The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  But nobody, not even a man like Commandante Camillo, can stay angry for four decades and now, coming to work or going out, he forgot that the pictures were even there.

  It was sunny in Plaza Universidad and the smell of blood, mixed with traffic fumes, drifted across the gardens as he walked, slowly, to the bombing. Halfway there, the Commandante spotted a hand which had plowed down a row of orange marigolds and come to rest in one of the formal flower beds. There were screams coming from the far side of the square.

  Commandante Camillo noticed that everything had a shadow, the park benches, the rubbish bins, and as he got closer to the university entrance the shadows deepened. On one side, the side closest to the bomb, things were darker and behind them, behind the slim, cast-iron legs of the benches, behind the ice-cream stand, behind the lampposts, in the shadow, it was lighter. One side dry and clean, one side dark and damp, misted with a spray of blood and tissue, hair, clothing, rucksack, denim, the little copper studs from a pair of jeans, coins, a wallet, a plastic comb, it was all there, somewhere, shredded and minced and sieved as fine as dust and blasted out across the square in a shrieking, angry drizzle.

  Crossing the square, the mist thickened into soup until, at the foot of the broad stone staircase that led up to the university entrance, it had clogged into ragout. And, as Commandante Camillo walked across the square the screams grew louder. Ambulances were jammed in at all angles. They choked the street. They were contaminating the crime scene. Some of them had already left for the hospital. There were tire tracks in the blood.

  Camillo saw one of his detectives slamming the door on an ambulance and waving it out of the square. He raised a hand and beckoned him over.

  “Boss.”

  “You hurt?”

  “No, boss.”

  “You’re covered in blood.”

  “Not mine.”

  “How many dead?”

  “I have no idea. We won’t know until we start matching up the bits but I think there’s about twenty on the way to the hospital and they won’t all live.”

  Camillo was only pretending to listen. He had no need to know how many people were dead. It made no difference to the inquiry and, anyway, it made no difference. It simply made no difference. He took out a big white handkerchief and folded it into a wad and then, with a lover’s tenderness, he wiped it gently across the policeman’s face.

  “Stand still.”

  Over his eyes, across his broad cheekbones, down the long eagle-curve of his Indian’s nose, his mouth, the nub of his chin.

  “Here,” Camillo folded the handkerchief in on itself to find some unbloodied cloth, “wipe your hands.”

  The man obeyed like a child.

  “Noticed anybody unusual?”

  “I’ve been busy, boss.”

  “Anybody watching?”

  “Dozens of them. They stand and watch. They don’t come and help. They don’t rush off to the hospital to give blood. They just stand around here and watch.”

  “Any freaks? Anybody laughing? Anybody standing with his hand down his pants?”

  “Not that I noticed, boss. I was busy. Like I said, I was busy.”

  The last of the ambulances was reversing out of the square. When it reached the junction with University Avenue, the sirens came on and it sped away.

  “OK, son. Go back to the Hall. Get some coffee. Have a smoke.” Camillo patted him on the shoulder and sent him on his way with a gentle shove. He walked on, across the sticky, clotting cement, to where a fat inspector in a crisp uniform was standing, arms more or less outstretched, pretending to hold back the crowd. Camillo approached him stealthily, leaned close to his ear and said: “What are you doing?”

  The man jumped. “Crowd control, boss.”

  “Well, you can stop now. Do you see over there?” Camillo pointed to where the blood was thickest, where there was a black star burned into the concrete like the eye of a poppy, with petals of blood sprayed out from it in every direction, up the steps, across the square, washing the flower beds. “That’s where the bomb went off. I want tapes in a square, fifteen meters on each side. I want you to find a photographer and tell him from me that I want every picture he’s got with faces from the crowd in it. Tell him to take lots more of them until the last rubber-necking bastard has gone home. Don’t point into the crowd, don’t let them see he’s doing it, just make sure we get lots of happy snaps of happy citizens having a nice day out at the bombing. Got that?”

  The man nodded. His jowls trembled a little and his eyes were watery.

  “Good. Hurry it up and then, when you have done that, I want you to go to the,” Camillo pointed, ticking things off in the air, “go to the one, two, three, fourth flower bed along. You will find a hand in it. Pick it up and bring it back here to where the real policemen are working.”

  The inspector threw a salute and waddled away.

  “Run, man! Hurry.”

  The inspector waddled faster.

  Commandante Camillo went back to the bottom of the steps where a man in a suit was walking carefully backward and forward, head bent to the ground, stopping now and then to pick something up with tweezers and drop it in a plastic bag. These bags he numbered and placed in a knapsack and, for every numbered bag, he took out a piece of folded white card, like a name card on a dinner table, and placed it carefully on the ground.

  Camillo stood respectfully a little way off, careful where he put his feet. “Got anything?” he said.

  “There’s not much to get. Bits and pieces, but I don’t know yet what came from the bomb and what was here before. I need to take it back to the lab and wash the blood off it.”

  “Is there nothing you can tell me?”

  “I’m pretty sure it was an own-goal. It went off before it was meant to, while he was carrying it into the university—amateur stuff.”

  “And you’re sure he was headed for the university?”

  “Look at the shape of it. You can see where he was standing. The bomb was in his rucksack, on his back. He was right in front of it. The blast radiated out from there, he soaked it up in that direction. That’s mostly him on the steps. Out like a light.”

  “Time runs more slowly in the dentist’s chair,” said Camillo. He lit up a cigar. “Got any ID?”

  “Be serious. You want to know who he was, go and ask who didn’t turn up for class today.”

  From across the square, four flower beds further back, the police inspector came shambling up. He trotted along with his hands held in front of him, cupped together. He was pale and sweating. His uniform was stained under the arms and creased across the chest.

  He was cradling the severed hand, clipped clean off at the wrist, bled white and without so much as a broken fingernail, holding it flat in the basket formed by his knotted fingers and running with it, the way a child might run with an injured bird, to bring it home, to make it better.

  But, when he arrived, he realized that he had no idea what to do. He stretched out his arms a little, offering the hand like a gift to Camillo.

  The inspector said: “Sir?” and Camillo turned to the man with the tweezers and said: “Oh, for God’s sake, give him one of your bags.”

  The inspector bent down and pulled his fingers apart so the hand fell, gently, to the ground. Then he took the bag, opened it carefully and threw up in it.

  CATERINA WAS NOT at class that morning. When the bomb exploded in Plaza Universidad and Mr. Valdez was hurrying along the Merino with the wind in his hair and tango blaring from the radio, Caterina was still in bed.

  By a strange coincidence Dr. Cochrane was not in class either. He had lingered too long over coffee and an old, dog-eared copy of The Mad Dog of San Clemente in the Phoenix. Down there in the warm, coffee-flavored dark, nobody noticed the explosion or the sirens or the screams. When he climbed the stairs up to the street at a little before ten, the city was almost back to normal again.

  Costa, De Silva and Father Gonzalez were at their desks when the bomb went off
. It all showed up in the records later along with the name of one boy who could not be traced anywhere: not at the hospital, not at the morgue. Oscar Miralles, another of Dr. Cochrane’s students, the boy who sat next to Caterina in class, the boy who sat next to her in the Phoenix, the boy Mr. L.H. Valdez chased away. Nobody knew where he was.

  He was spread in a thin film of flesh up the steps from the square. They found his address. The man with the tweezers found most of his upper jaw wedged between a wall and an iron handrail. After the cops matched it up with dental records they sent it home to his parents in a coffin with three loose arms, two right feet, some shoes and a couple of sandbags for the weight.

  Oscar Miralles kept a diary. The cops kicked the door down on his flat and picked it clean and, when they were finished, the diary was the most interesting thing they had. Caterina filled pages of that diary, and toward the end there was quite a lot about Mr. L.H. Valdez too. Most of it was a mad, acidic scrawl, the white noise of concentrated loneliness, but with enough stupid, idealistic politics and clichéd sermons on human rights and land reform to let Camillo write a report to the capital. Still, he was interested in the other stuff. He took notes.

  Sitting on the edge of a desk in the Detectives’ Hall he told his men: “This Miralles, he didn’t do it on his own. He must have friends. Find them. Squeeze his parents. Get his cousins in here. I want them all questioned. Get them in and grip them by the balls—and that includes his grandmother! He must have contacts and associates. Trace them all.”

  Commandante Camillo found the sergeant from the bombing and took him aside. He pointed quietly to three names in the diary. “Not her and not him and not him. Leave them alone. For now.”

  There were questionings and beatings.

  But all of that was still to come. That morning Caterina was lying in bed. Lying on her belly, her hair foamed around her head, covering her face. She had kicked off the sheets in the night and now she lay there like a distant landscape of pale, rounded hills.

  While she was doing that, firemen with hoses were scouring Plaza Universidad, washing the blood away, jets of water painting it into strange blossoms that melted and melded and whispered down the drains.

  And while they were doing that, just a few miles away Mr. L.H. Valdez was standing at the counter of his favorite florist, where the blooms were like bloody explosions in his arms.

  Mr. Valdez liked to buy flowers. He always had them in his home. He felt they completed the place and they could make no dent in his masculinity but he was unused to buying them for his women—not now, not before the event. For Mr. Valdez, flowers were a reward, not an inducement. He never wooed.

  For Mr. Valdez, life was tango, and in tango the man leads, the man initiates. There is a way to walk, as a man walks, and there is the cabeceo, the almost invisible signals across the shadowed dance floor, a glance held, an eyebrow raised, a subtle smile, a nod, a meeting on the dance floor. It is a contract but it is invisible to all but the man and his chosen woman, subtle and indecipherable as the signals the mantis semaphores to his mate. There is room for rejection, yes, but it is an unseen rejection, one without humiliation. Everybody knows the rules. Maria Marrom understood those things instinctively. She let it be known that she was bored, receptive, available. She held his glance, she acknowledged the flick of his eyebrow, she smiled and the dance began.

  But Caterina was different. She was too young, too fresh. She had not suffered enough to dance tango, she did not understand the cabeceo. She was so innocent that she had simply offered herself to him—not more than Maria did but clumsily. Caterina was like a new pony, too eager to join the game. He would have to teach her, slow her down. A good pony could read the game. A good pony felt the shifting weight in the saddle, moved to the press of a thigh, the slightest twitch of the reins. If Caterina were to become a wife, she would need training, and Mr. Valdez was prepared to make the investment in time and in roses.

  Mr. Valdez dumped an armful of blood-red blooms on the counter. “I want these,” he said.

  The shopkeeper was looking out the window after a police car and two ambulances which had just gone past. “There’s something up,” she said. “Some poor souls in trouble.”

  Mr. Valdez made no reply. For an artist—and he was a very great artist—Mr. Valdez was a remarkably pragmatic man. He had come to buy flowers. He had come to buy flowers because they were the best way he could see to getting the woman he wanted, the way he wanted to get her, and while he was not unsympathetic to the plight of “poor souls in trouble” they were far away and beyond any help he could offer. The police would help them. The ambulance staff would help them. Gazing out the window would not help them.

  “I want these,” he said again.

  “Yes. Sorry.” She was suddenly amazed. “All of them?”

  “Yes, have you any more?”

  “There might be some out the back.”

  “I’ll take them—so long as they’re fresh. Have them made up by the dozens. And strelitzia too. I want a lot of those. Have you any Lily of the Incas? I want those and keep them apart from the roses and the strelitzia. They do not go together. She won’t have vases. Do you have vases?”

  “Well, we have some. But they are for display.”

  “Then charge me for buckets. You have buckets, don’t you? This is a florist?”

  “We have buckets.”

  Mr. Valdez grabbed a pad from the counter and scribbled on it. “Deliver them here.”

  “All of them?”

  “Of course, ‘all of them.’ And I’m not finished yet.”

  In a corner of the shop there was a vase of freesia, as bright and simple as a candle. Mr. Valdez stood quietly, catching his breath, contemplating that sweet, beautiful thing.

  “I’ll take these too,” he said. “Do you have black tissue paper?”

  “We have red and we have white.”

  “Then red. The white would bleed them out. Wrap them, please.” Mr. Valdez stood at the counter with his wallet in his hand. Another ambulance went by outside the window, its tires making a noise like rain on the asphalt as it passed.

  The florist was wagging the end of her pencil at bucket after bucket of blooms, counting them, adding them together, noting them down on a pad beside her. “You really want all of these?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “And the buckets?”

  She made a few more additions for buckets and some imaginary flowers which might, or might not, be in the back shop but which would certainly never be delivered. She drew a line, scribbled a number and stabbed a final full stop as emphatic as her blunt pencil would allow. “He’ll never pay it,” she thought, pushing the pad across the glass counter.

  Mr. Valdez flipped open his wallet and counted out a pile of notes. “How soon can you deliver?”

  “Not before noon.”

  “I can pay extra. I’ve bought the shop—who else can need the van?”

  “If you paid double I couldn’t do it. I don’t have a driver.”

  Mr. Valdez wanted the flowers delivered at once. He was in a hurry to begin the long slow business of wooing. He wanted the instant gratification of not rushing at this. He wanted her overwhelmed with delight so he could bask in it and dismiss it as nothing.

  “Do what you can,” he said. He took the bunch of freesias with him as he left the shop and laid them carefully on the ribbed leather banquette of his car. It gave him a prideful delight, that upholstery; so bright, so taut, so rigid it might almost have been inflated, like the rubber tubes of a child’s paddling pool. The flowers lay across it beside him, touching only on the infinite peaks of those little leather hummocks. He gunned the engine, because he could.

  When he left the little side street and turned toward the concrete slip road that led back onto the highway along the Merino, Mr. Valdez hit traffic. Looking ahead he saw a line of cars stretching into the distance, none of them as beautiful as his. There was still time to escape. He could reverse just a
few meters and get back on to the side streets. He checked his mirror, dropped into reverse and, just then, he saw a dirty red lorry, loaded with crates, stop right against his back bumper.

  Mr. Valdez took the car out of gear again. Suddenly the heat became unbearable. Sitting still, surrounded by other cars, there was no wind rushing by to cool him.

  The smell of burning petrol was sickening and, instantly, he felt the sweat begin to roll down his back, soaking into his shirt where it pressed against the raised upholstery, trickling in the tunnels where it did not, tickling as it rolled and then, unmistakably, arriving at the crack between his buttocks and soaking into his underpants. It was vile. Mr. Valdez was disgusted at the thought of delivering his lecture drenched in his own stagnant sweat.

  He took out a handkerchief and rubbed it over his eyes, looked at it, noted the exhaust smuts already spotting the white cloth and folded it away again. He wondered about putting the roof up for the shade. He decided against it. The traffic might clear at any moment and he would be left, wrestling with the mechanism and blocking the road, glared at, honked at. Anyway, it would make no difference if he grilled or baked. Mr. Valdez turned the knob on the radio. There was tango. No matter how hot it was, there would always be tango.

  But there was no tango. Just words, the endless electric news gabble of people talking about something shocking and important, something that they knew had happened, something that they knew almost nothing about but that they felt they must tell to others. A bomb. A bomb in Plaza Universidad. A bomb in Plaza Universidad that had killed people. A bomb in Plaza Universidad that had killed people and hurt other people. Some people. Possibly many people.

  Mr. Valdez slumped across the steering wheel with a sigh. He could see the university just up ahead on the other side of the highway. He could walk to it in less than a quarter of an hour. He could see the flag on the flagpole but he could see the sun in the sky too and it was as far away.