“I don’t know. All I know is he sat with us for a while and then he went and joined her.”
“No, there was no falling out. Well, perhaps a little. But that was all forgotten by then. We were all getting on and then he just left.”
“I didn’t say he left the café, did I? Did I say that? You’re trying to trip me up.”
“No. He left our table. Yes, our table. Me and Costa and De Silva. He just got up with no word and went to the girl’s table. He didn’t say ‘goodbye’ or ‘good evening’ or ‘excuse me.’ He simply left.”
“Nothing. We just watched.”
“Yes. Pretty much, they welcomed him.”
Of course they welcomed him. It was a mark of triumph to be noticed by L.H. Valdez. Everybody at the university knows L.H. Valdez. People who wouldn’t recognize the captain of the national football team know who L.H. Valdez is. People who don’t know the stars of the telenovelas have heard of L.H. Valdez and, worse still, people who know the telenovelas inside out know him too. There are janitors who swill out the lavatories every day who walk around with cheap copies of his novels folded into the back pockets of their jeans, just in case they catch him having a piss, so they can wait and ask for his autograph. Good God, even the Engineering students have heard of him.
“There was a boy. He was talking to the girl.”
“Yes, that girl.”
“Nothing. Valdez just went and sat on the very end of the bench they were sitting on and he was just sort of perched there, almost falling off the edge. There really wasn’t room for him. He had his leg stuck out to keep himself in place and he put his arm along the back of the bench as if to hold on and he was ignoring the boy, leaning right in front of him and across him to talk to the girl.”
“I didn’t see that.”
“I am telling you the truth. I didn’t see that.”
“No, no card, no message.”
“Fine. If that’s what people tell you, then maybe he did. I have no idea. I didn’t see it.”
“Look, I didn’t spend every moment staring at him. I was with some friends and we were talking of other things. You know these things. You know. I’m trying to help you but our entire conversation is not taken up with a moment-by-moment commentary on what Mr. L.H. Valdez is up to.”
He remembered De Silva leaning in close, talking in what passes for a whisper for people who have had several brandies. “Shh. Say nothing. Don’t look. He’s hitting on the girl with the tits. For God’s sake! I told you not to look. Didn’t I? Didn’t I say that? Costa, you take a look now. What’s he doing, the lucky, lucky bastard?”
And then the girl had leaned across to speak to him.
“It went on like that for a bit and then there was another girl who joined in the conversation and a couple of young men at the far end of the table. Then the boy in the middle got fed up of being talked round and went away.”
“Just the other end of the table.”
“No, he didn’t look pleased.”
“Nothing happened. Valdez and the girl talked. Other people talked with them. Then the other people talked less and less and they talked more and more.”
“I mean they just went away, turned round and spoke to somebody else, got on with other things. It’s as I said; not everybody is quite as obsessed with L.H. Valdez as you appear to be.”
“Are you insane? In the Phoenix? L.H. Valdez? No, he did not.”
“And I’m telling you he did not kiss her. Not when we were there.”
“I have no idea.”
“They may have done, but I don’t know whether they did or not. They were still sitting together on that same bench when we left.”
“De Silva and Costa and me. We all left together. We arrived together and we left together.”
“Home, I suppose.”
“I told you, they were still there.”
“Yes, there were a few. A couple anyway. I don’t know their names. I don’t! They’re not in my classes. Math, I suppose. Dr. Cochrane.”
“I don’t know. Before midnight anyway.”
“No.”
There was a heavy click and the line went dead.
The sun was coming in at the window. Father Gonzalez found that he had spent the entire conversation gazing at that portrait of St. Max Kolbe which hung on the far wall, gazing into those sad eyes behind their round, steel-rimmed glasses, and he knew in his soul that he could have done what Max Kolbe did. If someone had asked him would he take their place in the death cell he could do it and do it gladly. He would wait there, singing and praying, starving to death, dying of thirst, until they came to inject him with carbolic acid. He could do that. He could face the ugliest death. But nobody threatened him with death. They threatened to tell.
Father Gonzalez put down the phone and went back to his marking.
OF COURSE, FATHER Gonzalez had given a truthful account of what had happened that night in the Phoenix. He tried not to, he tried to dissemble about who was there and what they did, but it was pointless. So many people had been there. They saw him, they saw Valdez, they saw the girl. Poor Father Gonzalez could not know which of them was a Judas, he only knew that he was. But, as much as he had struggled to limit himself to a strictly accurate account of events, it could not be a full one. Only the girl and L.H. Valdez knew what L.H. Valdez had said to the girl.
Mr. Valdez remembered it vividly—every word—as he lay in bed at the gray of dawn and mournful tango whispered from the radio by his ear. He remembered how he had made that great leap across the chasm that separated his chair from her bench. She smiled. It was a nervous smile. The boy smiled. He moved up to make room. Mr. Valdez had clung to that bench for exactly thirteen minutes before he succeeded in driving the boy away and he counted each one of them off on his elegant, silver watch as he sat, left arm outstretched along the back of the bench, holding on.
And, when the boy left and there was that gap, that narrow puddle of shiny, trouser-polished wood which she slid across, then his arm stayed there, along the back of the bench, around her. What could be more natural?
“I have something for you.” Mr. Valdez remembered saying it as he kicked back the sheets and let the music drift into his head. Was there music in the Phoenix? He couldn’t recall. There should have been. He painted it into his memory in careful dabs.
“I have something for you,” he said, when the others had noticed there was no place for them in this particular conversation and respectfully, dutifully, withdrawn to the other end of the table.
“I have something for you,” he said. When she looked at him, smiling, wondering, a little afraid, he knew. He reached into his jacket and took from the pocket of his perfect pink shirt, uncreased, not even slightly damp, the cuffs unfrayed, pristine, the links so, so right, a calling card and placed it in her hand.
Caterina looked at it. She looked at him.
He reached gently into her cupped palms and turned it over. He had written: “I write.”
“I felt I should return the compliment,” he said.
She was thrilled. She was smiling. L.H. Valdez concentrated on looking at her lovely smile.
She said: “Mr. Valdez!”
“Please.” He took the card from her in careful fingers and, with his pen, his beautiful, thick, heavy fountain pen, that pen with its broad, gold nib, the very pen that wrote The Old Man of San Tomé, the same pen with which he had written “the scrawny yellow cat crossed the road,” over and over, he scored once through “L.H. Valdez” and, instead, he wrote “Chano.”
She was delighted.
Mr. Valdez found himself thinking of Faust. He had beguiled the woman of his dreams with a casket of jewels dredged up from the pits of Hell. Mr. Valdez managed it with a scrap of cardboard—and not a very special scrap of cardboard either. There were dozens—it must be dozens—just like that one all over town and strewn across the country from here to the capital, all of them carefully marked with that same, unique, spontaneous signature, a deep, black
score and “Chano” repeated uniquely, spontaneously, again and again and again. Sometimes Mr. Valdez wondered what had happened to all those little cards. Some, he felt sure, had finished in confetti when the women who once treasured them noticed that the warm and happy “Chano” had suddenly ended in a dark and final full stop. He could imagine those—the ones a little too close to home, the ones with nothing to lose, no husband, no position, no reputation. Even worse, the ones who were willing to sacrifice all those things, the ones who ignored the rules of that very special game and expected him to do the same. Those were the ones who had to be pulled up short. “It’s been wonderful, darling,” he would tell them, “and I’ll remember this time always, but it would be better if we ended it now and quickly. Don’t call this number again.” Theirs were the calling cards that had been torn to shreds.
But there were others, he liked to think, which were treasured like holy relics, like pressed flowers that still carried the faint scent of a warm, brief summer and delicious afternoons in shady gardens. They were precious souvenirs, taken out of secret places from time to time, touched and kissed by women reverent as nuns who found those little scraps of card stirred memories of times when they had been lewd as harlots. And that was no bad thing, thought Mr. Valdez.
He congratulated himself on the number of dull marriages he had saved, the anguished suicides he had prevented just by a few shared afternoons of love—or something very like it. There were husbands in every bleak little town the length of the Merino who would have woken up one day to find their throats cut but for the kind attentions of Mr. L.H. Valdez and they would bless his name for it if they only knew.
“Yes,” she said, “You write. I know. And now I’m supposed to say ‘So what do you write?’ and you say …” She stopped. She was remembering their conversation outside the toilets, daring him. She had taken a little too much wine. It made her brave. She could not hear the distant cannon crack of the ice sheet shearing off and tumbling into the sea, the iceberg setting off toward her.
Lying in his bed, reliving last night’s adventures, Mr. Valdez gloried in the thrill of it. She was so bold, this Caterina—his Caterina—for now, in that moment, he was more certain than ever that he would have her. She was challenging him, she was inviting him to join the dance.
“Then I say. Then I say …” He was smiling.
“Yes? What do you say?” She could not bring herself to look at him. All the breath seemed to have left her body and she concentrated instead on watching her fingertip as it trailed damply round the edge of her wine glass, “Chano?”
“Then I say: ‘Wouldn’t you rather have sex?’”
She dared to look at him again. “Should I be polite now and pretend not to have heard?”
“I wasn’t being polite. You frightened me.”
“I can hardly believe that. You must have had stupid girls fling themselves at you before now.”
“Not as often as you might imagine.” What a lie. What a storyteller you are, Chano.
They both laughed at that.
“Anyway,” she said, “I decline to answer your improper and impertinent question.”
“And I decline to answer yours.” No, I don’t, he thought. I’ll answer it. You’ll find out soon enough. I’ll show you.
Oh, but not yet. Mr. Valdez could hardly believe how strong he had been, how clever he was, how much he was enjoying not having her. How could there be any pleasure more intense than waiting for this pleasure? He gloried in it: that glass of wine, the next glass of wine, the coffee, a final, large brandy, paying the bill—he had especially enjoyed paying the bill. No counting up of who had what. No dividing it all up. He wasn’t a student. He could afford it and he didn’t have to make a show. Just a glance at the bill, a quick fold of notes and they left together, laughing their way up the stairs and out into the dark warmth of the street. And she was beside him, arm in arm, all the way down Cristobal Avenue, yes, even past the big glass doors of his apartment block, where he was so intent on watching his own reflection that he failed to notice the man in the tight suit walking a little behind, watching, all the way to her little flat where she said it again: “Wouldn’t you rather …?” standing against him with her face turned up to his and her whole body pressed to him.
“I must go,” he said.
“No. Stay. Wouldn’t you rather stay?”
“I must go. Soon. I promise. Soon.”
And then he kissed his own finger and laid it against her warm lips.
“Soon,” he said.
Mr. Valdez walked quickly back up the avenue to his home, and when he arrived Mrs. Marrom was waiting in the marble lobby, swinging her sandal from her toe and flicking angrily through a month-old magazine, pouting.
“Chano, you are so late! Ernesto has been called away to head office and I’m lonely.”
“That’s lucky,” he said. “So am I.”
Out on the avenue, the man in the tight suit wrote a line or two in his notebook and looked at his watch. There were still four hours of his shift to go and that union organizer from the chicken factory down in Cell 7 wasn’t going to knock his own teeth out. He turned and walked back up the street. His feet hurt.
NOBODY ASKED DR. Cochrane to bear witness to that night in the Phoenix. The telephone did not ring on the desk of Dr. Cochrane. If it had, it would have jangled there alone, ringing and ringing pointlessly until the gardeners watering the laburnum trees down in the gardens below tilted their hats and looked up with annoyed frowns, while millions and millions of specks of dust, some of them stirred up from the crumbling textbooks that lined the walls, most of them—as anybody in the Medical Faculty would testify—the jettisoned skin particles of long-forgotten students, danced in the sunbeams streaming through his window.
Dr. Cochrane was not in his office. Dr. Cochrane was not at home. He was not in the Phoenix and he was not strolling, pointlessly, in the gardens of the Ottavio House. Dr. Cochrane had awarded himself a holiday.
He had no lectures to give and there was a large envelope pinned to his door with a note, announcing that he would not be available that day, inviting his students to leave any messages for his later attention. Nobody left any messages.
When the Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics—a man who never expressed any admiration for the late Colonel Presidente, nor made any comment on the present Colonel Presidente—saw the note and tutted his disapproval about 9:30 that morning, Dr. Cochrane was already far away.
A couple of hours earlier, Dr. Cochrane had joined a throng of travelers at the quayside where he was jostled and bumped along the broad gangway of the Merino ferry and up onto the waiting ship. Dr. Cochrane knew the old ferry well.
It delighted him that, just below the stern rail, where lovers liked to lean and watch the churn of the propellers and gaze at the arrow wake streaming away from home, where years of paint had been layered on, as thick as wedding-cake icing, he could still read the words “Hippocampo” and “Glasgow.” It was a Scottish ship, as Scottish as his ancestor the Admiral and perhaps only a little more Scottish than Dr. Cochrane himself.
He often stood at the river’s edge to watch her tie up, waiting for the moment when one more lorry would roll down the clanging iron gangway and shift enough weight onto dry land to let the painted Plimsoll line appear from beneath the green-greasy river water. It showed the captain had faith in his old ship. He knew her. He knew what she could take. He knew she would not let him down. Dr. Cochrane approved of that buccaneering defiance of the rules, just as the old Admiral would have done. But he found it easier to approve when he was safe on shore and not slipping across the oily deck with a host of other passengers, hurrying to claim a place close to the lifebelts. After all, the Merino was very wide.
Dr. Cochrane drove such thoughts from his mind as he tucked his cane under his arm and gripped the handrail which was still, more or less, recognizable under layer upon layer of leprous paint and climbed up the worn metal stairway to the First Class deck.
/>
A strange thing happened to Dr. Cochrane as he climbed those steep stairs.
He seemed to unfold a little when he reached the top deck and, miraculously, he no longer needed his cane. He held it in his fist like a sword, the way the Admiral might have gripped a cutlass as he came storming down an enemy deck. He felt young.
The First Class accommodation was directly under the bridge deck. Lifeboats hung in reassuring garlands around the rails, strung together with tarry ropes and looped with automatic lamps which, the signs claimed, would light on contact with the water. Dr. Cochrane could hear the captain up above, just out of sight, giving his commands in a quiet, confident voice as electric bells clanged and radio speakers squawked their replies.
From far below, through the soles of his shoes, Dr. Cochrane felt the powerful stir of something awakening. At the back of the ship, the water gathered itself into a knot like clotted emeralds, swelled and boiled over, creamed and foamed. Nothing happened. And then, so slowly that at first he doubted his own senses, the ship began to move. Dr. Cochrane watched a yellow beer can trapped in the narrow strip of water between the dockside and the ship. The gap was opening, widening toward the prow, and the suck of water from behind made the can rush toward the back of the boat, spinning through the narrowing gap, turning and tilting, into the shadow of the stern and then, suddenly, plucked down under the water. If he had been a poet, Dr. Cochrane would have found inspiration for a sonnet in that, but he was a mathematician and he followed the can downward in a turmoil of parabolic equations, measuring the rush and swirl of it as it went. And then the gap at the back of the ship opened. Little by little the concrete columns along the dockside began to appear from the stern shadows, the tops of them hung with old tires, huge iron bolts holding the pillars in place, lazy green water surging around them as, at last, the ship lost its grip on the land.
Dr. Cochrane could deceive himself no longer. The ship was moving. He felt sick. He spread his legs and braced himself against the rail and felt his stomach heave. In the bar of the First Class saloon the glasses on the shelf stood without so much as a tremor, the beer in the necks of the bottles was dead level. Dr. Cochrane suffered a surge of shame and promised himself that, for the Admiral’s sake, he would not vomit.
The Love and Death of Caterina Page 6