The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini

by Stephen Dobyns

  Carrera and Quatrone were still arguing. “You will not search the house,” said Carrera. “If there were shots fired, then we will discover who did it, but I don’t intend to let you and your men rampage through here doing whatever violence you care to commit.”

  Quatrone kept his eyes lowered but was clearly furious. Carrera, on the other hand, appeared completely calm, a sort of disdainful, superior calm. Really he was one of us. Although he didn’t belong to our group, he easily could have. He was polished, urbane, and wealthy, while Quatrone belonged to another class altogether—he being one of those energetic and angry young men who join the army as a private and bully and fight their way up through the ranks. He reminded me of a bull terrier, those ferocious little dogs that sink in their teeth and refuse to let go. Just as Malgiolio saw in these troubles a chance for advancement, so, presumably, did Quatrone.

  By this time I had joined Dalakis and Malgiolio by the library door—we three guests, we old schoolboys. Both appeared frightened and I suppose I did as well. Dalakis had been looking around the hall, which shone in the light of a hundred candles. Then he glanced toward the stairs and his whole body grew rigid.

  I turned and there was Señora Puccini just beginning to descend the left-hand side of the staircase. She had changed out of her black dress into a blue one—a long, light blue dress with a white collar. There was something shocking about it. I had thought of her as middle-aged; yet this was the dress of a young woman. Her hair was loose, also like a young woman’s, and there were flowers in it, red flowers. All this was shadowy because of the candles, and as she descended we could only see her in profile. Her arms hung at her sides and the balustrade kept us from seeing her hands. She held herself as straight as a board and never once turned her head, but something was wrong with the way she looked. There was some madness in it.

  We stared at her and even the soldiers grew silent. Glancing toward Pacheco, I saw that he appeared extremely alert. He took a few steps toward the stairs. Then Señora Puccini made the turn at the corner of the bracket and as she came around to face us I saw there was blood on the front of her blue dress. She wore a necklace of flowers and the blood seemed mixed with it.

  “She’s done something to herself,” said Dalakis. But despite the blood, she seemed unhurt and walked without weakness or hesitation. It was only later that we discovered the blood was not her own.

  As she descended the lower bracket of the staircase, the soldiers across the room, who could see all of her, began to whisper and point. There must have been over thirty men in the hall and we all stared at her. Quatrone had moved away from the door and stood with his six men in front of one of the marble busts.

  Pacheco walked to the bottom of the staircase, next to the small pond and fountain. The statue of the naked girl rose directly behind him. Balancing on one leg with one arm raised, she appeared to be half dancing, half falling. The fountain itself had stopped when the electricity had gone off. When Señora Puccini reached the bottom of the staircase and turned again to face us, I saw that the entire front of her dress was splashed and spotted with blood, even though there was no sign of a wound. In her right hand, which she held to her side, was the small pistol that I had seen in the kitchen.

  Pacheco held out his hand but she drew back, evading him, then walked around him toward the soldiers and the rest of us. How can I describe her face? It had a joyous quality, as if she had just stopped laughing. Yet there was such a contrast between youth and age, the flowers and the pistol, the blood and the dress, the beauty and the horror that, believe me, the soldiers found it extremely alarming, and even I, who knew her story, stepped back into the doorway of the library. Then she turned again to face Pacheco. From where I stood, I could see both their faces, his full front with that awful bruise where Quatrone had struck him, hers in profile. The candlelight on the shiny chrome of the pistol danced like a live thing.

  Pacheco still seemed triumphant. He had prided himself on being able to anticipate all her actions and now here was something different. Yet that very difference gave him pleasure. Again I had the sense that he had made the evening as a painter might make a canvas. Even when she raised the pistol and pointed it at him, his response was to smile.

  “You won’t shoot me,” he said. His back was to the stairs. I hardly knew where he found the confidence to speak so certainly.

  She kept pointing the gun at him but her hand was trembling and her face began to look strained as if she were attempting to lift a great weight. Had he chosen, Pacheco could have knocked the gun from her hand, she was that close. I wanted her to speak, to charge him for ruining her life and the life of Roberto Collura, to judge and condemn him, to shout out his crime so that Carrera and Quatrone and the soldiers would hear her accusation. Certainly if there had been a trial Pacheco would have been found guilty. After all, lives had been destroyed.

  Instead, she lowered the pistol to her side so the barrel pointed at the floor. Slowly her face began to change again. She started to smile and once more her face took on that joyous quality. She looked happy and youthful. She looked like a girl greeting her lover. Stepping forward, she raised her face, lifting her mouth to be kissed. For the first time Pacheco looked uncertain, but then he too started to smile, partly with relief, but also with love and pleasure, as if the two were a young couple who had been separated and were now together again and reconciled. And he stepped forward to accept her kiss and to embrace her.

  But almost as their lips touched she reached back the hand with the pistol so that it pointed toward the soldiers and Quatrone, and she pulled the trigger. Even for a small gun, the noise was immense in that enclosed marble space. The bullet struck the floor and ricocheted back among Quatrone’s men. Then she fired again and again. Three shots in rapid succession. And Pacheco, instead of grabbing the gun, put one arm around her waist and continued to kiss her. But perhaps he knew he had no time, that everything was over, because as rapidly as Señora Puccini fired the pistol, so did the soldiers respond. One of the young men with Quatrone opened fire with his automatic rifle, then a second and a third. I saw the bullets strike Pacheco. They picked him up and hurled him back into the small pool so that a wave of water splashed out onto the marble floor. Señora Puccini collapsed upon the stairs. We were deafened by the rattle of gunfire.

  Carrera ran forward. “Stop firing!” he shouted. “Put down your weapons!”

  Only a few seconds had passed but the damage was done. I ran forward with the others, pushing the soldiers out of the way. Reaching the fountain, I knelt down on the wet floor. Pacheco was dead. The bullets had struck him in the chest. He lay on his back in the water with his arms outstretched. His eyes were open. I had expected his face to show anger or fear or pain. Instead, he looked as if he were listening to a noise far away, as if someone in the distance had just called his name. I found myself angrily wondering what right he had to look so peaceful. His blood had dyed the water, as if the pool were full of blood, the blood of many people. The goldfish swam through it as calmly as before.

  Señora Puccini had also been hit several times, but she was still alive. With her last strength she was attempting to crawl up the stairs, pushing herself up, dragging herself to the next step, collapsing, then pushing herself up again—one step, two, five, seven. No one attempted to help her. She had dropped the pistol and Quatrone was holding it. We watched Señora Puccini, her light blue dress drenched with blood, the chain of red flowers breaking and scattering around her. But then after a dozen steps she could go no farther. Raising herself up on her arms, she lifted her head so the skin of her neck was stretched tight. She opened her mouth as if to call out, but then she clamped her jaw shut, rolled to her left, and tumbled back down the stairs, head over heels, dead as she fell, rolling half into the pond so that her head and shoulders were in the water and her legs were still on the floor. Her long skirt was pulled up to her thighs and I found myself staring at her bare legs. T
hen I reached forward and pulled it down. Her arm was flung backward and lay across Pacheco’s chest. Her eyes were shut. Did her face look peaceful? It looked black and secretive. Whatever her last feelings, they had disappeared within her. We stood in a semicircle around the pond and looked down at them. Even Quatrone looked amazed and stricken.

  That really was the finish of our evening. The soldiers who had done the shooting certainly couldn’t be blamed. We tried to tell Carrera what had been going on, why Señora Puccini had done what she had done, but it remained a mystery to him. He’d heard that Pacheco had a bad reputation with women and this was a final example of it. As for Quatrone, he didn’t even try to understand. Crazy people doing crazy things, was how he explained it. Dalakis tried to tell him the story but he didn’t want to listen. Not that we were coherent. After all, Pacheco had been our dear friend, and our grief, as well as our horror at the manner of his death, of both their deaths, rendered us, if not speechless, then at least inarticulate.

  Upstairs we found Roberto Collura also dead. Señora Puccini had shot him; the blood on her dress had been his. I imagined her listening to Pacheco’s confession about how he had tried to kill Collura by running him off the road. I imagined her hurrying back to the kitchen and getting the pistol. But then she must have picked the flowers and changed into that blue dress. I couldn’t understand that. Why had she dressed herself like a young woman? I imagined her entering Collura’s room in her blue dress with the necklace of flowers and more flowers in her hair. What did he think, what did she say? She had been wearing lipstick and although I blush to admit it, I looked closely at Collura’s mouth, his lips, his cheeks and forehead, for a trace of that lipstick as if she might have kissed him goodbye. But there was nothing. All I know is that she changed her clothes and entered his room. I don’t even know if he was awake. Yet considering how his blood had covered her dress, I imagined that she had lain down on top of him, giving him one last embrace before putting a bullet in his heart. Then she had fired her pistol into the street from the upstairs balcony. And why did she do that? Again, there is no answer. Perhaps to make the soldiers fire back or to frighten them. Had she already formed her plan to make the soldiers shoot them both? Had she already decided to present Pacheco with that last kiss, the one freely given?

  The single good thing that came out of all this, if that night can be said to have had anything good, is that Colonel Carrera offered to escort the three of us—we old boys—back to our homes. Of course we accepted, having no wish to sleep at Pacheco’s. I wanted to be by myself, far away from these friends of my childhood. Better to hide our grief in the privacy of our own homes.

  I was also just as glad to get away from Malgiolio, who had begun to act in a way which was an embarrassment to Dalakis and myself. Inexplicably, he had begun to laugh. Clasping his arms to his fat belly and doubling over, he had begun to explode with loud hoots. He didn’t say anything and I felt that even he was embarrassed because once he realized that he couldn’t stop, he went into the library and shut the door. But out in the hall, I continued to hear him. It was a high unattractive laugh, almost effeminate, and I could see that the soldiers thought badly of him. I found myself thinking again of his promise as a poet. What a sordid end he had come to.

  Dalakis wept openly, mopping his eyes and uttering great sobs. He also kept asking where Señora Puccini had obtained the pistol. Of course I didn’t speak or admit my knowledge, since I thought it would be misunderstood. Actually, I felt certain that Pacheco had given her the weapon some time in the past. In any case, as I came to realize, Pacheco too had known that Señora Puccini had had the pistol. Therefore I couldn’t be judged for not telling him. He, after all, had orchestrated the evening. I was only part of the stricken audience. It occurred to me that he had even placed the picture of the young Señora Puccini on the mantel just for this occasion, just so we would see it and comment upon it. I tried to ask the cook’s grandson if this were indeed the case but his extreme grief made him unable to give me a coherent answer. As for calling her “Señora,” that too was an example of Pacheco’s constant pressure: the pretense that she was a married woman.

  Before leaving, I went back into the dining room. There were the remains of the cake with its sixteen small figures meant to represent us sixteen old boys, now thirteen with Kress, Schwab, and Pacheco dead. And others dead as well for all I knew on this difficult night. I found the little figure that was meant to be Pacheco—a man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck—and I took it away with me. How grateful I have felt to be able to take the chaos of that evening and order it into a history, to make it digestible. Proud and self-assured, as if my friend were with me still, that small figure has stood attentively to the left of my typewriter in these months following the dinner party as I have composed my history and the city has put itself back together. There have been changes, of course. The old man who sold vegetables from his cart has disappeared and familiar faces are no longer in the news. There is talk of treachery and treason. Still, we have begun to reknit our lives, to make them as they had been before. I have resumed my old habits, my charitable work, and my neighbors continue to think of me as a middle-aged widower who keeps to himself.

  As for that night and the violence in the streets, it remains something of a mystery, an upheaval brought about by a profound dissatisfaction, even unhappiness. Unfortunately, as I have indicated before, I have little interest in politics and so most of the details of that night are vague to me. But still we move forward, the pages are daily ripped from the calendars. Happily, the next dinner is almost upon us. This time the host will be Julio Hernandez, the priest. Does it seem so odd that already I am looking forward to seeing my old friends once again?

  But my last act at Pacheco’s was to lift the carving knife and cut another piece of that divine cake. Taking one of the blue linen napkins, I wrapped the cake within it and slipped it into my jacket pocket so that I could better enjoy it within the solitude of my own home. Then I took another slice, meaning only to touch a few crumbs to my lips, but that proved impossible and I ate the whole piece from my hand as the pink crumbs and bits of strawberry cascaded down my jacket and shirt front, just pushing it into my mouth, eating more like Malgiolio or Schwab than in my normal manner. Even though the sugar was like poison to me, I couldn’t help myself. That cake was so good, so sweet.

  About the Author

  Stephen Dobyns is the author of more than thirty novels and poetry collections, including The Church of Dead Girls, Cold Dog Soup, Cemetery Nights, and The Burn Palace. Among his many honors are a Melville Cane Award, Pushcart Prizes, a National Poetry Series prize, and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. His novels have been translated into twenty languages, and his poetry has appeared in the Best American Poems anthology. Dobyns teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College and has taught at the University of Iowa, Sarah Lawrence College, and Syracuse University.

  Looking for more?

  Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.

  Discover your next great read!