herself swimming in the water in front your house, and she tell me how she couldn’t get it out of her mind how you had asked her if she wanted to eat spaghetti or if she wanted you to look for something else for her to eat.
“When Madam came back here, she was not the same Madam who had left for Canada three months earlier, you know. That place make her strong-willed, and it put ideas in her head. She was brisk, and her voice—you know how she used to be quiet-quiet? Her voice get bright. And almost every day she went to bathe in the swimming pool. She was looking after herself. I don’t mean going to the hairdresser and that kind of thing. But rather, she stop eating too much fat and meat and say how she feeling like a young woman again, and how, sudden-sudden so, she want to be fit. She exercise, swim two-three times a day, back and forth in the pool, you see it there, nobody else using it. First few days Madam look like her age was in reverse. A few times after I gone into my room for the evening, I had to go back into the kitchen, as I thought I had forgotten to turn off the radio. It was no radio: it was Madam singing, humming old-time tunes, and even making up her own words and music as she herself sat there doing work that the yardman is supposed to do—polishing the silver and the brass.
“Sometimes I walk out there to find her holding up a piece of silver from on the sideboard, a cake knife, for instance, or from the coffee table down in the front of the house, a crystal ashtray in the palm of her hand. One day I find her taking out her collection of expensive coffee cups and teacups that she used to use only when her lady friends used to come for tea, and she take out the little-little spoons to look at them, too. Just sitting, looking at all them things. I never see her do that kind of thing before. Those were nights when Boss was out until two-three in the morning, and you didn’t know if it was really work he was doing, as he say it was, or if it was gallivanting. And gallivanting in this place always involve a woman. When I ask Madam what she doing out there late so, she hold up the items to the light as if to see them better, and she say, ‘Piyari, these things pretty, and they dear for so, it is true, but they don’t talk to me. In my next life, I will have no need for things like these.’
“She was really watching them as if for the last time. And then those same pieces, one by one, started going missing. In a short time, the sideboard and the buffet that had been covered with all kind of stupidness—nice stupidness: silver cigarette box and lighter to match, a crystal bird with a long, long, long neck that Madam used to always tell me to careful with when I dusting, six crystal decanters, two silver fighting cocks, a pewter bud vase, a bone-china bowl with a picture of yellow roses inside it, expensive stupidness, in truth—in a short time so, the buffet top was empty-empty.
“One day I open a drawer in the buffet. The special knife-and-fork set—a kind of set that had knife for regular food, knife for meat, knife for fish, knife for butter, and knife for what else I don’t know, and three different kind of spoons, and a fork for this and for that, the set that they use for parties—well, it was gone, the drawer was empty.
“Another time I come outside and see Madam lean over the dining room table, almost lying on top of it, cleaning and shining the top with a cloth and tung oil. She tell me take another cloth and help her. But I stand up right there and I watch her. You know it is I who tell Madam that if Boss don’t miss anything else, he was bound to miss the table and the chairs. She come down from the table and say quiet-quiet, ‘You right. He might notice, in truth.’ Is like she wasn’t thinking. It was then that everything start falling apart.”