The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini

by Stephen Dobyns

  “That’s enough,” said Pacheco. “Your story is sordid.”

  “And what’s yours?” answered Malgiolio bitterly. “You ruined some girl, wrecked her life, and I let a woman pee on me. Does that make you better? In fact, why should we believe you? This woman comes in and out and you claim to have ruined her. Why should we believe that you’ve ever touched her? This could be a fantasy of yours, some sort of craziness.”

  “Is that true, Daniel?” asked Dalakis, as if he hoped it were so. “Is this just a story you are telling to amuse us?”

  Pacheco picked up the small bell that stood by his plate and rang it sharply. Moments later Señora Puccini entered, and again I thought she must have been nearby in the hall. Pacheco got to his feet, took Señora Puccini’s arm, and slowly led her over to Malgiolio. Standing behind her, he began to unbutton the buttons of her dress. She jerked and tried to pull away but Pacheco said something I couldn’t hear and she stopped. I was right across from Malgiolio and could see as well as he. Pacheco unbuttoned her dress, then yanked it down over her shoulders to her waist. Then he yanked down her slip. Beneath it was an old-fashioned white brassiere, more like armor than clothing. She stared directly at Malgiolio but her face was wooden, almost as if dead.

  “Daniel!” said Dalakis, “leave her alone, please stop this!”

  Pacheco ignored him. He too was staring at Malgiolio. Slowly, he unhooked Señora Puccini’s brassiere, stripped it off, and tossed it onto the table in front of Malgiolio so it fell on his plate. The woman had large firm breasts and dark nipples. Standing behind her, Pacheco lifted her breasts with the flat of his hands, pushing them up toward Malgiolio, then dropping them and pushing them up again. Her breasts were very white, as if never touched by the sun. Looking over at Dalakis, I was surprised to see tears on his cheeks. Malgiolio was staring down at the great brassiere on his plate. Señora Puccini turned from Malgiolio to Dalakis to me. Her eyes were bright and animal, and she had sucked in her belly till I could see her ribs. I must have looked shocked, since that was certainly how I felt. Pacheco leaned his head forward, resting it on her shoulder and against her mass of graying hair. I couldn’t see his eyes. As I was the only one still looking at her, she stared back and began to smile, a smile without humor or warmth or affection. I wondered about the gun in her skirt pocket and if it was still there.

  Four

  I had left the dinner table to find the bathroom, or at least that was my excuse for absenting myself moments after Pacheco discontinued his mauling of Señora Puccini to let her return to the kitchen. I watched her retrieve her brassiere from Malgiolio’s plate, then hurry to the door, pulling up her slip and pushing her hands through the sleeves of her black dress. I do not like emotional scenes. I do not like the way strong feeling can sweep through a civilized gathering in the way a strong wind sweeps across a pond where children are sailing their paper boats. An orderly life requires detachment. If someone wanted to suggest I had fled the dining room, that would be correct.

  A few years ago, shortly after the newspaper published my interview with Borges, a Borges-type story occurred to me. It was based on the idea that when something truly horrible happens, the mind goes into shock and engages in amnesia to shield itself from the awfulness. In my story, a smudge would suddenly appear on the floor of a college classroom and the professor vanish. The man assigned to investigate at last determines that the teacher was a victim of spontaneous combustion, which was so horrible to witness that the entire class blocked it out, leaving only the smudge as evidence that the professor had gone up in flames. Many respectable people have believed in spontaneous combustion—look at Dickens and Balzac.

  The difficulty with my story was that the idea was more interesting then the story itself, and I could never really hit upon anything awful enough, or upon a situation in which the witnesses might in fact forget. At the same time, I began to think that perhaps such a phenomenon was quite common, that I myself might have experienced it, say, a dozen times over the years, and never realized it; that the only evidence might be something incredibly small, like an empty glass on a table where I had thought there was nothing, or a strange shoe appearing in my closet, or a smell of lilacs in mid-winter—that these might be the only snippets of evidence proving the existence of who knew what, some horrible thing. Yet just how awful would it have to be? Because certainly I had seen awful things and instead of forgetting them my mind brought them back again and again. How preferable to find a white brassiere upon the table and know this was evidence that something dreadful had just passed, than to see Pacheco paw his housekeeper’s pale breasts and watch what I thought to be the animal flutter behind her eyes.

  Yet perhaps one does forget. Perhaps even in that scene there was something much worse which I am not relating, which I am unable to relate. Perhaps I have forgotten her pleasure or pain or indifference, or even evidence of our own inappropriate feelings. Perhaps we howled with laughter. After all, we are creatures of self-deception and it is possible that several things occurred that night which were so unbearable that my mind has entombed them. Yet how terrible they must have been, considering the terror I recall so vividly.

  In any case, I fled to the bathroom, which was on the second floor at the very front of the house. On the far side of the bathroom was a pair of French doors leading to a small balcony that projected over the sidewalk. I did no more than wash my face in cold water, then glance at myself in the mirror. The candles on either side of the glass seemed to distort my image, causing me to see myself afresh. How unmuscular my face looked, and I wondered why I’d ever felt pleased about my little gray moustache or why I affected the bow ties that I wore as a kind of trademark. I looked at my watch; it was just past ten. Blowing out the candles, I went to the French doors on which the shutters had been closed. I wanted to know what was happening outside and, in retrospect, it seems almost comical that I sought out the physical chaos of the city to escape from the emotional chaos of the house. Like a thief I made my way onto the balcony. I knew that if there were soldiers about I stood a fair chance of getting shot.

  The street was deserted. I crouched down with my head above the low wall of the balcony, one of those cement walls with Grecian balusters two feet high and set about every sixteen inches between an upper and lower rail. The night seemed even hotter. A broiling wind blew out of the west and with it came a mixture of smoke and the perfume of hundreds of flowers, the two smells being as intertwined as melody and harmony. To my left was sporadic shooting. The houses were dark and their shutters closed: two- or three-story houses with whitewashed stone fronts and black wrought-iron bars over some of the windows. A few houses had ivy or flowering vines or large potted plants on their balconies. Although the street lights were out, there were two kerosene lanterns, hardly more than smudge pots, on the sidewalk about twenty and thirty yards to my right. And of course there was the moon, three quarters full and somewhere behind me over Pacheco’s house.

  Although the houses seemed empty and their facades anonymous, I knew that most had enclosed patios with gardens, grape arbors, fig and orange trees; and that, despite the apparent barrenness of the street, the rich perfume of the flowers was rising up from these hidden centers. Furthermore, even though the houses looked empty, I occasionally heard, mixed in with the gunshots and sirens, the sound of laughter and glasses clinking together or the sound of silverware clicking against plates, as if in some of these houses were private feasts like our own, hidden celebrations.

  Several blocks away was a major highway and I kept hearing the noise of heavy trucks, military trucks, and once I heard the clanking rumble of a tank. These deep-throated roars reminded me of nothing so much as wild animals. Often there were sirens, police or ambulance, as well as the high squealing sirens of the police motorcycles, large white BMW’s. Sometimes I also heard running footsteps, although I never saw anyone. And often there were gunshots, both the single shots of a rifle or pistol and lon
g bursts from automatic weapons. As I knelt on the narrow balcony I felt great waves of movement sweeping from one spot in the city to another, in the same way great formations of cloud can be gathered and dispersed about the sky, while my own street—the street of Dr. Pacheco—remained quiet.

  It was just as I was sensing these waves of movement that I heard a noise that was so common yet so out of place that at first I couldn’t recognize it: the hollow, almost syncopated clopping of a horse’s hooves far down the street to my right. I looked but saw nothing. Then, as I continued to peer into the dark, the horse came into view, an old white horse, almost pink, walking slowly down the center of the street with its head hanging so low that its muzzle was only a foot or so above the cobblestones. And as I stared at it, I realized I knew the horse, that it was a horse I’d been seeing for nearly half my life.

  My own house, as I may have said, was situated on a similar residential street about a mile away, and for years, every two or three days, there came an old man who sold vegetables from a horse-drawn cart. Certainly the horse now clopping its way down the street was the same horse. It had the same pinkish color, the same sway back and black mane. The wagon had been black with a tattered black canvas roof and an axle and wheels taken from an automobile, something ancient like a Model T Ford. The old man sat up in front while piled behind him were vegetables, potatoes, fruit; and as he moved slowly from one street to the next he would call out his wares: Onions, tomatoes, apples, fresh lettuce, eggs!

  Even though the man’s produce was more expensive than the market’s, certain women always bought from him, perhaps from convenience or laziness or charity or because they felt his produce was fresher than what they found at the store. I had purchased apples from him, and eggs, and tomatoes in late spring. Although we knew each other, we rarely spoke. His own comments were limited to climatic descriptions. “Weather’s changing,” he’d shout, or “Rain gathering,” while I would praise his pears or the firmness of his tomatoes—not a strong bond but a bond nonetheless. The man and his wagon had looked old even twenty years ago. In fact, I’d come to think of the horse, the wagon, the old man, and his produce as a single entity, as one creature who showed up every few days, ambled through the neighborhood, then disappeared. And now here was the horse by itself. What had happened to the man and his wagon? How had they become separated?

  When the horse passed the first kerosene lantern or smudge pot, I saw that it still wore its bridle. It swayed from side to side as it moved into the dim light, becoming a vague white shape, almost a ghost-horse, then into the darkness again, clip-clopping at the same slow pace down the center of the street. Obviously something had happened to the old man, and the horse, now lost and ownerless, had fallen back into the pattern of meandering through a thousand suburban streets. When the horse moved into the second small pool of light about twenty yards away, I saw that red flowers were caught up in its black tail, but whether by accident or if someone had put them there I had no way of knowing.

  All this time I was increasingly aware of shouting and running in the area to my left. There were also more gunshots as well as the rattle of automatic weapons. The horse passed beneath me. Its ribs stuck out like barrel staves and its head didn’t seem to hang so much as dangle as it swung back and forth. When the horse had gone about ten feet past the doctor’s house, a figure came rushing around the corner to my left and halted some yards ahead of the horse, which neither stopped nor slowed but continued its steady pace. The figure wore a dark hooded sweatshirt and carried a small machine gun or machine pistol. At this distance it was impossible to tell what side it was on or even if it was male or female. Then, with one smooth movement, the figure raised the gun and shot a short burst at the horse, the noise echoing violently against the stone fronts of the houses.

  At first I thought the horse hadn’t been hit since it continued to move forward, but then I saw that very slowly its legs were beginning to buckle, but so gradually that the horse first appeared to be making its way into a ditch or into deep water or was simply getting shorter. Then its legs buckled completely and bit by bit the horse rolled over on its side, but still with the same slow speed, like a loaf of bread rolling over, and never with any protest or even seeming to notice that it had been shot. It rolled half onto its back and lay motionless in the street, a small white mountain. No blood was visible but perhaps it was too dark to see any. The person who had shot the horse walked around it in a quick, businesslike manner, prodding its belly with his or her foot. Then abruptly the figure sprinted around the corner and disappeared.

  To say I was stunned would be incorrect. The whole progression of the horse and its subsequent shooting was so dreamlike that the force of its death hardly touched me. Also I worried that the hooded figure might see me and take a shot in my direction. But a heavy mixture of sadness and regret settled like a flat stone on my chest, not just sadness for the horse but for that greater creature of horse, man, wagon, vegetables, which, no matter what happened in the city, no matter who won, was now gone forever.

  I had moved to my house two years before my marriage, and I’d known the old man and his wagon since that time. “Weather’s changing,” he’d say, “clouds heaping up.” But the sadness I felt was for more than the old man and his vegetables. It was for my life, marriage, my whole youth, as if to see the old man every few days was also to be in touch with my departed wife; and with his passing another mode of access to those memories was shut down. But as I thought this, I began to remember a particular event that occurred during those first years. To say “began to remember” is perhaps inaccurate. Rather a picture took shape in my mind and around it I had to reconstruct the events that led up to it. How clumsy is language. How many words it takes to convey what happened. First the horse was shot, then came the sadness, regret, and the sense of another door closing upon my marriage; and then this image, this picture, for which I had to remember a context in order to understand. Even this brief summary gives no idea of my violent feelings, and perhaps this is why I recall my Borges story, for surely this image was horrible enough for me to block it from memory.

  There had been a party and I was on the balcony. Not a small balcony like the one at Pacheco’s but a great balcony that led off to a series of terraced gardens and lawns where a dozen young people were playing croquet illuminated by a string of ornate gas lamps bordering the grass. The house was one of those imitation French chateaux that the rich liked to build for themselves toward the end of the last century. I was looking for my fiancée, Cora. In some rooms people were dancing, in others they were playing cards or eating. Someone, a younger cousin, had just turned eighteen and all this was for her benefit—over a hundred and fifty young people between eighteen and thirty as well as several dozen parents. Twenty years ago this sort of party was quite common.

  I had looked for Cora through most of the house and was going along the balcony trying to see if she was in any of the rooms opening onto it. We had not quarreled and all seemed well between us, which made her absence something of a mystery. The band consisted of a dozen middle-aged men who specialized in songs that were many years out of date, and I remember the aggressive blare of the horns as I looked in one set of windows after another. Placed along the wall of the balcony were black metal pots full of red geraniums. It was summer, the same time of year as this night at Pacheco’s, and the air was full of the smell of flowers and fresh-cut grass.

  The corner room at the end of the balcony was some kind of study and it was there I found Cora with Daniel Pacheco. They were talking, standing quite close together. I was about to tap on the glass when Pacheco grasped Cora’s shoulders and very slowly eased her backward over the top of a desk. She put up no resistance. Reaching under the long dress he pulled down her panties and shoved them in his pocket. I stood paralyzed as Pacheco moved between Cora’s legs and began to make love to her as she lay back on the desk. She was wearing a long yellow taffeta gown. The window was pa
rtly open and I could hear the gown rustling as he kept moving against her. I remained at the side of the window and watched. There was very little light and I’m sure no one saw me. Cora’s head was turned toward the window. At first her face was blank, almost sad, but then there appeared an almost bestial expression, half anger, half hunger, as slowly she lifted her legs and linked them behind Pacheco’s back. She seemed to be looking straight at me. I had known her for many years, both at the university and before. There was nothing in her behavior which would have led me to anticipate or expect what I was now watching. Pacheco stood erect, just kept pushing himself against her while she, as she grew more excited, clutched at his dinner jacket and shirt front and tried to lift herself up from the desk, as she continued to stare toward the window where I stood. When Pacheco was done, he stepped back, then took a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his penis. Cora sat up and reached out her hand for her panties. Pacheco took them from his pocket. They were light blue with white lace around the edge. Then he shrugged, returned them to his pocket, and walked from the room.