The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini

by Stephen Dobyns

  I remember once running into him with Cora a few months before our marriage. We were in a women’s clothing store and she was trying on a hat. In fact, there were two hats and she was completely unable to decide between them. Schwab saw us through the window and came in. She told him her problem and Schwab laughed and bought both hats. Then he took us out to dinner, to a rather strange private club in the old part of the city with private dining rooms and waiters who must have had a million secrets. We ate in a little room by ourselves. There was a big fireplace and old etchings on the walls. From nearby rooms I kept hearing hysterical female laughter. The meal was extremely lavish with course after course of fish and beef and fowl and complicated arrangements in aspic. When it was done we went into another little room and Schwab drew back a curtain and we saw we were in a private box above a stage. A man and a woman, both practically naked, were doing a wild dance. Each had a whip and as they circled one another they pretended to lash each other’s faces and bodies. I say pretended, but really it was hard to tell and right at the end I remember seeing a great red welt appear across the woman’s breast. The music was Arabic or Greek. During the whole performance, Schwab laughed happily and pointed out to Cora intricacies of the dance. Although fascinated, I found the whole thing rather depraved.

  I was about to ask Schwab about the roadblocks and if they weren’t still in place when Señora Puccini reentered the dining room and went to Pacheco. “I think you should look at her,” she said.

  Without glancing at us, Pacheco stood up and walked rapidly into the hall. Even though he was intent on doing his duties as host, I felt most of his mind was on the cook and her dying. But no matter the degree of his grief, Pacheco would have hidden it from us. That was his way. Sometimes I even felt he flirted with strong emotion just to show he was immune from it.

  “The pity about these disturbances,” said Schwab, letting the smile slide from his face, “is that so many innocent people get hurt. But what can you do? It is like those porpoises that get killed in the tuna catches. The poor things just get in the way.” Saying this, he sipped a little water, then looked thoughtfully at his empty fork before jabbing it with renewed vigor into the veal.

  “Do you think it would be all right for us to go home tonight?” asked Dalakis, reassured by Schwab’s descriptions of the city. “Pacheco has said we can stay, but of course I only sleep well in my own bed.”

  Schwab had continued to look somber, sitting very straight in his chair and rising about a foot above Malgiolio on his left. “No, there are too many fanatics about. You should stay until tomorrow at least.”

  “But you said the city was safe,” said Dalakis.

  “There you go again, my friend,” said Schwab with the beginnings of a smile, “pressing for safety in a helter-skelter world. Remember what I said about the sun? Safety is relative and while it’s relatively safe there are still a few malcontents. The army wants to make certain they’re out of the way before trying to put the city back together. Surely you can see that.”

  “I saw someone shoot a horse a little while ago,” I said.

  Schwab happily clapped his hands together. “Yes, I nearly crashed into it. I’m afraid there’ll be a lot of cleaning up to do before the city is fit for normal life. I’ll tell you what. If there is any chance of the curfew being extended, I’ll return tomorrow and take you home myself. It’s quite convenient having an armored car.” He took another huge bite of veal, then washed it down with more wine. He didn’t chew his food so much as float it into his stomach.

  Wiping his mouth, Schwab pushed his chair away from the table, got to his feet and stood smoothing down the front of his blue tunic with both hands. “Now, back to work,” he said.

  We were surprised and spoke all at once. “You’re leaving already?” I said. Really he’d hardly come.

  “You’ve still given us little idea what’s happening,” said Malgiolio.

  “What about the government,” asked Dalakis, “will it survive?”

  Schwab sucked thoughtfully at his teeth as he turned to look at us. “I wanted to see how you were. You’re my friends, all men I’ve known for forty years. What does the city matter? I’m not a newspaper. Yes, it has changed, but what it is and what you will find is not for me to say. I’m your old friend who has gone through much trouble to spend time in your company. You should say, ‘Here’s Schwab. How good to see him well and healthy.’ You should see this as possibly the last moment of our world. We must drink to it.” Here Schwab lifted his glass and motioned to us to follow his example. Only Malgiolio raised his glass, although hesitantly. Dalakis assumed he was joking and I had had enough.

  Then Schwab did an astonishing thing. Drawing his pistol from the holster at his belt, he held it over his head.

  “Drink!” he shouted.

  “Really, Schwab,” protested Dalakis.

  Of course he was joking but we drank nonetheless, even though I’d already had more than was good for me. Emptying his glass, Schwab stared at us critically, then turned and threw his glass against the wall. It made a little flash of light and the fragments scattered every which way. We watched, then Schwab raised his pistol again, pointing it at the ceiling.

  “Throw them,” he ordered, grinning.

  We all threw our glasses, although tossed would be the more accurate word. Dalakis actually missed the wall, bouncing his glass off the back of a chair so that it fell to the floor, where it shattered. To tell the truth, I found Schwab’s conceit almost impossible to stomach.

  Pacheco had just reentered the room and was standing by the door. If he thought anything about our toast and the damage to his stemware, he gave no sign of it. “What have you been doing out in the city that has caused you trouble?” asked Pacheco, walking to his chair.

  “Patrols, mostly. The city has been divided into sectors and we were assigned to this particular area. That’s how I was able to stop by.”

  “Have you seen anyone?” asked Pacheco.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rebels or troublemakers or curfew violators, whatever you call them.”

  “Some.”

  “And when you catch them, you question them. Is that right?”

  “Yes, if we’re able to catch them. Usually they run or shoot back at us.” Schwab stood by his chair, still smoothing down the front of his uniform. He seemed to have little interest in Pacheco’s questions.

  “And when you’re finished with them,” asked Pacheco, “what do you do with them then?”

  “Often they go to one of the neighborhood jails.”

  “You don’t just kill them as curfew violators?” asked Pacheco. He was also standing by his chair and the two men were speaking back and forth over Malgiolio’s head.

  “Some have died, yes.”

  “So you kill them?” Pacheco asked again.

  “It has happened. Why do you care?”

  “They are my neighbors. Malgiolio was earlier praising the disturbances by saying it would give him more opportunities to find a suitable job. And I just wanted to see if they would be hiring grave diggers.”

  Schwab laughed heartily, apparently deciding that Pacheco was having a joke. “Yes, they’ll need lots of grave diggers.”

  “What about Kress,” asked Dalakis, “have you seen anything of him?” David Kress was a colonel in the army who was also a member of our group.

  “No, his garrison is in the southern part of the city. I know there’s been a lot of shooting down there but I haven’t been able to get news. I’m sure he’s all right. You know Kress, he’s a survivor.”

  Schwab walked out to the hall and we followed him. He was quite tall and walked as if his back were held straight by a brace. Standing by the door were four uniformed policemen. When they saw him, they stood quickly to attention. I was struck that they seemed frightened of him. Schwab glanced at the cook lying on her mat
tress, then continued to the door.

  “Too many casualties,” he said, “too many hurt people.” Turning, Schwab shook our hands, then embraced each one of us. “I hope our next meeting is more cordial. We need to remember that we have two lives—those we had when young and our present ones. We can’t let the latter interfere with the former.” He smiled, then straightened the patent leather holster attached to his belt. “After all, these current lives are not why we meet. They are trifles and exist to keep those other lives bright and shiny in our minds.” With this Schwab turned away and one of his men opened the door. They all ducked down and ran for the armored car which was parked at the curb. Schwab didn’t look back. Considering his claim that the streets were safe, I thought he ran rather quickly. As Pacheco shut the door, I heard the armored car roaring its motor, then accelerating down the street.

  “He’s a cheerful man for a torturer,” said Pacheco.

  Dalakis turned to Pacheco in surprise. “How can you say that about a man who’s your friend?”

  “As I said earlier, I’ve had to treat the men and women whom he’s questioned.”

  I was struck by what Schwab had said about our having two lives and equally struck that Pacheco had either chosen to ignore it or hadn’t noticed. And I wondered if that were true, as if our group when it first decided to meet was no more than a fan club for the boys we had been, boys and young men; as if as adults we could in no way compete with those past selves, so much more alive and interesting. And perhaps that was why Pacheco hadn’t seemed to notice Schwab’s comment, just because his life as an adult, his affair with Señora Puccini, was larger than any life he’d had as a boy or young man. With me the reverse is true because often it seems that my life stopped with the death of my wife. And the reverse may also be true with Malgiolio and Dalakis. Here then is another explanation why we took such a chance to travel to Pacheco’s house that night—that it formed an avenue to reach the important parts of ourselves: those boys we had been.

  Just then the cook’s grandson called to Pacheco. There was such fear in his voice that I hardly wanted to see what was wrong. We turned to find the cook arching her back high off the mattress, almost like a gymnast. All the veins seemed to stand out on her face and her blind eggshell eyes bulged from their sockets. She reached out toward Pacheco and I had the impression she could see him, although that was impossible. The gasping grew louder, like a machine breaking itself apart. Señora Puccini hurried in from the corridor. The cook kept arching her back, bending as if she would break, then she collapsed to the floor. Pacheco knelt down and felt her pulse. He let go of her hand, and it fell to the mattress. There was no need to say she was dead.

  The boy burst into tears. When Señora Puccini stood up, I could see that she too was crying. She put her arms around the boy and embraced him. I had become so accustomed to her blank stares that to see her eyes full of tears was tremendously affecting. I looked over at Dalakis and Malgiolio. Dalakis had taken a rather gray handkerchief from his pocket and was blowing into it. Malgiolio stood with his head bowed.

  Pacheco continued to kneel beside Madame Letendre, stroking her forehead. I thought how her skin was growing cold and stiff and how he could probably feel the change. I couldn’t be sure in the dim light, but it seemed her eyes were still open.

  “I’d like to carry her to the garden,” said Pacheco. “Perhaps you’ll be good enough to help.”

  We each took a corner of the mattress from the chaise longue and lifted. The cook was a big woman but with the four of us and the boy at the back we had no trouble except for gripping the canvas surface of the mattress itself. Señora Puccini went in front holding several candles. I was carrying the rear right corner and the cook’s head kept lolling back toward my hands. For some reason I had an absolute terror of her gray hair brushing my wrists and I almost dropped the mattress as I tried to keep from touching her. Her eyes were half closed and her mouth was open. If it hadn’t been for the boy holding the rear of the mattress between me and Malgiolio, the whole business would have fallen to the floor.

  We made our way to the corridor, then turned right through the door to the patio. As we passed the dining room I glanced in at the remnants of food that Schwab had spared, crumbs mostly, bones, oyster shells. The five of us carrying the cook made quite a bit of noise and our entrance disturbed the birds, which began chirping and fluttering in their cages. Señora Puccini placed the candles on a chair. There was a long wooden table, a sort of picnic table, at the back of the patio and we put the mattress on top. The bird cages were all around us and the air was filled with nervous twittering. Malgiolio stared at them as if frightened. Some people, I know, have quite a terror of birds. Señora Puccini lit more candles. Their flames flickered in the slight breeze.

  “I’ll get something with which to cover her,” said Pacheco, and he hurried off, leaving us with the cook. Although he was certainly fond of the dead woman, he showed a casualness with death that came, I supposed, from being a surgeon. Señora Puccini approached the cook’s body, then reached out and touched her face. She did this with great tenderness and I couldn’t help but be surprised at her loving expression, particularly when I considered that she might have purposefully done nothing to keep the cook from leaving the house, that she might even have encouraged her to leave.

  Dalakis stood beside her. “Had you known her for many years?”

  “We all came at the same time—she and the man upstairs and myself.”

  “You must have loved her very much,” said Dalakis. He reached forward and closed the cook’s eyes. I shuddered. The idea of touching that dead flesh was horrible to me.

  “She knew all my secrets,” said Señora Puccini.

  Dalakis put a hand on her shoulder. “If there’s any way I can help . . .”

  Señora Puccini shrugged away from his touch, then glanced at the three of us. Her face grew cold again; it was like seeing curtains being pulled across a window. Without another word, she walked toward the kitchen, passing Pacheco as he came out with a white sheet. I followed her part of the way through the garden. The rich smell of the flowers, the smell of herbs, mint and dill and basil, seemed to push away the smoky smells of the city, the smells of death and blood that surrounded the cook. I started to light my pipe, then stopped myself. How odd, I thought, that in the very midst of enjoying this perfume, I should decide to violate it with my tobacco.

  To my right the great bougainvillaea rose up against the side of the house huge and voluptuous, with its purple flowers resembling decadent kisses as they crowded together from ground to roof. Then, after several seconds, I saw a movement, then another. Taking a few steps toward the bougainvillaea, I noticed a small pair of eyes which, when they saw me, darted away with the flick of a brown tail. There were rats running along the branches, behind the leaves and purple flowers. Maybe five, maybe twenty, darting, jumping, peeking out from the darkness, so the great flowering shrub trembled as if alive. I turned away, disgusted, and was about to rejoin the others when I saw Dalakis approaching me along the stone path. He had taken off his glasses and was rubbing a hand across his eyes.

  “It’s so sad,” he said.

  Of course he meant the cook but I could think of nothing but that beautiful shrub swarming with rats like a kind of purple madness. I started to point it out to him, then stopped. Why upset poor Dalakis any more than he was upset already? I looked up at him. He has a long rectangular face that seems to have too much skin, hanging jowls, bags beneath the eyes, so the whole impression is of an unmade bed. As he returned my look, he pushed his glasses back up his nose and blinked. How unhappy he seemed. Even so there was something repellent about his emotion.

  “Do you mean the cook?” I asked.

  “The cook and everything. Think of that man upstairs spending his life as a paralyzed guest in Pacheco’s house.”

  There seemed nothing to say.

  “Did Pacheco
ever know your wife?” persisted Dalakis. “I remember he was in the south at the time of your marriage.”

  “He’d met her several years before our wedding.” I couldn’t imagine why Dalakis wanted to talk about my marriage. The trouble with people like him is that their natural sympathy becomes an excuse to pry into the lives of others.

  “It was all so long ago,” he continued. “You know, of the thirty in our class, I wonder how many wives and girl friends he was involved with. My wife . . . we weren’t married then, but she laughed when I grew angry. She was still a child and there was that trouble with her parents. What do you think makes a woman go with a man like that?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe he spends a lot of money on them,” I added, jokingly.

  “But don’t you wonder about it?”

  “Not if I can help it.” I put my arm through Dalakis’s and led him back across the patio to where Pacheco was talking with Malgiolio. Yes, I had lied, but I told myself there was no reason to stir up the past, that what my wife had done was nearly forgotten. The white sheet lay spread over the body of the cook so that she looked like no more than a long white hill, something snow-covered and wintry.

  “Let’s go back inside,” said Pacheco. “Our meal isn’t quite over.

  In single file, we followed him down the corridor. I came last. Behind me I could still see that white mound lying on the table surrounded by many candles. Then I turned away.

  When we had nearly reached the dining room there was another loud knock on the front door. Perhaps it was just the echoes in the large hall that made these arrivals dramatic and almost frightening. Not that I felt fear this time; rather, it was irritation at the further interruption.