The Last Resort Read Free Page A

gruesome stories never start off that way. But he relented and dutifully steered his gaze downstairs. All he saw was what looked like a married couple with a considerable age difference between them, sitting at a table and eating in silence.
    “Who are they?”
    “Darling, I thought that in your spiritual withdrawal from the world you spent all your time devouring gossip magazines.”
    “I have never seen those two in my life. Though I sense they are a married couple despite the age difference. Am I right?”
    “Yes, a marriage maintained through eight years of mutual boredom. Do you want to hear the story or don’t you?” she asked, signaling vaguely for the waiter to remove the salad she had barely touched. “I have never met anyone more immune to high-society gossip than you, Rafamolinet.”
    Molinet didn’t bother to explain that he was an old dog. He wasn’t insensitive to gossip, far from it—he simply did not trust clever conversationalists and their theatrical attempts to liven up otherwise boring conversations.
Coffee time chitchat,
he thought, and his face indicated that yes, he was familiar with her little trick—exaggeration can sometimes be very effective.
    “So what do you have to say?”
    Molinet shrugged his shoulders without saying anything. The waiter had just arrived with the second course, a cheese soufflé that was listed as an appetizer on the menu and which he had long since learned to request as a main course, since it was quite filling and inexpensive, to boot. “The story of a murderess,” Fernanda had said in that very conspiratorial tone a person uses just before tearing someone to shreds. He looked downstairs. The woman seemed attractive enough to interest him for another ten minutes, at least. Maybe even half an hour, he conceded. She has something of a contradiction about her. She seems like such a good girl.
    Molinet paused for another moment to study the husband and then he turned his gaze back to the woman before admitting surrender.
What a shame I have no idea who these people are,
he said to himself.
No matter how intriguing it may be, a story is never quite so fascinating when the protagonists are two illustrious people you don’t know.
Distracted, he took a little sip of the sherry that an imprudent waiter had not seen fit to remove from the table. Then he added, to himself again,
I do hope that Fernanda is not one of those insufferable types who take an eternity to tell a completely idiotic story.
    Terrible Things That Happen Only to Other People
    Fernanda’s first version of the story of Jaime Valdés’s deathwas told amid a fit of giggles, combined with a confusing tale about two friends and her description of a man who listened to Silvio Rodríguez songs, as well as two or three additional anecdotes that Molinet could make neither head nor tail of. It was now painfully clear that his niece was not someone who could speak and eat at the same time. And to make matters worse, as she talked on and on, the little arabesques she drew in the sauce of her scorned fish grew more emphatic. Once she had laid out the basics, she sat up straight in her chair, waiting for some kind of a response.
    “Fernanda darling, I haven’t understood a single word of what you just said.”
    She leaned in toward her uncle once more, her fork pointing toward her sauce, threatening to begin a new set of designs, but he stopped her with a halting hand gesture.
    Holding out his fingers to reveal a set of fingernails that were not quite as well tended as the rest of his person, he began to enumerate with his pinky: “First of all, there is no way she can possibly hear you. Second, from what I can see, there is nobody in the vicinity who might interrupt us, and third, neither my ears nor my sensibilities will allow . . .
des chuchoteries,
my darling. So, please, start from the top and tell me that . . . terrible story with the same level of detail you use when you tell me about our dearly departed