She saw the van arrive. She saw the delivery man take a package from the back and when, a moment later, the intercom buzzed she said: “Yes, of course. Come on up.”
Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez walked down the hall of her lovely flat, past the shelf of unread books that greeted every visitor, undoing the cord of her soft, silk dressing gown as she walked, and went to the door.
And, when Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez was waiting naked behind the door of her flat, ready to sign for her delivery, Caterina was crossing the busy street outside her flat and hurrying to the telephone box on the corner. She had Chano’s card in her purse but she did not look at it. She knew the number off by heart and, when he answered, she said: “Hello! It’s me. It’s Caterina.”
He said: “Hello.” Even in that stale little box, down that thin, tinny wire, it sounded like a warm bath filled with roses.
She said: “Hello! I’ve been calling and calling,” and she hated herself for saying that because it sounded like nagging. “I just wanted to thank you for the flowers.”
He said: “You are very welcome. I’m glad you like them.”
She said: “I want to thank you for them. Really thank you. Thank you properly. Can I come round?”
He said: “I think that would be wonderful.”
When Mr. Valdez went back to the kitchen, he found that his glass had left a damp ring of orange juice on the first page of his notebook. He tore it out, crumpled it into a ball and jammed it down beside the broken freesias.
HE SHAVED BEFORE she arrived, stripped the bed and remade it. For a moment Mr. Valdez found himself wondering if there might not be something unsavory about that, but how could there be? There was no question that he would bed Caterina. There could be no doubt that she wanted that too. “I want to thank you properly”: that’s what she said. What else could that possibly mean? Whatever it meant, it wasn’t: “I have written you a lovely letter on notepaper with kittens on it and I’d like to hand it in.” No, it meant: “Wouldn’t you rather have sex?”
Mr. Valdez knew that this was the culmination of a long seduction. It was not quite as he planned, of course. He had hoped for more of a chase, a token struggle, and he acknowledged there was just a hint of aggression in her call, as if she had been in charge, as if she were the hunter and he the prey. He was unused to that and, already, he felt a tiny pang for the moment of surrender that would not now be his.
“It’s her age,” he said to himself. “She doesn’t know how to behave.”
Still, Mr. Valdez was ready to be generous and forgiving. Caterina had been his from the moment he decided to have her. He knew that. If it suited her to believe something else, if it made her happy to behave as if she had some choice in the matter, he would go along with that.
He bundled the soiled sheets into the laundry basket and went to choose a suit from his wardrobe. The dark blue would be best, he decided, so soft, so fine, so well cut, and a plain white shirt, enamel links and that tie, so blue it was almost black, with its white polka dots. That went with anything. He was satisfied.
Mr. Valdez perfected his knot in the mirror but, standing there preening, tweaking, he felt suddenly foolish. He was dressing to go out when, really, he planned to stay in and undress again very soon. But then what about his shoes? He seemed to have forgotten how to take them off. And those cufflinks. They seemed superfluous. They could be awkward. He pictured himself struggling to take off his shirt as Caterina waited and waited, drumming her fingers on the mattress. And that tie. What was the point of a tie? Or a jacket? Why wear a jacket indoors—in his own house?
It was ridiculous. It was all ridiculous. He was fussing like a girl, like a widow suddenly lifted off the shelf after years, like a divorcee back in the swim again, fretting about which shoes to wear, wondering about what that dress might “say,” worrying over how much leg she ought to put on show. Stupid. Luciano Hernando Valdez was no novice. He was not some schoolgirl looking to throw herself at the local tennis coach in her lunch hour. He was no beginner but, still, he found himself unsettled.
He looked in the mirror. “It is the cabeceo,” he told himself. “There should be a cabeceo.”
Mr. Valdez walked back to the kitchen with a sigh, took off his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair.
That would do. She would see it and know that he had a jacket. She could assemble, in her mind’s eye, how it should look but without asking why on earth he might be wearing it in his own kitchen. The chair squeaked on the tiles as he pulled it out to sit down. He opened his big, blue notebook again, found his pen and, halfway down the page, halfway across, he began to write.
He wrote: “The scrawny yellow,” and the doorbell rang.
Mr. Valdez closed his notebook and went to the door. His mouth was dry. He composed his face into an expression of wisdom, welcome, interest—but the gilded mirror in the vestibule looked back at him nervously and with fluttering eyes. He took a slow breath, let it out and turned the handle.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“Welcome.” He swept his arm into the house, waving her in.
She said nothing, just made a little noise like a stifled giggle and stepped over the threshold.
“A little further,” he said.
“Hmmm?”
“I can’t close the door.”
“Oh. Oh, yes.” And that half-choked laugh again.
Outside it was warm but Caterina was wearing a coat that stunned him by its ugliness. It hung about her in a shapeless dome of rough, mud-colored cloth, like those old horse blankets they wear in the mountain towns with just a hole slashed in the middle to let their heads poke through. Mr. Valdez was suddenly reminded of an old book from a long-ago childhood with its alien images of Rumpelstiltskin dancing fiendishly round a fire and odd forest elves who dressed themselves in upturned nutshells.
“You look lovely,” he said.
She smiled and made that noise again. She looked half dazed.
“May I take your coat?”
Mr. Valdez was the perfect host but he was beginning to wonder if this might not have been a dreadful mistake. She was an idiot. She could barely even talk. And then she took her coat off and he remembered why he wanted her. The shape of her. It was impossible, unbelievable. The scent of her rising from that awful brown coat. As he hung it in the cupboard by the door it filled him and drove the breath from his lungs. “My God,” he thought, “she’s young. She smells so young.”
Mr. Valdez said: “Would you like a drink?” as he came out of the cupboard again but Caterina had already left on a tentative exploration and the little vestibule was empty. He followed slowly, listening for the slight suck and squeak of her rubber-soled gym shoes on the tiled floor and then the mysterious cat-silence as she passed across his rich Baluchi rugs.
“You have a lovely house,” she said. Her fingers trailed along shelves as she passed. She looked about herself as if she had just stepped from a glittering silver spacecraft onto an unknown planet.
“Thank you,” he said and stalked her.
“What’s this?”
“It’s the dining room.”
“It’s pretty.”
“Thank you. I never use it.”
“No one comes?”
“No. No one comes.”
“I know,” she said. “And what’s this?”
“My grandfather’s sword.”
“He was a hero.”
“He was to me.”
“And this?”
“Some award. Some trophy. I forget. They like to hand out things to dust along with their checks. It makes the whole thing less sordid.”
“It doesn’t say what you won it for.”
“Diligence. Perfect attendance. Biblical knowledge. I don’t know. A book. I forget which one. Have it, if you want.”
She looked at him with a fake scowl and said: “No, thank you. I will wait for one of m
y own.”
He tried to catch her up, move closer so he could press his face into her hair and bury himself in that smell again, so he could put his hands on her, but she danced away.
“Here’s the kitchen,” she said.
“With a big fridge. It usually has champagne in it. Would you like to check?”
“You. You check.” She laughed her quiet, secret, embarrassed laugh again and, while he busied himself with taking down cold glasses from the top shelf and peeling back the foil wrapper and untwisting the wire cage, she danced away again.
“The lounge!” she said.
“Sitting room. It’s not a ship.”
“Lovely view. Nice carpet.”
Mr. Valdez turned the bottle, not the cork—never the cork—and it came out with a politely whispered belch, like a replete aunt after a good lunch. It was only then that he noticed his notebook was gone.
Caterina was standing at the big window that looks down Cristobal Avenue to the Merino, holding the notebook against her chest, when he arrived with her champagne.
He fought down a flutter of panic and held out the glass. “Shall I take that?” he said.
“Can I look? I wouldn’t look without asking. Can I?”
The flutter came back. “If I let you look, what will you give me?”
“What do you want?”
“Everything. I want it all.”
“I could just look anyway. I could.”
“That’s the price.”
“If I give you everything, can I look?”
“Yes. If you give me everything, you may look, Caterina.”
She opened the notebook. She flicked through its empty pages. “I think you cheated me.”
“You made your own bargain.”
“So I get ‘The scrawny yellow’ and you get ‘everything’?” She was pretending to be outraged.
“Three words from the pen of a master—in autograph manuscript too. You can keep them if you like. I’ll even sign them, like one of Picasso’s napkins. I am paid quite well for my words. It’s probably not a bad bargain.”
“Three of your words for my everything? Oh, I think you’ve done pretty well on the deal.” She danced away from him again and opened the door to the back corridor. “Pretty well—if I stick to it.”
“I think you’ll stick to it.”
“The scrawny yellow what, then? The scrawny yellow Chinaman? The scrawny yellow chicken? What? What?”
“Cat. It’s a scrawny yellow cat.”
“And what does he do, this scrawny yellow cat? Where does he go?” She opened another door and said: “Linen cupboard,” with disappointment.
“He goes into a whorehouse.”
“Just visiting, or does he live there?”
“Why not wait and read the rest of the book?”
“So there’s more?”
“Much, much more,” he lied.
Caterina found the last door in the passage. She stood, touching the handle, hesitating like Bluebeard’s wife outside the only locked room in the castle.
“This one?” she asked.
“That one.”
“Everything?”
“To the last drop of your blood. To your last breath.”
“All right.”
She turned the handle and went through the door but she stopped, just inside the room. Mr. Valdez stood behind her, a hand on each of her shoulders, holding her, securing her, and he pressed his face into her hair and breathed in her scent.
She laughed again and said: “Chano,” very softly.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told her.
“I’m not afraid.”
“Yes, you are. There’s no need. Here, come and sit on the bed.” He lay down, his head propped on one arm and she sat beside him, her back to him, two hands jammed down between her clamped thighs.
“Where’s your drink?”
“I put it down over there.” She nodded toward his Art Deco dressing table and Mr. Valdez saw it and tried hard not to think of the cold damp glass burning a ring into the varnish.
“Take mine,” he said. “Go on. Just a sip. A tiny sip.”
She unfolded a little and she took the glass.
“Not so terrible,” he said. “Now a little more.”
She obeyed.
“And again.”
“All gone,” she said and held out the glass to him.
Mr. Valdez rolled from the bed and picked up the other glass. He wiped the place where it stood with his plain, white handkerchief. There was no mark in the wood. He stood in front of her and handed her the glass.
“Thank you,” she said.
He knelt on the floor at her feet looking up at her. She took another gulp of wine and did not look at him.
“I would like to kiss you now.”
That distant giggle again.
“It’s what usually happens. At a time like this. It’s usual.”
She tilted her head up a little, her hair falling around her face like a veil. She was biting her lip and he liked that. This suited him. This was the cabeceo he had longed for. The chase. The wooing.
“Would you like to be kissed?”
She nodded and offered him her mouth, still damp with champagne, still with a sherbet sparkle lingering on her lips. She tasted fresh and alive and young. God, so young, and she sought him. He felt her hunger. She was electric.
“That was nice,” he said.
“Yes, it was. Let’s do that some more.”
He kissed her again but this time when he trailed his fingers over her blouse and touched a button she gripped his hand and pulled it away.
“More kissing first. Kisses.”
“I’ll trade you a kiss for every button.”
“No. Wait. Just. Can’t we go slowly?”
“Yes,” he kissed her again, this time with the tips of his fingers brushing the knuckles of her fist as she held her blouse shut. “Yes, we can take our time. There’s no hurry. We can take as much time as you want.” He kissed her again. “But, you did promise me ‘everything’ and, I’m not an expert, but when a beautiful young girl promises ‘everything’ it usually means taking her clothes off.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m going to start with your shoes.”
They were like children’s shoes, the sort of thing you could see knotted together and strung over the electric cables in grimy back streets, filthy things made of cloth with white rubber on the toes and heels and a white rubber rim gluing them together and flat, woven laces that passed through painted metal eyes. These were not a woman’s shoes. Mr. Valdez imagined what Maria would have said. She could never have worn such things. She would have been disgraced. There was no heel, for God’s sake. Even when she pruned the roses in her garden, Mrs. Marrom wore something with a heel.
When he tugged on the laces, he felt grime on the dusty gray fabric. They came loose, first one and then the other, and he tugged them off. She did not resist. In fact she helped him, offering her feet, holding them up like a little girl getting ready for bath time.
She was wearing socks. He rolled them off and balled them and threw them away with a jokey flourish and a silly, onomatopoeic “Pop” that was designed to reassure himself as much as it was her. Socks. She might have made more effort.
He rubbed her feet. He trailed his hands over her jeans, up her calves and over her thighs up to the copper button at the top.
“These?” he asked. “Can I have these?”
She nodded, silently, biting her lip again and raised her hips to help him peel them away. And there she was, long legs bare and wearing that black blouse like an obscenely short miniskirt.
“Now this?” He reached again to her buttons
“No. Soon. Come up on the bed. Kiss me some more.”
So he did. They rolled around there for another hour, playing like teenagers, he in his suit trousers and his shirt and she temptingly, tantalizingly, not quite naked, kissing, tasting, finding each other out until, eagerl
y, suddenly, all unplanned, that blouse fell open.
She pushed him onto his back and straddled him. “Here.” she said. “My cuffs. Undo my cuffs.”
His fingers trembled but he managed it and then she was sitting on him, looking down at him and smiling, dressed in nothing but lace, and he wanted her so much. He reached up to her to touch those astounding breasts. She took his hands and whispered: “Wait,” and, kissing his fingers, “Wait,” again.
And then the waiting was over. She was naked with him at last. Her skin, like silk but without the grain, against his shirt, against his face, in his hands, in his mouth.
She said: “Everything” and meant it.
Sometimes, if you glance up at the clock at precisely the right moment, time seems to stand still. If the eye falls on the secondhand just at the very instant when it arrives at the next black dash then, somehow, the mechanism seems to freeze. Everything stops just long enough for the mind to notice that the whole world has frozen and there’s a tiny moment of exultation and delight at having finally conquered time, at being free to stand outside it forever, immortal, and there is a cold sliver of glassy terror at the thought of it and then the clock ticks on again. Being with Caterina was like that.
Being with Caterina was like standing on the cliffs above a bay on a bright, clear day, like looking down from afar, seeing the waves hitting the beach in silence, waiting, waiting, waiting until the roar arrives, but by then the waves have gone. Being with Caterina was like that.
Being with Caterina changed everything. Being with Caterina made everything slow, compressed the whole universe into a drop of water, made a single breath fill the sky, made a day and a night and a day into a heartbeat. A whole day and a whole night before they left that bed and a day more before they left the flat.
And even when, in a moment of abandonment, she gripped him tight and called him “Daddy!” his heart froze for only a second and then he reveled in it.
While he was with Caterina, the Merino congealed into a waxy trickle. The trees in the park wilted. They stood with their branches drooped like disgraced officers on the parade ground, waiting to have their buttons pulled off and their swords snapped.
The Love and Death of Caterina Page 13