What We Become

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Do you still dance tangos, Max?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Even the Old School Tango? I don’t suppose you’ve lost your touch.”

  He looked away, uncomfortable.

  “Things aren’t the way they used to be.”

  “You mean you no longer need to dance for money?”

  He chose not to reply. He was thinking of her swaying in his arms that first time in the ballroom on the Cap Polonio. The sun illuminating her slender body in the room at the boardinghouse on Almirante Brown. Her mouth and her greedy, searching tongue when she thrust the tango dancer aside at the dive in Buenos Aires. Her husband’s dazed expression, eyes bleary with drink and drugs, his salacious laughter as they copulated in front of him, there and later on in the hotel room, where they met in a hungry embrace, obscene in their nakedness and utter abandon. He was thinking, too, of the countless times he had remembered that scene over the nine years that had gone by, whenever an orchestra struck up the first bars of the melody composed by Armando de Troeye, or he heard it playing on a radio or phonograph. That tango (the last time he had danced to it was five weeks before, at the Carlton in Cannes with the daughter of a German steel manufacturer) had followed Max halfway around the world, and it always gave him a feeling of emptiness, absence, or loss, an intense, physical yearning for Mecha Inzunza’s body. Her luminous eyes, open wide, staring at him from close up, frozen with pleasure. Her delicious flesh, always warm and moist in his memory, which he recalled so vividly, and which was close to him once more—still so unbelievably, so strangely close.

  “Tell me about your life,” she said.

  “Which part?”

  “This one.” She made a gesture that seemed to embrace him all. “The part you’ve been cultivating all these years.”

  Max began to talk, cautiously, discreetly, and without going into detail. Skillfully mixing fact and fiction, weaving together amusing anecdotes and interesting situations that obscured the checkered parts of his life. With that natural ease he had, adapting his genuine past to that of the person he was pretending to be at that moment: a wealthy businessman, socialite, habitué of trains, transatlantic liners, and luxury hotels in Europe and South America, perfected over time and from consorting with distinguished or wealthy people. He spoke without knowing whether she believed him or not, but in any case did his best to avoid any reference to the clandestine nature of his true activities, or their consequences: to the brief spell in a Havana jail, which ended happily in his release, or his minor brush with the law in Kraków following the suicide of a wealthy Polish furrier’s sister, or the shot that missed its target in the doorway of a gambling den in Berlin, involving a bungled sting during an illegal card game. Nor did he mention the money he had made and spent with identical ease during those years, or the emergency funds he kept in Monte Carlo, or his long, invaluable association with the safebreaker Enrico Fossataro. Nor, of course, did he mention the pair of professional swindlers, a husband and wife, he had encountered at the Chambre d’Amour bar in Biarritz, during the autumn of ’31. Their brief association ended when the wife (a melancholy, attractive Englishwoman named Edith Casey, who specialized in fleecing wealthy widowers) took it upon herself to strengthen her ties with Max, to the point where her husband took exception. He was a cultivated yet brutish Scotsman, who called himself McGill or McDonald, and whose more or less justified jealousy brought to an end a year of mutually lucrative activities, following an unpleasant scene in which, to the couple’s surprise (they had always considered him a peace-loving young gentleman) Max had been forced to resort to a couple of dirty tricks he had learned during his time in the Legion in North Africa. He had left McGill or McDonald or whatever his real name was laid out on the carpet of a room in the HÔtel du Golf de Deauville, with a bloody nose, while Edith Casey hurled insults at him as he fled along the corridor and vanished from their lives.

  “What about you?”

  “Oh . . . Me.”

  She had been listening to him attentively, in silence. Now she shrugged in response to Max’s question, smiling beneath her dark glasses.

  “High society. Isn’t that what they call it in the illustrated magazines?”

  He would have reached over to take off her sunglasses so that he could see the expression in her eyes, but he didn’t dare.

  “I never understood the way your husband . . .”

  He fell silent, but she said nothing. The dark glasses reflected Max, inquisitively. Waiting for him to finish his sentence.

  “The way he . . .” he started to say, before pausing again, ill at ease. “I don’t know. You and he.”

  “And third parties, you mean?”

  A silence. Drawn out. Cicadas were singing in the pines.

  “Buenos Aires wasn’t the first time, or the last,” Mecha finally said. “Armando had his own way of looking at life. At relationships between the sexes.”

  “A strange one, in any case.”

  A joyless laugh. Sharp. She raised her hands slightly to express surprise.

  “I never thought of you as a prude, Max. . . . Nobody would have said so in Buenos Aires.”

  She was drawing with her foot in the sand. What looked like a heart, he decided. But she finally erased it when she seemed to be tracing an arrow that pierced it.

  “It started as a provocative game. A challenge to upbringing and morality. Then it became part of all the rest.”

  She took a few paces toward the shore, amid the clumps of seaweed, until she appeared framed by the dazzling turquoise of the water.

  “It happened gradually, from the very beginning. The morning of our honeymoon, Armando contrived to have the waitress who brought our breakfast discover us naked in bed, making love. We laughed like crazy.”

  Shielding his eyes with his hand, Max strained to make out her face against the light. But all he could see was her silhouette against the shimmering bay as she continued to tell her story, in a monotonous, almost jaded voice.

  “We took a friend home once, after a dinner party. An Italian musician, terribly handsome and languorous with curly hair. ­D’Ambrosio he was called. Armando arranged things so that the Italian and I made love in front of him. He only joined in after watching closely for a long time, with a smile and a strange glint in his eye. With that special propensity he had for mathematical elegance.”

  “Did you always . . . enjoy it?”

  “Not always. Especially not at the beginning. A conventional Catholic upbringing isn’t something you forget overnight. But Armando liked to push the boundaries . . .”

  Max felt his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. The sun was sweltering and he was thirsty. And strangely uneasy, too, an almost physical malaise. He was tempted to sit down where he stood, at the risk of ruining his immaculate trousers. He wished he hadn’t left his hat behind at the villa. Yet he knew it wasn’t the sun, or the heat.

  “I was very young,” she went on. “I felt like an actress going out onstage seeking the audience’s approval, hoping people will applaud.”

  “You were in love. That explains a lot.”

  “Yes . . . I suppose I did love him in those days. A lot.”

  She had tilted her head as she said that, reflecting. Then, she glanced around, as though looking for an image or word. Possibly an explanation. Finally, she seemed to give up, and gave a resigned, ironical shrug.

  “It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t just him. I had my own dark places. I would never have gone that far, otherwise. Not just to please him. Sometimes he hit me. Or I hit him. Once, in Berlin, he made me sleep with two young waiters from a bar in Tauentzienstrasse. That night he didn’t even touch me. He would usually come to me, when the others were done, but on that occasion he just sat there smoking and watching until it was over. That was the first time I really enjoyed feeling I was being observed.”

 
; She had told the story in a neutral tone, without inflection. She could have been reading out of a pharmacist’s leaflet, thought Max. And yet she seemed interested in the effect her words had on him, he was surprised to notice. In a rather cold, clinical way. As if she were an anthropologist. The contrast with his own tumultuous emotions was as stark as all that light clashing with the dark outline of her shadow. This woman aroused jealousy in him, he realized, more alarmed than astonished. This was a strange, unfamiliar despair he had never experienced before. Of violent, unsatisfied desire. Animal resentment and rage.

  “Armando groomed me,” she was saying. “With a methodical patience that characterized him, he showed me to use my mind in sex. Its immense power. The physical side is only part of it, he used to say. The necessary, inevitable embodiment of everything else. It is a question of harmonies.”

  They came to a halt momentarily. Returning to the path between the beach and the pines, and Mecha slipped off her sandals, taking Max’s arm with complete naturalness.

  “Afterward, I would go to bed and listen to him working at the piano in his studio until dawn. And I admired him even more.”

  Max managed to detach his tongue from the roof of his mouth.

  “Do you still use your mind?”

  His voice had sounded hoarse. Dry. It had almost hurt to speak.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Your husband isn’t here.” He made a sweeping gesture that embraced the bay, Antibes, and the rest of the world. “And I don’t think he will be coming back soon. With his mathematical elegance.”

  He stared at Mecha with an aggressive wariness.

  “You want to know if I sleep with other men? Or women? When he isn’t around? Yes, I do, Max.”

  I don’t want to be here, he thought, surprising himself. Not in this light that dulls my judgment. Dries up my thoughts and my mouth.

  “Yes,” she repeated. “I do, sometimes.”

  She had paused once more, outlined against the glare of the beach. The soft sea breeze ruffled her hair across her skin, lightly bronzed by the southern French sun.

  “Just like Armando,” she said in an inscrutable voice. “Or you yourself.”

  In the lenses of her dark glasses, the coastline, the clump of pines, and the beach with the azure sea were reflected. Max watched her carefully, his eyes lingering on the curve of her shoulders and her torso beneath the striped shirt, slightly damp under the arms where she had perspired. She was even more beautiful than in Buenos Aires, he concluded, almost despondently. If that were possible. She must be thirty-two now; the perfect age when a woman becomes fully formed. Mecha Inzunza was one of those seemingly unattainable women whom men dreamed about in the bowels of ships or the trenches at a battlefront. For thousands of years, they had killed, waged war, and razed cities for women like her.

  “There’s a place near here,” she said suddenly. “Pension Semaphore . . . close to the lighthouse.”

  He looked at her, confused at first. Mecha pointed to a path on their left leading through the pine trees, past a white villa surrounded by palm trees and agaves.

  “It offers cheap lodgings for tourists. There’s a small outdoor restaurant under the shade of a magnolia tree. They rent rooms.”

  Max was a calm man. His nature and life itself had made him what he was. It was this calm that allowed him to stand firm and keep his mouth shut, motionless in front of her. Lest a clumsy word or gesture sever the tenuous thread from which everything was hanging.

  “I want to go to bed with you,” Mecha said abruptly, in response to his silence. “And I want that to happen now.”

  “Why?” he managed to speak, at last.

  “Because during the past nine years you have often been in my mind, if you get my meaning.”

  “In spite of everything?”

  “In spite of everything.” She grinned. “Pearl necklace included.”

  “Have you been there before?”

  “You ask too many questions. And they are all stupid.”

  She had raised a hand, placing her fingers on Max’s dried lips. A soft caress, filled with strange promise.

  “Of course I have,” she said after a moment. “And it has a room with a big mirror on the wall. Perfect for watching.”

  The blind was made of wooden slats. The afternoon sun seeping in cast strips of light and shade on the bed and over Mecha’s body as she slept. Lying beside her, trying not to wake her, Max turned to study her face, touched by a ray of sunlight, mouth half-open, nostrils flaring slightly as she breathed softly, and her naked breasts with their dark nipples and tiny drops of perspiration glistening between the strips of light. And the surface of her taut skin, descending toward her belly and forking at her thighs, covering her sex, from which his seed oozed silently onto the sheet with the smell of their bodies and the gentle perspiration of their prolonged embraces.

  Raising his head slightly from the pillow, Max contemplated their motionless forms in the huge mirror on the wall, with its silver backing tarnished through age and neglect, like the rest of the cheap furnishings: a chest of drawers, a bidet and washbasin, a dusty lamp and some twisted electric cables fastened to the wall with porcelain insulators, a faded travel poster proposing, rather unconvincingly (a yellow sunset and a few purple pine trees), a visit to Villefranche. One of those rooms, in short, which seemed to cater to commercial travelers, fugitives from justice, would-be suicides, or lovers. Without her sleeping beside him and the shafts of sunlight falling through the blinds, Max would have found it depressing, reminiscent of other places where he had stayed out of necessity rather than choice. And yet, from the moment they crossed the threshold, Mecha seemed delighted by the squalid room that had no running water, and the sleepy landlady who handed them the key in exchange for forty francs, without asking for their identity papers or posing any questions. The moment the door was closed, Mecha’s voice had grown hoarser, and she had started to perspire. Max was surprised when, while he was commenting on the pleasant view, which, with the window open, he said, compensated for the gloomy décor, she walked up to him, mouth half-open as if she were breathless, interrupting his deliberate observations, slipping her striped blouse over her head, to reveal her breasts, paler than the rest of her skin exposed to the sun.

  “You’re so handsome, it hurts to look at you.”

  Her upper body was completely naked, and she raised one hand, pushing his chin with her finger to turn his head so that she could see him better.

  “I’m not wearing my necklace today,” she whispered after a moment.

  “What a shame,” he parried.

  “You’re a scoundrel, Max.”

  “Yes . . . sometimes.”

  Everything happened afterward in a complex yet orderly sequence of flesh, saliva, caresses, and essential moistness. From the moment she kicked off her last piece of clothing and lay on the bed, from which he had removed the coverlet, Max realized she was already unusually aroused, ready to receive him instantly. That room in a boardinghouse, he concluded, seemed to work miracles. And yet there was no hurry, he told himself, determined to keep his cool. And so he attempted to draw out their foreplay, aware that his desire, swelling painfully in every nerve and muscle (grating his clenched teeth, gasping with suppressed desire and rage) might jeopardize everything. They couldn’t settle nine years in thirty minutes. And so he employed every ounce of self-control and experience to prolong the caresses, the collisions, the almost extreme violence she insisted on sometimes (she punched him twice while he attempted to take her), the groans of pleasure and breathless gasps in between caresses, two or twenty different ways of kissing, licking, and biting. Max had forgotten about the mirror on the wall, but she hadn’t. And finally he discovered her peering into it, head turned to the side, while he was busy with her body and her mouth, watching herself and him. Max turned his head, too, and saw himself there, enga
ging in what looked like a savage duel, back arched over her, arms tensed so that the muscles and tendons seemed about to burst as he struggled to immobilize her, and also to hold back, while she writhed with animallike ferocity, biting and hitting out at him until, all at once, eyes fixed on him in the mirror, awaiting his reaction, she yielded, clasping him at last, or anew, his flesh vibrant with pleasure, slowly abandoning herself to the age-old ritual of complete surrender. And after Max had watched himself and watched her in the mirror, he had turned once more to look at her close up, the real image just two inches from his eyes and lips, glimpsing a flicker of disdain in her honey-colored gaze and a defiant smile on her mouth that belied it all; his apparent dominance and her own submission. Then Max’s will finally deserted him, and like a vanquished gladiator he sank his face into Mecha’s neck, losing all sense of his surroundings, and slowly, intensely, defenseless at last, he spilled his seed into the dark warmth of Mecha Inzunza’s belly.

  10

  The Click of Ivory

  MAX HASN’T HAD a good night. I’ve certainly known better ones, he thought to himself in the morning as he emerged from an uneasy sleep. He was still thinking about this as he ran the Braun electric razor over his chin, contemplating his tired face in the mirror of the hotel bathroom, the bags under his eyes, the signs of recent anxiety added to the ravages of time and life, not to mention last-minute failures and fresh doubts, just when he thought everything was almost settled, or he had settled everything, when it was too late to start applying new labels to old experiences. Several times during his fretful night, tossing and turning between sleep and wakefulness, he imagined he could hear his old certainties plummet like a pile of plates crashing noisily to the floor. The sum of his eventful life, which until only a few hours before, he thought he had salvaged from his successive misadventures, was a kind of worldly indifference, which he assumed with gallant serenity. And now this last bastion of calm fatalism, a mind-set that until the previous day was his sole asset, has been smashed to smithereens. Sleeping peacefully, with the serenity of a tired old marathon runner, has been the one remaining privilege that, prior to his last conversation with Mecha Inzunza, Max believed he could still enjoy at his age, without life snatching it away from him.