The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  He circled the old man’s ears, brushing them with oil, the way a father washes his baby. “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by hearing.”

  The oil was gone. Father Gonzalez tipped the little bottle into his palms again. He brushed his hands over the old man’s keel nose. “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by smell.”

  And down, across his mouth. “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by taste.”

  He held his hands, one after the other, wiping the oil across them back and front. “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by touch.” The old man was cold. The blood was retreating like a tide, shrinking from the world and taking the life with it.

  He shuffled on his knees and folded back the blankets to reach the old man’s feet. They were wrapped in filthy socks, stiff and stinking. Father Gonzalez tugged the socks off and the feet inside were black and bony with clawed, yellow toenails.

  Jesus Christ did this. Jesus Christ who made the whole world, who made the universe and everything in it, washed the feet of his friends. “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by walking.”

  The old man’s skin was so fragile and transparent. Almost imaginary. Just barely holding the life inside, thinning, getting ready to dissolve and let him leak away. There was almost nothing left of him.

  Father Gonzalez tipped the oil into his hand once again and reached under the blankets. He was embarrassed and ashamed. Like a doctor. Like a doctor for the soul. Like a doctor. He found the old man’s withered penis, like a cold worm in his hand.

  “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by carnal delectation.”

  He leaned back on his heels and said. “That’s all there is. I will wait here with you.”

  The boy said: “Our Father. Our Father. Our Father,” and some place outside, a choir of men was singing: “We’re on the march. This road we’re treading, it leads to freedom. It leads to freedom and liberty.”

  It was like a hymn.

  KNOWING HIS PLACE, the old man did his duty and got on with dying quietly and without fuss, unseen and unnoticed just as he had been all his life. There was no final trapped-rabbit shriek, no thrashing about, no fish-eyed, breathless gasping, no watery, lung-filled death rattle, not even the last, drunken snore. He simply died like a candle.

  Father Gonzalez was kneeling by the old man’s side when it happened. He closed his eyes for a moment’s prayer and, when he looked back, the old man was dead. Nothing had so much convinced the priest of the existence of the soul as having seen people on either side of life. He looked down in that instant and knew at once that the old man was no longer asleep or unconscious but dead. There is no way of telling, just by looking, if a clock is broken or simply stopped. You can’t look at cars parked by the roadside and know which of them will start with the flick of a key and which has no fuel, which has a flat battery. With people it’s different. The old man was empty and scoured out, like a burst football, like an oyster when the pearl fishers are finished with it, nothing left but torn, gray flesh.

  The boy had run out of “Our Father”s and lay curled up in an exhausted ball to sleep. Quietly Father Gonzalez tidied the old man up. Symmetry seemed important at times like these. People liked to see order and death can be very jumbled so, before he shook the boy gently by the shoulder, Father Gonzalez straightened the crick in the old man’s neck, combed his hair and arranged his hands; as if he were on parade and not lying on his back on a mud floor in a shack made of packing crates and old plastic sacks.

  “He’s gone,” he said. The boy was still young enough to weep without shame. Father Gonzalez held him while he sobbed.

  When that had passed—and it passed quickly—Father Gonzalez asked: “Who lives here with you?”

  “Nobody. There’s just me and him.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She said she was going to town for a job. She brought me here. We didn’t see her after that. Granpa said she got a man and he didn’t want me around.”

  “Don’t you have any idea where she is?”

  The boy started crying again.

  “It’s all right, son. It’s all right.” But it wasn’t all right. Father Gonzalez wanted to explain that there were people who would care for him, a place to stay and food and school and a bed of his own to sleep in, hope and even a cold substitute for love, but the kid drove down with his sharp little elbows and ducked away, out through the sack door and into the last of night, running hard.

  Father Gonzalez tried to follow but he was not young. He took some time to get off his knees, and when he groped his way to the door the boy had disappeared into the maze of little sheds and shacks. Walls loomed up in the red dawn, the same red dawn that was breaking over the tall glass towers of the city and kissing the windows of the Merino and National Banking Company, the same dawn that was graying the courtyard of the Ottavio House and redrawing the bottles on the table there. But though dawn came sooner up the hill in Santa Marta, it was like everything else in Santa Marta, a little slower, a little weaker, a little dirtier.

  The old priest was just as lost in the dawn as he had been in the middle of the night. He stumbled about from wall to wall, from house to house, slip-sliding in the mud and the half-dark, calling out feebly to a boy whose name he never knew until, on the path back to town, on a bit of sloping grass where two sewage ditches met, he turned a corner and found Dr. Cochrane.

  It was a ludicrous moment: Dr. Cochrane tottering on his cane and the priest with mud on the knees of his black trousers, his elbows, his hands, and his purple stole wrapped round his throat like an aviator’s scarf.

  Dr. Cochrane said: “Gonzalez!” with an embarrassed squeak in his voice.

  And Father Gonzalez said: “Joaquin.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Then Father Gonzalez remembered the singing. He remembered the rebel songs and he remembered what everybody knew: that Dr. Cochrane liked the old Colonel. He said: “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  And, because he could think of no ready lie, because there was no possible reason to explain why he, Dr. Joaquin Cochrane, respected reader in mathematics, descendant of the heroic national liberator and cripple, should be there on a greasy path between two stinking ditches in the poorest barriada of the city at dawn and also because he looked into the face of Father Gonzalez and read there knowledge and understanding, Dr. Cochrane did the only thing he could do. Dr. Cochrane leaned heavily on his cane, so heavily that it actually penetrated the soft earth a little and a tiny crater of mud swelled around the rubber ferrule as moon dust blooms around an impacting meteorite, and he knelt there on the path and took off his hat.

  He said: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  “What?”

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  “Joaquin, what are you saying?”

  “I want to make confession.”

  “What?”

  “You are a priest. You cannot deny me. You cannot prevent my reconciliation with God.”

  “Now? Here? Can’t it wait? Let’s go back to town. I think I know the way from here. My car is at the bottom of the hill.”

  “No, Father, it must be now. I may be close to death. At any moment, I may die unshriven.”

  “The Church’s view on these matters has changed a great deal. You needn’t worry.”

  “Father!” There was an angry urgency in his voice.

  “Joaquin, you’re not even a Catholic.”

  “I am a Catholic. I am. I am baptized and confir
med. I am as much a Catholic as the Archbishop himself, as much a Catholic as the Pope.”

  “But you do not believe.”

  “How do you know that? How do you know what the Archbishop believes or what the Pope believes? You believe and that’s all that counts. You believe.”

  “Yes, I believe. And you don’t know how fervently I pray to be rid of it, this belief of mine.”

  “But, if your belief fled,” said Dr. Cochrane, “that would only prove that your prayers had been answered, which must mean that somebody answered them and that, after all, your faith—which had just evaporated—was justified.”

  “Are you a mathematician or a philosopher, Joaquin?”

  “Please, Father, my knees are not what they were.”

  Father Gonzalez wiped his hands on his mud-stained trousers, unfurled the stole from his neck, kissed the embroidered cross there and put it on again. He knelt down on the thin grass beside his friend, two old men side by side, one facing east, squinting into the early sun, one facing west toward the last bruised remnants of night, close enough to catch every whispered confidence but invisible to each other. He said: “Begin again.”

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  “May the Lord be in thy heart and on thy lips, that thou, with truth and with humility, mayest confess thy sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”

  “I confess to God Almighty, the Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, to Blessed Michael Archangel, to Blessed John Baptist, to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to all Saints and to thee, Oh Father, that I have excessively sinned in thought, in word, in deed and by omission, through my own fault, through my own fault, through my own, very great fault. I have spent the night in plotting how best to overthrow the state and conspiring in the murder of our national leaders.”

  EVERYTHING ABOUT THE sea is perfect. There is no part of the sea you can look at and imagine that it could be improved. It is perfect, but it is never the same. It is different in different places at different times. It is alike in different places at the same time. It is different in the same place from moment to moment and alike, in different places, in the moments in between.

  Everything about the sea is perfectly balanced. As it follows the moon around the earth in a great, bulging, expectant teardrop, it grows thin behind. For every crest, there is a trough. For every ocean deep there is a shore as shallow as a ripple. So, Mr. Valdez reasoned, there must be some part of the sea where the wind was rushing by like knives and screaming like widows because, there, where he was sitting, looking out from his usual bench in the square beside the Merino, hundreds of miles from the sea but still touching the sea, it was more than still, past still. The air was like glue.

  And he knew there must be some place where the rain was falling in torrents, hammering down like angry nails, because there on the Merino the water was rising in clouds, drifting up in a thick jungle vapor to hide the sun. He knew there must be such a place because the sea never lessens, never loses a single drop of water, never gives up a cloud unless it accepts a million raindrops in exchange. So there must have been another place where the sea was wild and mountainous, with great wave crests reaching up to claw at frightened stars, because there, in that place, it was as flat and sticky as syrup in a jar, smooth as a velvet tablecloth in an aunt’s parlor and as quiet.

  Along the Merino it was chicken-gravy hot so there must be some frozen place with icebergs that scraped the sky. There must be some place where everything was blue as sapphires, blue as cornflowers, blue as ice, blue as eyes, because there, along the Merino, everything was a million different shades of yellow. The hot fog rising from the river was yellow. It rolled in yellow folds toward a hidden yellow sun. The river was yellow. Yellow as a madhouse. Yellow as a villa in France. Yellow as a pot of sunflowers. Yellow as a quarrel or a hair ribbon. Egg yellow. Dog yellow. Daffodil yellow. Certificate yellow. Rust yellow. Rot yellow. Mushroom yellow. Fish-belly yellow. Everything was yellow, except for the black ship tied up under the cranes on the quayside and the flag that hung over the great curving whale-cliff of the stern, as limp and wet as a winter handkerchief.

  Something inside the ship belched and a stream of oily bilge water began to spurt from high up on the hull, thin and erratic, like an old man’s piss. It splattered into the river and loud drops flew up at the policemen standing there on the dockside and signaling to a shiny-headed Chinaman looking over the stern. They had long boathooks.

  The tallest of them said: “Let down the net.”

  The dark head disappeared, the filthy water stopped splashing from the pipe, the whole yellow world was quiet again until an iron clang and stutter from above made the men on the dock look up.

  A crane derrick jerked unsteadily out over the side of the ship and a thick net of rope, showing the signs of hard work, began to fall. On the quayside the tall policeman signaled with flicks of his finger. The net fell and sagged and blossomed as it hit the water and Mr. Valdez, who found these days that almost nothing interested him, stood up from the bench, where he sat with his notebook clamped shut in his hand and his pen, unused, between his teeth, and walked over to investigate.

  One of the policemen put up a hand. “I wouldn’t,” he said. “This isn’t going to be pretty.”

  His mates were using their boathooks to poke and drag at something in the water. Mr. Valdez looked over the edge of the seawall and saw it was a man, floating facedown, crucified in the water.

  “If it’s who we think it is, he’s been in the water for a while. Not nice.”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “Oh, just some sailor who didn’t show up for work. They get drunk and fall in. It happens. Now piss off. Sir.”

  Mr. Valdez retreated a step or two, just enough so as not to appear difficult or disrespectful, but he kept watching as the mechanism on the crane began its clanging and the rope rose and the net lengthened and tightened and drew up out of the water all that was left of a man, curled in a ball like a sleeping baby.

  The tall policeman signaled pointlessly at the Chinaman on deck. The crane turned. The net hovered, dripping over the quayside, lowered, spread, opened.

  “Help me,” the tall policeman said.

  The others came forward.

  “Take him under the knees. I’ll hold his shoulders.”

  They had him. They paused. They shifted the weight. He gurgled. There was a green belch of gas. The tall policeman turned his face away as it broke. They put him down on a canvas sheet and stepped back. The tall policeman arranged him, made him straight, tucked the canvas all around him, folded it underneath. The others stood apart. One dragged his hands up and down on his trouser legs with a look of disgust.

  “May I,” said Mr. Valdez, stooping to twitch aside a corner of the canvas.

  “Leave it!” the tall man said.

  Mr. Valdez straightened with dignity. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I find this fascinating.”

  “It’s a dead man, that’s all.”

  And then, as if it would explain or excuse, Mr. Valdez said: “I am an author.” He actually used that word. “Author.” Not “I’m a writer” but “I am an author,” as if that explained everything, the way that a man could say: “Let me through, I’m a doctor.”

  The policeman stood aside. He had a stomach-calming cigarette to light. He had an ambulance to call and a report to write. It was none of his business if this man wanted to throw up.

  But Mr. Valdez did not throw up. He flicked back the corner of the canvas and looked at where the face should be and decided it was time to go to the Phoenix for a morning coffee. He walked back across the square and down the little calle and through the fancy doors and down the stairs into the café, where the usual university crowd had already gathered for breakfast.

  Sitting in the corner seat, Dr. Cochrane flapped his huge newspaper so the air caught it at the crease and helped him fold it into something the size of a bed sheet. He had an announcement to make
and he wanted to be seen making it.

  “According to this,” he said, “the face of Christ has appeared in a burrito in Punto del Rey. According to this, the burrito was purchased by a bus driver who was two bites into it when, at the third bite, he noticed the face of Jesus looking back at him from his lunch and so, instead of finishing it, he has put it on display on top of his TV set and people are queuing on the stairs to adore it.” Dr. Cochrane gave the newspaper another flap for emphasis and said: “What do you think of that, Gonzalez?”

  The old priest looked up from his coffee, glared at him with a look that was more hurt than angry and said: “I do not mock the simple faith of simple people.”

  “No, but really. A burrito?”

  “Why not a burrito?”

  “Bread and wine is bad enough, but a burrito!”

  “Joaquin, God is not mocked.”

  “Yeah, you tell him, Father,” said Costa, as if that settled it.

  They nodded their good mornings at Valdez as he pulled up a chair and it was only when his coffee came, only when he took his first sip, when he lifted the bread and the ham to his lips and chewed, that Mr. Valdez realized he felt nothing. He had just seen a dead man pulled from the Merino with his face half eaten away and his belly bloated and he felt nothing. He could drink coffee and eat bread and ham and feel nothing. Mr. Valdez had no brother and no father, but if he had and he had seen them lying there, he knew he would have felt nothing. He tried to imagine pulling any of his university colleagues from the Merino—Costa, De Silva, Dr. Cochrane or Father Gonzalez—and he felt nothing.

  The bleakness of that washed over him in a torrent. “I am an author,” that’s what he’d said. “What a storyteller you are.” That’s what he’d said. But how could he be a storyteller when he couldn’t feel?

  With the second sip of coffee, Mr. Valdez looked along his entire shelf of novels and he found, again and again, the same brown dog he once saw in a park, the same couple saying goodbye under the trees he had seen from a passing train. He followed the progress of his various adventures in the pages of his books. This one dreading the end of the week when he must be parted from the woman he wants. Then the consummation. The satisfaction that turns to a glut and the boredom and, finally, the disgust, thousands of different sensations, always producing the same response; ice always cold, fire always hot when, once upon a time, he would have known the difference between the fire of love and the fire of hate. A bright, leaping flame and a slow ember are not the same thing. The meaning is different and once upon a time he could see and feel and understand them differently, write them differently, but it had gone. There was nothing left but a scrawny yellow cat crossing the road and creeping into the whorehouse.