She knew it was a mistake. Nobody would send her flowers. Certainly nobody would send so many flowers.
She ran back into the flat and, in the time it took to pull on a T-shirt and jump into a pair of jeans, the delivery man had returned.
He was red in the face and wheezing after climbing the stairs with his arms full of buckets. Buckets are heavy. But he was still a man, like Costa and De Silva, like L.H. Valdez and Father Gonzalez, and he couldn’t help but look at Caterina. That T-shirt. It stretched across her, skimmed her and then fell away like a waterfall, like a river dropping off a cliff, held out from her body in a loose flapping circle that left her belly exposed. Of course he looked. He was a man.
“You’ll have to take some of these inside, love. I can’t get in the door.”
“No. Wait. There’s been a mistake. They’re not for me.”
The man squinted down into the pocket of his shirt. He took out a packet of cigarettes with its top ripped off and then a small, white envelope which he handed to her.
“That you?”
Caterina was astonished. It showed in her face.
“No mistake then. There’s more, so if you could just get them out of the door, that’d be a help.”
He went off down the stairs again and, when he stopped on the first landing, looked back and said: “Jesus.” She mistook it for exasperation. Three years later, when things were tight before payday and the florist sacked him after just a little bit of money went missing from the till although he was going to pay it back for sure, when he went off in the van and drove to Punto Del Rey just to gather his thoughts and the cops found him there and he got two months in the city jail, he told his cellmates about the day he met Caterina. Nobody believed him.
Caterina had a way of looking—not that she knew she was doing it—a kind of angry scowl she wore whenever she met a man. It was a protective thing, attack being the best form of defense. It was as if she went about always with her little hands knotted into fists, ready for a fight, and it showed in her face in a look that said: “What do you think you’re looking at?” She knew very well what they were looking at.
But, standing there in the doorway, holding that little envelope with buckets of flowers all around her and puddles of water between her toes, the scowl vanished. She looked at the envelope and she knew who had sent it. She recognized that broad nib, the dark ink. Caterina put her little finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. Inside there was nothing, or nearly nothing. Just a plain, white card and “Chano.” Just one word. Not even “I write.” Less than that. One word less and one letter less. No “love from.” Just a name. His name. She was delighted. He had not pledged his love lightly and even that she regarded as a blessing. It meant he might.
Across the landing the door opened and Erica came out. “Thank God you’re all right,” she said.
“I’m fine. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Haven’t you heard about the bomb? It’s all over the radio. Somebody planted a bomb at the university. I thought you were going in early. I was worried.”
And then she saw the flowers.
“Who sent all these?”
“Who do you think?” Caterina waggled the envelope teasingly by one corner and fanned herself as if to stave off a swoon.
“No!”
“Yes!”
Erica snatched the card away. Caterina let her. “Chano! Ooooh, Chano.”
“That’s ‘Mr. L.H. Valdez’ to you.”
“Did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Come on! Have you done it?”
“No.”
“He’ll want to. For all these flowers he’ll expect it.”
“There’s more.”
The delivery man was coming, clanking up from the street with four more buckets, and they leaned out over the stairs to watch him. Three years later, in the town jail, he told them about that too and they didn’t believe him.
“My God. He’ll definitely want to do it now.”
Caterina laughed and said: “I’d let him.”
Standing there at the top of the stairs the delivery man heard her and he didn’t say anything but he thought plenty. He put down the last of his buckets with a gasp, lit a celebratory cigarette and he said: “You can keep the buckets, they’re paid for,” but he thought: “Yeah, I bet you would, but not for me you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t let me.”
He stood waiting for an awkward moment until he realized they had not even thought to tip him, picked a stray bit of tobacco from the tip of his tongue and staggered back down the stairs. A pale blue trail of smoke rose angrily behind him and grew thinner and angrier until there was nothing left but the smell. That night, when he went home, the wife who had loved him for more than twenty years cooked him steak and took a bath and dried herself and dusted herself in a blizzard of powder and took the ground glass stopper from a bottle of Christmas perfume, as small, as precious as a reliquary, and dabbed herself in secret places and came to bed and loved him. But he didn’t tell them that three years later in the town jail. He didn’t even remember. All he remembered was meeting Caterina, and nobody believed him.
“Help me with these,” Caterina said and picked up some buckets. “You’ll have to take some. There’s far too many for the flat.”
Poor Caterina, she opened that little white envelope and she had no idea that it contained her death warrant. She had read his name without a shudder, not as the name of her executioner but like the name of a lover, as if a man who sent her flowers must be always one and never the other. But, sometimes, that’s how life is. Sometimes a tiny dab of glue, moistened on the edge of an envelope, is the only thing that holds together the whole world and everything that’s in it. Sometimes life, death, disaster arrive with no more warning than the whispered crunch of a snail shell underfoot. No one notices but the snail.
SEAGULLS ARE UNATTRACTIVE creatures: noisy, garrulous, aggressive, messy, inconsiderate. They are the nasty drunks of the bird world. They come ashore like sailors in every port, walking round with a swagger, hands in pockets, pushing their way through the crowd with their shoulders. They annex window sills. They claim the chimney pots as terra nullius, the property of no one and theirs to colonize. They are white, but they are filthy. They look out on the world with unsympathetic eyes, the eyes of a sociopath, flat, glinting shark eyes. They raid the bins, they scatter rubbish, they mug office girls for their lunches, falling out of the sky with beaks agape, and they splatter everything, cars, buildings, children, washing lines, with long strings of grainy, sticky, stinking shit.
There was a seagull standing on a carved pediment above the door of the Merino and National Banking Company when Ernesto Marrom left work that evening. It pattered about on its pink scaly feet and looked down into the street with its yellow-rimmed eyes, as if taking aim.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Go back a few hours to when Mrs. Marrom was clawing at the sheets of Mr. L.H. Valdez’s bed, when her sweat was falling in sizzling drops onto his snow-white, lavender-scented pillows. Then Ernesto Marrom was running his pencil down another column of figures.
Ernesto Marrom understood figures. They sang in his head like the notes of a symphony. Tax rates, tax exemptions, Government bonds, dollar exchange, futures, shorts, offshore accounting, trusts. He could look at an account book and understand it, swim in it and through it like a fish, see how to make it better, richer, see where the holes were, where the money had gone—and who took it.
The banker Marrom was as much of a detective as the policeman Camillo and, like Camillo, he depended on facts for nine tenths of his work. The rest they would both have dismissed as guesswork. It was not guesswork. It was instinct. The jaguar in the jungle does not guess which path the deer will use when she comes to drink. The jaguar knows the things the jaguar knows, the policeman knows the things the policeman knows and the banker knows the things the banker knows even if he can’t explain them. Mr. Marrom could tell when a stock was over
valued or undervalued, he could tell when the price of coffee would peak, how much the price of beef would fall. If anybody had asked him what made him think that way, he might have had to stop for a little, gather his thoughts and come up with a reason: a string of numbers, the weather conditions these past three months, a shift in the American markets, a twitch in the price of oil. But none of those things was any more than an imaginary justification for what he already knew. Ernesto Marrom had heard it said that a butterfly sipping on an orchid in some faraway clearing could sink mighty ships and send tornadoes battering at the coast of Japan with the tiniest flap of its wings. He believed it. Every morning, when he opened the paper and turned to the stock market report, he saw butterflies and watched the earthquakes that rumbled along the rows of figures when they stamped.
“I know things,” he told himself. “And I know my wife is having an affair.”
Of course, the rows of figures could not have told Mr. Marrom that Maria was unfaithful any more than they had told him that the price of coffee would rise by two centavos that morning, but still the price of coffee went up. There was nothing he could point to. There were no facts. But he knew.
He knew for sure after he called her for the sixth time that afternoon. The telephone jangled on its onyx table in the hallway. It jangled and it jangled but nobody answered. Mr. Marrom had often called home in the afternoon and Mrs. Marrom had often failed to answer. Sometimes he had called as many as six times in a row and received no reply. But today, far away from his home on the hill, sitting in his comfortable chair with its deep-buttoned green leather, green as a turtle, green as the trees by the river, sitting in his cool and shady office, surrounded by dark wooden panels that dripped with carved fruit, he knew. Perhaps if he had called home only five times that day he would still have been unsure, perhaps the thought would never have occurred to him, but the telephone rang just once too often. He knew and he could not believe he had been such a fool. Mr. Marrom, sitting in his dark, cool office inside the Merino and National Banking Company, with the telephone in his hand, listening all alone to a bell ringing far away, knew that somewhere, perhaps very close by, his wife was naked in another man’s bed.
Mr. Marrom was disturbed to discover that he did not want to murder her. He felt sad and wounded but he did not want to murder her.
After six rings so many things suddenly made sense. How could any woman spend all those afternoons shopping and yet never buy anything?
Mr. Marrom began to count the rows of figures in his head, month after month of bank statements, neat piles of checkbooks, every stub meticulously filled out with the date, the amount, the name of the payee. Mr. Marrom could recall them all, every bit of paper, every number, debits and credits, the figures rising and falling along the columns in a monthly tide in just the way the taxi driver parked outside his window could recall every score line, every pass, every goal for every FC Atletico match in the past twenty seasons.
There was nothing odd or out of the ordinary about any of it, and that was every bit as strange as a telephone that rang six times. How often had she sat there, on the other side of the silver candlesticks she inherited from Aunt Malvina, how many times had she looked away, darting her eyes down into her wine glass and then up to the ceiling when he asked: “And what did you do today, my love?”
“Oh, shopping,” she would say, “just shopping.”
Some shoes or a new dress—“such a bargain”—and she would always promise to show him later, after dinner. But she never did.
Mr. Marrom could not recall the last time he had seen Maria in a new dress and he knew he stood condemned because of it. Why had he never asked to see her in those imagined dresses? Why did he not demand a viewing of all those shoes—“No, darling, just the shoes. Don’t bother wearing anything else. Just the shoes”—why did he not insist on having them lined up like soldiers at attention, each pair with its own smart little box, ready for storage? If only he had demanded an audit. If Maria had been a back-street garage or a pet shop he would have been within his rights. He could have arrived at any time and inspected the books. But she was a wife. He had not cared enough. He had not kept a check on his investments.
“Later,” that was what she said. She would show him “later.” And now it was too late.
And Mr. Marrom knew he had failed in other ways too: things she had hinted at, things she had asked for, things she had tried to teach him. He had tried to offer compensations: a beautiful house, money, a place in society, and she wanted those too but they were not enough. They were not the things she needed and he knew that. He had always known that. How could he complain now when she had found those things elsewhere?
He picked up the telephone for the seventh time and waited for a moment. He gave her time to put aside her coffee cup, fold her magazine and walk down the corridor, he gave her time to take off her earring, lift the receiver and say “Hello” in the way she always did and he whispered: “I am so sorry, Maria. I was not man enough for you. But I am man enough to admit it. There are some things which are simply not in my nature to give. The rest is all yours, my love.” This time he had not even bothered to dial the number. He put the telephone down with a click.
Of course Mr. Marrom did not want to kill his wife. He loved his wife. He did not want to be without her and, if he killed her, he would certainly be without her. If he went to jail he would be without her in a horrible place with no one to visit him, and if the police looked at him and saw a wronged husband and a whore of a wife who deserved all she got, if they forgot to investigate too thoroughly or if the bank greased a few palms so the whole thing was forgotten, he would still be without her, alone in a lovely house where the telephone sat silent on its onyx table and the clock ticked.
He would rather not be without her and so he resolved to turn a blind eye. He would know and say nothing and that, he decided, was the real machismo.
If his wife knew he was a cuckold, if his wife’s lover knew, if every man in the city had her and laughed at his horns, they would not know of his great courage, his great love. They would not know what he bore, for the sake of his manhood. It was a great and a noble thing, he decided.
And as he finished work for the afternoon, as he straightened his tie in the mirror, as he flicked a finger through the silver hair at his temples, Mr. Marrom took some small comfort from that. “Yes,” he told himself, “L.H. Valdez would make me the hero of his next book, if he only knew.”
Mr. Marrom did not want to kill his wife but he was desperately sad. He stood with his hand on the doorknob for quite a long time, staring at the darkly polished door with its flame-flowered grain. He was in no hurry to leave. He liked his office. It was calm and quiet and secure, so distant, so muffled from the world that he had known nothing of the explosion only a street away until his secretary arrived with his morning coffee and told him.
But everything he loved about his office was sweet to him only because Maria was at home. The heavy furniture oozing its calm silence, the stuttering clock eating his life away, moment by moment, these things were a comfort to him, but at home, without her, they would be a threat and a reminder.
In the office these things were calming, reassuring, they were symbols of his status far above the daily bustle of the banking hall, distant from lowly clerks and customers. At home, without Maria, they would mean only loneliness. The empty chair would scream at him, the clock would hammer in his brain, the silence would shriek until his nerves shredded.
Mr. Marrom turned back to his desk, adjusted the blotter to make it straight, checked—again—that all the drawers were locked and then, with the firm step of a man determined to walk to the wall with courage, he opened the door and set out for home, through the dark little corridor, through the banking hall, his heels ringing on the marble floor, nodding his “good evenings” as he went, through the door that was held open for him by a liveried flunkey, and out onto the street.
And it was then that the seagull, with its yel
low-rimmed eyes and its pink scaly feet, pattering on the carved stone ball which forms the dramatic full stop to the gorgeous curlicues and arabesques decorating the façade of the Merino and National Banking Company, dropped the delicious, bloody gobbet it had picked up from Plaza Universidad a short time earlier. The meat fell through the air and landed on the shining toe of Ernesto Marrom’s right shoe, bounced and fell down three more steps to the pavement, where it lay for less than a moment until the gull dropped from the roof, snatched it up in its beak and flew off again, choking it down with its throat lopsided and distended like a bursting sack.
Luckily the banker Marrom had no more idea of what had struck his foot than did the seagull, but it offended him anyway; the plump moisture of it, the lavish scarlet, the gull’s gorging, the shock of that little blow coming from nowhere. He stooped to wipe his shoe with a handkerchief and pretended to himself that he had not noticed when it came away stained red. Mr. Marrom felt his stomach complain. He was tired and sad and now he felt sick too. He needed a brandy—just to settle himself—and he thought of the Phoenix, where he used to go when he was still a student. The Phoenix. He could go there and linger a little, waste a little time, let Maria come home to him. Just to be sure.
Mr. Marrom was still in the Phoenix, sitting alone at the corner table, when L.H. Valdez arrived at a little after 7 that evening. His best friend—if only he had a best friend—would have to admit that he was a little drunk, and Mr. Valdez, who was very far from being Mr. Marrom’s best friend, would have agreed.
It was an awkward moment. Mr. Valdez had spent almost an hour under the steady beat of the shower, washing the last traces of Maria from his skin, and suddenly it was all for nothing. He had come from his home hoping to find adulation. He had picked up his notebook with its single line of script—“The scrawny yellow cat crossed the road and crept into the whorehouse”—and he pretended to himself that he was going to the Phoenix to write some more. He would take a double espresso and a brandy and he would sit at the corner table under the big gilt mirror—in exactly the seat where Ernesto Marrom had chosen to sit—and write. Of course there was still a part of his brain which recognized that was rubbish. Mr. Valdez had no intention of writing. How could he write? How could he write when Maria had discarded him and he lacked the courage to open the fridge, pick up a bunch of freesias and take them to a woman who might not reject him? Mr. Valdez did not want to write. Instead he wanted to be seen writing. He wanted the reassurance that came from admiring glances. He wanted to sit at that table and have people look at him. He wanted to turn his head up from the page and catch someone glancing away quickly. He wanted a huddled conversation on the other side of the room, somebody working up the courage, somebody saying: “Go on, go on, I dare you! He won’t mind,” somebody brave enough to jostle between the tables with a scrap of paper torn from a diary or a smoothed-out napkin, somebody who would say: “Could I ask? I’m so sorry to trouble you. Only it would be a great honor. Such an honor. I’ve read all your books,” somebody who would smile and say: “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. You don’t know what this means.” Somebody who might even try to sneak a glimpse of his notebook and say: “And is this your new one? Oh, wonderful!,” so he could slowly, calmly, with great and gentle discretion, flip the notebook shut, hide it from prying eyes and say something modest and dismissive and self-deprecating.
The Love and Death of Caterina Page 11