The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home Read online

  And our estate was quite rich. The land had belonged to my mother’s family, wealthy beneficiaries who luxuriated in fine arts and foods, the fawning attention that comes from kind donations to the poor, and a carefree life not beholden to any business or industry. Wealth is either a blight upon the soul or a balm. My mother’s family saw money as a privilege, allowing them to read poetry and explore intellectual gentility, which is why they approved of her marriage to my father, a working man with an average education. Few rich families of that time would have allowed their daughter to marry into a family without wealth, for fear that a dowry would be taken and the young bride and her family ignored.

  As the son of a merchant, my father spent much of his youth traveling to farms to purchase livestock and produce to then sell at larger markets in the city. He met my mother one summer while stocking figs in a market not far from the estate. A quick errand into town to buy food turned into a long afternoon of discussion about the sweetest figs in late June. “You can tell the ripest by the smell,” he told her, gently holding the green bulb to her nose, as she inhaled the aromas of golden syrup and earth. The long afternoon turned to weeks of not-so-accidental meetings between the two, and that became a courtship. The family trusted him so thoroughly, and my mother loved him so fully, that no question of the integrity of their marriage ever arose. They were married on the grounds of this estate, which was then handed over to the new couple by my mother’s parents. My father loved this home. Why would he not? He had developed a nose for the finest produce, and here he could savor every rich grape, every spring onion, every plump orange.

  Beside the citrus groves, there was the main house, a vast thing, inhabited now by only my father and me. There were servants’ wings and towers that we left sealed to gather dust. Eventually, we reduced our presence to one small wing of the house, sleeping in adjacent bedrooms, using what was once a small kitchenette for the stable workers as our place for both cooking and eating. My father carried the habits of the small merchant family he’d grown up in and didn’t know what to do with luxury on the scale it was being offered. Still, the lands were maintained by a variety of servants who came regularly, and the area of our house that we lived in was also well kept, and I did eventually begin to wonder, as the years went on, how my father was able to pay for the upkeep of such a large and lush estate when he did not seem to have any job in particular, having given up his merchant travels after I was born.

  This was all so long ago. To parse through my earliest years is difficult. I am an old woman, perhaps the oldest there has ever been. A mind was never meant to catalogue this much. A life was never meant to be this long. But I do retain some memories of my earliest and greatest period of joy, when I lived in ignorance of what the world could do to a person.

  I am three years old. This is my earliest memory. I am running through the orange groves. I am chasing my father, or he is chasing me. It is a radiant and clear day. I decide to hide. I wiggle my way up into one of the trees. I wedge myself against the trunk a few feet up into the leaves. I see my father looking for me. “Where is my daughter?” he says, in exaggerated confusion. “Where is her beautiful face? I must see that face again. Where could it be?” Soon I allow myself to fall onto the soft dirt, where my father scoops me up and both of us are laughing. Was my face actually beautiful? My father would say so either way.

  Another moment. I don’t know how old I am. Probably five or so. We are in our little kitchen in our big house, and my father is cooking. I don’t remember what he is cooking, I only remember the smell, which is meaty and green, the smell of vegetables cooking in fat. He asks me to cut the bread for our dinner, and he shows me how, supervising my use of the knife, but allowing me to do it myself. “There are only two of us, little one,” he says. “Both of us need to be able to take care of the other.” He shows me where I should cut, but it is I who carefully lowers the knife through the hard crust. The smells of onions and herbs and lamb fill this memory, and anchors it forever in my mind.

  One more memory of my earliest years is not like the others. I am six years old. Again I am in the orange groves, but this time on my own. My father is away for the afternoon on business, as happened every week or so, and I am left to play around the estate. I knew every disused shed, every good swimming spot, and each climbable tree in the groves, where I could hide and secretly watch the groundskeepers, or the ships in the harbor, or even the deer. I am playing in one of these hidden places and I see a shape moving forward in an odd, stop and start way across a line of trees. I assume it was one of the gardeners and called for them. No one answers. I am scared but determined to be able to tell my father how brave I had been, and so I run after the figure. Soon I reach the end of the line of trees and break out into the broad grass leading down to the shore. And there by the shore is a man lurching in a strange, stiff manner. He does not turn to look back at me, only shambles to the edge of the rock and then tips forward into the water. I run down to look. Where he had fallen, the water is clear and shallow, but there is no sign of the man. I decide I must have been mistaken and do not tell anyone what I have seen.

  2

  My father did not wish me to know what he did for a living, and if he had had his way, I would likely still not know. But few of us ever get our way in this world. We accommodate what life gives us and do our best to retain some sense of ourselves.

  Father had a business partner, a man named Edmond. Edmond and my father grew up together, my father nearly ten years older. My father had looked after the younger Edmond, teaching him to fish and row a boat, teaching the young boy to be in nature, to find work that used the whole of his body, to take in the world through all five senses. But Edmond took a liking to math. He was a thinking man, enjoying calculations and finance. Life was Edmond’s puzzle to solve. He was much smarter than most children, and despite their differences, my father had hired a twelve-year-old Edmond to help with bookkeeping and inventory at my father’s warehouse, and that began a partnership that would last throughout my father’s life.

  Edmond would frequently join us for dinner, where he would pull faces that made me laugh, and ask me questions about what new parts of the estate I had discovered that day. I enjoyed his visits immensely, and it always made me angry when my father would tell me I needed to go to bed so that he and Edmond could have conversations for adults. At six, of course, I thought I was as adult as anyone could be, and it seemed unfair that I would be left out of these discussions as though I were a child. I would stand at my bedroom door, listening through the crack and trying to make out even a single word. But my father was aware of such tricks, and always moved the conversation to the far side of the kitchen, where even the sharp hearing of the young would be unable to eavesdrop over the crackle of the fire. All I could hear was the occasional roar of laughter from Edmond, always an enthusiastic man.

  Despite the annoyance of secrecy, I enjoyed Edmond’s visits, and in many ways he became a second father to me. He traveled much for work and was always bringing me little gifts and souvenirs. A painted seashell from France. A tiny bag of cinnamon from Morocco. A figurine of a horse from Svitz. He seemed to always be going to a new country, and he always had some trinket of that country for me. They decorated a shelf in my bedroom, and since I never left the estate, they formed a tactile map of the world. This is what Spain sounds like. This is what Franchia feels like.

  Once in my youngest years I did stumble upon my father in the midst of his work. I woke up one evening from a dream in which my mother was alive, only she wasn’t my mother, but someone very much like my mother. She had no face and was hiding somewhere in my house and I couldn’t find her, even as I saw her moving in the corner of my eye. I was crying as I woke, the terror of an unknowable entity, an unseeable face, still causing me to pant. I ran to my father’s room, but he wasn’t there. I called for him, and there was no answer. Then I looked out the window and saw lamps down at the water. Frightened, but determined to find my father, I p
ulled on a shawl and ran barefoot down through the grass to the water. There I saw my father, and Edmond, and a third man with a rough, scarred cheek and disheveled clothes. They were pulling a rowboat full of canvas bundles onto the shore. The sharp oil smell of the lamps hit me from several meters away. The man with the scarred cheek saw me, and shouted an alarm, but my father waved him quiet. “There’s been a shipwreck, little one,” he said to me. “Fortunately, we were able to help with the rescue. Go back to bed. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”

  In the morning, he refused to provide any details. Later I remembered that Edmond had not visited us in months. What had he been doing at the estate so late at night, when this shipwreck happened?

  There is one other person left to mention from my childhood. I don’t remember when it was that I met Albert, only that from my earliest years he was there. He was four days older than me, and so we grew in unison. When I explored the grounds, often Albert was with me. We would play hide and seek in the orange groves. We would swim together in the cove, daring each other to hold our breath longer, to dive farther, to grab stones at the bottom of the deepest point of the cove. He was a better swimmer than me by far. Despite my years with the water, my mother’s death caused me to associate the sea with danger, and so I was not as fearless as Albert when it came to these challenges. Once he jumped from a cliff at least ten meters high, missing the rocks by a few body lengths. It wasn’t the water that frightened me. It was the fall. I tried to imagine falling that far, then hitting the water and continuing to fall, deep below, until I settled on the soft sand of the bottom. When Albert dared me to follow him, I demurred, pretending that I had to get home for dinner. I could see in his eyes that he saw through my excuse, but even as young as we were, he did not take the opportunity to mock me, instead pretending to believe me.

  Other children from other estates came and went, but Albert was always there. My father, noticing our friendship, would sometimes invite him for dinner, but Albert always had to return to his house. I would ask him about which estate he belonged in, and he would point vaguely, in a different direction each time. It became clear he did not want me to visit his home. I sensed he was ashamed of his family, perhaps because they were one of the brutal landlord families always terrorizing the peasants in the nearby valleys, or because he belonged to a strictly religious family that did not like to fraternize with outsiders. Like my timidity with the water, Albert’s evasiveness about his home became a thing we did not speak about, because there were always so much delight to do and see instead.

  3

  Although our estate was difficult to spy from the sea, there were places on nearby cliffs, easily accessible from our home, from which you could watch the passing ship traffic. And this I did often, enjoying identifying which of the ships belonged to governments, and which were merchant ships, and which were the pleasure yachts of royalty and the rich, and which the schooners of pirates and bandits that flew no colors, moving stolen cargo and attacking pleasure yachts that had not shelled out sufficiently for mercenaries and bodyguards. Soon, through the boredom and patience of a child, I had a better grasp on the routes of the various factions than the most well-informed spies of kings and emperors.

  By age seven, I knew most of the ships in the region by name. If they passed close enough to our cliffs, I might even know the crew members by prominent physical traits. Here is the Bee Sting from Portugal, and the navigator has bushy red hair and a limp. Here is the Lucky Bell, a ship of bandits from right up the coast, their leader missing his left hand. And so it was a great surprise to me when I saw a ship that I did not recognize. The idea of seeing a vessel for which I had no information was astonishing to me. With the serene certainty of a child, I knew all there was to be known about the world.

  This new ship was smaller, like the ships of the bandits, but it flew a flag. The flag was black and had an insignia of a labyrinth on it. There was no crew visible, but the deck was stacked high with crates. It passed slowly, and quite close to the cliffs, but I never saw any movement on it. Down the coast, one of the regular bandit ships that often passed our home swerved sharply to avoid passing close to the ship with the sign of a labyrinth.

  Of course I asked my father about this ship, and he frowned and kneeled in front of me.

  “The organization that carries the sign of the labyrinth is an ancient and secret one, and you must never be seen by them. If you spot a ship with the flag of a labyrinth, I want you to run back home and stay inside until it passes. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t, but I also understood that I shouldn’t ask any more questions. And so I kept quiet when I saw more and more of these strange ships. Crew were rarely ever on deck, and if they were they wore hoods and worked with their heads bowed. Always the crates piled high on their decks and lashed down with thick rope. And always a flag with the sign of the labyrinth. But I also refused to run away. I would stay hidden, and watch them pass until they were lost to the horizon or to a turn in the shore.

  When I reached the age of eight, my father started to depart on regular business trips. “It would have been good to do this sooner,” he said, “but I didn’t want to leave you alone when you were so young. Now that you are a little older, I will occasionally need to go attend to affairs. I will return soon, do not worry.”

  He hired a series of caretakers for me during his trips, none of whom lasted long. My father assured me that this wasn’t due to any sort of difficulty with caring for me, only that the young workforce in our rural region tended to immigrate to the great capitals of Europe seeking better jobs, and so one was always looking for good help. It was only much later it would occur to me that my father did not want any one person to know what the schedule of his trips were, and so was having the caretakers regularly replaced.

  But I never used my father’s absences as an excuse to cause real trouble. I took the responsibility he put on me seriously, and I wanted to prove, more to myself than to him, that I deserved his trust. And so while I would sometimes sneak out of bed after being put there far too early by some exhausted caretaker or the other, I would only use those hours snatched from sleep as an opportunity to read, or to wander the estate in the nighttime, when all familiar landmarks turned to indistinct shadow, or often I would just sit precariously on my windowsill, feet dangling over the lengthy drop, smelling the nearby sea. I had never in my life been far enough from the sea that I couldn’t smell it, at least as a faint undercurrent under the other smells that filled my life.

  On one of my father’s trips, I snuck out in the morning to meet with Albert. We played hide and seek, and then ate a simple lunch of fruit and cheese on a rock by the cove, our toes dangling into the water.

  “There are rumors about your father,” he said.

  “No there aren’t.” I glared at him. “What kind?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged, and stuffed a large piece of cheese into his mouth.

  “Tell me.”

  “People say your father is some kind of spy for a king, or even an agent of the devil, and his journeys are crime journeys.” Albert nodded solemnly. “For crimes.”

  I shoved him into the water. He came up sputtering and I kicked water in his face.

  “That’s stupid. Don’t say stupid things like that to me ever again.” I ate the rest of the cheese all in a few bites, just to punish him, although later this would be more of a punishment on me.

  Despite my dismissal, what Albert said stayed with me. What did my father do? How did we afford this estate? And why was he never specific about where he was going on these business trips of his?

  I started to pay more attention to his comings and goings. I noticed that there was a great variability in how he packed. On some trips, he brought a full trunk, which he would struggle to load into a carriage before leaving. But on the other trips, he packed lightly and haphazardly, throwing only a few necessities into a sack and then taking off on a horse. The care with which he packed did not cor
relate at all with the length of his business trips.

  The mystery was deepened by an even stranger discovery. One night, against the repeated and increasingly desperate commands of my current caretaker, I was sitting awake in my windowsill. Despite my disobedience, my body did very much want to comply with the command to sleep, and so I was gently nodding off, leaning against the sturdy stone frame, when I heard a voice out in the garden. Hidden as we were, we never had to contend with thieves, but ours was a large estate and so theft was always a possibility. Perhaps our time had finally come, and my father was not here to help. As I sprang up, quite awake now, I realized, to my absolute confusion, that I recognized the voice. It was the voice of my father. He was in the garden, two days into a weeklong business trip.

  My first impulse was to run out and joyously greet him, assuming that he had returned earlier than expected. But something about the situation made me cautious. Instead I slipped out of my room, past my caretaker who had fallen asleep while reading at the table in the kitchen, and out the front door. I moved as quietly as I could through the fields and gardens, ducking behind hedges and trees. And there my father was, walking with a group of men down to the water. A rowboat waited on shore, and in the deeper water of the cove one of the small ships that bore no flag, one I recognized as belonging to bandits. My father was chatting with the men from the ship, and he even affectionately slapped the back of one. I had no idea what to make of this, but in my horror started to realize that perhaps Albert had been right. Perhaps my father was going on crime trips. To do crime.