Read Inez: A Novel for Free Online Page B

he took the house, and he hadn’t moved them, well, out of superstition—he smiled—or maybe not to disturb the ghosts.
    “Who is he?” she asked, putting the steaming cup of coffee to her lips without taking her eyes from the photograph, indifferent to the maestro’s asides on folklore.
    “My brother,” Gabriel answered simply, looking away from the funerary stools.
    “You don’t look at all alike.”
    “Well, I say ‘brother’ the way you might say ‘comrade.’”
    “We women never call each other ‘sister’ or ‘comrade’ or things like that.”
    “‘Love,’ ‘friend’ …”
    “Yes. I guess I shouldn’t press you. Sorry. I don’t mean to pry.”
    “No, no. It’s just that my words have a price, Inés. If you want me to talk about myself—want, not press—you’ll have to tell me about you.”
    “All right.” She laughed, amused by the way Gabriel had turned things around.
    The young maestro glanced around his no-frills cottage and said that if it were up to him there wouldn’t be a stick of furniture in it, nothing. In empty houses, echoes are the only things that flourish: voices flourish, if we know how to listen. He came here—he stared deep into Inés’s eyes—to hear the voice of his brother …
    “Your brother?”
    “Yes, because most of all he was my companion. Companion, brother, ceci, cela, whatever …”
    “Where is he?”
    Gabriel didn’t just look down. He looked … down.
    “I don’t know. He always liked long, mysterious disappearances.”
    “Doesn’t he keep in touch with you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then you do know where he is.”
    “His letters have no date or return address.”
    “Where are they mailed from?”
    “I left him in France. That’s why I chose this place.”
    “Who brings them to you?”
    “Here I’m closer to France. I can see the coast of Normandy.”
    “What does he say in the letters? Oh, I apologize … I know you haven’t given me permission—”
    “Yes, yes, don’t worry. Look, he likes to reminisce about our life as teenagers. Mmh, he remembers, I don’t know, how he envied me when I asked the prettiest girl to dance and showed her off on the dance floor. He confesses he was jealous of me, but being jealous just means making the person we’d like to have all to ourselves more important. Jealousy, Inés, not envy. Envy is poisonous, pointless, because we want to be a different person. Jealousy is generous—we want the other person to be ours.”
    “What was he like? He didn’t dance?”
    “No. He preferred to watch me dance and then tell me he was jealous. He was like that. He lived through me and I through him. We were comrades, can you understand? We had this deep tie that the world rarely understands and always tries to destroy: isolating us in jobs, ambition, women, habits we acquire on our own … history.”
    “Maybe it’s best that way, maestro.”
    “Gabriel.”
    “Gabriel. Maybe if that wonderful youthful friendship had been prolonged, it would have lost its luster.”
    “Nostalgia preserves it, you mean?”
    “Something like that, maestro … Gabriel.”
    “And you, Inés?” Atlan-Ferrara brusquely changed the subject.
    “Nothing special. My name is Inés Rosenzweig. My uncle is a Mexican diplomat in London. Ever since I was little, people have said I have a good voice. I went to the Conservatorio de Mexico, and now I’m in London”—she laughed—“sowing confusion among the chorus of The Damnation of Faust and giving the celebrated young maestro Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara fits.”
    She lifted her coffee cup as if it were a champagne flute. She burned her fingers. She was just going to ask the maestro again, “Who brings the letters?” but Gabriel beat her to the punch.
    “Don’t you have a boyfriend? Didn’t you leave someone behind in Mexico?”
    Inés shook her head no, and the movement highlighted the cherry tones in her hair. She rubbed her burned fingers discreetly on her skirt. Just at the thigh.