The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  “Your mother and father too?”

  “There was a curtain.”

  “A curtain?” Mr. Valdez was amazed. He was amazed at the life this girl had led, amazed that she had so little, astonished that he wanted her so much in his own life.

  “Yes, a curtain. We could pull it across at night to split the room up. But we were very young. Anyway, it’s not the worst thing in the world to think that your mother and father make love.”

  Make love. Her mother and father made love on the other side of the curtain and yet she had asked him if he wanted sex.

  “No,” he said. “Not the worst thing.” He opened the door. “And is there still only one room in your house?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Pappi died. I think my brother made another room on the outside of the house. I haven’t been home for a while.” She offered her face to be kissed again but he seemed not to notice.

  “How did you come here, from that place with your little one-room house? How did you come here? Dr. Cochrane says you are one of his best students.”

  “I was lucky,” she said. “And people were kind and I work. I work hard. I know how to work.”

  “Yes,” he said. He put his fingers on the buttons of her shirt, his thumb and his first two fingers, ready to press them together and push and turn and open, and he found her fingers there too, brushing against his but this time she was helping him, not fending him off. This time she wanted to be naked with him. This time she wanted to be rid of her clothes.

  “Chano,” the word still sounded new and strange in her mouth. “Chano, I don’t do this sort of thing. I don’t.”

  He took his hand away in alarm. “But I wasn’t the first.” Suddenly the thought horrified him. Before—in the time before Caterina—it would have thrilled him, it would have added extra savor to the conquest, but now it made him feel like a thief. And then, because what he had said sounded like an accusation, he said: “Was I?”

  She flung herself at him. She wrapped her arms around him. She stumbled across her stupid canvas bag so she could be close to him and she pressed her face into his shirt. “No,” she said, “you weren’t the first. But it feels like the first. There were boys before. You’re a man. There were fumbles in the dark but you aren’t like them. I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. I’m making more of this than it deserves and I threw myself at you in the first place. And then, when it happened, it was so good, it was all so good and then I left you this morning and I didn’t think you’d even call me again and I was ready for that. I told myself I could be grown up about it and then by the afternoon I’m sitting on your doorstep like a lost puppy. It’s not your fault. I’m sorry.” She stepped back and started pulling at the buttons of her shirt again, sniffling and saying: “Come on, come on!”

  And now, when he put his hands on hers, it was to stop her and still her. She did not look at him so he took her face between his hands and kissed her, kissed her hair and her forehead, kissed her eyes, kissed her nose, her lips, her chin, kissed her and held her until they both cried. It was the second time Mr. Valdez had cried in the past thirty-seven years.

  EVERYTHING THAT WAS left of the afternoon they spent together. They sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and talking. She told him about her father and life on the farm, about her village. He told her about his grandfather, the Admiral. She told him why she walked with her arms folded and her eyes downcast like a cloistered nun, avoiding the eyes of men or, sometimes, when it became too much to bear, glaring fire at them and shooting her chin.

  When it began to grow dark they moved to the sitting room. Mr. Valdez sat on the huge leather sofa with its square cushions and legs of bent chrome pipe and looked down the long vista of Cristobal Avenue, a rising, narrowing V of perspective disappearing into the dusk. Caterina lingered near his desk, trailing fingers over it, brushing it with her hands. Mr. Valdez remembered how that felt.

  “I don’t keep any money in it, you know.”

  “I know,” she said.

  His notebook was lying there. For a moment he was afraid that she might open it and discover that there was nothing to discover and then he remembered that she already knew. He had bought her with that single line, those few words, which were all that he had in the world.

  “Come away from there,” he said. “Sit here, beside me.”

  But she ignored him. “Be quiet while I idolize profanely,” she said and she turned her back to his and raised her arms over her head, snaking wrist over wrist, twining her fingers and coiling in gorgeous, obscene ripples that shook her whole body as she made obeisance to the desk. She finished by kissing it, like the Bishop, kneeling to kiss the altar. “This is a holy thing, you know.”

  “It’s a desk.”

  “It’s where you write.”

  “There’s no point drenching me in compliments. I have already willed it to the museum.”

  “You can always change your will. You could leave it to me.”

  “Already you want me dead!”

  She threw herself at him again. “No, no! Chano, no! Live forever. Live.” She knocked him over like a puppy and they fell on the sofa together. Nothing happened. There was no kissing. There was something in the way of it. They lay together watching the gathering dark and the traffic moving along the avenue like burning strings of jewels, winking and sparkling on the other side of that vast window. Mr. Valdez wondered if he had fallen asleep. He got up, went to the kitchen and made omelets, came back and they ate. She took off her horrible shoes, drew up her legs and sat on the sofa beside him. They watched TV. Her shoes stank. They went to bed. She asked if she might use his toothbrush. They undressed in the dark. They lay down together, wrapped in each other, touching the length of their bodies, and they slept. There was no “Again.” They slept. He woke in the night when her hair brushed against his face, when her new smell filled him. High above the street lamps the city glow was faint at the window and it hummed over her pale skin and there was, again, that shimmering aura of beauty, drawn around every line of her like a protective glow. He could see it clearly, even in the darkness. He put his hand on her, barely touching her, skimming over the curves of her, touching her in disbelief. When she moved, he covered her lightly with the sheets and went back to sleep.

  In the morning he woke to the sound of water running in the bathroom. She had left a warm curve, a child’s shape, marked in the bed by her woman’s body. He let his hand rest there, looking for a memory of her.

  When she came back, walking flat-footed across the whispering tiles, she was carrying a plastic folder.

  “It was in my bag,” she said. “I brought it. In case I found the courage.” Her voice sounded tight and dry and faint. She gave a little cough. “I write, you see.”

  “Yes. You told me.”

  “Yes.” She climbed into bed. “I wanted you to read it but now I don’t. I want to read it to you instead.” She moved on top of him so he was lying on his belly and she could sit on him, like a grand lady riding her horse through the park on a Sunday morning. He felt her heat in his back, the softness of her thighs down his sides. She stroked his hair and rubbed his back. “You have nice shoulders,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m going to read to you now and would you, please, not say anything until it’s finished.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “I know it’s rubbish. I know it’s nothing to what you could do but I want to read it to you.”

  “I’m sure it won’t be rubbish.” Oh, Chano, he thought, you storyteller. How you’ve changed your tune.

  “Shh. Listen.”

  This is what she read.

  Once upon a time, a long, long time ago (which is the accepted and recognized style for beginning a story such as this and has been since stories were invented), once upon a time there was a hot little hill village set in the middle of some red fields with not much water.

  There were thirty families living in that village, including one woman
with three clean children who made her living entertaining anybody who passed by along the road and any of the men from the village or the two other villages in that long valley who happened to call. That was nice for the other women in the village, since it gave them someone to look down on and that is always encouraging.

  When a man gets so drunk that he falls down in the street, crawls home and slaps his wife, sleeps until noon and then is too ill to go out and look after the animals, it does his woman good to remember that at least she is not the village whore. Life might be bad, but it’s not as bad as that, which is a comfort.

  Down in the gully at the end of the village, where that woman lived, her three clean little children spent all the morning playing in the stream, building dams and launching stick boats which might, one day, reach the sea.

  Then, in the afternoon, when it got too hot to play, they came inside and learned their lessons while their mother washed their clothes and pressed their clothes and combed their hair and told them that they would grow up to be doctors and live rich in the city—which they did. And years later, when the people in the village heard about that and remembered the little children who used to live there, they all agreed that it would be very unpleasant to be ill in the city and find that your doctor was somebody who had clearly spent far too little time contemplating the very great sins that must have been committed to pay for such a fancy education.

  Now, if this were a proper story, a story as stories used to be told, we would climb out of the gully and along the street to where the old well sits at the bottom of the hill. We would climb the hill, up the zigzag path, all the way to the beautiful old house at the top, and find the wise old hidalgo who lived there. He would have a handsome son, with flashing eyes and a powerful sword-arm, a prancing stallion black as a woman’s hatred—but no wife. And then, after many sighs and much singing, he would get one.

  But, as you already know, while things change they never get better, so this is not that kind of a story.

  There is no wise old hidalgo and there is no beautiful old house. At the top of the hill there is only an ancient fort, all broken and roofless, with walls of strangely shaped stones, huge boulders shaped into skewed rectangles with flat faces and beveled edges, all locked together like the teeth of an alligator to stand against the earthquakes. Since the days of the Conquistadores nobody but monkeys has lived there, so we will go back down the hill to the village and the big white house at the end of the street by the well.

  It’s a nice house, don’t you think? Good solid gates painted green and a thick wall all the way round, higher than a man and replastered every year against the rains. Stand on the other side of the street and you can see the tops of three trees waving like slow, green flags. They take a lot of watering, but they give good shade and they make the neighbors envious, which is what counts. Those trees, sucking up bucket after bucket of water and waving their branches over the high wall, are as good as a flashing neon sign that says: “A man of wealth lives in this house.”

  This is the home of Jose Pablo Rodriguez, and when he stands on his roof in the evening, all the fields he can see away off to the south are his, everything in the north is his, everything on every side is his.

  Now, it was not always so. In the days of the father of Jose Pablo, there were fields all around the village which belonged to others, but times change. Men die and their little bits of ground are parceled off among half a dozen sons and some will always want to sell—always. Or there are daughters to be married and dowries to be provided and weddings to be paid for. Sometimes men must borrow. Jose Pablo was always ready to lend—at interest and for the right security. Or there is misfortune. A sick child. A broken leg. The plow standing idle. Sometimes men must sell. Jose Pablo was always ready to buy.

  Jose Pablo understood that nothing works harder than money because money never sleeps. Put money to work and it is always working. A man cannot work in the field every minute of the day. It cannot be done. He must rest. He must eat. But he must pay rent every minute of the day. Night and morning, sleeping and waking, the rent is being paid. Jose Pablo understood that. That was why, at last, he owned all the fields.

  They had called out to his father in the street, as to one they had known from childhood. They called his father Manolito but him they called “Señor” because he was lord and mother and father of the whole village and he held it in his hand to crush or caress. Jose Pablo Rodriguez was heaven-born and he walked the street with a heavy tread so that men would notice.

  On this morning, when he got up and looked from his roof across the fields—which were all his and his alone—Jose Pablo saw a strange thing. To the south, all the fields were empty. In the north, nobody was at work. To the east and the west, the paths leading out of the village were empty, and this distressed him because he liked to lie late, knowing his money was always hard at work and he expected to look out in the morning and see it working. And then, what was more distressing still, even before he had taken his coffee, he heard the distant tinkle of the brass bell that hung by his gate.

  It was a delegation, and that displeased Jose Pablo very much; the whining and the pleading and the childish requests. He was in no mood for it but there they stood, at the big green gate—half the men in the village, and they pushed before them the idiot Julio as the chief of the beggars.

  “Oh, Señor Rodriguez, will you not hear the voice of an innocent who has suffered a great wrong?”

  Jose Pablo heaved a great sigh and settled himself on the cane chair that sat in the shade under the middle tree of his three great trees. He sat open-legged to give his belly room and he beckoned shortly to the men at the gate.

  Four of them came in, the idiot Julio and three of his friends. They stood respectfully just outside the ring of tree shade, examining their feet, or glancing at his.

  “Speak,” he said.

  Julio said nothing.

  “Donkey, speak up. Do you think I have nothing to do all day but watch you standing here, dumb?”

  Little by little, with pokes and urgings from the three friends, the story came out, how the pedlar Miguel Ángel, that wicked boy with his hair too long and his smiling eyes and his quick-fingered flute, had passed along the valley and camped up in the old stone fort. And because the pedlar Miguel Ángel is many times cursed and in the pay of devils, the monkeys of the fort had not come at night to attack him and steal from his pack.

  Everybody had heard the sweet music of his flute, floating down from the castle walls in the night, and when he moved on up the valley again, the daughter of Julio had a golden comb in her hair.

  “This was a month ago, Señor. Also two goats were stolen and the pedlar Miguel Ángel must be caught and punished.”

  Then Jose Pablo laughed. “Two goats! A month ago! A month and only now you have come to complain?” He slapped his hand on his fat thigh. “I am thinking the pedlar played a good tune with his flute. And where’s your daughter now? I heard she walked to the railway station and went to visit a sick aunt in town. Is that right? Maybe she took the goats with her. Miguel Ángel is no thief of goats.”

  The old cane chair groaned as Jose Pablo stood up and went back inside his fine house. He was laughing still when he sat down to take his maté and he congratulated himself again on his good fortune. “The man who can buy jewels for his daughter’s dowry need have no fear of a pedlar with a shiny comb.”

  It was not many days after that, when a fat moon was hanging in the sky, half behind the hilltop and making the red earth shine blue for miles around, that they heard the music from the fort again.

  Jose Pablo stood on his roof, a thick blanket over his shoulders against the dewy night, and followed the tune as it drifted, like silver threads, as weightless as the moonshine up and down the street.

  Later, when he was in his bed and the music still played, soft and soothing and far away, he found he had followed it all the way down to sleep, but he never even realized until he woke with a start and re
membered, as if in a dream, that a door had banged far off. There was the sound of running in the street, and a little while later, when the fat landlord was asleep again, the music stopped.

  The next day, when the men were going out to work, he saw Julio on the path and laughed and called him “donkey” again. “I see you have a black eye and a split lip, donkey. Have you been taking flute lessons at the fort? Last night, I heard you. And how many goats have you lost today?” He laughed and laughed but Julio only flung his hoe across his shoulders and walked on to clear his fields.

  All that day the men worked the fields, the thin clouds wandered about high up and forgot to shed any rain, the birds flew, the goats clambered over the red hill, the turned earth grew dry and dusty in the furrows and blew away in a fine drizzle like spume from the tops of waves on an ocean which none of them had ever seen or could even imagine. And all that day Jose Pablo sat in his fine house, counting columns in his ledgers and listening to the sound of the fields, where his money was working, and then it was night again. That’s how it was in the village. That’s how it is in every village everywhere, from the little place at the bottom of the hill under the strange stone fort, to New York.

  For the second night in a row, he went to sleep to the sound of the flute calling from the hilltop, and in the morning, when he looked out from the roof and saw Ines, the daughter of his tenant Arsenio, stopping at the well, she had an armful of bangles that were not there the day before.

  “Hello there, pretty thing,” he called. “Has your father counted his goats since last night?”

  The girl ran off down the street without an answer but, just a little later on, the men were at his gate to report another theft.

  This time Arsenio was at the front of the queue, reluctantly jangling on the brass bell, but before he allowed his tenants into the garden, Jose Pablo called to his daughter, his precious baby girl, his niña, and gave her instructions.

  Then: “Come in, come in,” said Jose Pablo. “Come here,” and he eased himself down into the creaking cane chair under the shade of the middle of his three great trees. He pointed at each in turn and said: “In one month the rent falls due, for you. And you. And you. And you. Have you come to tell me that so many goats have been stolen that none of you can pay?”