Body Work

16 Nada About Nadia

I had to go downtown for a meeting, a routine inquiry where I’d been able to do all the work without any shadowy menaces blocking my path. I pulled my documents together, put on some makeup and my dressy boots, and went back out into the bracing winter air. The snow had stopped after a mere four inches-nothing, really, to a third-degree street fighter.

As I rode the L down to the Loop, I knew I needed to talk to the Guamans. I’d only been on the case for two days, but it had been five days since Nadia had died. It was strange that they hadn’t sought me out, the woman who’d been with their daughter when she died. I decided to go over to Pilsen to try to speak with Cristina Guaman at the hardware store where LifeStory told me she worked.

As soon as my Loop meeting ended, I took the L west and south to Damen and Cermak and walked the three blocks to the hardware store (¡Sopladores de nieve! ¡Palas! ¡Todo para el invierno! ¡Se habla inglés!).

The placard in the window had advertised “Everything for Winter,” but the store really had everything period. Snow shovels, ice melt, mittens, space heaters, fans, kitchen utensils, TVs, microwaves, coloring books. It was a small space, but not only was every surface covered, long hooks dangling from the ceiling held dried tomatoes and garlic, DVDs, dog collars, trusses.

The place wasn’t well lit, and I didn’t see Cristina Guaman at first, but after stumbling against a rack full of hard hats I found her near the back at a computer. Someone was talking to her in Spanish, but the conversation was apparently desultory because Cristina only nodded her head while she typed.

I stood next to the woman who was speaking to her, waiting for a lull, but the woman saw I was a stranger, perhaps a customer, and asked in Spanish if I needed help.

“I need a word with Ms. Guaman,” I said, hoping she really did know English. My Spanish is pretty rudimentary.

The woman moved away from the counter, and Cristina Guaman stopped typing to look at me. “Yes?” she said. “What do you need?”

I pulled one of my cards out of my bag.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you at work, Ms. Guaman, but I’m the woman who was with your daughter when she died. Is there a place where we could talk?”

“We can talk here.”

She folded her hands on top of the keyboard, not the gesture of a woman at ease, but to create a barrier between herself and me.

“I don’t want to broadcast your family’s business to the whole store. Isn’t there someplace private?”

“My family has no business that the whole world cannot attend to. Are you the owner of that terrible place, that club where women take off their clothes so men can draw nasty pictures on their bodies?”

I wondered if family ties would make her unbend, so I explained my role as Petra’s cousin, my desire to protect her, my observation of Nadia and Nadia’s anguish or anger. “She kept drawing a face, the face of a beautiful young woman with short curly hair, and then she would slash a line through it. I’m wondering if that might have been her sister.”

“Clara’s hair is long and it is almost blond.” Cristina Guaman’s eyes were wary.

“Alexandra. Do you have a photograph of her? It was her name Nadia was calling as she died.”

At that, Cristina sucked in a breath. “Alexandra has been dead a long time. Nadia couldn’t let her rest in peace.”

“So she was painting Alexandra’s face?”

“I have no desire to know what pictures Nadia might be painting on a woman’s body. She knew how strongly I felt-her father, too-about her going to that place.”

“When did you last talk to her?”

Cristina Guaman looked around to see if anyone was in earshot. “Many months went by. Nadia was angry, always, for the last two years, so angry she would not speak to her father or me. My heart is broken at her death, but she cut herself away from her family. She moved into that apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, she stayed away from mass. Even though I knew she would pay no attention to my words, I had to call her when she started making a spectacle of herself in that degenerate club.”

I asked how she had learned Nadia was painting on the Body Artist, but of course people had been using their phones to take video footage of the performances. These inevitably ended up skipping around the World Wide Web, where more than one neighbor had shown them to the Guamans.

“The picture was poor, the light was bad, but everyone could see that woman sitting there naked, showing off her breasts, and people could easily see Nadia’s face. Can you imagine how you would feel when your daughter has flaunted herself in public for the whole world to see? I had to call her. I had to try to tell her how very worried I was to see her in such a corrupt place.”

“And was it Alexandra’s face she was painting?”

Cristina’s nose twitched as if she were smelling something bad. “It was enough to see Nadia together with a naked woman. If she was involving her sainted sister, then I am thankful to God that I was spared that sight.”

“How did Alexandra die?”

Cristina backed away from me. “In a painful, hard way that I prefer not to discuss.”

“Did she have a boyfriend, a girlfriend, anyone I could talk to?”

“What are you trying to ask?” Cristina hissed.

So she knew her daughter had women as lovers. Alexandra wouldn’t come out of the closet for fear her mother would learn, and her mother had known all along. Had Alexandra committed suicide because of the pressure? Had Nadia known and moved out after fighting with her mother over Allie’s sexuality?

I couldn’t think of any good way to ask these questions, so I asked in a bad way. “Who told you that Alexandra was sleeping with women?”

Cristina gasped. “If you came here to slander my saint, my angel, I will call the police. Leave!”

“I’m not trying to upset you, Ms. Guaman, just to figure out who killed your beloved daughter Nadia.”

“They arrested a man. It’s enough, enough that we’re dragged through the dirt by Nadia, without you coming to me and pouring it over me.”

“I went to Nadia’s apartment this morning,” I said. “Someone had broken in, had stolen her computer and all her discs. All her artwork is missing.”

At that, she became very quiet. She shook her head slowly as if unhappy at whatever she was thinking, but even though I tried several different gambits, she wouldn’t share her private thoughts with me. I told her about Nadia’s conviction that someone was spying on her.

“Who would that have been, do you think?” I asked. “The person who murdered her?”

Cristina shook her head again. “Nadia had many unhappy ideas, and not very many of them are-were-true. Was it she who told you those filthy lies about Alexandra? Nadia believed them and wouldn’t accept my word that her sister was pure, a good Christian, not capable of such acts. But enough anger. Nadia is with her sister now, in the arms of the Blessed Mother. I thank God that she has no more pain on this earth.”

That was all I was going to learn from her: Nada about Nadia. I walked unhappily from the store, wondering just what it was Cristina Guaman didn’t want me to know about her daughter. Daughters.

I stopped in a taquería across the street for a bowl of rice and beans. Ernie couldn’t tell me anything. Even if I could get past security at O’Hare to reach Lazar Guaman, it was hard to convince myself that such a gray and beaten man would talk to me. That left the surviving daughter, poor young Clara. It was two-thirty-with luck, I’d make it to her school before she left.