The Last Resort Read Online Free PDF Page B

that day, it was because he always suffered in the springtime—allergies, sneezing fits, and so on. Now comes the interesting part.”
    “Finally,” said Molinet with a sigh of relief.
    “Well, as it happened, the poor man, may he rest in peace, suffered from asthma. Now, being asthmatic is really the most distinguished kind of ailment.” She let out a sigh as she said this, as if she too were a chronic sufferer. “Whenever spring rolls around, people who have asthma become incredibly languid, and they talk in a kind of gaspy, a very, very . . . oh, how would I put it? A very Don Corleone way, kind of a cross between threatening and sexy. Apparently, given how repulsive pollution is these days, the air appears to be full of new fumes, terribly dangerous ones—just look at poor Valdés—Russian fumes, Rafamolinet, extremely dangerous stuff.”
    “I’ve never heard of anything so preposterous.”
    “Don’t you read the newspapers?”
    “Is that why you take all those multicolored pills, dear?”
    “Don’t be so old-fashioned, Rafamolinet—melatonin and antioxidants and selenium pills are for staying young and fit, they have nothing to do with Russian fumes. Russian fumes only affect asthmatics, and their effect is so severe that asthmatics are advised to take very special precautions with regard to changes in temperature and climate, and they are supposed to carry around a special, rather bulky inhaler at all times, to use in the event they begin to feel sick. Nobody does it, of course, especially not in a situation like the one our friend found himself in. Because, I mean, can you possibly imagine a romantic rendezvous with an inhaler, Rafamolinet?”
    “What do you mean romantic? Romantic with whom?”
    “With Isabella, who else?”
    “This story makes absolutely no sense to me. Just now you said that the dead man’s wife wasn’t able to go to the country that night but that Isabella’s husband was most definitely there with them.”
    “A husband of a certain age, who falls asleep on the couch in the middle of a conversation and who, that night, went straight to bed upon arrival.”
    “Ah, I see, I see. Now we seem to be getting somewhere. So there was a romantic tryst between Isabella and Valdés.”
    “May he rest in peace.”
    “Yes, may he rest in peace. You said that before.”
    “And I will say it again. Maybe it sounds provincial to you, you don’t have to remind me, but there’s no need to tempt the spirits. It is a very important precaution, according to my Tarot card reader, especially when one is preparing to discuss certain things about certain dead people.”
    “Fernanda, for the love of God . . .”
    “All right, all right, I’m finishing up. The point is, Steine goes to bed, quiet as can be, at about eleven, eleven-thirty. Valdés and Isabella claim they are not tired and stay on in the living room for a nightcap. Risky, you might say, to take advantage of such a dangerous opportunity for a little roll in the hay or, to put it bluntly, a fuck. It would have been much easier, and much more comfortable, to wait a day or two and go to a hotel together—how far could they go with this, after all? But their relationship, if you look at it carefully, was in the very early stages. They were in that very romantic phase in which both of them must have been feeling,
Ooh! Anything is possible. Let’s use whatever excuse we can come up with to be alone.
And so they say to each other: ‘Shall we stay here a bit, have another drink?’ ‘Of course, why not? I’m going to put on an album you are going to love. Do you know Silvio Rodríguez?’ ‘Silvio Rodriguez? No, no—who is he? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything of his . . .’ A blatant lie, of course, but that doesn’t matter—any old excuse will do at the dawn of a new relationship, so that the two bodies can inch closer and closer together, first the heads, all very careful, let’s just huddle together to look at the