The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  “Forgive me,” said Valdez, “my experience is so limited. I had only one father and yet, as you say, so many of them seem to disappear. Fathers, sons, uncles, daughters. All of them here one day and vanished the next but, as you say, they all have secrets. I imagine there must be an entire city of vanished fathers, living happily with their mistresses, perhaps just across the Merino.”

  The policeman hooked an ice cube from his glass with two fingers and crunched it. “You should make that place the setting for your next novel,” he said. “After you finish this one, of course. I hear it progresses well.”

  “It progresses,” said Valdez with a nod. “Will you be spending the rest of the evening here?”

  “I think so, yes,” said Camillo. “I think that tall one deserves another lesson. You?”

  “I’m afraid I must be going.”

  Camillo made no attempt to rise. “Be sure to remember me to your mother,” he said.

  “Remember me to your mother too—since you’re staying,” said Mr. Valdez, but he waited until he was back in the square before he said it.

  He was very, very angry. He wanted a woman and he had been chased away by the Commandante like a naughty schoolboy, seen off, charged down by the big bull because he refused to rise to the challenge and lock horns, because he declined to see which of them might—might what? Was Camillo expecting the girls of the Ottavio House to give marks out of ten?

  Mr. Valdez stopped under a street lamp at the corner where the square met Cristobal Avenue. He scratched a long match off the rough stucco of the house front and lit a cigar, inhaled deeply.

  He looked west, back toward his home just around the corner. He looked east, far away toward where Cristobal Avenue ran out in the Square of the September Revolution. Tonight was not the night for Madame Ottavio’s. Not tonight, just in case. He would take a stroll, find something to eat, talk books in that nice bar by the university and, perhaps, drink a brandy in the Phoenix before bed.

  IS IT NOT astonishing that, in a world full of icebergs, none of us ever sees the one looming toward his own ship? Far away to the north, after creeping millennia of travel, crawling its way over the pole, the ice finally reaches the sea, finally breaks free, and floats away. There are still perhaps thousands of miles of open ocean between us and it, thousands of miles of random winds and waves and invisible currents. If that iceberg broke off ten minutes later, if we left port ten minutes earlier, nothing would happen, but instead, always, unerringly, unfailingly, we on our fragile ship and the frozen, dripping, disappearing iceberg meet in the one place where we can destroy one another. That was how it was with Mr. L.H. Valdez, literato, amorato, celebrato, and with Caterina. Who can say which of them was the ship and which the iceberg? It hardly matters. Each of them was destroyed, both were wrecked, and it could so easily have been otherwise.

  Poor Caterina. Almost like a character from a novel by L.H. Valdez, she found she had a gift for sobbing. But, unlike Mr. Valdez, Caterina was more and more convinced that she was going insane. There could be no other explanation. She had felt it creeping up on her for days—since Mr. Valdez presented himself at the till in the Phoenix and she had made such an effort to be pleasant and polite but no more than that because he was so amazing and so wonderful and so terrifying and he frightened her so much. And then there was that stupid business with the note, that stupid “I write” nonsense—as if he would care!

  Mad, all of it pure madness, but then, that morning, in the corridor, the maddest madness of all. Pure distilled lunacy. Caterina slumped backward in her chair, thumping her temples with the heels of her hands. What had she been thinking? How? Why? Every boy in class had wanted to get into her bed at one time or another. They had tried everything short of simply handing over their wallets.

  “And I know why!” she said.

  None of it worked. She didn’t want to. She wasn’t going to. Not with them. But then he’d been there, in the corridor, in his suit, smart and older and clever and she just felt it. She just turned round and saw him and felt it. And then she said it. Said that. What had possessed her?

  And what if he told the Dean? Or Dr. Cochrane? He’d be within his rights. He could have her flung off the course and, even if he didn’t, he’d talk. Word would get out about that little tart on the math course. Everybody would know. They’d speak of nothing else over coffee in the Phoenix.

  “Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. The Phoenix! I’ll lose my job.”

  She was done for. Without that job and the little bit of money it brought she would have to leave the university and go home to the farm. And her brother would hate her for wasting her chance, hate her for coming home to eat, hate her for being alive, and then she would have to get a job shelling beans or slaughtering chickens until she found a bean sheller or a chicken killer to marry. “And they’ll come,” she said. “Just for a chance to get their hands on these.” She hugged herself and rocked on the chair.

  Men. Stupid shallow bastards. Show them a nice pair of tits and they’ll say anything, do anything, promise anything for a chance to crawl back into the cradle and play with them.

  “But not L.H. Valdez.”

  Caterina knew he could have any woman he wanted. Sophisticated society salonistes, dancers, movie stars, journalists, critics, professors—the wives of professors. He could have any of them and when some young girl, barely out of her teens, offered to lie down and part her thighs, right there in the corridor outside the toilets, he didn’t even notice. That’s how wonderful he was. He just walked right by as if he’d never heard. That was the kind of man he was. The boys from class would have grabbed her and done it right there on the floor, just so they could tell their mates, but not Mr. L.H. Valdez. He had tried to save her blushes and pretend that he never even noticed she was there, so good and kind was he.

  “God damn you, L.H. Valdez!” she screamed and she folded her arms across her wonderful breasts again and rocked in her chair and sobbed, her hair hiding her face, she rocked and sobbed and cried until with a child’s grace, the rhythms of all three converged and she fell sleep.

  If Caterina had stayed there, hunched in that chair, sleeping crick-necked until morning, all might have been well. But instead, when Erica from across the landing knocked on her door and announced that it was time to go out, she once more damned the name of L.H. Valdez and washed her face and painted her lips and went.

  And, if Mr. Valdez had chosen to ignore the threatening whisper of failure—for that was what it was—if, instead of leaving Madame Ottavio’s (where six of the eight girls who worked there were only then arriving for the evening), he had stayed and made at least one of those girls very, very happy, how much different might life have been?

  WHEN MR. VALDEZ had walked the entire length of Cristobal Avenue, tugging on his cigar until its rich demerara smoke had soothed and calmed him and made him, once more, invincible, he found the newly named Square of the September Revolution empty and abandoned. It was a “between time.” People who had gone out for the evening had already gone and now they were comfortable and happy in this bar or that café. Maybe, in an hour or two, when it was time to go home, when it was time to stroll with a lover or brawl with a rival or walk home, alone and rejected for another night, then the square would be busy again, but for now it was silent except for the click of his heels on the chessboard tiles alongside the river and the three toots of the flag-changing party on the evening ferry.

  The green cross was flashing slowly above the chemist’s shop on the corner, as if there were never quite enough current in the wires to sustain its glow. It fizzed and buzzed as Mr. Valdez passed beneath it and into the shadows of the little calle that hid the doors of the Phoenix. And they were, truly, almost hidden. There were so many little, hidden places like this all over town, little bars, perfectly respectable cafés, even tiny chapels with secret, jewel-box interiors where the Consecrated Host, the actual physical presence of God, was exposed and old ladies prayed behind secret doors, camouflage
d and made invisible by dreariness. Only an expert could find them, only a native who knew the city as well as the blue-haired Indians knew their way from tree to tree through the jungle.

  So much was hidden and yet Madame Ottavio’s stood brazenly in its square, unabashed, concealing nothing, as naked as the girls inside. Mr. Valdez looked at his watch. He considered walking back there. It was still early. There was no reason why not. By the time he got there Camillo would probably have left.

  But he might still be there. Or he might be leaving just as Valdez arrived. They might meet.

  Mr. Valdez pushed on the door of the Phoenix, swung it open and went down the stairs.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have sex?” he asked himself.

  “I would,” he said. Yes, he thought he probably would. Asked to choose between a coffee in the Phoenix or sex, he would almost certainly choose sex but, asked to choose between an evening in the Phoenix or admitting that he had run away from Camillo, well, his mind was already made up. He would rather have coffee.

  They called his name the moment he set foot in the room—that same bunch from the university, still sitting round, goading one another.

  “Valdez, Valdez! Over here. Come on—settle an argument. You’re an expert.”

  He sat down. “What?”

  “The Odyssey or Don Quixote?”

  “What?”

  “Which is better?”

  “What?”

  “Well, it’s a simple enough question. Which is better?”

  “I say it’s Don Quixote,” said De Silva, “and Father Gonzalez agrees with me but Costa says …”

  “I can speak for myself.”

  “Costa—who’s been in a boat once—says that long, weary Ancient Greek tour guide is better literature.”

  “We’ll stick by your decision,” said Costa. “Whatever you say.”

  “I don’t care,” he said.

  They looked at him.

  “I don’t care. Who cares? How could you care? Is this the best you’ve got to do on a Saturday night? Is it? Just to sit here picking away at things? It doesn’t matter. None of you is ever going to write the Odyssey and none of you is ever going to write Don Quixote.”

  “Well, we’re all very sorry we’re not in your league.”

  “Oh, shut up, Costa. That’s not the point. I’m never going to write Don Quixote either. That’s not the point.”

  “So what’s the point? Come on, tell us.”

  “Well, it’s not this. Not this pointless jabber. Look, wouldn’t you rather have …” and then he couldn’t say it. He almost said it but, before he could say it, he stopped for half a breath and his courage failed him, the moment passed.

  “You seem upset,” said Father Gonzalez. “Everything all right, Chano?”

  “I’m fine,” he said but it sounded snappy and ill-natured when it was a chance to sound frail and tired and winning. Mr. Valdez knew he had broken the rules of the group and failed to play the role they had given him too long ago to remember. There was a hierarchy. They wanted to defer to him. They wanted to confect these stupid, candy-floss arguments about damn all and hold them up for his approval like little boys coming home from school, carrying something ghastly and gaudy for their mothers to swoon over. And he’d let them down. Instead of taking their pointless argument and holding it up to the light and saying how pretty it was, he had crumpled it up and dropped it in the bin.

  “Look, wouldn’t you rather have a brandy?” he said. “I’ll stand us all a brandy,” and he made that gesture again, raising his hand high in blessing, like a Pope, like a matador in the ring, and he called out to the waiter: “Brandies here. Four brandies and coffee. And make them large ones.”

  So that was how he made things right, by pouring brandy into them and pontificating mightily on Homer and Cervantes.

  Years later when they talked about that night—and they often talked about that night—De Silva would point to that table in the corner and say: “That’s where we were sitting, all of us, the old gang, drinking brandy at that very table. Me, Costa there, Father Gonzalez there and L.H. Valdez sitting next to him right there—in that very chair.” He said it as if he were one of Father Gonzalez’s brother Jesuits, attesting the authenticity of a holy relic, as if that worn old chair could be bound round with red string and sealed under wax, stamped with a bishop’s insignum and venerated forever by students of literature while they, his friends, basked in the glow of having known him.

  “That was where we were sitting, just talking about nothing in particular, when the girl came in.”

  They were on their third glass of brandy by that time although, when Costa and De Silva bought a round, they did not buy doubles. They were on their third glass of brandy and laughing again, their awkward little quarrel all forgotten, when the door opened and Erica came into the room. Nobody noticed. Nothing happened. And then, just a pace behind, came Caterina and the whole place changed.

  A bunch of kids at a big table over by the kitchen doors started shouting and screaming and waving and Erica smiled and started to squeeze her way between the chairs to join them, although she must have known they were not screaming for her. She must have known because, even after she sat down, they kept shouting and howling for Caterina to come and join the party, but Caterina had stopped by the door. The moment she arrived she had spotted Valdez. She saw him and hesitated—nearly fled—but that would have been even worse so, instead, she pretended not to have noticed him and looked away at some far corner of the room and went to join her friends.

  “We all saw her,” De Silva said. “She was the sort of girl you looked at. She came into a room and people noticed. Of course we had no idea. Not then. In fact, I think she went up to that other table and kissed a boy. She did.”

  De Silva remembered that and added it to the story. It was there the next time and, whenever he told it again, he remembered to include it as a perfect little eyewitness detail—the sort of thing that would make his Gospel believed, the sort of thing that was written down and added to magazine interviews and dissertations, the sort of thing that got him a lot of free drinks when he was an old man.

  Caterina kissed a boy and she kissed him for longer than friendliness demanded and then she looked across to the other corner of the room, just to make sure that everybody had noticed. They noticed. They looked at her with angry, envious eyes and wished. She saw it and smiled, took the boy’s glass from his hand, just as he was about to drink, and finished his wine.

  “Get me some more,” she said and he obeyed her meekly. While he was gone she gabbled with Erica and the others, looking back over her shoulder, watching them watching her.

  They turned away, the others. They were dazzled by the glow of her. But not Valdez. He lifted his brandy glass to his nose and looked at her across it, letting the fumes fill him and counting, silently, inwardly. One, two, measuring his breathing, three, four. She dropped his gaze after “five.” When he reached “eight” she glanced back and found him still fixed on her. After two more heartbeats she looked away again.

  “I have her,” he thought.

  Mr. Valdez took out his wallet and removed a card. Behind him Gonzalez and De Silva and Costa were laughing. He looked over his shoulder at them. They were trying so hard not to look at the girl that they did not dare look in his direction. Mr. Valdez took out his pen and he wrote on the card.

  WHEN COSTA REACHED across his desk, pushed aside the pile of papers and answered the telephone that was ringing under them, he said: “Classics, hello.”

  There was no reply.

  When he said it again, and when there was still no reply, he hung up. “I’ve served my country,” he said. “You can’t tell me about patriotism. Don’t talk to me about loyalty. I won’t do this.” But, like Valdez walking out of the whorehouse, he waited until he had replaced the pile of papers before he said it.

  When the telephone rang a few seconds later in an office on the other side of the building, Father Gonzalez ans
wered it and said: “Department of History,” and when nobody answered he knew who was there.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  There was an electric muttering in his ear.

  “But you said …”

  “No.”

  “I have no idea. Please believe me.”

  “You said the last time.”

  “He was with that girl.”

  “Yes, that girl. Yes.”

  “Dr. Cochrane’s class, yes.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know. How would I know?”

  “He doesn’t take me into his confidence in these matters. He has rather more taste.”

  “No, not even in the confessional. Mr. Valdez has never made his confession to me and not even you could make me repeat it if he had. Not even you.”

  Dear God, he prayed, give me the strength to make that true.

  “All I know is what I saw. The place was packed. I’m not telling you anything that dozens of other people couldn’t tell you.”

  Father Gonzalez found himself wondering how many of those dozens of others had received a call like this today, how many might, how many would find the courage not to answer.

  “He bought us a brandy—me a brandy.”

  “No, I meant ‘me.’”

  “No, there was nobody else with us.”

  “Nobody, just Valdez and me.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Yes, all right. Yes, Costa and De Silva, yes.”

  “Yes, both at the university.”

  I am not alone, thought Father Gonzalez, not the only one, perhaps not the weakest. Who else? De Silva, Costa, a waiter? Perhaps one of those boys at the other table? All of them, any of them. The child herself?

  “I have no idea.”

  “I’m not. I’m trying to be helpful. Please believe me.”

  “Thank you.”