I WAS ON MY WAY through the Pasaje de la Concepción back to La Pedrera when I recognized Ben and Frankie coming towards me. Ben had pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt with the name of some gym in San Francisco, and she was marching ahead of Frankie through the little pedestrian street. They were still quarrelling.
“I don’t understand how you could accept me once with all my quirks and eccentricities and then go so judgmental on me,” Frankie was saying. In contrast to Ben who set each high-top sneaker down as if it were a dumbbell, Frankie bounced and slid along in her pointed shoes.
“We didn’t have anybody else in Iowa,” Ben said glumly. “We had to accept each other.”
“I’m no different than what I was ten years ago.”
Ben turned on her. “You’re completely different, Frankie. How can you say you’re not different?”
Frankie stopped too. “Aren’t you ever going to understand? I never was a man. Never felt like one, never looked like one, never was one inside. I was always a woman.”
“You didn’t feel to me like a woman.”
“What do you know and what does it matter anyway?” Frankie’s triangular face twisted sadly. “I thought you loved me for the person I was and am. My qualities have never changed even though my body did.”
“I do care about you, Frankie,” Ben said, after a minute. “But I don’t know how to deal with you anymore.”
“Sometimes I think that my caring about Delilah throws your whole self-concept of motherhood in doubt. If I can be a mother too, what does your motherhood mean?”
“There’s always one biological mother,” Ben said. “That’s the way it is. And the biological mother always feels different than the other parent.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Frankie. “Motherhood isn’t about biology, it’s about love.”
“Don’t talk to me about biology meaning nothing,” Ben snapped, starting to walk away again. “We are our bodies, our bodies make us who we are. You can’t just play fast and loose with biology.”
“Says the great bodybuilder,” Frankie said snidely.
They both saw me.
“Where’s April?” Ben demanded.
“I… well… I don’t know exactly.”
Frankie looked closely at me and then rolled her eyes nervously.
“What’s wrong, where’s April?” Ben repeated, advancing on me threateningly, “I know you’ve been seeing her. What’s going on between you?”
It’s hard to tell someone that their lover has betrayed them, no matter what that betrayal consists of.
But Frankie took the initiative. “Look, Ben, you had to know sometime. April helped me with Delilah last night.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“It’s true, Ben,” I said. “Frankie set it up with April to let her into the apartment while I was there, so that she’d have an alibi. But Hamilton came home and then you did, and… you know the rest.”
“I don’t believe you,” Ben said again, her solid face anguished. “Why would April do such a thing to me? She loves me, she loves Delilah, she was the one who set up this whole trip to Barcelona… Cassandra, you’re in on this with Frankie, you’re making this up.”
Frankie’s voice shook, “Can’t you get it through your head that April doesn’t like kids?”
“I’m afraid it’s true, Ben,” I said. “April told me as much out on the street. She doesn’t feel comfortable around kids. And she says you followed her to Barcelona.”
“April would never say that!”
“Is it or isn’t it true?” Frankie demanded. “Is that why you took Delilah out of school, quit your job and disrupted all our lives? Because of some half-baked infatuation with a foot therapist?”
“Oh, what does it matter,” Ben wailed, “when Delilah’s gone.” She turned on Frankie. “It’s all your fault. If you hadn’t come here and stirred up trouble, none of this would have happened. April and I were making progress on our relationship. Now she’s gone.”
“She’s gone and she’s taken Delilah with her,” said Frankie portentously. “She stole our daughter from the hotel this morning.”
“How do you know that, Frankie?”
“Who else could it be?”
I tried to get things back to a level of rationality. “What reason would April have for taking Delilah, Frankie?”
“You think she did too, admit it!”
“Well, she did say she had something to tell me. We agreed to meet in an hour at the restaurant inside the Mercat Sant Josep. Maybe she felt bad about having helped last night.”
“But she fainted today when you two showed up without Delilah,” Ben said. “Doesn’t that prove she’s innocent?”
“Maybe she’s just high-strung,” Frankie said. “Those spiritual types often are.”
“April told me you slept in until nine-thirty, Ben. Wouldn’t you have noticed if she’d gone out?”
“She’s been sleeping in a different room,” Ben said painfully. “We don’t sleep together.”
But that admission must have been too much for her. Because right after she made it she ran back the way she’d come to the Passeig de Gràcia and jumped into a passing cab.
“Come on,” Frankie said, taking my arm, “Talk to me.”
We sat down at April’s and my old seats at the outdoor table, and ordered cafés con leche.
“Do you really think April has Delilah then?” Frankie said anxiously, lighting up a Camel.
“I hope so.”
Frankie sighed. “Ben and her girlfriends! And she says I’m unstable.” She crossed her legs and struck a wounded pose. “She talks about my lying! I’m an amateur next to her. Can you believe we’re all here in Barcelona because Ben has a crush on someone?”
I had to smile. “So what did you say to April yesterday afternoon to persuade her to help you?”
Frankie put a finger to her red lips. “I have my ways.”
“Did you offer her money? Did you blackmail her?”
“Did I threaten to expose her as practicing Reflexology under false pretenses? No, I simply suggested that I could take Delilah off her hands for a while. You see, even in San Francisco I’d noticed that April was never very happy to see Delilah when I dropped her off after a weekend.”
The waitress crossed the street from the bar on the corner with our coffee.
Frankie was already wired. She kept talking. “To hear Ben go on you’d think it was totally her idea to have Delilah and totally her responsibility. But it was my idea. I was the one who wanted a child.”
“Ben said you met in college.”
“We did, we were inseparable. We were roommates for two years and then we got married. You couldn’t pry us apart.”
“How could she have not known about you? How could you have not known about each other?”
“I said we were close. I didn’t say we ever talked. For christssake, we were eighteen when we met, twenty-one when we had Delilah. I didn’t have a clue who I was. Yes, I had these feelings but I thought they’d go away. They didn’t and I’m happy they didn’t. I’m just starting my life in some ways and it’s exciting. I’m living my life finally as I want to live it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a right to be a mother. I am a parent. I have a child. And nobody can take her away from me.”
“Frankie, you and Ben have to work this stuff out. It isn’t good for Delilah.”
“Ben and her girlfriends aren’t good for Delilah,” she said stubbornly. “Delilah and I are fine together.”
“What about you, don’t you have a relationship?”
“Not at the moment,” she said. “Someday I’ll find the right man. I’m not like Ben. When I get attached, I stay attached.”
Speaking of attachments…
The head was coming down the street on two blue-jeaned legs. She was still smiling implacably.
“Excuse me,” I said, and pelted across the street. It wasn’t my physical prowess but luck and caffeine that enabled me to grab the teenage boy. Plus the fact that he wasn’t running.
“Where do you think you’re going, ladrón?” I shouted.
But he wasn’t really a pickpocket, just a university student who’d been having second thoughts.
“I thought it might look good in my room,” he apologized. “I’m really very sorry. I wanted to bring it back to where I took it from.”
He handed it over to me with a sheepish look and I hadn’t the heart to scold him.
“Mom’s back!” I turned to call to Frankie, but she was no longer there.
The Mercat Sant Josep was a nineteenth-century enclosed marketplace of glass and wrought iron, of the train-station school of architecture. A little city of comestibles: houses built of oranges and bananas; monuments of dried apricots and peaches; parks of leafy greens and browns. The cheese sellers stood behind cases of fresh white queso de Burgos and hard yellowish chunks from the Pyrenees; they would thinly slice you a hundred grams, if you asked, of salty Serrano ham, or cut you off a chunk of sausage or sell you a whole strand of fatty rust-red chorizo. I always avoided the meat displays with their plucked chickens dangling from the top of the stand like traitors on a gibbet, but I often was drawn, as if by undersea currents, to the icy stands of fish, where the fishmongers looked as pale as their catch from long years of sunless filleting and wrapping.
In the restaurant inside the market I took a seat that faced the window and ordered a three-course lunch of salad, braised lamb with fried potatoes and crema catalana for dessert. There was no sign of April.
I took a long time to eat. I had a small carafe of wine and then coffee. I watched the vegetable sellers outside the restaurant strip the soiled outer leaves from a boxful of lettuce, build a barricade of potatoes against an encroachment of rocket-shaped parsnips, fling limp carrots with seaweed-like hair back into the bin. After a while I noticed someone standing outside the restaurant and staring in. He was wearing a turtleneck sweater and a suede jacket; his hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he had on very dark Italian shades. He smoked with the cigarette held between his thumb and forefinger.
I’d seen him somewhere… and a shiver went up my spine. Maybe he was the man who’d followed me through the Barri Gòtic. A professional thief—or someone Frankie or Ben or even April had hired to stake me out and kill me.
For he was definitely staking someone out. I glanced covertly around the restaurant. Was there anyone here I’d missed? The small room was packed and the waiters dashed expertly back and forth from the kitchen with plates of food and bottles of wine.
Then I saw that the tough didn’t have his eye on me, but on an elderly woman seated at the bar in front of the restaurant. I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t noticed her before. In her black head scarf, black dress and black shawl she looked like a widow who’d wandered in from the countryside to see a big-city relative. She was perched on a stool at the bar eating a sandwich and drinking mineral water, with her head down and her eyes moving restlessly.
There was something peculiar about those eyes.
They were blue.
In my surprise I knocked over my water carafe, and when I looked up again, she was gone. So was the tough guy in the suede jacket. I hastily paid my bill and ran out of the restaurant in search of them.
It was two o’clock, siesta time, and some of the stands were closed, while others had been left in the care of a son or a daughter. There were a couple of men pushing brooms around and not many customers.
There she was, the little old lady in black. But how oddly she walked, not as if she were old, and not as if she were a lady either. Was she Hamilton in drag? I flattened myself against a stand with its metal door rolled down and let the señora cross the aisle perpendicular to mine. A few seconds later the man in the dark glasses slid past, smooth and soundless as a fish in an aquarium. He had a leather bag over one shoulder. Yes, it was him—the man with the threatening sack who’d followed me through the Barri Gòtic from the Ramblas and scared the wits out of me.
I squeezed into a tiny space between two stands and waited till he’d passed by.
The afternoon light filtered in through the dusty windows overhead and an eerie quiet seemed to blanket the great hall. A sensation of dread spread through my limbs and my heart pounded. I had the distinct impression that I was going to witness something awful.
A scream cut the air.
I rounded the corner at a bound to see the widow and the tough locked in a death grip, rolling on the floor on a rapidly flattening cushion of bananas which they must have knocked over when they began to grapple.
“Stop it, stop it,” a teenage girl in a green apron was crying. She told me and the others who converged upon the stand, “They just started fighting, I don’t know why.”
“Mira, it’s two men,” someone said, trying to tear them apart.
“No, son dos mujeres,” someone else said.
The widow’s black scarf had fallen away, revealing a blond brush cut, and the tough’s dark glasses had smashed in pieces. The two struggling bodies were smeared with banana mush; that suede jacket would never be the same.
“Son maridos,” I explained. Married. And some of the crowd, at least, seemed to understand. “Well actually,” I admitted. “They’re divorced.”
Ben was the first to recover. “You said April would be here with Delilah,” she accused me.
“I guess I was wrong.”
Frankie undid her ponytail and lit a cigarette. “You look totally ridiculous, Ben. Even before I had my operation I could do a better job of passing than that.”
Ben angrily tore off her shawl. Her biceps strained at the thin fabric over her shoulders.
“What have I done to you, Frankie, that you should be following me like this?”
“You thought you could just come to the restaurant and take Delilah off with you.”
“Well, isn’t that what you thought?”
“Frankie, Ben,” I pleaded. “Your daughter’s missing. What’s it going to take for you to be seriously worried?”
“You shut up, Cassandra,” Ben said, and she flung her shawl over her shoulder as she stomped off down the aisle. “What do you know about anything? You’ve never even been a mother.”
What a rejoinder. I was dumbstruck.
“Wait, Ben,” Frankie called. “I’m coming with you, like it or not.”
“I take it I’m definitely fired then?” I shouted after Frankie.
But neither of them bothered to reply.