The Last Resort Read Free

into an elderly-looking elf.
    Fernanda, however, had not quite begun to pay that steep price for her seemingly eternal youth. Also, she seemed to have a predisposition for seeing everything in life as a kind of amusing joke—she had a dispassionate way of speaking and wasn’t afraid to laugh at herself from time to time. In this manner she regaled her uncle with the details of her life, in the very best manner of the relative one sees on very few occasions.
    By the time Fernanda decided it was time to get her uncle up-to-date on her present life, Molinet was already thinking about other topics—the trip he was taking the following day, for example. As such, he only registered bits and pieces of his niece’s storytelling. He vaguely heard something about Fernanda’s children, three big boys of various ages, none of which he could remember, and about how they took lots and lots of classes.
    “You can’t even imagine all the classes: piano, judo, tennis, horseback riding, karate, and God only knows how expensive it all is. It’s a nightmare, I’m telling you . . .” From there, his niece then found it necessary to go into a detail about the Ideal Home Exhibition that had brought her to London with the intention of purchasing some kitchen utensils for the catering outfit she ran, something called Paprika and Dill—or was it Cayenne and Dill? In any event, all of a sudden, she leaned in toward her uncle to tell him something in a most conspiratorial tone of voice:
    “Listen, Rafamolinet—” That was how she addressed him, saying first and last name all together in one long tongue twister. “Listen: how would you like to hear the story of a murderess?”
    For a moment, he felt a shiver run up his spine, but he quickly shrugged it off, certain that he knew what the question was leading up to. He squinted his eyes and then patted his pockets for his glasses. Of course, the explanation was right in front of him: Surely she was referring to one of the actors’ photographs on the wall.
What a melodramatic way of changing the conversation,
Molinet thought, with a touch of displeasure. Maybe he was a bit behind the times when it came to social habits, this banal chitchat used for passing the time, but from his point of view, their conversation had not sunk so low that they had to turn to the hopelessly unimaginative topic of the star photos lining the restaurant walls.
    “Darling, really, I would much rather you tell me more about your children,” he was about to reply as a way of redirecting the conversation when he realized that Fernanda’s eyes were not at all glued to the lineup of celebrity photographs. Gazing just a bit to the left of him, peering in between the pillars along the staircase, Fernanda seemed to be spying on someone downstairs in the lower-level dining room.
    “Did you hear what I said, Rafamolinet?” she repeated. Molinet then assumed that she always chirped first and last name like that, all together in a powerful phonetic blast, because she went on to pronounce another name in the very same manner.
    “Look at her right there, Isabellalaínez,” she said. Then, leaning back to allow her uncle to see who she was talking about, she flicked her chin to indicate some indeterminate location in the downstairs dining room.
    “If you lean a bit to the right, you’ll see her. No, no—down there, silly, in the dining room for the nobodies, in Siberia. Boy would she be furious if she knew that I came here and saw where they sat her.”
    Molinet looked, entirely skeptical, toward the spot Fernanda was pointing at. His angle of vision wasn’t very good; it was awful, as a matter of fact. The plant that swished against the nape of his neck from time to time covered a fair amount of the space between the pillars along the staircase, and he found it annoying to exert such an effort to follow his niece’s instructions, despite the information she had disclosed. A murderess. Come now, he thought, truly