The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  He breathed out. The click of heels again. She was walking across the room. The door opened. She was in the passage. He let her go two paces before he flung open the door and went out.

  “Oh! Caterina.” He was trying too hard to sound bright and casual. “Nice to see you.”

  She stopped and looked back at him over her shoulder with that automatic smile, so beautiful, so open, so young, so beautiful, so beautiful. And then she recognized him and she changed. Her eyes flicked to the floor for a second and, when she looked up again, she was respectful and deferential.

  “Hello, Mr. Valdez,” she said.

  “Hello.” He had no idea what to say next so he said again: “Nice to see you.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “I got your note.”

  “I put it in your hand.”

  “Yes.” He stopped, remembering the moment. “Yes. So, what do you write?”

  “Oh, stories. Silly stuff, really.”

  “If it matters to you, it’s not silly.” What a lie. He rebuked himself for it. What a storyteller you are, Chano. How much rubbish had he read in his time, bits of nonsense pressed into his hand by hopeless, helpless, driven, desperate amateurs? And he’d thrown all of it into the bucket and told them to stop wasting ink and killing trees for the sake of that drivel. “I’d be delighted to talk about your work. Maybe you’d let me buy you a cup of coffee—and this time I’ll be the one serving you.” He had practiced that little joke over and over and it was only now, saying it to her, that he realized how feeble it sounded.

  She looked at him with something like pity. That was all right. Pity was good—well, not good but it would do if it gave him a foot in the door.

  She seemed to be deciding and then she said: “Coffee? Yes, coffee would be nice. But wouldn’t you rather have sex?”

  “THE SCRAWNY YELLOW cat crossed the road.”

  “The scrawny yellow cat crossed the road.”

  “The scrawny yellow cat crossed the road.”

  Mr. Valdez sat at his desk in front of his open window and wrote until the light finally faded and the street lamps came to life.

  He filled pages but he wrote just one line, those same seven words, over and over, writing, stopping, thinking, imagining that damned cat, where it would go, who owned it, what it would do, who it might see, scoring out, thinking and starting again with “The scrawny yellow cat crossed the road” until he had filled sheets and sheets of beautiful blue paper, page after page of written migraine.

  At last, like a blanket drawn respectfully over the face of a corpse, shadows began to creep across his desk and all the dark, angry lines written in his notebook merged with one another, merged with the evening, quieted and disappeared. Mr. Valdez was relieved. He might easily have reached across his desk and switched on his table lamp, but instead he leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He had done enough. If he measured his work for the day not in words, but in hours, he had done enough. With a gentle pull he removed the cap of his fountain pen, screwed it back into place and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket as it hung on the chair behind him.

  Mr. Valdez closed the cover of his notebook, twined his fingers as if in prayer and rested his hands on his desk. He sighed again.

  Even with the notebook closed, that same sentence kept forming itself in his head, writing itself across the inside of his eyelids over and over, gradually unveiling itself, disappearing in a scrawl of scoring out and starting again. Those same seven words rattled between his ears like the carriage of a typewriter, like a silly tune heard on the wireless at breakfast which lingers in the brain all day long, like the throb of a toothache, like the empty, heavy, aching, itching need for a woman.

  Mr. Valdez looked at his watch. It was not yet 9 o’clock—still rather too early for a visit to Madame Ottavio’s, although on the other hand the girls would be fresh. He could have his pick. No need to wait. No need for all the obvious, unpleasant corollaries that the wait brought with it, the slightly shudder-some, warm-toilet-seat sensations which could be banished only by a matter-of-factness that an artist like Mr. Valdez could never quite muster.

  But Mr. Valdez felt uncertain of himself. He was uneasy. Disturbed. The feeling—was it fear?—had stayed with him all day since the corridor outside the lavatories when he stepped past Caterina and hurried away without a word.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have sex?”

  It thrummed in his head as much as that damned cat.

  When she said that, when she said: “Wouldn’t you rather have sex?” like that, the way she had, Mr. Valdez felt cheated. He had been about to bestow a great treasure on her but, before he could, she had turned and snatched it out of his hands. It was as if she had bared her teeth at him, as if he had carefully tracked some beautiful deer into the forest and then, in a jungle clearing, he had found himself face to face with a snarling jaguar. He had become the hunted. He had become the prey.

  It was an unbeautiful moment played out to the music of flushing urinals. It was not what he had planned.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have sex?”

  What on earth could that mean? Was she mocking him? Was she saying: “I know exactly what you’re after and you’re not getting it”?

  Or was it something worse? Was she simply issuing an invitation as direct as one of Maria’s anonymous postcards? That would be worse. That would be so much worse. That would make her well, what, exactly? An enthusiast?

  Mr. Valdez could hardly complain about that. He was an enthusiast too, an enthusiast for the act itself, for women in general, and for the moment an enthusiast for Caterina in particular. He should be pleased that she shared that enthusiasm.

  Instead, it gnawed at him. Those young boys at the university with their greasy docker’s jackets and their unforgivable haircuts—how many of them had shared her enthusiasm? And they were so young—she was so young! There might be comparisons. She might make comparisons. She was, after all, so very young, perhaps too young to understand, as Maria Marrom did, what an honor it was to have the novelist L.H. Valdez in her bed and he wanted her to realize that. He very much wanted her to realize that, but not to seek it too eagerly—certainly not quite as eagerly as she had.

  Mr. Valdez drew the flat of his hand across his barred and shuttered notebook and listened hard for the sound of words trying to escape. Of course, there was none. If there was a story dammed up in there, he knew the only way to release it was by pouring it out into the body of Caterina. The girls at Madame Ottavio’s could not draw that out of him. They had in the past, but this time the only cure was to bathe himself in the pearl glow of her beauty. It was a need. It was a matter of urgency, like a medical prescription. And then the fear came back. If he could no longer write, then maybe the other thing would fade too. Perhaps he would end like Dr. Cochrane, sipping a brandy in the courtyard of the Ottavio House, walking arm in arm with the girls, telling stories he hoped they would laugh at but never, ever, going upstairs.

  Mr. Valdez stood up and put on his jacket. As he turned the key in the lock, he was smiling. It no longer mattered to him whether Caterina was an enthusiast or not. He had seen that in her which could heal him. It was undamaged. No one else had seen it or touched it. It was still his to take. If Mr. Valdez had met any of his neighbors as he walked down the stairs and into the street, he would have looked perfectly sane—not that Mr. Valdez would have spoken to any of his neighbors about his sanity or anything else.

  He knew no more about them than the nameplates on the letter boxes in the lobby, and that was all he wished to know—although the daughter of that dentist, Dr. Nero, on the second floor had suddenly begun to blossom in unexpected ways. Perhaps later, in a year or two, when he felt better, after he finished the book, he might take her under his wing.

  He pushed open the heavy glass and bronze doors of the lobby and walked out into empty Cristobal Avenue, practicing his polo swing as he walked. And, as he walked, swinging his imaginary mallet, thwacking an invisible ball be
tween two oncoming ponies, dodging them, jinking round them with a shift of his weight in the saddle, a barely perceptible tug on the reins, heading for the goal, curving across the pavement and quoting Omar Khayyam at every stride, tango music drifted from a streetful of different radios, from a kitchen window, from a bar where a dozen unfortunates were waiting for the lottery draw, from a sick room where an old man, as thin as the Host and as brittle, fed soup to his dying wife of thirty years and remembered again dancing alone with Rosita, the girl he should have married.

  The whole street was packed with stories and the scrawny yellow cat of Mr. Valdez might have led him to any one of them, except he had forgotten to listen to any story but his own, to dance to any music but his own, and that music was drawing him on toward the beautiful young girl he would shortly murder.

  The Ottavio House stood in a quiet square just off the avenue. There was a little garden in front with a few trees—Mr. Valdez had never bothered to identify them—which gave cool shade in the daytime. Now, in the evening, they rustled and whispered so there was at least the illusion of a breeze.

  Mr. Valdez liked that garden. It was neat and ordered and he appreciated neatness and order. He liked the pattern of square flower beds that bloomed in succession throughout the season. He liked the railings of wrought iron which mimicked exactly the screens on the windows of the houses in the square. He liked the fine gravel path and the way it was constantly dampened to keep down the dust. Mr. Valdez could walk through that little garden, always careful to swing the gate shut behind him and close it with its iron latch to keep the dogs out, and he could be sure, when he reached the gate at the other side, there would be no speck of dust spoiling the mirror shine of his shoes.

  It was a lovely spot, cool and calm and restful. Mr. Valdez liked to imagine Madame Ottavio’s girls rising late and leaving the house together, walking two by two like nuns, with broad straw hats to keep the sun off their faces and thick canvas gloves protecting hands that must be kept soft for other employment. He liked to think of them together, spending a quiet afternoon tending to the roses and sweeping the paths, laughing together in healthy outdoor recreation before it was time to take off their hats and smocks and start work for the evening.

  Of course that never happened. The little garden was not a labor of love but was kept up by a subscription from every house in the square and the girls from Madame Ottavio’s never worked there. The garden was tended by a beautiful young man who went hatless and shirtless in the heat of the day and clumped round in huge boots and tiny shorts. The girls at Madame Ottavio’s hung from their windows and licked their lips and howled. They whispered to him, called aloud, inviting him in—no charge—just to see if he tasted as good as he looked, but he never came. The young man had a friend, a waiter in the Hotel Imperial. On hot nights they would sit together in the park and touch and kiss.

  Like all the other houses in the square, the Ottavio House was built of soft red bricks and painted over with a thick layer of stucco and painted again according to the tastes of the owners so that, little by little, over the years, the architect’s vision of a single, unified whole had collapsed into a cacophony of clashing shades.

  In the past, Mr. Valdez might have found a rich seam of metaphor there, the painted house sheltering the painted whores, each of them pretending to be something else; a solidly built mansion of stone, a devoted mistress. He might have been able to draw the whole history of the country in the history of the square and watch, on his page, the passage of time as the trees of the jungle river bank were swept away, as the ground was leveled and paved, as the little square was regimented into a gavotte of pillared house-fronts and then, bit by bit, how everything fell apart, how the door hinges sagged and the windows warped and everybody chose a different color of paint or some abandoned paint completely.

  Madame Ottavio did her best to keep up appearances but the last rains had overflowed the gutters on her house and left a damp stain down the front of the building and a cancerous bubbling in the stucco beside the open door.

  The wide entrance hall was empty and, beyond it, the doors stood open to the courtyard where lanterns were hung among the trees and shadowed figures wandered. On warm evenings Madame Ottavio saw to it that the table against the back wall of the garden was loaded with bottles and buckets of ice. There was never any charge for the drinks but they were not free. Everybody understood that the price of everything, from a bottle of champagne to the smallest citron, was added to the bill. Only a very foolish customer would spoil his welcome by visiting too often for a drink without paying for something rather more substantial as well.

  A dry leaf from the tree overhead had fluttered down to lie on the tablecloth. Mr. Valdez picked it off, crumbled it to dust and brushed it from his hands onto the gravel of the garden path. He looked at his palms and, when he was sure they were clean, he took the metal tongs from their place in the bucket and helped himself to a good deal of ice. The broken clumps clunked in the heavy glass, melted for a moment, fused again and spun together in the tumbler. Mr. Valdez did not know—because he had never stopped to ask—that the strange bottles of English lime juice which Madame Ottavio never failed to supply were furnished solely for him. Nobody else ever touched them. None of the other customers would ever have considered it. None would have dared. And, in just the same way as Marrom the banker should have overcome his squeamishness and his righteous anger to glory in the knowledge that L.H. Valdez was his wife’s lover, so Madame Ottavio was honored to indulge him with a little foreign lime juice.

  Mr. Valdez tipped almost half the bottle over the ice rattling in his glass and followed it with a generous measure of gin. It was a silly affectation but one he had enjoyed since university days when he had found the gimlet shining like another green fairy in the pages of Raymond Chandler. Like all green fairies, he found, it had opened the doors of creativity. Perhaps it would again. He hoped it would again.

  Sitting on a plush bench under the back window of the house, Mr. Valdez watched cold beads of moisture sweating on the glass and hoped.

  “The scrawny yellow cat crossed the road and crept into the whorehouse.”

  He was pleased. He had almost doubled his word count and he knew where the cat was going. He patted his pockets, looking for a piece of paper, hunting for his pen, and he was still patting his pockets when the hard wooden chair on the other side of the table moved backward with a scrape.

  “Good evening, Mr. Valdez. Do you mind if I sit down?”

  Mr. Valdez minded very much. There were plenty of other tables in the garden, plenty of other rooms in the house, but the Chief of Police, with his stained and crumpled suit that had once been white, bagged at the knees, bulging at the armpit, was not a man to be refused.

  “Please, Commandante Camillo, sit down.” That was all he said. Short and to the point. No more than politeness deserved. No invitation to indulge in chitchat.

  The policeman sat with his legs flung out in front of him so his large feet stuck out into the gravel path. He was not exactly a hazard to navigation for the couples who strolled quietly through the shaded garden. They could pass him easily and safely enough. Camillo was simply making a statement about his presence, the way a dog does with a lamppost.

  Mr. Valdez saw it and read it as the gesture of a bully, perhaps not even deliberate but the sort of thing a policeman like Camillo would do simply because, for years and years, he has been a policeman like Camillo in a country where policemen like Camillo are permitted to exist. Valdez could almost sympathize with him: never knowing if he had a friend, never knowing if he was loved, never knowing if he were welcome to sit down at a table or simply too terrifying to be turned away, like a customer in a whorehouse who could never leave the whorehouse.

  “I haven’t seen you here before,” said Camillo.

  “Oh, I think you probably have,” said Mr. Valdez. “In fact, I think you probably have a very accurate idea of when I was last here.”

  “Well, I
don’t keep records, you know.”

  “Someone does.”

  “Yes,” said Camillo, “I am almost sure someone does.”

  “Are there many such files?”

  “Must we talk shop?” Camillo gave a bored sigh and shifted in his seat so the butt of a pistol in its brown leather holster showed at his belt. “I suppose we have a few. A few, you know. There are hardly any notables like yourself, Mr. Valdez. A few trade unionists, the odd student radical—of course, colleagues in the capital like to keep an eye on them just in case somebody stops talking about making trouble long enough to make trouble. It’s purely precautionary. If we know what people are doing, we can advise. It allows us to nip things in the bud and, you must understand, what’s good for the hive is good for the bee. But you are not like them. You are not under suspicion. If we are concerned with you, it is only from a fatherly interest. We cherish you. You are a national treasure, Valdez.”

  The “Mr.” had disappeared. He noticed that, tasted it in his mouth for a moment, wondered what it meant, if it was an attempt at friendship or another bullying slap like the unaccidental glimpse of that second pistol.

  Camillo raised his glass so quietly that the ice made no sound. “How is your dear mother?” he asked.

  “I don’t think this is really the place.”

  “No, of course.” Camillo took another long swig and nodded across the garden into the shadows. “Now that one—the tall one—she came here just two weeks ago, no, three weeks ago. Straight off the farm. Way up country. If you haven’t tried her yet, I would. I’d recommend her. But you didn’t tell me; how is your mother?”

  “How do you know my mother?”

  “Did I say I knew her?”

  “But you knew my father.”

  Camillo put down his glass as carefully as he had picked it up. “What makes you say that?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “Fathers do that. They have secrets. They just,” he tiptoed a little two-fingered mannikin along the edge of the table, “they just walk off. They just disappear.”