The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Rosaura lived in a house of many balconies, shadowed by a dense overgrowth of crimson bougainvillea vines. She used to hide behind these vines, where she could read her storybooks undisturbed. Rosaura, Rosaura. A melancholy child, she had few friends, but no one had ever been able to guess the reason for her sadness. She was devoted to her father, and whenever he was home she used to sing and laugh around the house, but as soon as he left to supervise the workers in the canefields, she would hide once more behind the crimson vines and before long she’d be deep in her storybook world.

I know I ought to get up and look after the mourners, offer my clients coffee and serve cognac to their unbearable husbands, but I feel exhausted. I just want to sit here and rest my aching feet, listen to my neighbors chatter endlessly about me. When I met him, Don Lorenzo was an impoverished sugar-cane planter, who only managed to keep the family afloat by working from dawn to dusk. First Rosaura, then Lorenzo. What an extraordinary coincidence. He loved the old plantation house, with its dozen balconies jutting out over the canefields like a windswept schooner’s. He had been born there, and the building’s historic past had made his blood stir with patriotic zeal: It was there that the criollos’ first resistance to the invasion had taken place, almost a hundred years before.

Don Lorenzo remembered the day very well, and he would enthusiastically reenact the battle scene as he strode vigorously through halls and parlors—war whoops, saber, musket and all—thinking of those heroic ancestors who had gloriously died for their homeland. In recent years, however, he’d been forced to exercise some caution in his historic walks, as the wood-planked floor of the house was eaten through with termites. The chicken coop and the pigpen that Don Lorenzo was compelled to keep in the cellar to bolster the family income were now clearly visible, and the sight of them would always cast a pall over his dreams of glory. Despite his economic hardships, however, he had never considered selling the house or the plantation. A man could sell anything he had—his horse, his cart, his shirt, even the skin off his back—but one’s land, like one’s heart, must never be sold.

I mustn’t betray my surprise, my growing amazement. After everything that’s happened, to find ourselves at the mercy of a two-bit writer. As if my customers’ bad-mouthing wasn’t enough. I can almost hear them whispering, tearing me apart behind their fluttering fans: “Whoever would have thought it; from charwoman to gentlewoman, first wallowing in mud, then wallowing in wealth. But finery does not a lady make.” I couldn’t care less. Thanks to Lorenzo, their claws can’t reach me anymore; I’m beyond their “lower my neckline a little more, Rosita dear, pinch my waist a little tighter there, Rosita darling,” as though alterations to their gowns were no work at all and I didn’t have to get paid for them. But I don’t want to think about that now.

When his first wife died, Don Lorenzo behaved like a drowning man in a shipwreck. He thrashed about desperately in an ocean of loneliness for a while, until he finally grabbed on to the nearest piece of flotsam. Rosa offered to keep him afloat, clasped to her broad hips and generous breasts. He married her soon afterwards and, his domestic comfort thus reestablished, Don Lorenzo’s hearty laugh could once again be heard echoing through the house, as he went out of his way to make his daughter happy. An educated man, well-versed in literature and art, he found nothing wrong with Rosaura’s passion for storybooks. He felt guilty about the fact that she had been forced to leave school because of his poor business deals, and perhaps because of it on her birthday he always gave her a lavish, gold-bound storybook as a present.

This story is getting better; it’s funnier by the minute. The small-town, two-bit writer’s style makes me want to laugh; he’s stilted and mawkish and turns everything around for his own benefit. He obviously doesn’t sympathize with me. Rosa was a practical woman, for whom the family’s modest luxuries were unforgivable selfindulgences. Rosaura disliked her because of this. The house, like Rosaura’s books, was a fantasy world, filled with exquisite old dolls in threadbare clothes; musty wardrobes full of satin robes, velvet capes, and crystal candelabra which Rosaura used to swear she’d seen floating through the halls at night, held aloft by flickering ghosts. One day Rosa, without so much as a twinge of guilt, arranged to sell all the family heirlooms to the local antique dealer.

The small-town writer is mistaken. First of all, Lorenzo began pestering me long before his wife passed away. I remember how he used to undress me boldly with his eyes when I was standing by her sickbed, and I was torn between feeling sorry for him and my scorn for his weak, sentimental mooning. I finally married him out of pity and not because I was after his money, as this story falsely implies. I refused him several times, and when I finally weakened and said yes, my family thought I’d gone out of my mind. They believed that my marrying Lorenzo and taking charge of his huge house would mean professional suicide because my designer clothes were already beginning to earn me a reputation. Selling the so-called family heirlooms, moreover, made sense from a psychological as well as from a practical point of view. At my own home we’ve always been proud; I have ten brothers and sisters, but we’ve never gone to bed hungry. The sight of Lorenzo’s empty cupboard, impeccably whitewashed and with a skylight to better display its frightening bareness, would have made the bravest one of us shudder. I sold the broken-down furniture and the useless knickknacks to fill that cupboard, to put some honest bread on the table.

But Rosa’s miserliness didn’t stop there. She went on to pawn the silver, the table linen, and the embroidered bedsheets that had once belonged to Rosaura’s mother, and to her mother before her. Her niggardliness extended to the family menu, and even such moderately epicurean dishes as fricasseed rabbit, rice with guinea hen, and baby lamb stew were banished forever from the table. This last measure saddened Don Lorenzo deeply because, next to his wife and daughter, he had loved those criollo dishes more than anything else in the world, and the sight of them at dinnertime would always make him beam with happiness.

Who could have strung together this trash, this dirty gossip? The title, one must admit, is perfect: the unwritten page will bear patiently whatever poison you spit on it. Rosa’s frugal ways often made her seem two-faced: she’d be all smiles in public and a shrew at home. “Look at the bright side of things, dear, keep your chin up when the chips are down,” she’d say spunkily to Lorenzo as she put on her best clothes for mass on Sunday, insisting he do the same. “We’ve been through hard times before and we’ll weather this one out, too, but there’s no sense in letting our neighbors know.” She opened a custom dress shop in one of the small rooms of the first floor of the house and hung a little sign that read “The fall of the Bastille” over its door. Believe it or not, she was so ignorant that she was sure this would win her a more educated clientele. Soon she began to invest every penny she got from the sale of the family heirlooms in costly materials for her customers’ dresses, and she’d sit night and day in her shop, self-righteously threading needles and sewing seams.

The mayor’s wife just walked in; I’ll nod hello from here, without getting up. She’s wearing one of my exclusive models, which I must have made over at least six times just to please her. I know she expects me to go over and tell her how becoming it looks, but I just don’t feel up to it. I’m tired of acting out the role of high priestess of fashion for the women of this town. At first I felt sorry for them. It broke my heart to see them with nothing to think about but bridge, gossip, and gadflying from luncheon to luncheon. Boredom’s velvet claw had already finished off several of them who’d been interned in mainland sanatoriums for “mysterious health problems,” when I began to preach, from my modest workshop, the doctrine of “salvation through style.” Style heals all, cures all, restores all. Its followers are legion, as can be seen by the hosts of angels in lavishly billowing robes that mill under our cathedral’s frescoed dome.

Thanks to Lorenzo’s generosity, I subscribed to all the latest fashion magazines, which were mailed to me directly from Paris, London, and New York. I began to write about the importance of line and color to a successful business, and not only for advertisement, but for the spiritual well-being of the modern entrepreneur. I began to publish a weekly column of fashion advice in our local gazette, which kept my clientele pegged to the latest fashion trends. Whether the “in” color of the season was obituary orchid or asthma green, whether in springtime the bodice was to be quilted or curled like a cabbage leaf, whether buttons were to be made of tortoise shell or mother-of-pearl, it was all a matter of dogma to them, an article of faith. My shop turned into a beehive of activity, with the town’s most well-to-do ladies constantly coming and going from my door, consulting me about their latest ensembles.

The success of my store soon made us rich. I felt immensely grateful to Lorenzo, who had made it all possible by selling the plantation and lending me the extra bit of money to expand my workshop. Thanks to him, today I’m a free woman; I don’t have to grovel or be polite to anyone. I’m sick of all the bowing and scraping before these good-for-nothing housewives, who must be constantly flattered to feel at peace. Let the mayor’s wife lift her own tail and smell her own cunt for a while. I much prefer to read this vile story rather than speak to her, rather than tell her “how nicely you’ve got yourself up today, my dear, with your witch’s shroud, your whisk-broomed shoes, and your stovepipe bag.”

Don Lorenzo sold his house and his land and moved to town with his family. The change did Rosaura good. She soon looked rosy-cheeked and made new friends, with whom she strolled in the parks and squares of the town. For the first time in her life she lost interest in her storybooks, and when her father made her his usual birthday gift a few months later, she left it half read and forgotten on the parlor table. Don Lorenzo, on the other hand, became more and more bereaved, his heart torn to pieces by the loss of his canefields.

Rosa, in her workshop, took on several seamstresses to help her out and now had more customers than ever before. Her shop took up the whole first floor of the house, and her clientele became more exclusive. She no longer had to cope with the infernal din of the chicken coop and the pigpen, which in the old days had adjoined her workshop and cheapened its atmosphere, making elegant conversation impossible. As these ladies, however, took forever to pay their bills, and Rosa couldn’t resist keeping a number of the lavish couturier models for herself, the business went deeper and deeper into debt.

It was around that time that she began to nag Lorenzo constantly about his will. “If you were to pass away today, I’d have to work till I was old and gray just to pay off our business debts,” she told him one night with tears in her eyes, before putting out the light on their bedside table. “Even if you sold half your estate, we couldn’t even begin to pay them.” And when she saw that he remained silent, his gray head slumped on his chest, and refused to disinherit his daughter for her sake, she began to heap insults on Rosaura, accusing her of not earning her keep and of living in a storybook world, while she had to sew her fingers to the bone in order to feed them all. Then, before turning her back to put out the light, she told him that, because he obviously loved his daughter more than anyone else in the world, she had no choice but to leave him.

I feel curiously numb, indifferent to what I’m reading. A sudden chill hangs in the air; I’ve begun to shiver and I feel a bit dizzy. It’s as though this wake will never end; they’ll never come to take away the coffin so the gossipmongers can finally go home. Compared to my clients’ sneers, the innuendos of this strange tale barely made me flinch; they bounce off me like harmless needles. After all, I’ve a clear conscience. I was a good wife to Lorenzo and a good mother to Rosaura. That’s the only thing that matters. It’s true I insisted on our moving to town, and it did us a lot of good. It’s true I insisted he make me the sole executrix of his estate, but that was because I felt I was better fit to administer it than Rosaura while she’s still a minor, because she lives with her head in the clouds. But I never threatened to leave him, that’s a treacherous lie. The family finances were going from bad to worse and each day we were closer to bankruptcy, but Lorenzo didn’t seem to care. He’d always been capricious and whimsical, and he picked precisely that difficult time in our lives to sit down and write a book about the patriots of our island’s independence struggle.

From morning till night he’d go on scribbling page after page about our lost identity, tragically maimed by the “invasion” of 1898, when the truth was that our islanders welcomed the Marines with open arms. It’s true that, as Lorenzo wrote in his book, for almost a hundred years we’ve lived on the verge of civil war, but the only ones who want independence on this island are the romantic and the rich; the ruined landowners who still dream of the past as of a paradise lost; the frustrated, small-town writers; the bitter politicians with a thirst for power and monumental ambitions. The poor of this island have always been for commonwealth or statehood, because they’d rather be dead than squashed once again under the patent leather boot of the bourgeoisie. Each country knows which leg it limps on, and our people know that the rich of this land have always been a plague of vultures. And today they’re still doing it; those families are still trying to scalp the land, calling themselves pro-American and friends of the Yankees to keep their goodwill, when deep down they wish they’d leave, so they would graze once again on the poor man’s empty guts.

On Rosaura’s next birthday, Don Lorenzo gave his daughter the usual book of stories. Rosaura, for her part, decided to cook her father’s favorite guava compote for him, following one of her mother’s old recipes. As she stirred the bubbling, bloodlike syrup on the stove, the compote’s aroma gradually filled the house. At that moment Rosaura felt so happy, she thought she saw her mother waft in and out of the window several times, on a guava-colored cloud. That evening, Don Lorenzo was in a cheerful mood as he sat down to dinner. He ate with more relish than usual, and after dinner he gave Rosaura her book of short stories, with her initials elegantly monogrammed in gold, and bound in gleaming doe-heart’s skin. Ignoring his wife’s furrowed brow, he browsed with his daughter through the exquisite volume, whose thick gold-leaf edges and elegant bindings shone brightly on the lace tablecloth. Sitting stiffly, Rosa looked on in silence, an icy smile playing on her lips. She was dressed in her most luxurious opulent lace gown, as she and Don Lorenzo were to attend a formal dinner at the mayor’s mansion that evening. She was trying hard to keep her patience with Rosaura because she was convinced that being angry made even the most beautifully dressed woman look ugly.

Don Lorenzo then began to humor his wife, trying to bring her out of her dark mood. He held the book out to her, so she might also enjoy its lavish illustrations of kings and queens, all sumptuously dressed in brocade robes. “They could very well inspire some of your fashionable designs for the incoming season, my dear. Although it would probably take a few more bolts of silk to cover your fullness than it took to cover theirs, I wouldn’t mind footing the bill because you’re a lovable, squeezable woman, and not a stuck-up, storybook doll,” he teased her, as he covertly pinched her behind.

Poor Lorenzo, you truly did love me. You had a wonderful sense of humor, and your jokes always made me laugh until my eyes teared. Unyielding and distant, Rosa found the joke in poor taste and showed no interest at all in the book’s illustrations. When father and daughter were finally done admiring them, Rosaura got up from her place and went to the kitchen to fetch the guava compote, which had been spreading its delightful perfume through the house all day. As she approached the table, however, she tripped and dropped the silver serving dish, spattering her stepmother’s skirt.

I knew something had been bothering me for a while, and now I finally know what it is. The guava compote incident took place years ago, when we still lived in the country and Rosaura was almost a child. The small-town writer is lying again; he’s shamelessly and knowingly altered the order of events. He gives the impression the scene he’s retelling took place recently, that it actually took place only three months ago, but it’s been almost six years since Lorenzo sold the farm. Anyone would think Rosaura was still a girl, when in fact she’s a grown woman. She takes after her mother more and more; she fiddles away her time daydreaming, refuses to make herself useful, and lives off the honest sweat of those of us who work.

I remember the guava compote incident clearly. We were on our way to a Rosario Ferre cocktail party at the mayor's house because he'd finally made you an offer on the sale of the hacienda, which you had nostalgically named “The Sundowns,” and the people of the town had rebaptized “Curly Cunt Downs, ” in revenge for your aristocratic airs. At first you were offended and turned him down, but when the mayor suggested he would restore the house as a historic landmark, where the mementos of the sugar-cane-growing aristocracy would be preserved for future generations, you promised to think about it. The decision finally came when I managed to persuade you, after hours of endless arguments under our bed’s threadbare canopy, that we couldn’t go on living in that huge house, with no electricity, no hot water, and no adequate toilet facilities; and where one had to move one’s bowels on an antique French Provincial latrine, which had been a gift to your grandfather from King Alphonse XII. That’s why I was wearing that awful dress the day of Rosaura’s petty tantrum. I had managed to cut it from our brocade living-room curtains, just as Vivien Leigh had done in Gone With the Wind, and its gaudy frills and garish flounces were admittedly in the worst of taste. But I knew that was the only way to impress the mayor’s high-flown wife and cater to her boorish, aristocratic longings. The mayor finally bought the house, with all the family antiques and objets d’art, but not to turn it into a museum, as you had so innocently believed, but to enjoy it himself as his opulent country house.

Rosa stood up horrified and stared at the blood-colored streaks of syrup that trickled slowly down her skirt, until they reached the silk embossed buckles of her shoes. She was trembling with rage, and at first couldn’t get a single word out. When her soul finally came back to her body, she began calling Rosaura names, accusing her shrilly of living in a storybook world, while she, Rosa, worked her fingers to the bone in order to keep them all fed. Those damned books were to blame for the girl’s shiftlessness, and as they were also undeniable proof of Don Lorenzo’s preference for Rosaura, and of the fact that he held his daughter in higher esteem than his wife, she had no choice but to leave him. Unless, of course, Rosaura agreed to get rid of all her books, which should immediately be collected in a heap in the backyard, where they would be set on fire.

Maybe it’s the smoking candles, maybe it’s the heavy scent of all those myrtles Rosaura heaped on the coffin, but I’m feeling dizzier. I can’t stop my hands from trembling and my palms are moist with sweat. The story has begun to fester in some remote corner of my mind, poisoning me with its dregs of resentment. As soon as she ended her speech, Rosa went deathly pale and fell forward to the floor in a heap. Terrified at his wife’s fainting spell, Don Lorenzo knelt down beside her and begged her in a faltering voice not to leave him. He promised he’d do everything she’d asked for, if only she’d stay and forgive him. Pacified by his promises, Rosa opened her eyes and smiled at her husband. As a token of goodwill at their reconciliation, she allowed Rosaura to keep her books and promised she wouldn’t burn them.

That night Rosaura hid her birthday gift under her pillow and wept herself to sleep. She had an unusual dream. She dreamt that one of the tales in her book had been cursed with a mysterious power that would instantly destroy its first reader. The author had gone to great lengths to leave a sign, a definite clue in the story which would serve as a warning, but try as she might in her dream, Rosaura couldn’t bring herself to remember what that sign had been. When she finally woke up she was in a cold sweat, but she was still in the dark as to whether the story worked its evil through the ear, the tongue, or the skin.

Don Lorenzo died peacefully in his bed a few months later, comforted by the cares and prayers of his loving wife and daughter. His body had been solemnly laid out in the parlor for all to see, bedecked with wreaths and surrounded by smoking candles, when Rosa came into the room, carrying in her hand a book elegantly bound in red and gold leather, Don Lorenzo’s last gift to Rosaura. Friends and relatives all stopped talking when they saw her walk in. She nodded a distant hello to the mayor’s wife and went to sit by herself in a corner of the room, as though in need of some peace and quiet to comfort her in her sadness. She opened the book at random and began to turn the pages slowly, pretending she was reading but really admiring the illustrations of the fashionably dressed ladies and queens. As she leafed through the pages, she couldn’t help thinking that now that she was a w oman of means, she could well afford one of those lavish robes for herself. Suddenly, she came to a story that caught her eye. Unlike the others, it had no drawings, and it had been printed in a thick, guava-colored ink she’d never seen before. The first sentence took her mildly by surprise, because the heroine’s name was the same as her stepdaughter’s. Her curiosity kindled, she read on quickly, moistening the pages with her index finger because the guava-colored ink made them stick to each other annoyingly. She went from wonder to amazement and from amazement to horror, but in spite of her growing panic, she couldn’t make herself stop reading. The story began . . . “Rosaura lived in a house of many balconies, shadowed by a dense overgrowth of crimson bougainvillea vines . . . ,” and how the story ended, Rosa never knew.