She clutched at the collar of her dressing gown, pulling the two sides together, hiding herself. “How lovely to see you, darling,” she said. “You should have told me you were bringing a guest.”
Mr. Valdez looked from his mother to Caterina, who stood at his side, holding his hand, struck dumb by embarrassment. “Mama, there is someone I want you to meet. Mama, permit me to present Caterina …”
“Chano, stop!” she said. And then, not unkindly, she told Caterina: “My dear, I simply cannot meet anybody in this condition. Pardon me. Please give me a few moments.”
Mama left, disappearing through a door which, Mr. Valdez realized, must lead to her bedroom.
Caterina sat down on a little round chair under the long shelf where Mrs. Valdez kept her collection of first editions. “Oh, God,” she said.
“Oh, God.”
“Chano, this is awful. That poor woman.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea. It never occurred to me.”
“It never occurred to you that your poor mother might have no clothes on?”
“I have never seen her like that. Never in my life.”
“Oh, you must have!”
“Never. Not once. Not even as a child. She was always spotless. My mother thinks taking her gloves off is reckless informality.”
Caterina glared at him until she couldn’t bear to look at him any more, then she looked at the floor and said: “That poor woman,” then up at the long shelf of books. “She’s obviously very proud of you,” she said.
“She hasn’t read them.”
“How can you know that?” Caterina got out of her chair and went to take down The Killings at the Bridge of San Miguel.
“Don’t touch,” he whispered.
“Why not?”
“Best just to leave them alone. She has them all arranged the way she likes them.”
Caterina had the book half off the shelf, tipped backward by its top edge the way that people who love reading but do not love books do, the way that gets dust jackets torn and bruises the bottom of the spine, but she stopped and put it back obediently. She sat down in her chair again and looked out the window with her chin in her hand. She huffed a sigh. “We should go.”
“We can’t go.”
“This is a disaster. You bring me here to meet your mother, to tell her that you are about to marry some girl she’s never heard of, somebody she knows nothing about, and then humiliate her like that.”
“It wasn’t intentional. She will understand.”
“And I’m sitting here in these same ripped jeans.”
He said nothing.
“We should go.”
“Stay. It’ll be all right.”
Caterina huffed another sigh and she was about to complain again when the door at the back of the room opened a crack and Mrs. Valdez said: “Chano, darling, could I see you for a moment?”
She sounded friendly, bright, at ease but when Mr. Valdez knocked—“Yes, darling, come in”—she spoke in a glacial hiss.
Mrs. Valdez was sitting on an embroidered stool, properly dressed, shoes and stockings on, a sober pencil skirt in charcoal gray just below the knee, every hair in place, pearls at throat and ear, makeup so flawless that, if he had not seen her without it, he would not have known it was there.
She glared at him in the mirror of her dressing table. “How could you?”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
“How dare you?”
“Dare what? I came to visit my mother. You let me in.”
“Of course I let you in. I am your mother, not a monster. How could a mother turn her son away? And you humiliate me with that young woman. Who is she? And how dare you introduce me? I know about your women, Chano. That’s all right, I’m not an innocent, I know what men are and anybody could see why you want her—it’s disgustingly, brazenly obvious—but you should have enough respect not to rub my face in it. I do not wish to be introduced to your whores, Chano. Please take her out of my house.”
“You have to meet her.”
“No, Chano, I do not. I am your mother and the mistress in my own home.”
“We are going to be married.”
She looked at him for a long moment, saying nothing. Light bounced from the window into the hinged, three-sided mirror with his mother reflected and half reflected and repeated in it, with the images of the elegant old furniture he remembered from childhood, things from the Admiral’s house, things he had not seen since his mother moved to the flat.
Mrs. Valdez plucked a tissue from a leather-covered box on the dressing table and another and another, a little stream of cockatoo crests. She folded them into a blunt edge and dabbed gently at her eyes, leaving blackened moth-marks on the paper.
“Is she pregnant?” All in the same piercing hiss.
“No, Mama. But she will be. I promise.”
“What was her name again?”
“Caterina.”
“Good name. Sensible. Religious name. You know she only wants you for your money.”
“She doesn’t even want to marry me. She’s terrified. She wants to go on as we are. I bullied her into it.”
“Oh, that’s the oldest trick in the book! Who are her people?”
“She has no people.”
“I see. She dresses like a beggar.”
“That’s why I brought her. It’s why we came. There are so many things she needs to learn and you can teach her. You can show her how to dress. Start with that.”
“But she is very young.”
“Mama, it is indelicate to mention a lady’s age but I believe you are twenty years older than me.”
“Things have changed a lot since those days.”
“Mama, do you want me to marry a woman my own age or a woman who can give you grandchildren?”
Mrs. Valdez stood up, smoothed the wrinkles out of her skirt and offered her cheek to be kissed. “I am very happy, darling.” They stood there, awkwardly together, saying nothing until she was forced to hint, clear her throat and nod toward the door.
He had only just put his hand on the doorknob when she said: “I assume you are fucking her.”
Mr. Valdez looked at the carpet.
“That will have to stop. Just for now. Just until the wedding.”
“Yes, Mama.” He opened the door.
THE DARK ROOMS under the Palace of Justice were empty again and more or less clean. Policemen took the same fire hoses that they were sometimes forced to train on difficult prisoners and used them to scour down the walls and the hard concrete floors until the blood came off and the smell of terrified incontinence was washed away. The round iron grilles sunk in every floor gurgled with clean water and the grille in Cell 7 trapped a glittering golden tooth.
Upstairs in his office at the very back of the Detectives’ Hall Commandante Camillo was on his second cigar of the day and his fifth coffee, and it was beginning to affect his digestion. All through the bomb investigation there had been calls from the capital sometimes three a day, then one a day, then a couple of times a week and now, nothing. There was no reason to be alarmed. Nobody had called to ask why there was no progress on the bombing. Commandante Camillo found that the most disturbing thing of all. There were so many reasons why they might not call for answers. Maybe they already knew. Maybe it was just a little bomb in a little town far away up the Merino. Commandante Camillo saw all the reasons and his mind danced in the gaps between them. Maybe it wasn’t important. Maybe they just didn’t care, and that was very, very worrying.
Commandante Camillo wanted to find the answer—not that he cared about the answer. He just wanted to prove that it could be found and that he could find it.
The boy Miralles was mad, the Commandante was sure about that, but not so mad that he couldn’t make a bomb and plaster himself all over Plaza Universidad. And he got the bomb from somewhere. Somebody gave him the bomb; either handed the whole thing over and told him which switch to press or gave him the parts and taught him how to screw t
hem together. But there was nothing to show either way. After all the long hours of questioning, nothing. One of the boy’s cousins had admitted that he didn’t like girls—another one, they were everywhere now—and his Aunt Laura turned in Uncle Arturo for screwing his tax return, but that was it. Five minutes in the cell with their arms up their backs and the whole family was queuing to confess, but that was the best they could come up with. Nobody even mentioned the oppression of the peasants. Nobody mentioned a bomb. Nothing. Nothing to show whether Miralles was a single, independent lunatic with enough cash to fund a spectacular suicide, or part of something bigger, something more interesting, something that would interest even the capital, make them sit up and take notice, make them see the sort of person they were dealing with, someone to be respected, someone to be regarded, not a man to be dismissed and forgotten halfway up the Merino.
On Camillo’s desk, beside his brimming ashtray, there was a brown cardboard box, and inside that the diary of Oscar Miralles. Camillo put down his cigar and opened the box. The same book, the same tight, mad scrawl. There wasn’t a page of it that he hadn’t read a dozen times, straining over the jagged, angry letters until they scratched at his eyes. It was horrible stuff—like being cornered on the street by some stinking madman, but this one you couldn’t push aside, this one you couldn’t slap down into the gutter. This one sat you down in the padded cell, buttoned up your straitjacket and made you share his nightmare all the way to the last page.
The Commandante tore a sheet of paper from his pad, squeezed it into a tight ball and flung it at the glass in his door. The thud of it made the detectives look up from their desks and one of them, the one whose face he had wiped so tenderly on the day of the bombing, pushed back his chair and came forward.
Camillo waved him in to the room: “Come on, come on. You don’t have to knock—I called you in here.”
The man closed the door and stood with his hands folded in front of himself, as if he had been on parade.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake sit down.”
The man obeyed. He said nothing. That was expected of him.
Camillo dropped the diary on the desk in front of him. “Remember that?”
“I did exactly as you said, boss.”
“And what did you get?”
“Nothing.”
“Why not?”
“I did what you said, boss. I did exactly what you said.”
“Who did you speak to?”
“I spoke to everybody in that book.”
“Everybody?”
“Everybody except the ones you told me to stay away from. Those three.”
“And you got nothing.”
“Boss, they’re a bunch of university kids. They dress like revolutionaries and they talk like revolutionaries but their daddies are all accountants. There’s nobody mentioned in that diary who gives a stuff about the peasants except …”
“Except those three.”
“Well, I don’t know that, boss. You wouldn’t let me ask them.”
Commandante Camillo took a long drag on his cigar and blew the smoke out toward the roof. He said: “I like the old man for this. I really, really like him. He makes my palms itchy. He goes way back. He liked the old Colonel—never made any secret of it. At one time liking the old Colonel was the smart thing to do, but it’s not smart now. We never got anything on him or he’d have been hanging off a meat hook, but I like him for this. And Valdez goes way back too. He’s got bad blood. I knew his father. He looks like he’s kept his nose clean but why does he turn up in the diary if he’s not connected? And the girl. She’s perfect for it.”
“Boss,” the policeman hesitated before he dared to offer a theory of his own, “you know what I think?” Camillo waved his cigar, signaling permission to speak. “I think there’s nothing to it. Cochrane is in the book because he was Bomb Boy’s teacher, the girl’s in the book because she was in the same class and Bomb Boy fancied her and Valdez is in the book because he muscled in. That’s all. It’s a love triangle. The kid blew himself up to impress a girl. He was showing off.”
After what Father Gonzalez had told him, Camillo knew that might be true but he chose not to acknowledge it. “You mean: ‘You may have gone off with the international best-selling author while I was trying to get my hands in your knickers but, look at me, darling, I can magically transform myself into soup,’ that kinda thing?”
The policeman shrugged. “It’s a theory,” he said. “It makes as much sense as anything else. And he wasn’t planning on blowing himself up. Maybe he was trying to kill her or Valdez.”
“Those three, where were they when the bomb went off?”
“Boss, I don’t know. You told me not to ask.”
Camillo said nothing.
“Do you want me to ask, boss? I can go and find them right now.”
“No. Forget it. I’ll do it. I need to do it.”
“You getting heat from upstairs?”
“Son, there’s nobody anywhere in this building can give me heat.” He paused to draw on his cigar again. He paused a little longer to let that sound important.
“Higher up than that?”
“I’ve got nothing to say.”
Do you see what a beautiful lie that was? Do you see how a frightened man who feared that he was unimportant, a man who feared he was being ignored, by saying nothing at all, just by rolling his tongue around his cigar for a few moments, made himself important?
“I’ve got nothing to say to you but I have a few words to say to Mr. L.H. Valdez and I know exactly where to find him.”
NATURALLY, WHEN MAMA issued her ridiculous order, Mr. Valdez had no intention of obeying. He agreed at once, of course, but only to make her shut up, only to make the moment pass. To hear such a word in his mother’s mouth! Mothers never forget that they have seen their sons naked, suckled them, wiped their shitty asses clean. Mothers refuse to relinquish that degree of intimacy. They think it gives them license to say anything, but Mr. Valdez, like all sons and in spite of the irrefutable evidence of his own existence, preferred not to acknowledge that his mother had ever had sex and the idea that she had taken pleasure in it, even once and no matter how long ago, was simply too much to contemplate. He banished the idea of eagerness from his mind. Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez was not Maria Marrom. Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez could not possibly have behaved as Caterina had behaved only a few hours earlier. Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez was not capable of that kind of famished need. That was what he chose to believe and, in exchange, he expected her to believe the same of him, so when she said: “I assume you are fucking her,” Mr. Valdez looked at the carpet and agreed only because it would make that nightmarish moment of confrontation end.
And yet afterward, after he had gone through that door, after he had begun again and introduced Caterina to his mother and his mother to Caterina, in that order, respectful of their status, pretending that they had not already met a few moments earlier when his mother had been as good as naked, it had come back to him. Not when Mama extended her hand and smiled with a smile like a bacon slicer, not when she turned a cheek as cold as the steppe and waited … to be kissed, not when she said: “My dear, I’m thrilled,” as she would have done if the cleaning woman had just tipped over an entire cabinet of her best china, not amidst the endless sharp chinking of coffee spoons, not when she pleaded, as a sergeant-major would plead: “Darling, say you will,” for the chance to take Caterina shopping, demolish her and rebuild her in kitten heels, not even when she said: “I’m so glad you came. It’s been a joy to meet you. I think this is the happiest day of my life,” and the door closed and the lock snapped shut with a noise like a coup de grâce, no, even then he had no intention of obeying.
And when Caterina asked: “Did I pass?” and he kissed her as a reward, when they spent the remains of the day together, wandering the art gallery, drinking coffee, w
alking under the trees that taunt the prison, and all through dinner and then when he took her home, not to her flat but to his, where now she had a toothbrush of her own, taken from a plastic packet of three in the bathroom cabinet and left out, brazenly, beside his, above the sink in the gorgeous limestone bathroom, Mr. Valdez had every intention of defying his mother.
But then nothing happened. He went for a shower and she didn’t come with him and nothing happened. He lay down between crisp sheets of Egyptian cotton and nothing happened. Caterina walked through the bedroom, smiling, scattering clothing behind her and nothing happened. He lay listening to the water running and he thought hard about where it was running but nothing happened and she came back, wrapped in a thick, white towel, her skin dewed and sparkling and nothing happened. She stood at the side of the bed and let the towel drop away and nothing happened. She threw back the sheet and nothing happened, lifted one knee, moved her leg, tipped forward, shifted her weight, moved from the floor to the mattress where she lay beside him, folded her skin against his, covered him with her leg, brushed him with her hair, kissed his shoulder, dragged fingertips down his chest and nothing happened. Nothing.
She kept kissing him. She nuzzled him. She made a noise in her throat.
He said: “It’s been a long day.”
“It ended better than I would ever have imagined,” and she kissed him again, slowly, right under his ear.
He didn’t move. “You must be exhausted.”
She was still kissing him. She stopped. “Yes,” she said. “It has been a long day. I’m very tired.”
“Let’s wait until tomorrow. I don’t mind.”
She rolled away from him. He felt the curve of her back against his as she curled into a ball on the other side of the bed and he sighed. Mr. Valdez measured the passage of time in her breaths. He reached backward, finding her skin with his fingers, but she inched away from him. It was just a tiny movement but he read disgust in it.
The Love and Death of Caterina Page 24