The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  When Caterina opened the door that led to her stairs, Commandante Camillo breathed out in a hot sigh. He was tired. His suit was soft with sweat. He smelled his own rankness.

  On the seat beside him there was a pile of papers in a dusty green folder and, on top of that, the strange journal of a sick, sad boy.

  He picked it up and held it against his eyes without opening it. “Five times I have read this and I don’t understand a word of it. What is he to you, Valdez? And the girl—little Miss Luscious Tits? What’s her story?”

  The Commandante flicked back the cover of the folder with a thick finger. Inside it was exactly the same as it had been all the other times he had read it. There were two sheets of crisp, white paper on top, new, neatly printed. They were dated from the day of the bombing and, under them, another eighty-three pages, frail, brittle, yellow, with words across them in uncertain lines, odd letters out of place, typed in blue-black and purple, soft, leaky unfocused letters made by old typewriter keys striking through worn-out carbon paper. They were nearly forty years old.

  Commandante Camillo sighed again. “My beautiful Sophia Antonia,” he said. “All this you brought on yourself.”

  It’s strange that everybody in this story seemed, at that moment, to be sitting on the opposite side of town from somebody who was thinking of them. Caterina, standing in her shower of sunbeams, surrounded by wilting flowers, was thinking of Mr. Valdez, gliding slow and stately in his wonderful green car between the paddocks of the polo club.

  Mr. Valdez turned smoothly into the car park where the long, dusty drive changed to a crackle of fine yellow pebbles that spat under his tires. He slowed down, stopped. The car park was almost empty and Mr. Valdez chose his space with care, sliding his lovely mermaid-green car next to an ancient gray Volvo with a broken taillight. He put his car there the way a jeweler would put a diamond in its silver setting; not to make the metal look dull but to make the diamond sparkle more. His car shone.

  In front of him, behind another line of white fence and across a broad lens of lawn as smooth and level as a Persian rug, the polo club glowed with a cool beauty. Mr. Valdez ignored it and, instead, he threw his jacket over his shoulder and walked off in the other direction, toward the stables. Mr. Valdez liked the stables, the ponies with their soft noses and their hard-spring legs and the warm, clean smell of their flesh and their breath and their dung. But before he reached the horse boxes, he stopped in front of an open set of double doors.

  “Hello, De Silva,” he said.

  “Oh. Hello.”

  De Silva was sitting in a saddle slung over a wooden trestle. He was wearing the suit he wore to university every day and his bald suede shoes were pushed into a pair of stirrups.

  He said: “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

  “I spotted your car.”

  De Silva said: “How did you know it was mine?”

  “I know about cars. Yours is an old car.”

  “I don’t think it’s as old as yours.”

  “Ah, but mine is an antique. Yours is just old.”

  De Silva didn’t know what to say to that. He made a few idle swings with the polo mallet in his right hand and then he said: “You must be wondering what I am doing?”

  “I can see what you’re doing and you’re not doing it very well.”

  “I’m practicing. I’m just learning.”

  “Yes. Try to follow through a bit more. Here, try this.” Mr. Valdez took a ball from a heap by the wall and bowled it through the thick sawdust on the floor toward De Silva’s imaginary horse. He missed.

  “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you I was doing quite well at this until you arrived.”

  “It’s always the way and, for all the technique, once you get two or three ponies jammed in together, with the ball in amongst their legs, it’s all just a matter of poking about.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to play.”

  “Oh, don’t say that. I can easily get you a knockabout. We’ll get a few of the boys together if you’re interested—which you clearly are. What brought this on?”

  De Silva handed him the mallet and stepped down from the saddle. “I don’t know. Mid-life crisis I suppose. Polo isn’t something we did a lot in the Navy.”

  “Hard to get the ponies on the boat.”

  “Ship. Submarines are boats.” They walked out of the shed together into the sunshine and, as he put on a pair of sunglasses, De Silva said: “When I saw you, my heart sank. Thank you for not making fun of me. You always do things so well and you don’t suffer fools. I felt sure you would laugh at me. I’m sorry I misjudged you.”

  “Don’t be sorry. If I’d seen you yesterday or the day before I would have mocked you mercilessly.”

  “But?”

  “But things change.”

  “What things?”

  “Just things. People.”

  They were almost back at the car park when Mr. Valdez said: “You know that scar on my lip …”

  And he was not even slightly surprised when De Silva said: “What about it?”

  “Is it really noticeable?”

  “Does it bother you? I never gave it a moment’s thought. You’ve had it as long as I’ve known you. It was always just part of the furniture. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  De Silva paused and said: “Chano, is everything all right?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Well, you forgot to be cruel to me. You’re worried about some ancient scar. You tell me that things change. It’s not that girl, is it?”

  “What girl?”

  “Come on. That girl. The kid from Cochrane’s math class. The one from the Phoenix. You know,” he cupped his hands in front of his chest, “that one.”

  “Oh. That one.” Mr. Valdez lied: “No, don’t you worry about that.”

  “And how’s the book going?”

  Without stopping to think, Mr. Valdez found himself telling the truth. “It’s shit. It is total shit. I can’t think of a single thing to write. There’s no story.”

  “How come?”

  “I just can’t think of what’s supposed to happen. There’s no story.”

  “Come on. There are stories everywhere. Look in the paper. There’s a priest who wasn’t allowed to take the Mass on Sunday and the bishop sent a message that he was in the asylum after ‘a complaint.’ What’s his story? There’s an old major who saved three of his men from a burning truck. One of those men had a kid and that kid killed the major’s son in a car crash.”

  “You could have explained that better.”

  “I’m not the acclaimed author. Look, I was sitting on that horse and I saw a butterfly. What’s his story? Where did he come from, what did he see, what does he think, what are butterfly songs like, do butterflies love or mourn?”

  “I’m not a poet—and neither are you.”

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “Yes, I know. I know. Thanks.” And then it was over and Mr. Valdez began to lie again. “It’s just, I’ve got this character, a fair way into the book, a good way in, and he goes on a journey, arrives at his destination, and …”

  “And you don’t know what happens next.” De Silva unlocked his car and sat down inside. “Relax. It’ll come to you. You’ve got this far.”

  “Yes, it’ll come to me.”

  De Silva pulled the door shut with the sort of heavy clunk that only comes from the kind of engineering designed to cope with elk-crashes. “You’ll sort it out. How’s your mother, by the way?”

  “I’m just about to meet her in the club.”

  “Be sure to give her my kindest regards.” He turned the wheel and reversed away.

  IN JUST THE way that Caterina was standing in her kitchen and thinking of Mr. Valdez, Commandante Camillo was sitting in his car and thinking of Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez, who was also at the polo club, seated at her favorite table by the window, trying not to fray the lovely
napkin in front of her, wondering why her only son would make her take a taxi so far out of town when he could just as easily have picked her up, and dreading the meeting they were about to have.

  She was offended and upset and—because Mrs. Valdez was always scrupulously fair in these matters, never judging others more harshly than she judged herself, in fact, as she was forced to acknowledge, usually the reverse—she felt completely justified.

  And, in just the way that Commandante Camillo was sitting in his car, thinking of Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez, she was sitting at her table thinking of him. For nearly forty years she had managed to think of him hardly at all, but now, since Chano had so unthinkingly passed on his regards, he seemed to haunt her.

  Things that Mrs. Valdez had carefully and deliberately pruned from her memory had now, suddenly, returned in a plague of dark and poisonous blossoms. Camillo was lurking in the shadows of her father’s house, washing the Admiral’s enormous black car, sweeping the leaves from the drive that curved up to the three marble steps at the front door, kissing her, pressing his mouth into hers and putting his hands on her exactly as she had longed for him to do, but something had changed. He wasn’t a boy any more. The Camillo of memory was the same one she saw every day in the newspaper or in TV broadcasts, standing up gigantic and terrifying, surrounded by strong young men with blank and brutal faces just as he had once stood beside the Commandante of Detectives long years ago, just as he had stood outside her house, watching. And now there was this business of the scar.

  Mrs. Valdez put down her napkin and forced a smile as she saw Chano arrive. She offered her cheek to be kissed.

  “Hello, Mama.”

  She said: “Darling.”

  “Did you order?”

  “No. I was waiting.”

  He drew out a chair and sat down and then, after saying nothing for a while when they just looked at each other and examined the cutlery, he said: “Anyway, I asked you a question.”

  Mrs. Valdez bristled at that. “You are very short,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sometimes you have no manners. I blame myself, of course.”

  “Please, Mama.”

  Mrs. Valdez sighed impatiently. “What do you want to know?”

  “Mama, I have a scar on my lip. I do. Don’t I? And yet all my life we have never, ever talked about it.”

  The waiter arrived and they ordered coffee and cakes and, sat in a stiff, upright, straight-backed silence while he fussed, pointlessly around the table. When, at last, he left again, Mr. Valdez said: “Why?” very quietly.

  “Why? Why have you suddenly become interested? Why now?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t notice before.”

  “You didn’t notice?” There was a harsh quality to her voice, like a fork drawn sharply across a china plate, and it made people on the other side of the room look up.

  Mrs. Valdez looked down into her napkin. She said: “I have lost count of the times that a perfectly nice morning coffee has been ruined by other people’s complaints. The number of times I have put on my gloves to go out to some little gathering, in a friend’s house or a pleasant café, expecting a little chatter, perhaps even a tiny acidic pearl of gossip to enjoy, only to find, instead, that it turned into an endless stream of misery! ‘My feet, my dear. My bunions, my dear. My veins, my dear.’

  “I would no more discuss my ailments amongst friends than I would, than I would”—she struggled to find something sufficiently outlandish—“than I would cut my toenails at the table.

  “Of course, like a good friend and out of politeness I listen with sympathy, you know I always try to put others first, but it is boring—very boring—and annoying and, most of all, it is unfair. Could there be anything more tedious than other people’s illness?

  “And out of all of them, out of all those complaining women, none of them, not one of them, would have listened if I wanted to complain about my great trouble; the dreadful, cold gap in my life where my grandchildren should be and, if I should die without seeing my husband’s name preserved, which of them would share my shame? It is all too awful to talk about and now you, Chano, you have decided to join in with your strange telephone calls and your ‘Mama, do I have a scar on my lip?’”

  “But I do.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Valdez looked up from her napkin at last. “Yes, you do. What of it? Has it held you back in some way? Has it blighted your life? Do women find you less attractive? Has it damaged your career? Have you been bullied? Has anyone ever even commented on it?”

  “No, Mama. That’s the point. Nobody has ever mentioned it. You never mentioned it. Children are cruel, they latch on to any tiny difference like a pack of dogs, but nobody ever mentioned it. Not once. Not a word. None of the cousins ever said a word, none of the uncles, none of the aunts. Don’t you think that strange?”

  “No. Perhaps people are kinder than you know. Anyway, you never mentioned it either.”

  “Mama, how could I? I didn’t know.”

  “You didn’t know? How could you not know?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  She looked at him without understanding.

  He said: “I’m sorry. This is a waste of your time.” And when she still said nothing, he said: “I don’t know who I am, Mama. I don’t know myself. We never talk about anything. My father. Who was Daddy? What happened to him? Where did he go? I don’t know anything. I don’t even recognize my own face. Do you?”

  Mrs. Valdez fussed with her pastry fork for a moment then she said: “And you made me take a taxi to get here too.”

  “You can get a taxi back,” he said. Mr. Valdez stood up to go but she put her hand down on his, her thin hand, with its fragile skin.

  “It’s hard for me,” she said. “It’s hard for me to remember.”

  “I can’t remember at all,” he said.

  By the time the waiter came, bringing his tray of coffee and cakes, Mr. Valdez and his lovely green car were already leaving the car park.

  MR. VALDEZ LEFT his beautiful car in the basement of his apartment building where it sat, like a sleeping panther, smelling of leather and hot oil and ticking as it cooled. Mr. Valdez looked back at it with love, turned and climbed the stairs to the lobby.

  On each side of the room there was a broad, red leather sofa and Caterina was sitting on one of them, the one behind the basement door, with her feet flung out in front of her and a big canvas bag on the seat beside her. Mr. Valdez didn’t even notice her. He walked from the door marked “Stairs to the Basement” straight to a half wall of pigeon holes, each one sealed with a hinged brass cover, each one numbered with black enamel figures.

  Mr. Valdez unlocked his box and looked inside and then, with two fingers, like a magician, like a pickpocket, like a man with tweezers picking up broken teeth from a city pavement, he removed a postcard.

  It was a postcard exactly like dozens of other postcards he had received before. In the past they had said “Tomorrow at 2” or “Tuesday afternoon.” But this one was different. This one said “I know what a dreadful mistake I made. Dying without you. I am so very sorry. Let me show you how much. Please forgive me. Grant me absolution tomorrow” and it was signed simply “M.” Mr. Valdez read it all in a second and tore the card to confetti.

  It was only then, when he lifted his eyes from the wire wastebasket at his feet, that he noticed her sitting there, watching him.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello.” He said only “Hello” when, before, with his other women, he would have said, “Darling” or “My Angel” and he was conscious that he had made the change unselfconsciously. It was natural. The extra parts of him were torn away in front of this girl until only Luciano was left. He was smiling.

  “You look happy,” she said.

  “I suppose I am. Surprised to see you, too.”

  “Sorry, should I go?” She swung her feet under her body as if to stand up. “I
don’t want to pester you.”

  “No, of course I don’t want you to go. Have you been here long?”

  “Not long. Half an hour, maybe. Not angry with me?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Why should I be angry?”

  “Well, we didn’t part happily.” She looked down at her ridiculous faded sneakers. “That business with the scar. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “I’m not offended. You were right. It’s for me to apologize.”

  “Silly. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No. Not really.” Mr. Valdez was baffled. How could he talk about something he could not see and did not understand? “Some things can’t be fixed by talking. Most things in fact. Actually, the more I think about it, I can’t think of a single thing that can be fixed by talking. When you are as old as I am, you will know that too and yet, just a short while ago—earlier this afternoon in fact—I did want to talk.”

  “It’s not such a mad idea, talking. It cures most things. It can even cure wars.”

  “The only thing that can cure a war is excess of pain. When people get sick of the pain, they stop the war.”

  “When people get sick of the pain, they talk,” she said.

  Mr. Valdez took his keys from his pocket. “Do you want to come up?”

  “Again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Yes. Do you want to? Again.”

  “Yes.”

  He took her hand and, in the lift, he kissed her, there, on the palm of her hand.

  Caterina said: “You are very lucky to have a quiet, secret place like this.”

  “You mean, like this lift?”

  “I meant your lovely flat but, yes, even your lift. Some place where there’s nobody watching or listening. Some place where you can be alone or with somebody else. Some place where you can kiss.”

  The lift stopped.

  “Don’t you have such a place?” he said.

  “I never did. Not ever. I live in a student flat and, before that, we all lived in the cottage, all of us in the one room.”