by Jack Tollers
*
Eventually they retired to sleep. But like anyone who happens to sleep in new surroundings, Peter woke up after a few hours of rest to alien smells and noises. The night before Victoria had produced a couple of mattresses where Jimmy and Thomas were now sleeping next to him while he had settled for the old couch in the sitting room, where he lay fully dressed. One or two springs prodded his back contributing to his general discomfort and a broken window let in a steady current of damp air that had persistently blown on his neck throughout the night. He could feel certain cramps creeping up his back, but disregarded them with juvenile and military presumption hoisting himself to a sitting position and relieved to find that the night was over. Outside it was still raining.
Peter looked around curiously. He was sitting in the middle of an enormous sitting room, disproportionately long and incongruously narrow—a fact made ever present by the grand piano that dominated the centre of the room (the yellow cloth and black rock were nowhere in view) and which forced a small detour on anyone wanting to cross to the other side. At one end of it you could see the door through which you entered the kitchen (and that had lately been used by Father Mole in memorable circumstances). On the opposite side there was a big dining room with a table long enough to comfortably accommodate some fourteen people. On top of it a vast pile of un-ironed washed clothes seemed to be silently demanding attention. There were several windows much too small to light up the big rooms, the builder having conceived the house on Alsatian lines, fit to weather north-European winters, but somewhat inappropriate for Buenos Aires’s tempered climate. The house however, was airy enough. It had nine bedrooms, six on the top floor, the rest downstairs (among which was the guest room where Father Mole had tried to sleep the night before), the professor's study, two stairways and two balconies, a garage, a large basement, a winter garden, and, the distinctive feature of the whole place, books everywhere. There was no free space on the walls that hadn't been requisitioned by Victoria's father for more shelves and bookcases from where all sorts of volumes dangled in confusing disarray (despite Victoria's father claim that they had been originally arranged on sound library management principles). There were books on the stoves and books on the piano. A couple of old volumes had been put to service balancing an old sofa, and there was an open detective novel on the chair in front of Peter's couch. There were two big boxes in a corner full to the brim with books on the Romans (the professor used those for his classes) and you couldn't quite walk into his study without tripping over heaps of books on Etruscan art, Communism, or Argentine history. Eventually Peter would also discover this small room in which Victoria’s father used to spend most of the day and that was in itself a small study in book-lore with tall cases that lined three walls of the room, some of the volumes dangerously leaning from high shelves, others covering every inch of the big desk where an enormous Bible Concordance on another lectern competed for space with the old Olivetti type-writer. A wide array of biographies and poetry books sat on the windowsill and it was only with some difficulty that you could actually open the window a few inches without tumbling them on to the floor. But the professor didn't seem to mind, much too concentrated as he usually was on his reading or writing to bother about such minutiae. There was a wide choice of short stories and quotation books in both bathrooms, and the garage had no car but three complete encyclopaedias instead, the Espasa-Calpe alone adding up to more than seventy volumes. They were frequently consulted by the professor and he was usually found there long after the meals had begun, Victoria's mother despairing of ever finding her husband and constantly forgetting that he was prone to spend whole days in the damp garage, perusing enormous books and going from one concept to the other, quite unmindful of his surroundings. Next to the garage there was a small tool shed where there were no tools, except an old electric lawn mower. But, again, here there were several piles of juvenile books, whole collections of children stories and magazines along with old painting books that had been used at one time or another.
Peter woke up to a house like that, that unforgettable Sunday morning. There were ten children in all, Victoria being the eldest, succeeded by four girls and five more boys all sorted out in an age range that went from the baby twins to her sixteen year old sister. Two very old women came in every day to help with the domestic service, one in charge of the washing and ironing of the never ending heaps and renewed heaps of clothes while the other cooked and gave a hand with the sweeping and general intendance of the place. Which was always something of a lost battle.
And then, well, there was the music. On top of one of the bookshelves in the sitting room where he had slept, Peter discovered a violin next to some yellowish scores. He had seen a guitar in the kitchen, and another one—minus a couple of strings—was lying on top of the piano. But, above all, there was the old gramophone, one of those big record players, which stood majestically against one of the sitting room's walls, disputing wall space with a couple of bookcases on each side. One of them had been used to put the records on and Peter got up with interest to have a closer look. He soon found out that most of them were classical, a lot of Bach and Mozart, the complete Beethoven symphonies, a Wagner and so on. But on a lower shelf there were some twenty records of an entirely different genre. Peter did not know German but it wasn't difficult to guess that they were all military marches from World War II he thought, knowing as he did one or two like ‘Erica’ and the ‘Horst Wessel Lied.’ On the highest bookshelf he also found a big pile of old tango records and, in the middle of it, two Gilbert & Sullivans and a musical labelled ‘South Pacific’ which he couldn't quite place.
The odd circumstances in which he found himself suddenly dawned on him, this inspection of old records on a rainy morning in this strange house in Bella Vista: the fact that this home belonged to a girl he had ridiculously followed only the day before, and that after that adventure he had been looking at old records at Jimmy's home.
He shook his head at the queer coincidences and walked up to a small door he found next to the piano hoping it would be the bathroom, but felt reluctant to try it when he discovered you had to pull it open, rather than push. He wondered if it wasn't Father Mole's resting room and figured that he could do without a renewed encounter with the cleric in what would certainly be embarrassing circumstances. Finally nature's call got the better of him and with a sigh he opened it only to find that, in effect, it was a toilet after all, a small one full of magazines and books loosely piled in the evidently disused bath tub, but for the rest of it, to his relief, a place that gave the minimum functional services to be expected.
After having washed his face with cold water (apparently the hot tap didn’t work) he felt better and with an inquisitive disposition he made his way to the kitchen cursorily glancing at his two friends who slept in the best of worlds, Jimmy snoring disgracefully as was to be expected. He was about to open the kitchen door when a sound from the other side froze him in his place.
It was Victoria huskily humming to herself, now and then breaking into the song with lyrics he immediately recognised as those from Butch Cassidy's main theme that Jimmy had been trying to sing the night before. He crouched next to the door hoping that Victoria wouldn't open it and find him in such an awkward position. However, nothing of the sort happened. The sweet voice enraptured him and he was quite surprised to discover how this girl humming could actually trap his soul to the point of making him feel quite dizzy. However, presently the gentle singing petered out and there was silence. He guessed that Victoria had sat down for there was a noise of a chair moving around. Peter straightened up and looked at the door, which seemed to assume a Narnian appearance and, for the second time on that Sunday morning, opened the door on to the unknown.
Victoria looked up with her red pencil between her teeth, her wrinkled forehead and spectacles all clearly telling that she had been concentrating on the wide open book that lay on the table. She took her eyeglasses off and smiled while greeting Peter
with her grave voice. She seemed quite at ease, so Peter sat down rather heavily in front of her and accepted the maté she offered him, glad to busy himself with anything as long as it would take his embarrassment away, even if he couldn't quite delete the stupid grin he was sure was still glued to his face. On the other hand, Victoria seemed to remain quite unselfconscious and Peter found himself answering perfunctorily Victoria's small talk queries about how he had slept and so on. However, soon enough he had dived straight into proper talk with her in that unabashed way that timid people can sometimes do.
‘Is that the same book you were reading yesterday on the bus?’ he asked pointing to the volume on the table.
Victoria had another go at the kettle and served herself a maté. She didn’t see him blush.
‘Yup.’
‘In Latin?’ he asked ‘did Oscar Wilde write it in Latin?’
Victoria laughed and shook her head.
‘It’s the title of a Psalm, you know... De profundis... I believe it’s Psalm CXXVIII.’ She pronounced the Roman numbers as letters which made Peter laugh, not sure if she hade done it on purpose or not.
But to his surprise and as if triggered by the innocent question, she hastily proceeded to elaborate, praising the book's merits and excellent language, and, most unexpectedly, its spiritual value. She lectured as if impatient to get her ideas behind her, using her spectacles, as it were, as a pointer. She weighed Wilde’s rhythm and praised his use of poetical images, and then she compared his style with other authors. She kept talking uninterruptedly for the most part of four minutes at the end of which Peter felt much more relaxed. There she was, lecturing on the Reading letters, this unassuming teenager with the low voice, smoking unaffectedly and punctuating her discourse with frequent smiles and clearing her forehead now and then with an impatient gesture that Peter was beginning to get familiar with. Peter had never in the whole of his life heard a girl talk like that and was quite fascinated even when her infectious enthusiasm was a bit disconcerting.
‘Spiritual?’ he asked pugnaciously, ‘how can Oscar Wilde with his well known decadent life style and salacious nature be called spiritual?’ He did this bit of enquiring with the clearly cut resolution of finding out what this girl knew about Wilde and what she didn't.
Victoria got up with the kettle and turned round to put it on the kitchen stove and Peter could not but notice that this time she was wearing a different kilt with a green tartan. He caught himself thinking that she had put it on for him after Jimmy's impertinent comments about magic kilts the night before. He knew it was a silly idea, but, all the same, it tickled him in a pleasant way. The kilt turned gracefully round and Victoria sat down again at the table and renewed the maté with a couple of spoonfuls of the green stuff it's made of.
It soon became apparent that Victoria knew nothing about Oscar Wilde's life having only read ‘Dorian Gray’ so that inevitably Peter found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to explain to her the rather nefarious circumstances that eventually had landed the Irishman in jail in the first place and how Wilde actually happened to be a bit of a Dorian Gray himself.
She listened attentively to Peter while looking with renewed interest at a photograph of Wilde that the book sported on its cover. She took in her lower lip, then set it free.
‘Well, maybe you're right, but all I can say is that I've never read a more spiritual author than this one, his rendering of the real Jesus Christ is incomparable... You can only compare it to the Gospels.’ She evidently searched for words and concluded rather lamely, ‘You must read this book... it's absolutely tops.’
Even when her words included a few teen-ager colloquialisms Peter could see that this girl was really into Religion, something that as any would-be suitor he immediately recognised as a possible rival to his dearest wishes. Accordingly, he prudently steered the conversation to more trivial topics.
‘Are you still at school?’ he asked.
‘Uh-uh,’ Victoria made a face, ‘Horrible, isn't it? But I've only a couple of months to go and can definitely finish with it—before it finishes with me.’
She laughed again at her own joke and asked him while tending him another maté: ‘And what about yourself? When are you finishing school?’ There was evident relish in her voice as she played with the analogy between their respective centres of learning.
Peter smiled trying to hide the general rebounding effects of Victoria's laughs. ‘Well, with a bit of luck, I'll be also finishing school by the end of the year and hopefully will be soon assigned to my first military destination.’ He lit a cigarette and added: ‘Which, if things turn up as I hope they will, would be somewhere in the South of the country.’ They soon discovered that they both much preferred cold climates to warm ones and, with this, both felt that they were warming to one another, and by now Peter wore a smile that wasn’t half as stupid, genuinely enjoying himself and chatting away in a more relaxed manner about this and that.
Suddenly they heard someone playing the piano next door. Peter was quite surprised.
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, that’s Daddy. He usually plays at these early hours. He likes to wake the house with that. He’s recently been wrestling with Debussy,’ she smiled.
‘Not bad at all,’ Peter assented. Sure enough, one of the Arabesques was clearly heard from the kitchen.
Peter looked out through the window and thought that it was particularly apt music for a raining Sunday morning.
Some church bells tolled in the distance. Victoria looked at her tiny watch and stood up in a hurry. ‘Gosh, it's later than you think!’ she took off her spectacles and grabbed an old umbrella that was lying nearby, ‘I must rush now if I want to get to Mass on time.’
Without quite knowing what he was doing, Peter soon found himself walking under the rain with the girl of his dreams—himself off to Mass for the first time in many a long day.
Fortunately, he thought, the umbrella was a small feminine thing quite incapable of sheltering two people from the steady rain and so they walked leaning against one another, the two of them getting wet by the minute and not caring a fig.
They sat together at the back of the church just as Mass was beginning. For Peter the whole thing was most confusing. He tried desperately to get his liturgical responses right—after so many years he couldn't quite remember them and for the most part could only mumble what he felt to be appropriate noises—while feeling aprehensive that Victoria would find out any moment about the awkward fact that he didn't usually go to Mass in the first place. On the other hand the old priest in charge apparently seemed to be flustered with the way some women dressed in Church and Peter couldn't repress a quick look at Victoria's jointed knees that appeared where her shortened kilt ended. He was so distracted by this vision that when the priest suddenly appeared to indicate it and feeling the flock's general movement, he knelt down—only to find out too late that he had got it wrong, and that Victoria with the rest of them were all standing up. He could feel the girl looking down on him and in a most inappropriate fashion he silently blasted himself for his awkwardness and stood up clumsily feeling his face reddening by the second. And then he started to think about what was coming next. He knew perfectly well that he was in no state to receive Holy Communion and that Victoria would most certainly ascertain the fact. He dreaded the moment, feeling it would put him miles away from the girl he knew he had fallen in love with. He suddenly felt dizzy with all this and made straight for the doorway having decided that he could always tell Victoria that he wasn't feeling entirely himself, which wasn't, after all, exactly false.
He waited for her outside the church where a small porch sheltered him from the rain only to eventually find out that while most people left the place immediately after the service was over, Victoria remained inside, praying or something, he thought.
A small boy with a little umbrella appeared at his side while Peter was lighting another cigarette.
‘I'm waiti
ng for my mother,’ the little boy announced with a glum face, ‘I hope her confession won't take too long.’
‘Hmmm,’ Peter wasn't much interested and certainly wasn't used to delving into small talk with eight-year-old boys. Par contre, the little chap felt quite at ease.
‘What's your name, mister?’ he enquired, looking straight up at Peter's eyes.
‘Peter.’ He was rather disconcerted at the direct question and rather amused at the straightforward way in which the dwarf questioned him.
‘That's funny,’ said the boy while kicking at a small pebble on the porch's floor, ‘that's really funny,’ he added.
Peter was rather taken aback and wasn't sure he liked being informed that his name was funny.
‘What's so funny about it?’ he asked.
‘I'm called Peter too,’ the boy replied, evidently implying that he was the first Peter and that anyone else had no right to use his name.
‘Well, well, that's quite a coincidence isn't it?’ said Peter with a grin while flicking his butt gardenwards. He looked at his watch and decided the service had been over for the better part of ten minutes. He wondered what Victoria was up to and began to feel impatient.
The child started to make a grating noise with his teeth and suddenly blurted another question: ‘You waiting for Victoria?’ he asked with childish perseverance.
Peter was surprised at this bit of clairvoyance. ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘How do you know? Do you happen to know her?’ he asked, recognising that the elf had succeeded in arousing renewed interest in the conversation.
Apparently the boy preferred to ignore Peter’s first question. ‘No, I don't think I know her... no, not that... but...’ he put on a puckered face and started grinding his teeth again while searching for the right words, ‘I mean, we've never talked or anything like that... but... well, she lives next door to my house... so, yes, I do know her...’ The boy renewed his teeth-grinding, the grating getting on Peter's nerves.
All the same he couldn't refrain from asking: ‘You mean that you've seen her, what?’
‘Right. I can see her from my bedroom window that looks on to the Wade’s garden,’ the boy informed, now beginning to play with his little umbrella making it spin slowly, ‘She's very lo-ve-ly, and on account of the future I keep an eye on her whenever I happen to be in my bedroom and she goes out to the garden.’ The little Johnsonian gnome blushed a bit, looked to his left and right and added in lower tones, ‘I once saw her in her bathing suit’.
‘You did, did you?’ Peter affected some reproach in his voice but couldn’t quite suppress a smile. ‘And may I enquire what do you mean by “on account of the future”?’
‘I'm gonna marry her when I grow up.’ With that, a lady in a red mac came out of the church and took the boy by his hand. The small one hopped by her side and the solitary cadet could not but hear how he proceeded to plaintively impart to his mother the frightful news that he was not the only Peter in the world.
When Victoria came out of the church she found Peter standing in the porch all by himself and smiling to apparently no one.
‘What are you smiling about, may I enquire? And why did you leave in the middle of the service?’ asked Victoria while she opened up her umbrella as they both stepped into the rain.
‘Uh, I wasn’t feeling too well and decided that a bit of fresh air would put me right, and indeed I feel perfectly O.K. now.’
‘Oh you sure looked all right to me when I came out of Church, you were smiling at no one in particular and looked like on the verge of actually laughing,’ said Victoria.
Peter thought about it for some time while they walked together shunning the puddles here and there. ‘Well, I was thinking that we all live in a small world, and that that accounts for many of its coincidences,’ he slowly said.
‘And so?’ Victoria encouraged him.
‘Well, I was just talking to Peter, your little neighbour, you know who I mean?’
Victoria waved at an old woman that crossed them as they sailed through the gates of the church's garden on to the sidewalk. ‘Oh yes, that would be Peter D'Angelo. They live next door. He's a darling, don't you think?’ Victoria asked with a smile.
‘Well, I don't know about that, now,’ said Peter trying to keep a straight face. ‘No darling to my mind. Apparently there's more than one Peter with the same idea, and frankly, I don't know that I like little daredevils stepping on my toes with unabashed ruthlessness and highly strung up passions.’
‘The same idea?’ Victoria asked, ‘High passions? What on earth are you talking about?’ By now they were only a block away from the house and Peter caught sight of Father Mole and Philip coming straight to them from the opposite direction inmersed in what looked like deep conversation. To his dismay a forceful idea entered his head: it was now or never, and this was no time for hedging.
‘Well, how can I put it? It's a bit of a coincidence if you ask me,’ he said resting his arm on hers, ‘but apparently there are actually two Peters in the world who want to marry you.’
It took a couple of seconds before Victoria grasped the implication. She stopped dead in her place and looked at him straight in the face. ‘I don't think you should joke over things like that...’ She looked towards the priest and her brother, by now about fifty yards away and approaching fast. She breathlessly added: ‘And if you're not joking, surely you're rushing things a bit?’ She was blushing, and her words came out huskier than ever.
By now they were in a rather uncomfortable situation, the two of them intensely talking to each other under the rain, glued to their places while the priest and Victoria's brother were nearly within ear reach and looking with interest at the petrified couple under the rain.
‘No I'm not,’ Peter answered with a serious face, ‘I'm definitely not joking, and yes, I actually plan to marry you, if only the other little bastard who also pretends to be your beau will get out of the way.’
Victoria couldn't help herself and laughed while they were accosted by Father Mole and Philip.
‘Have you two been to Mass already?’ asked the priest with a disapproving frown on his face, and without waiting for an answer, ‘Do you think I can get hold of the parson? I must celebrate Mass somewhere you know,’ he elaborated with the clerical presumption that most people are, or, anyway, should be, very much interested in their doings.
‘Yes,’ Victoria answered. ‘And I believe you can find the parish priest at his home right now. He should be having breakfast. Philip is sure to find him.’ The boy nodded gravely and they continued on their way.
Victoria and Peter resumed their walk towards the old house in embarrassed silence and at a slow pace, until they got to the gate.
It was there and then that Peter took her hand and kissed her knuckles and formally asked Victoria if she would marry him.
Eighteen-year old Victoria was frightened to death with the way things were going. They were young and inexperienced but both of them knew that this was no frolic. It is quite a peculiar phenomenon, though it happens from time to time, even when generally disregarded by older people, but even youngsters sometimes know the gravity of what they say and do—the transcendence of certain moments, the lifelong consequences, the long lived import of a flickering instant in time, no matter how young you may be.
Victoria put her doubts forward once again, seeking for respite. Her heart beat at a fast pace and she couldn’t quite help herself, flustered as she was.
‘Aren't you rushing things a bit?’ she asked, blushing once again, ‘I mean, aren't you rushing things a bit too much?’
Peter felt inspired and had lost any second thoughts he could have harboured only ten minutes ago. He was at sea. Duc in altum. It was simply a question of swimming or sinking.
‘Listen, Victoria,’ It was the first time he had called her by her name, and he relished its pronunciation that tasted delicately sweet somewhere inside him.
‘Victoria,’ he said again, not letting go of her tr
embling and surprisingly cold hands—even in these eminent circumstances, the words Che gelida manina found a way of shaping themselves at the back of his mind—‘This is serious business, and I know it doesn't look like it, but no, I'm not rushing things one bit.’
It was a bold thing to do, even a crazy one, but Peter couldn't help himself and he kissed her on her forehead while holding her firmly with both his arms. Victoria clumsily tried to steady the umbrella under the rain. Peter looked straight into her blue eyes, and added slowly:
‘It's later than you think.’