The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  “Oh, this? Oh, it’s just something I’m playing with at the moment. Nothing at all really. No, really, it’s nothing.”

  That wasn’t so much to ask and, in case adulation was in short supply, he had come to the Phoenix, where he was prepared to allow even Dr. Cochrane to flap and fuss over him. But, instead of Dr. Cochrane, who should he find but Ernesto Marrom, the banker Marrom whose wife had just left his bed for the last time. A man he had wronged, a man who had somehow, inexplicably, beaten him, a man who would never even know it, never have the chance to gloat triumphantly, never shake his head with a pitying look. It was disgusting, infuriating and even, Mr. Valdez realized, embarrassing.

  Standing at the door he looked away quickly, pretending that Marrom had not already seen him, but it was too late.

  “Valdez!” he said. “Chano! Here. Over here.” He beckoned with his brandy glass. “Come and sit down. Let me buy you a drink.”

  Mr. Valdez smiled weakly.

  “Come on, I’m buying. Come on.”

  Valdez looked round, hoping there might be someone else he could sit beside, some prior engagement he could plead. There was nobody. There was no escape.

  “Hello, Ernesto,” he said and pulled a chair out from under the table. They stood there and shook hands like two old friends and, after three large brandies, Mr. Marrom was feeling genuinely friendly toward just about everybody. Mr. Valdez saw himself in the mirror from the top of his head to where the table cut him off at mid-thigh with his shark-blue suit that fitted like a kiss and a shirt so white that it hurt the eyes. He saw himself and he saw Mr. Marrom’s back and he saw their hands gripping. He was touching Mr. Marrom and with that same hand he had touched Mrs. Marrom only hours ago, only that afternoon and on so many other afternoons. With that hand he had wiped his tears away.

  “Brandy? You want a brandy? I’m having a brandy.” Marrom waved his arm around until a waitress noticed and silently mouthed “Two more” at her.

  “Yes, that sounds good.”

  “Actually, I’ve had a couple already. I’m a little ahead of you. Started early.”

  “Celebrating?”

  “No. Not really. No.”

  “Drowning your sorrows, then?”

  Mr. Marrom made no reply to that. He sat looking down into his brandy glass, slowly wiping his finger round the rim until it began a ghostly, ringing singing. He took his hand away. “Sorry,” he said. “That was rude. Sorry. Oh, look. Here’s your drink—our drinks.”

  It was a dozen words, no more than the single sentence in his notebook, but with that moment of silence and that strange, mournful note, Mr. Valdez suddenly understood everything about Ernesto Marrom.

  “Yes, drowning my sorrows, I suppose.”

  “Taken a hammering on the markets?” Mr. Valdez was struggling to make bright conversation and he found himself guilty and embarrassed, even slightly fearful. He was afraid of a scene. What if Marrom knew? What if that was why he had called him over? What if this were an ambush? What if Marrom had been lying in wait, building up his courage as he drank it down and ready, at last, to spit out his drunken accusations?

  “No, nothing like that. No.” Mr. Marrom finished one glass of brandy and moved on to another. “Life just doesn’t turn out like you expect sometimes.”

  “I know. In fact I make my living from life not turning out as we expect—and so do you.”

  “Yes, we do; don’t we? But it’s meant to be other people’s lives. Turns out I’m the same as everybody else.”

  “Oh, we all are,” said Valdez. “We are all uniquely just like everybody else.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Even I. I have surprised myself these past few days.”

  Mr. Marrom took a large sip from his glass and closed his eyes as the treacle-sweet fumes burned up through his head. He nodded. “Even you. Yes, even you. The great Luciano Hernando Valdez. Imagine.”

  Now. It was coming now, the screaming and the punch and the accusation and everybody would look and there would be nothing to say, no excuse, no defense to offer and nothing to say except blank, stupid unbelievable denial.

  Mr. Valdez hurried over his brandy. “Well, I suppose I should be getting along.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Oh, forgive me.” Mr. Marrom waved his glass again. “Forgive me. I keep on being rude. I’m sorry. Please don’t hurry off. You just got here. Relax. Please forgive me. Please. Stay. I want to talk. Here, is that your new book? Tell me about that. How’s that going?”

  Mr. Valdez laid a hand down on his notebook shielding it. “Oh, this? Oh, it’s just something I’m playing with at the moment. Nothing at all really. No, really, it’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing. No, listen, it is not ‘nothing.’ What you write changes lives. It changes the whole world. It changes the way people see the world.”

  “Oh, rubbish.”

  “Listen, it is not rubbish. I know. It’s happened to me.”

  Mr. Valdez was astonished.

  “But you’re wrong.”

  Mr. Valdez was astonished again. “What am I wrong about?”

  “You think.” Ernesto took another swig of brandy. “You think I should kill my wife.”

  “No, I don’t! I do not!” There was an uncontainable squeak in his voice. “Why would I think that?”

  “I love her, you know.”

  “So you should. She’s a wonderful woman. Wonderful.”

  “She’s a whore, Chano!”

  Mr. Valdez glanced up in the mirror. He was pleased to see that he looked genuinely shocked.

  “No, listen, it’s true. It’s true.”

  “I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

  “She’s been having an affair.”

  “No.”

  “She has.” Marrom finished his brandy in a single fiery gulp and held out his glass. “Your turn, I think.”

  Mr. Valdez held up his hand and waved to the waitress in the mirror. He listened.

  “My wife is a whore and she’s been having an affair but I don’t care because I love her and I can’t live without her. Strickly. Strictly between ourselves.”

  “My God!”

  “Yes, that’s what I said.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Oh,” Marrom looked at his watch, “Oh, ’bout four hours.”

  “My God.”

  “My God, indeed. But, look, keep this between ourselves.”

  “Of course. I’m sure you’re wrong. Have you any idea who …?”

  “Nope. No clue. But according to the works of L.H. Valdez—oh, here comes our brandy.” Ernesto let his voice drop until the waitress left. “According to the works of L.H. Valdez, I’m supposed to find some sort of inner peace by slaughtering her and her lousy stinking boyfriend. Lotsa blood. Lots and lots of lovely blood.”

  “No.”

  “That’s what you would do. That’s what a real man would do.”

  “That’s shit. Those are just shitty stories. It’s just stories.”

  “Well, I don’t want to kill her.”

  “No. You mustn’t. She loves you. Anybody can see it. She loves you more than you can ever guess.”

  “But I might kill him.”

  “Yes, that would be allowed.”

  “If I ever find out who he is.”

  “She loves you, Ernesto. She loves you.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is I love her.”

  MR. VALDEZ WOKE with a bad case of morning mouth and a head full of angry, buzzing cotton wool. Lying in bed, trying to summon the courage to get up, he was more and more astonished at himself: astonished that he had dared to spend the evening with Ernesto Marrom, soothing his horns, kissing them better, telling him over and over that Maria was not a faithless whore, that she loved him truly and deeply as a good wife should, astonished that he had somehow pulled it off and, most astonishing of all, astonished that he almost believed it himself.

  When he slammed the door of the taxi, perhaps a little
too heavily for one o’clock in the morning, and waved Ernesto on his way out of the Square of the September Revolution with Orion striding across the sky above the Merino in an icy-blue blaze, he had felt genuinely warm toward him. That manly embrace, the brotherly back-slapping—he had meant it all and, although the brandy fumes had faded, he found he meant it still. That switch was still switched to “on,” the little dripping tap of emotional attachment had turned into a dribble. It was still alarming, but less so, and Mr. Valdez allowed these new feelings to wash over him as the addict sinks into the warm, cloud-cushioning waves of the poppy poison.

  There was still the sharp, fresh sting of the cut where Maria had been but that would fade. It was already fading. And there was the strong, warm, painful pulse that was Caterina, but that would fade too. He hoped it would fade too and he knew how to start it healing.

  Mr. Valdez cradled his hands behind his head, squeezed his temples, held his breath and sat up. He was relieved to find he did not want to vomit but he was painfully thirsty. The big blue notebook was lying where he had left it on the bedside table. He picked it up and went to the kitchen.

  It was as beautiful as every other room in his house, with its steel and its marble tiles and its dark wood and its huge, double-fronted American refrigerator. Everything was quiet and calm and efficient and clean. Everything was “right.” And everything was absolutely impersonal. The kitchen of L.H. Valdez was like his sitting room, like his bedroom, like his broad terrace balcony, like his bathroom. Every single room of his house could have come straight from the showroom of the city’s most fashionable furniture store. His home was like a catalog, like a photo shoot, like the glossy pages of a style magazine. It was furnished the way that the magnates of the past had furnished their libraries with 30 meters of green books and 30 meters of red. Someone else chose them. Nobody knew what they said, nobody looked at them again. Mr. Valdez had a whole house like that where only the books were real and everything else was for show. If anyone had ever come to the flat—and, apart from Maria Marrom, no one ever did, no friend, no colleague, no student, no wide-eyed, shallow-brained reviewer intent on finding the real L.H. Valdez—but if anyone had ever come to the flat, they would have found almost nothing of him there. There was no conversation piece, nothing to spark a little exchange: “Oh, that! I must tell you where I picked that up.”

  Or: “Yes, I’ve always been fond of that. It came from my days in Cairo you know.”

  The only photographs he could ever recall in that flat had appeared from behind the skirting boards when first he moved in and began stripping the place back to the plaster.

  There were dozens of them, standing upright against the wall, spattered with dust, crisscrossed with spiders’ webs and waiting there, side by side, one after the other, hidden, like the frozen frames of a forgotten newsreel, filled with the gray ghosts of chiseled young men who wore the Death’s Head on their collars. The last owner, Dr. Klement, must have put them there, afraid that they would be discovered but unwilling to be parted from them. Before he threw them away, Mr. Valdez had wondered if it gave the old man comfort, when he lay dying, to know his souvenirs were close at hand or if he had been terrified that they would be found.

  Mr. Valdez had nothing like that. No secrets. Apart from one souvenir of his grandfather, he had made sure that his house was as bare and stripped clean of connection as his soul. That was how he wanted it; clean, functional, fashionable, stylish and, now he realized, cold, empty.

  He went to the fridge, groping for orange juice, and found the freesias there, ruined. He had pushed them too far back, beyond the butter, so their petals froze to the back wall, icy and transparent, like the wings of dead, defeated fairies. They tore when he pulled them and they left a green slime of leaf skeletons against the white plastic. Mr. Valdez threw them away with a sigh.

  Sitting at the table with a carton of orange juice open in front of him, bent freesia stems and damp tissue paper sticking out from the lid of the waste bin beside him, he opened the notebook again and read.

  “The scrawny yellow cat crossed the road and crept into the whorehouse.” There must be something else. There must be another line. Something had to follow.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have sex?”

  Something had to follow. There must be another line. There must be something else.

  Mr. Valdez looked at the page. It stared back at him as blank and cold as an iceberg, one thin line of script in view and, below it, hidden, menacing, fatal, the great mass of unwritten, unseen nothing, page after page of frozen whiteness. But he knew it could be beaten. Line by line he could chip away at it and make a book. He put down his orange juice and went to find his pen.

  And while he was doing that, just a little way along Cristobal Avenue, Dr. Cochrane was sitting on a bench in the garden of the square outside the Ottavio House, enjoying the morning sunshine. The police were still at work in Plaza Universidad, classes were canceled, the day was his own and he had chosen to spend it under a tree in the garden.

  Just enough sunshine—but not too hot—cool, feathery shadows blowing across the paths, the flowers blazing all around in their well watered beds, the satisfying crunch of gravel beneath his feet—it was perfect.

  From where he sat, Dr. Cochrane could enjoy the whole street: the neat little children making their way to school, the noise of the traffic on Cristobal Avenue all so pleasantly distant, that dark-skinned girl walking to and fro in front of the second-story window of the Ottavio House, forgetting—or not caring—that she was as naked as a baby. And, best of all, Dr. Cochrane could watch that beautiful young man with his long, brown legs, as he worked on making the garden lovely. Dr. Cochrane folded his newspaper and put it down on the bench beside him. He decided it was time to stop pretending to read. It would never be time to stop pretending—not completely—but it was time to stop pretending to read. The paper was full of unpleasant things anyway. It was all about the bombing, it was all about pain and death, full of nasty words and nasty pictures of fearful, anguished people. Dr. Cochrane thought it wrong and silly to waste a lovely morning on so much unpleasantness when he could be enjoying the birds and the sunshine and the very long legs and the very short shorts of the gardener.

  The young man had his back to him. He was kneeling down, tending to a flower border that ran along the edge of the path. His long black hair hung down over his face, and from time to time he would uncurl a little, straighten his back, tuck his hair behind his ears and go back to work. Dr. Cochrane found it a beautiful gesture. There was such grace in it. It was so girlishly simple. Little by little, always on his knees, always with his back turned, the beautiful gardener made his way along the flower border.

  Dr. Cochrane picked up his newspaper again and turned to the crossword. At 7 Across, where the clue was “Daily Labors (4),” Dr. Cochrane wrote “KISS.” He looked down the list of clues for four-letter words and he wrote “KISS” in all of them until no more kisses would fit on the page, and by then the gardener was kneeling at his feet. Dr. Cochrane was almost breathless. The gardener stood up. He turned round. He said nothing but he looked Dr. Cochrane full in the face and he took off his shirt. He pulled it up over his flat belly, over his smooth chest, up over his head. He stood without saying a word, the crumpled shirt in his hand. His skin was brown and the skin on his arms and in the V of his collar was coffee brown.

  Dr. Cochrane leaned close to him, so close that he could feel the heat against his face. Dr. Cochrane drew in his breath through his nose. He could smell earth and grass and salt and something else. Dr. Cochrane held his breath as he would hold a sip of brandy in his mouth for a moment to let it flood him. He was so close to the young man. He was indecently close. He was afraid that one of the mothers pushing her baby in a pram just outside the garden might glance through the iron railings and see them there together. What would she see? There was nothing to see. A respectable university academic sitting on a bench in a public garden and a gardener standing in f
ront of him. That was all. But she would see and understand and know at once. It was stupid and reckless and shaming and irresistibly wonderful and he did not want to stop.

  Dr. Cochrane leaned on his cane and stood up. There was barely room to do it without touching and then, standing up, he found the bare knees of the gardener brushing against his trousers. Dr. Cochrane pressed a folded bill into the young man’s hand.

  “Thank you,” he said. “That was exactly right.”

  And, when Dr. Cochrane was pressing money into the strong hand of a brown young man, Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez was looking from her window, down into the courtyard of the building where she lived, watching and waiting for the parcel she had ordered.