And, like a child, he said: “I know you’ll come back. It’s not the coming back that worries me, it’s the going away. It’s the being away. Caterina, I don’t want you to go away. I don’t want that.”
Now she was looking at him. There was something in his voice that made her look at him. Just a few hours ago he said: “I like you,” and now he was ready to admit that he wanted her to stay.
He said: “Caterina. You will think this odd,” and then he cursed and jerked the car into a gap at the side of the pavement, bumped the wheel off the curb and parked. He turned to her and said: “Please don’t go. Please stay. Stay with me, if you like. I’m asking you to stay. If it’s a matter of money, don’t worry about money. I’ve got money.”
“I can’t take your money.”
“Yes, you can. I have plenty of money.”
“For God’s sake, listen to yourself. Is that what you think? You think you have lots of money and I have none so you can just pay me to stay here all summer? Or were you going to pay me for one night at a time—or an hour at a time? I can’t take your money. A girl can’t take a man’s money. What would that make me, Chano?”
“Stay with me.”
“Chano!” She turned round and scrabbled furiously with the door catch. Before he could reach her, she was gone. It took him a second or two to throw open the driver’s door and he left it hanging open to the traffic as he sprinted round the car to catch her.
He gripped her by the arms and she struggled, but not too much. Just enough to show that she didn’t want to get away. “Stay, Caterina. Please stay with me.”
“No. I won’t stay. I won’t stay and be your whore.”
“Then stay and be my wife.”
“People are looking.”
“Let them look. I don’t care any more.”
“I’ll scream.”
“Scream if you want to, just, for God’s sake, say ‘Yes.’”
She sagged in his arms. “Chano, no. I can’t marry you. No.”
“Yes, you can. Just say ‘Yes.’ Marry me. It’ll be fine. I’m an old man. I’ll die soon.”
“Stop saying these things.”
He held her tightly, almost holding her up, and she was so small and so lovely and the scent of her hair filled him and made him remember Maria and all those other women in this city, in all the little towns down the length of the river, in the capital. He glanced back at his beautiful car, with the scuff mark of the pavement ground into its white-walled tires, with its door open to the traffic, with buses shaving past, and he wanted to run to it and slam the door. He thought of the ice in a tall glass and the brilliant, throat-tightening bitterness of the lime juice from Madame Ottavio’s table and the girls walking slowly, slowly round the garden, stopping under the trees, climbing the stairs, and he wondered if that was over. Could that be over? And he thought of the scrawny yellow cat, that same cat endlessly crossing the same road, and he wanted it to stop. He wanted to find a way to make it stop and make it right and she was the way.
“I’ll stop. I’ll stop if you marry me.”
Caterina was crying. She said: “You don’t have to marry me. I’ll stay. I won’t go. I’ll stay and we can keep on like this. I’ll do whatever you say. I’ll be what you want.”
“Then do what I say. Marry me. Be what I want. Be my wife.”
And then, poor child, she said “Yes.” There were not many days left until he killed her.
THERE WERE SO many things to talk about but they didn’t talk. They went to bed and then, when he brought her champagne, he said: “You realize you’ll have to meet my mother.”
She groaned and covered her face with the pillow.
“There’s no point hiding.”
“You’ll have to meet mine,” she said, but he couldn’t hear her until he took the pillow away. “You’ll have to meet mine.”
“Yes, I will. Soon.” He said that in a way that meant: “Some day. Never. You should forget about the farm.”
“It’s a funny little church up there. I hope we’ll be able to fit everybody in.”
Mr. Valdez trailed the edge of his chilled glass along the line of her shoulder and he said: “We’ll manage,” in a way that meant: “We will be married in the cathedral, in front of the Bishop, and my mother would kill you and eat your quivering liver before she allowed you to drag her up the mountain.”
And then he said again: “Anyway, you’ll have to meet my mother,” in a way that meant: “You will have to be taken out to good shops and clothes will have to be bought for you, women’s clothes, not the children’s clothes you always wear, not workman’s clothes, not student clothes, and, above all, we’re going to have to get you some shoes.”
“Yes, I will have to meet your mother. I will have to be examined and questioned and officially approved.”
“You will have to be introduced,” he said, in a way that meant: “I don’t think my mother will approve of you. They won’t approve of you at the polo club, they may very well kick me out of the university because of you and literary editors in half the world’s newspapers will collapse at their desks, laughing, when they hear but I don’t care because I need you and I will marry you anyway.”
Caterina said: “When I meet your mother, am I likely to face an examination on my virginity? Because I think I may fail.”
“The key to passing any exam is study. And more study.”
“I have to say, in all honesty,” she took another sip of champagne, “I don’t think you have been entirely helpful with my studies. In fact as a virginity tutor, your biggest admirer—and I think that’s officially me—would have to say you are rubbish.”
He gave a little nod, a performer acknowledging an appreciative audience. “It’s not an excuse, I know,” he said, “but, as a teacher, I have to say that I have met pupils who have thrown themselves into their studies with rather more enthusiasm. Looking at your recent exams, I have to wonder if you are really cut out for virginity. On the other hand, if you wanted to transfer to the ‘Pleasure and Hedonism’ course, I could give you a very good reference.”
“I don’t want that,” she said.
“What do you want?”
“Do you have an opening on the ‘Love’ course? I would like to love you, Chano, if that’s all right.”
“I would like that very much. I would like you to love me until the day I die. I would like you to love me even more than you do now, more every day, and hold my hand at the very last and kiss me to send me on my way.”
“This afternoon you discovered you liked me but now you want me to love you unto death.”
“I said I liked you but you knew what I meant. I want you to love me unto death and I would be honored if you would let me love you and cover you with kisses and pile you with diamonds and furs, fill your arms with babies, strong sons and beautiful daughters. To love you is a delight and a joy beyond anything I have ever imagined or deserved. But first, you have to meet my mother.”
MR. VALDEZ WAS very like the rest of us. Few of us are expert tango dancers, skilled polo players, internationally admired authors and respected scholars. Very few of us have wonderful old cars or enough money in the bank never to have to worry about a thing. But, for the most part, we all believe we are good. We all assume we are more or less decent people, more sinned against than sinning, and if life has not turned out exactly as we planned, if it is a little less than we might have hoped for, if our achievements have not been as great as they might and our disappointments a little greater, if others have been left miserable in our wakes, that is invariably the result of circumstance and never because of any failure of our own, never because of any deliberate act of malice or selfishness. Except for Father Gonzalez, those who believe in Heaven are always sure they will get in.
Mr. Valdez was no different. His great ability to see into souls and open them on a page for others to look at, like frogs on a dissecting table, sliced apart and held with pins, did not extend to himself. His adulteries w
ere, literally, past number and, since they could not be counted, that made them trivial and beneath notice. His visits to the Ottavio House, the girls whose names he never knew, whose faces he would never recognize, were no more than business transactions, like buying a suit, like putting petrol in his car. Maria was forgotten, he owed Ernesto nothing, the things he wrote in reviews were simply funny, bright, witty—not cruel, or career-destroying—he was a dutiful son and he was convinced that marrying Caterina would make her happy and enrich her life.
And if anyone had pointed out that he did not ask Caterina to marry him but simply ordered it, demanded it again and again until she agreed, he would have looked at them with puzzlement, since it was obvious that what he wanted was what she wanted too. So, when she said: “I’ll need something to wear if I’m to meet your mother,” he heard what he wanted to hear.
Mr. Valdez could write a sentence as elegant as a swan but his sentences were like the swans served before a Renaissance prince: a swan stuffed with a goose, stuffed with a capon, stuffed with a chicken, stuffed with a poussin, stuffed with a partridge, stuffed with a lark, layer after layer, one inside the other, there to be discovered, looking like a swan. When he read the words of others, when he heard the words of others, he expected those layers to be in their words too. Sometimes they were not. There was nothing layered inside Caterina’s words—not in the words she spoke. Her stories were her stories but when she said: “Wouldn’t you rather have sex?,” when she said: “I would like to love you, Chano, if that’s all right,” when she wrote: “I write,” that was all there was. The simple truth. No layers. It was absolutely incomprehensible.
After the champagne was finished and they had showered together and he had scrubbed away the dust of the graveyard from his skin and gently washed the smell of his sweat from hers, he took her down in the lift and they went shopping. There was a place along the Avenue which Maria had mentioned and he went there. It was a mistake.
The place was stately, like an ambassadorial anteroom. It smelled of lilies and there were two women—women just like Maria—standing by the back wall, graceful as herons, whispering about something. One of them held up a violent yellow dress and tittered. Caterina was uncomfortable and embarrassed, even a little ashamed, and her unease spread to him, like a spark across a gap. She stood there in her silly cloth shoes—why did she always wear those, when that first day she was wearing heels?—and that coat, that shapeless, brown conical coat, not brown like the browns Maria wore, not honey-yellow, not treacle-black but the color of rot and mushrooms and compost, and she looked like an intruder. He put his hands on her shoulders and, gently, tugged the thing from her shoulders.
She did not resist. She was stunned into compliance, like a heretic being stripped for execution as the flames are kindling. “This isn’t the place for me,” she said.
“Nonsense. This is exactly the place.” He wasn’t listening again. “It’s a bit of a leap, that’s all.”
There was a woman approaching across a silent carpet, pallid, bloodless as a vampire, with an impenetrable, unreadable face under a mask of cosmetics, angular, plank-like, a woman with corners, and she was looking at Valdez, not at Caterina. She would not look at Caterina.
“It’s too much of a leap. This isn’t what I need.”
The woman said: “How can I help you, sir?”
Even for Valdez, who was used to sipping on a drink in a quiet garden while he explained his requirements and made his selection, that was a brutal epiphany.
He said: “Why are you talking to me?”
She made no answer. Caterina noticed, although Valdez did not, that the woman’s painted eyebrow flickered the way a seismograph does in Paris when a pomegranate falls from its tree in the gardens of the Japanese Emperor.
“Why are you talking to me?” he said again. “Why are you not talking to this lady?”
Caterina said: “I think we should try somewhere else.”
But he wouldn’t stop. “Why are you talking to me? Why?”
“Let’s just go, Chano.”
“This is a dress shop for women, isn’t it? Do I look like a woman?”
Caterina took back her coat.
“Sir.”
“Do I look like the sort of person who wears dresses? Do I look like a pervert? Do you think I’m some maricon?”
“I’m going now, Chano.”
His fury spluttered out and embarrassment came in its place. He glared at the woman, refusing to look away from her even when the door clicked quietly into place behind him.
“Besa mi culo, puta.” Mr. Valdez fled from the shop to where Caterina was sitting on a park bench across the street.
When he sat down beside her she said: “I can’t be the person who shops there.”
“You make me ashamed.”
“Ashamed? You’re ashamed of me?”
“I’m ashamed of myself. Yelling like that. At a woman like that. At a woman.”
“You’re embarrassed about behaving badly toward a social inferior.”
“Maybe.”
“No, you are. That’s it. You are ashamed about her for the same reason that you were protective of me. She saw all the reasons why I can’t be your wife and that made you furious.”
“But you will be my wife.” He took a deep breath. “Please, be my wife.”
“You are the great L.H. Valdez. I am a girl wearing torn jeans. How can I be your wife?”
“Because we love one another.” Mr. Valdez said that and he believed it.
“Yes, we love one another.” She believed it too. “Do you think that means nobody will notice that I come from a little town in the mountains? All your fancy friends, all those editors and authors and university professors, they won’t notice that I’m wearing ripped jeans? They won’t care that I’ve never been to the opera and I’m not clever like them—oh, I’m clever, but not like them—and I never use a fork and knife when I eat a peach? Your mother? She won’t notice?”
“My mother won’t care. She will love you because I do.”
“You can order that, can you? Simply tell her to love me?”
“Yes. And the rest doesn’t matter. I have had enough cleverness to last a lifetime. I have had enough of all the things you are not. Things will be hard for you—much harder than for me. I’m the man with the gorgeous young wife. They will be sick with envy.”
“They will be sick with laughter.”
“I don’t care if they laugh at me.”
“But you care if they laugh at me. That woman in the shop, she only ignored me and you went crazy.”
“Nobody will laugh at you.”
“Chano, they will.”
“Yes,” he said, “they will. Can you bear it?”
In the dress shop, the angular woman drew down the blinds and glided, smooth and silent, putting down one pointed toe, shifting her jagged hips, stepping forward, the thin lozenges of her soles, the vicious needles of her heels, one after another in a single line, marking the thick carpet with her passing as the jaguar marks the moss at the riverside, softly, so it springs back with no sign, walking silently into the shadows.
After a breath, Caterina said: “I would bear anything for you.”
VALDEZ NEVER CALLED on his mother without an appointment. He could drop in on the Dean, he could meet the editor of The Nation for coffee or something a little stronger, and he could probably arrange an interview with Señor Colonel el Presidente if he wanted to, but that would take a phone call and Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez ranked a little above Señor Colonel el Presidente and a little below the Pope.
When they met, which was as often as duty demanded, it was never spontaneous and invariably as formal as the tango but without the subtlety of the cabeceo. No glances exchanged, no flick of the eyebrow, no opportunity for acceptance or rejection with no offense given, Mrs. Valdez insisted on a note or, at the very least, a phone call as an acknowledgment that her time was valuable, that she wa
s in demand, that she might have something else to do. Of course, she never said “No.” She would die before she refused her son anything, but she liked to be asked.
It had been some time since their last meeting and that ended badly. Time passed, awkwardness deepened, and long afternoons with Caterina in his bed were somehow more attractive than another visit to Mama, another chinking of coffee spoons, another sad, envious report on long-forgotten cousins and their newest brats.
And yet there he was, in the lobby of her apartment block at 10 a.m., pressing the third silver button in a row of silver buttons, the silver button with the Valdez name engraved beside it in ugly Helvetica type. It made an unmusical note.
She said: “Hello,” recognizably herself but with an electric, robotic aftertaste to the word.
“Hello, Mama. This is Chano.” Nobody else in the world would call her “Mama.” Of course it was Chano.
She said nothing. She said nothing for so long that he was closing his lips to say: “Mama?” when she said: “Hello, darling,” and then: “This is a lovely surprise.”
“Can I come up?”
There was another electric apostrophe. “Yes, darling. Of course. Of course.” She pressed the buzzer.
When the lift reached the third floor, when the metallic concertina gate rolled back, when it bounced off its rubber bumpers, squeaked, wafted the scent of watch oil, when he crossed the corridor, when the door opened, it was her feet that terrified him most. It was the middle of the morning. He was shocked to find his mother still not dressed, still wearing a short white nightdress, her dressing gown hanging from her shoulders, her hair loose, but he was terrified by her feet.
It was one of those drowning moments when everything is clear, when nothing can be done. Mr. Valdez could not remember another time when he had seen his mother’s feet and they frightened him. Her toes were bent, angled, cruelly crabbed from years of elegant shoes. Her toenails had thickened and yellowed and clawed. Her ankles were round and lined and the flesh of her knees had sagged in flabby curtains. Mr. Valdez realized that his mother was old.
The Love and Death of Caterina Page 23