The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  De Silva gave his hand a friendly pat and said: “Best not to think about it. They ask too much of you, those clerical bastards with their stupid rules. Better just to cut your balls off than make you wear them and never use them. Best not to think of it.”

  Around the table they looked at one another like men discovered in something shameful and they looked again and studied the backs of their hands, except for Dr. Cochrane, who was too old or too weak or too stupid to feel the electricity of her passing.

  “Pretty girl,” he said. “The waitress. Did you notice her? Quite pretty.”

  They looked at him as if he were an idiot.

  “Caterina. That’s her name. One of my best students. I’m surprised to see her here but I suppose she’s hard up, needs a little money, like the rest of us.”

  All of them, except Dr. Cochrane himself and, perhaps, the priest, heard those words, “hard up, needs a little money,” and, for a moment, thought exactly the same thing. Valdez was the first to drive the notion from his head. Anything that could be bought with coin could never truly be his, and he had already decided that he must possess this Caterina completely.

  “She seems to know you, Valdez,” said the doctor.

  “Yes. I can’t think how.” From the far end of the table the others looked at him enviously.

  “Like me, she is an aficionada, I’m afraid. Whenever she comes into class there’s always one of your novels piled on the top of her textbooks. This week it’s The Fisherman Chavez, I think.”

  Mr. Valdez held his empty notebook a little more tightly, until he felt the yellow paper start to squeak under his fingers. “Really?” That was all he managed to say before Father Gonzalez made a face like a simpleton again.

  “Oh, God,” he said, “she’s coming back.”

  The others stiffened, afraid to follow his gaze. They sat, facing inwards across the table at Dr. Cochrane, who smiled a welcome to her. Even when she put the cups down on the table—“Coffee, coffee, coffee and your rolls, Dr. Cochrane. Ham. The eggs. Coffee for you, Mr. Valdez”—even then they sat rigid in their places, terrified to move when she passed so close in case (Oh, please God, let it happen—no, don’t) some part of her might brush some part of them.

  “Let me know if there’s anything else,” she said, and left.

  They all turned to watch her go and De Silva made a hungry growl. “Let me know if there’s anything else? Dear God, I can think of a few things. You know, I’ve seen shows where they charge money to watch and I’m telling you it’s nothing—nothing!—compared with her just walking across the room.” He seemed to realize he had said too much and shrugged apologetically. “Of course, that was when I was in the Navy,” he said.

  “Of course, that was when we had a navy,” said Costa.

  “We’ve still got a navy.”

  “So all we need now is a coast.”

  “We’ll get it back. Those bastards can’t hang on to it forever. Next time they start something, we’ll get it back. Señor Colonel the President isn’t going to take any crap from that bunch of sheep-shaggers. I’m telling you. Five years—at the most—and we’ll get the coast back and then you’ll be glad we kept the Navy.”

  Costa said nothing.

  “You will! I’m telling you.”

  Costa was trying not to laugh.

  De Silva glanced down at the chessboard, coiled his finger against his thumb and flicked his king over. “Aww, shut up and drink your coffee,” he said.

  “Our friend is right,” said Dr. Cochrane, shoveling eggs eagerly. “The survival of our Navy is essential to the survival of our national pride. Ours is a nation with seawater in its veins. The waves of our stolen coast truly lap at the edges of our most distant jungle clearings and wash even the heights of our snowy mountains.”

  “Are you getting this down?” De Silva asked from the corner but, before anybody could reply, Dr. Cochrane had begun again, talking proudly of “my glorious ancestor, the Admiral,” and the national destiny.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t stay,” said Valdez. “Enjoy your coffee, gentlemen. My treat,” and, nodding to Father Gonzalez because his mother had engrained in him a proper respect for the clergy, he stood up and turned toward the door.

  The coffee he hurried to finish had scalded his mouth and he was painfully aware that a single, dark brown spot stained his shirt front just above the pocket, but he had noticed Caterina sitting at the cash desk and decided.

  She did not look up as he approached and that suited him. Mr. Valdez was uncertain how he would have responded if she had turned those eyes upon him.

  Even when he put his yellow notebook down on the counter and reached for his wallet, she still ignored him, flicking her pencil over some quick arithmetic on her order pad. That suited him too. He had some time to breathe her in, taste the glory of her.

  Mr. Valdez felt five seconds pass, or maybe just two, and in that time he suffered a revelation. He saw—and he knew for certain he was the first man who had ever seen this—a halo of pearl that glowed around the girl’s body. It was a thing of quite extraordinary loveliness, a thing he had seen only once before in his life, and then only in a picture. It mimicked exactly the almost invisible, shimmering aura that Velazquez had painted around the invitational ass of his Venus as she flaunted herself on a couch of silken drapes. It meant “sex,” the holiness of it, the sacrament of pleasure and lust and heat. Mr. Valdez had imagined it was a beautiful conceit but, no, it had been real all along, perhaps visible only to a fellow artist but undeniable, nonetheless. And, though it glowed only from the delicious, welcoming, bounce-some backside of the goddess, it whipped and curled around every portion of Caterina. He saw it and, in that—one and two, breathe in and out—moment, Mr. Valdez knew that he must bathe himself in that glow, that it would make him a man again, complete him and, finally, break the dam that was holding back his words.

  Caterina finished her sums and put down her pad.

  “I’d like to pay now,” said Valdez.

  She pulled a piece of thick, pulpy paper from a clip at the side of the cash drawer, ran her finger down it and said: “I think that’s right,” as she handed it to him.

  Valdez was almost afraid to touch it, as if, having touched her, it might spark fire from his skin. He didn’t bother to read it but simply folded it up inside a large note.

  “Keep the change,” he said, “Caterina.”

  She was shocked. “It’s too much. Half of that would be too much.”

  “No, no. Please permit it. Dr. Cochrane told us you are one of his best students and working to pay your bills. That is to be encouraged.”

  “You’re kind. Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” he said. His mind was tumbling over itself. Had he done enough to make an impression? Would a moment longer be too much? But she already knew of him. She was an aficionada, Cochrane said. She knew his name. So, was she disappointed to meet him face to face? Had he made himself ridiculous? How long could he keep looking at that beautiful face without kissing it or worse yet, letting his eyes wander to there, or there or, NO!

  “Well, I must be going,” he said.

  She only smiled a little and nodded weakly and said: “Yes,” and “Thank you,” again.

  Mr. Valdez picked up his notebook, with the front cover firmly closed. “The university. Work. You know. Perhaps I’ll see you there.”

  She nodded and Valdez stepped out the door and into the little calle. He had gone only a few steps into the street and his eyes were still adjusting to the sunshine when he heard the door of the Phoenix bang and the girl appeared at his side.

  She was holding out a piece of paper, like a relay runner, ready to pass it on, fast, with no touching. “Mr. Valdez, your receipt! You left your receipt!” She pressed it into his hand and, before he could say anything, she fled back to the café.

  Valdez looked down at the paper in his hand. It was blank except for two words in pencil: “I write.”

  MR. L.H. VALDEZ, th
e celebrated author, the pole star around which the rest of the faculty rotated, who had already willed his desk to the national museum, whose portrait—wearing a snow-white Panama hat of distinctive style—appeared in the windows of no fewer than fourteen bookshops in the capital, was due to lecture on Shakespeare. The Sonnets. That morning he would explain, not poetry, of which he knew almost nothing, but obsessive love, of which he knew even less outside the pages of his novels. That mattered little. Like all teachers, he need be only one lesson ahead of his pupils and he was smug behind a carapace of reputation.

  The lecture bored him. He had delivered it so many times before that he knew it by heart, spotted the signposts that indicated this wise observation, that witty insight or pointed the way to a long avenue of brilliant wordsmithing and on to his heart-breakingly beautiful conclusion.

  He recited without incident and stood before the students like a confident tennis pro, facing the children of the beginners’ class, forcing them to squint into the sun and effortlessly batting away expected, predictable questions. And nothing that he said, nothing that he quoted, nothing that he read aloud was half so important as those two words, scrawled down with a blunt, gray pencil on a scrap of damp paper.

  I write.

  He could feel that tiny sentence burning its way through the leather of his wallet, through his shirt, through his flesh until it burrowed between his bones and into his heart.

  I write.

  “I write,” he thought. “I write too.” But that was not quite true. “I wrote.” That would be more accurate. “I wrote this and this and this and I will write. I will write again.”

  While he stood, regurgitating the old lie that Shakespeare was by no means unnatural in his appetites, that the experience of intense male friendship can be found everywhere in literature from the Iliad to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Mr. L.H. Valdez decided to turn his critical eye fully on Caterina’s note.

  “I write.”

  Not the shortest sentence it was possible to create but pretty near. Impersonal, in spite of the aggressive personal pronoun, something René Magritte might have inscribed on the side of a pencil: “I write” or “This is not a writer,” either would do. A bald statement of fact, then?

  No, not that. The author of this piece did not intend to convey simply that she makes marks on a page. One could not infer “shopping lists” as the next phrase in the sentence. No, a confession of that magnitude could be followed only by a word of great moment: “stories” or “poetry.”

  And yet—he wanted to stop wasting his words on Shakespeare and direct the class instead to study the epic that was glowing inside his wallet—she had chosen not to say more.

  In the lecture inside his head, the lecture not given, Mr. Valdez pointed out that the sensitive critic can reveal as much from what is not said as from what is. In this case the author had said: “I write.” She had not said: “too.”

  This was a message addressed to the foremost author of his generation. How could she have written “too”? That would be to put herself on a level with him. Impossible. Unthinkable. But it was still a message semaphored from the foothills to the mountaintops, a flag waved, a rocket sent up to say: “See me. Notice me, please.”

  She was so far below as to be almost out of sight and she had no idea that, up on the summit, he had already begun to slide down the far side, clutching at rocks as he fell, tearing his hands open, kicking up pebbles, scrabbling.

  I write. She meant it as a plea for attention. For a man clinging on over an empty chasm, it sounded like a promise of rescue.

  WHEN HE LEFT the lecture hall at a little after noon, Mr. Valdez walked across the courtyard that separates the Faculty of Arts from Modern Languages. The long, narrow lawns of coarse grass, imitations of something someone had once seen in a mezzotint of a Cambridge college, were always kept green and damp. Water trickled off between their brick edges and soaked into the yellow gravel paths where laburnum trees—another affectation—cast a feathery shade on the park benches that lined the way. Mr. Valdez hated those benches. Their brass plaques offended him. He thought them tasteless. He thought them pointless. He thought them silly and, above all, tedious.

  “In Memory of Professor So-and-So” or “An Affectionate Tribute to Dr. Such-and-Such.” Ghastly. Better no monument at all than a park bench left outside for pigeons to shit on while cigarette butts piled up around the legs. Mr. Valdez shuddered at the thought.

  He looked at those benches as the natives of the interior looked at cameras, as if they somehow held the power to capture a man’s soul, as if the nobodies they commemorated were denied even the oblivion of erasure and, instead, faced their eternity disturbed by an intermittent chorus of questioning “Who?”s.

  Mr. Valdez sprang up the three stone steps at the end of the path, little dusty bits of gravel crunching under the thin soles of his expensive shoes, and pushed open the double doors that lead into Modern Languages. He stood for a moment in the empty corridor, listening.

  When he heard voices in the staffroom he walked on through the brown corridor and out of the matching doors at the other end into the sunshine of the street. He wanted coffee, not conversation, so he crossed the road and sat down at a table in front of Bar America where the waiters were quick and efficient, which he liked, and where they never asked about his books, which he liked even better.

  They brought him a double espresso and, without his asking, a glass of water that stood sweating blue beads on a saucer of its own. It was a quality establishment. The water would be safe to drink. After a polite nod, the waiter retreated indoors to the shade and Mr. Valdez heard the electric gabble of a sports broadcast murmuring faintly behind.

  He put his hand on his yellow notebook and considered opening the cover. He lifted his hand again and reached inside his jacket for a pen, took off the cap, gripped the pen between his teeth just as he had done that morning and opened the notebook. He sat there like that for quite some time, writing nothing.

  Not a word.

  For a long time.

  Mr. Valdez was very angry with himself. He knew that his failure to write was nothing more than a failure of will, a moral failure, a deliberate act of laziness and cowardice and stupidity, and it could be overcome by the simple act of writing something. He looked out into the street and he saw a yellow cat, belly down, slinky, hurrying out from the shade of a parked car.

  “The yellow cat crossed the road,” he wrote. Six words. He examined them. They were not enough. They said nothing. Why did the yellow cat cross the road? Whose cat was it? Where was it going? How could a cat crossing the road become a novel? The whole idea was madness. Six words of rubbish. He looked again and made a little arrow, upward, through the line between “The” and “yellow.”

  Then he added “tawny” and looked again, like an artist stepping back from his canvas. “The tawny yellow cat crossed the road.” It was coming on.

  He clamped the pen between his teeth and pondered and then, in a fit of inspiration, he wrote “scrawny.”

  The scrawny, tawny, yellow cat crossed the road.

  He decided on a hyphen. “Scrawny-tawny.” He liked that. Then he hated it. Dismal, pathetic, affected, purple nonsense. Mr. Valdez scratched his pen angrily through “tawny.”

  The scrawny yellow cat crossed the road.

  He began to wonder if he had meant to say that, if he might not have scratched out the wrong word. Scrawny. Tawny. Scrawny? Tawny?

  Mr. Valdez took a sip of coffee. He leaned over his notebook with his head propped on his elbow, fighting down the rage and panic and frustration that were already boiling in his chest. He was close to tears with fury.

  Mr. Valdez leaned back in his chair and drew his hands down his face with a tired sigh. When he took them away again and opened his eyes, a woman was standing just on the other side of his table.

  “Hello, Chano,” she said.

  “Good afternoon, Maria. You look well.” She did.

  Kitten he
els, a simple, scoop-necked dress of burned-orange linen that set off her tanned arms and picked up the colors of her necklace. It was perhaps a bit tight over the swell of her hips. Mr. Valdez realized a little sadly that, in a year or two, maybe three, Maria would be past her best. But, for now, she smoldered. She always wore clothes of brown or, more truly, clothes of browns. Crocus yellow and amber, cream and ivory—which are all, whatever you might think, brown—right through to the black of licorice which is still, if you look closely enough, brown. She had a long, narrow silk scarf, all in pleats of alternate coffee and cream and fringed with tassels of wild pearls, and she wore jewelry that was designed to scandalize—stuff that looked as if it came from a school workshop in the Indian missions; polished shells and seeds strung on leather cords. If she had arrived for coffee with a shrunken head on a necklace, no one would have turned a hair and all the women would have hurried home and screamed until their husbands got them a shrunken head too.

  She wore those things, that rubbish, all the time, even in bed, even when she was naked. And when she was clothed they made her look naked, like the priestess of some jungle cult, waiting to receive her worshippers, ready to bathe in the gore of a blood sacrifice.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down?” she said. There was a hint of a pout on her full lips.

  “Of course,” Mr. Valdez stood up and offered a chair. “You must let me get you something. What would you like?”

  “Just hot water and lemon. I must watch my figure.”

  Mr. Valdez signaled to the waiter with a two-fingered gesture like a Papal blessing.

  Maria looked put out. “That was your chance to say something gallant, Chano. I say ‘I must watch my figure’ and you say how lovely it is or how every man in the city is doing that for me or ‘Oh, no. Let me.’ Honestly, darling, it’s no use if I have to invent my own compliments.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was distracted.”

  “The book, I suppose. How’s it coming along?” Her dress gaped prettily as she leaned over the table to look at his notebook—which he casually flipped shut.