“I’m really tired,” she said, but he knew she was only being kind, she was excusing his failure, and naturally he blamed his mother; his mother who was old and dry, his mother whose knees sagged, his mother with her crabbed, bent toes, with her cold bed, empty these forty years, his mother, with her thin, chicken skin, his mother who had choked down her bitter snobbery only because it was the price of a grandchild, his mother who had shriveled him with her stupid curse.
Before long, Caterina went to sleep. He recognized the softness of her breath and that whistle in her nose. Mr. Valdez did not go to sleep. The night weighed heavily on his eyes. He was too ashamed to sleep and his shame translated itself into anger.
When Mr. Valdez got up, Caterina never even stirred. When he sat down at his desk, naked, and lit the lamp with its green shade and picked up his pen and opened his notebook where there were still only those same dozen words, neither of them heard, at that very moment, far away in the distant capital, a plane taking off loaded with mail.
He wanted to write. He looked down at the page. “The scrawny yellow cat crossed the road and crept into the whorehouse.” That was all there was. He sat with his pen at the very end of the line until the ink began to pool out of it and soak its way down through three sheets of paper.
Two miles up in the sky, hundreds of miles away, lights twinkled, drawing closer.
Mr. Valdez tore pages from the front of his notebook and wrote again: “The scrawny yellow cat crossed the road and crept into the whorehouse,” and then he astonished himself by adding: “where it hoped the beautiful Angela would scratch his belly.”
Mr. Valdez stared at the page in amazement. After weeks of nothing, here were ten new words. The words were coming back. There was a beautiful girl lying naked and untouched in his bed and yet he smiled.
Looking down from his cockpit in the dark and lonely sky, the pilot looked at the Merino glittering in the moonlight and nudged the nose of his aircraft down toward a distant runway he could not see. Dials glowed. Needles twitched. The electric voices of people he would never meet gabbled in his ears. Far behind him the sleeping dogs in little mining towns heard the murmur of his engines and whined in their sleep. Babies, who had heard him pass every night of their lives, heard him pass again and did not notice. Down in the jungle, round-eyed monkeys looked up at the roaring lights in the sky and clung more closely to their mothers. The plane flew on and on, until the jungle thinned and turned into fields, on again until the fields sprouted houses that grew as thick as grass and taller than trees and then, with a final low circle over the barriada of Santa Marta, it landed at the city airport in the hour before dawn.
The plane taxied close to a long line of low, white buildings, blazing with lights, and trucks with “Servicio Postal” painted along the sides came out to greet it. By the time they arrived, the pilot had operated the machinery that opens the hold and men in white overalls started unloading sacks of mail. When the first birds were starting to sing, when Father Gonzalez was standing at his altar, afraid again and cold, as Madame Ottavio closed her front door and gathered up the empty bottles from her garden, sacks of mail started arriving at the central sorting office. One of them contained a thick white envelope addressed to Mr. Valdez and stamped with the letterhead of The Salon.
Caterina was still asleep.
THREE HOURS LATER, when Mr. Valdez went into the kitchen to make coffee, Caterina woke up. She was awake when he came into the bedroom and took his blue-black cotton dressing gown from the hook behind the bathroom door but she kept her eyes closed and lay still, sprawled across the bed with her hair tumbled around her face like a cloud and an annoying village-idiot trail of spittle tickling its way from the corner of her mouth. She could not decide if it would be more suggestive of sleep to let it roll its way into the crumpled pillow or to snap her jaws and lick her chops like a labrador. She chose to do nothing.
Mr. Valdez did not notice. He was not watching her. He wanted only to get across the room, cover himself and go without waking her. There was more to it than a newfound modesty imposed by his mother. There was more to it than the echo of his failure from the night before. Mr. Valdez planned to serve her coffee and eggs and rolls from the stock he kept in the freezer and Mr. Valdez was an aesthete with a fear of the ridiculous. He knew he could not arrive, naked, carrying a tray.
He went back to the kitchen. He clattered about. His espresso machine hissed and bubbled and, after a decent interval, she took that as a cue to rise.
Caterina had her own toothbrush now, but she had no dressing gown. She came into the kitchen with her hair scraped back off her face, wearing a nearly-white T-shirt and yesterday’s underwear. She looked like a goddess and she smiled at him and kissed him but there was something missing, a chilly gap that had not been there the night before, like the space where a tooth used to be, and teeth do not grow back.
“This is nice,” she said. “Thank you.”
“I was going to bring it to you. Sleep well?”
“Not really. I missed you.”
He looked at her disbelievingly over his coffee cup.
“I did. Really. I’m like an old woman. I’m getting used to you.”
“I had hoped to keep the magic alive for just a little longer. Say until we get married.”
“You don’t understand,” she said and she was right. Mr. Valdez had no idea of the way she loved him then. He told himself that he loved her, he knew he loved her because she had made the warm blood flow again into that amputated stump where once, long ago, he had been connected to the world, but he loved her with a reasonable love, because she was young and beautiful, because she gave him sex, because she held out to him the prospect of children, sons, companionship in old age, the possibility that he might not die alone in this flat and lie undiscovered until neighbors whom he did not know complained of the smell on the landing.
Like the rest of us Mr. Valdez was unable to conceive of a world where he might not exist, where that lamp would go on burning, where those trees would go on growing, where rivers would flow, cities grow up and turn to dust again, where stars would roll endlessly across the empty sky and all without him. But it was the measure of his love that there was a part of his mind where it was possible to imagine a world without Caterina in it. Even without her, he would survive. His life would be less lovely, it might not be sweetened with children to brighten his old age, but life would go on. He knew it.
But for Caterina it was very different. She was an aficionada, obsessed with the stories he had written, an orphan wandering the world and searching for a place to shelter. Caterina was crippled too, but not like Valdez. He gloried in his cold, dead scar, but Caterina had spent years looking for the missing part of herself, the part that died clutching at a handful of mud in a mountain field, and she counted herself as blessed that he had noticed her. He had no friends and any one of the small circle which gathered round Valdez, his university colleagues, Maria Marrom, even his own mother would, if they were honest, have to admit that Caterina was worth ten of him but she would not have believed it. She wanted to give the rest of her life to making him happy because she believed that would make her happy. She wanted his children because it would be an honor to bear his children and she wanted to sleep in his bed because she could not sleep without him. It was a mad love. She was besotted with him.
And yet, there at the table he could say something stupid and cynical like that, something about how the magic had gone. It was astonishing. More astonishing yet, she bore it.
“Anyway,” she said. “You were up very early. What have you been doing?”
“I wrote.” He sounded proud of himself and he said it with a smile of accomplishment.
“You wrote? Oh God, that’s fabulous.” She was so sincere, so enthusiastic, that she almost sounded mocking. “I haven’t written anything for ages. Not for days. What did you write? Tell me. I want to know all about it.”
“It’s not done yet. I don’t like to—not before
it’s ready. I’m very superstitious that way.”
“Please.”
“Maybe. Maybe later.” As if he had been responding to some outlandish request from a fractious child.
“Well, what did you write?”
“Lots.”
“Lots?”
“Lots and lots. It was like a dam bursting. It just came pouring out.”
“Oh God, I love that. When it happens to me.” She was suddenly modest, as if what she wrote and how she wrote it was not fit to be mentioned in his company. “I love that,” she whispered.
“I feel like I’ve turned a corner. You know?”
“Yes, when it takes on a life of its own.”
“Yes,” he said, “like taking dictation.” Oh, what a storyteller he was. All that excitement for less than a dozen words. In bald percentage terms, of course, his output of the night before had been prodigious, but that was all it was: less than a dozen words. The other half of that sentence came spurting from the end of his pen and the beautiful Angela suddenly appeared on the page and then nothing. Nothing again. Nothing in the bedroom and nothing at the desk. It was as if somebody had opened the door of a prison and then slammed it again. It was like the profound silence that rushes back after an echo, like the darkness that comes after a lightning flash, something even less than there was before.
Mr. Valdez had sat there for hours fighting that full stop, trying to find a way past its blockade, until, sick with fright and close to tears, he decided to make breakfast and now breakfast was over and another day loomed and that blank page would scream at him again.
“Are you going to the university today?” he asked.
“Yes. Dr. Cochrane on transcendental numbers.”
“Too good to miss.”
“A mathematical roller-coaster ride. Are you going?”
“Later. I should have a shave.”
“And I need to get some fresh clothes. Maybe I should keep some here.” She left a big question mark hanging on the end of that sentence.
He said: “Do you want a lift?”
“No. It’s OK. I’d like to walk.” She carried her coffee cup to the sink and rinsed it, standing there, flat-footed, her underwear sagging unbecomingly behind her, a spot with a greenish white head boiling up on her shoulder and still that glow of beauty fizzing and sparkling all around her, the way that rainbows hang over waterfalls. “Better hurry,” she said.
“Yes. I’ll come down with you.” He left his cup on the table and followed her to the bedroom where he pulled on a sweater and a pair of cotton trousers, enough to be decent when he went with her to the street.
The lift took a long time to come and there seemed to be nothing to say as they waited. Standing there, he felt her finger against the palm of his hand and he gripped it instinctively, as a baby does, but only for a moment and then he dropped it again. It was as if, despite everything, despite even their decision to marry, he remained afraid that they might be seen together.
“We should have taken the stairs,” she said.
“But, if we go now, the lift will arrive.” Mr. Valdez said that the way that everybody says it, as if all the moments they had wasted from life’s pitiably small store of moments, tiny shavings of time which they could have spent dancing or kissing or eating peaches or reading a book or writing a book, had actually been well used in waiting for a lift but would be rendered meaningless, would be needlessly squandered and wasted, if they stopped waiting and did something else instead.
She looked up at him. He glanced down and caught her doing it and looked away again, watching the doors doing nothing. The lift arrived. They got in it and closed the doors. Downstairs the postman had already come. He had already pushed open the big bronze doors into the lobby, taken a bundle of letters from his sack and, standing in front of the wall of named and numbered metal boxes, delivered each one as his oath demanded. The large white envelope which had flown from the capital, the one stamped with the letterhead of The Salon and the printed plea “DO NOT BEND,” he folded double and jammed into the box marked “L.H. Valdez,” and by the time the lift arrived at the lobby, the doors to Cristobal Avenue were closing softly behind him.
Mr. Valdez said: “I have been thinking.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t get you a ring. You should have a ring.”
For Caterina the thought of it was almost as wonderful as the thing itself, and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Perhaps, after classes, we could go and choose something.”
She only said: “Oh Chano!” and then, because the lobby was empty and they were alone, he kissed her.
GETTING A LETTER, a real letter, not an advertisement in disguise or a bill or a bank statement, is one of the best and nicest things that can happen to anybody. When Mr. Valdez was only a little boy, a faraway uncle sent him a letter, and in the envelope there was a red cardboard box, printed with the image of a cat, and inside the box there was a piece of soap shaped like a cat and the soap grew fur when it was used. It was wonderful and miraculous for a few days and then it ceased to look like a cat and became instead merely strange, like something festering, something forgotten at the bottom of the fruit bowl.
And then, when he was much older, there were letters from publishers—rejections first of all, but even they had a certain bitter tang, like a good cocktail, and he learned to savor it. Rejections were part of the learning process, in the tango hall, in the bedroom and in literature. He harbored no grudges.
But before long, letters started to arrive from magazine editors who agreed to publish his stories and then from publishers who begged to publish them, letters from critics, letters from fans. He enjoyed them all but the ones he liked best were the ones that came from people who had once turned him down. He lay in his bed at night, holding them up to the lamp, sliding one sheet of paper over the other so the edges lined up, so the letterheads and the typed addresses matched exactly, so they were precisely the same apart from where one said “No” and the other said “Please.” He remembered the deliciousness of it, long after he learned to take it for granted. There was no gambler’s thrill any more for L.H. Valdez, no excitement and anticipation over the unknown outcome. He wrote a story, he sent a story, the story was published. That was how it was or, at any rate, that was how it had been. That was how it had been when he was still writing stories. That was how it was.
All the same, when Mr. Valdez went to the wall of named and numbered metal boxes where he and his neighbors received their mail and he found that huge white envelope with those two words “The Salon” printed along the top left edge in ink so thick that it stood out under his thumb, he felt a thrill of delight and a little fatherly pride.
He knew what was in the envelope: a modest little check, a kindly effusive letter from the editor Correa and a couple of copies of the magazine with Caterina’s story tucked in somewhere near the back, between a dull interview with a first-time novelist and the start of the paperback reviews. And it made him happy that he was able to do that for her, that he had that much influence. It made him happy because he knew she would be happy. It made him happy because he remembered how proud and delighted he had been the day he first saw his work in print and now he had made that happen for her, he had opened a door for her, which was nice because the next time it would be easier. Next time she could say: “And I have been published in The Salon,” and she would be taken seriously. Mr. Valdez was glad that he had given her career a little push. He had set her on the road to being a writer although, obviously, she would have to set all that aside for motherhood, but only for a few years, perhaps ten, maybe fifteen depending on when the babies came and how many they were, and he was delighted to do it. Best of all, he was glad that she had not done it alone and part of her success, whatever it was, would always be his. She would be in his debt. She would be grateful. She would have to be grateful.
Mr. Valdez was so excited when he saw the letter that he almost tore it open right there in the lo
bby. But he didn’t. He gathered it up with his other letters, with that day’s copy of The Nation and with all the other brown rubbish that lay in the brass box, and he rode up in the lift, planning how he would take his ironing board from the kitchen cupboard and smooth out the cruel folds in the magazine, make it new again before he presented it to her.
And, inside his flat, that was exactly what he did. He went into his kitchen and, standing over the table, he sliced the envelope open with a cheese knife—because it was the first that came to hand—and he pulled out those two copies of The Salon.
Mr. Valdez was not a nice man. He was not simpático. There was nobody in the whole of the city who would have gone to the wall for him. But his worst enemy—and there were several who would gladly have claimed that title—would surely have felt for him in that moment.
The back page of the magazine was ordinary enough, just a full-page color ad for American Express, but when he turned it over in his hand, Mr. Valdez could make no sense of it. He stood staring at the front page, not understanding it, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. The words were there, he could see them, they were going into his eyes, but it was as if they were jammed there without penetrating his brain. There, under the usual headline, exactly as Juan Ignacio Correa had imagined, was the single word “VALDEZ!” embellished with an extravagant exclamation mark which Miss Cantaluppi had confected at the last moment.
It made no sense. He could not understand. And then he understood. He flicked through page after page of glossy advertisements, searching for the index, as his panic rose, pretending to himself that this could not possibly be true. But it was true. It was written all over Correa’s gushing editorial, announcing to the world the birth of a new short story by L.H. Valdez. And there was more, over twenty pages of critique and assessment, expert opinion from somebody he had never heard of, explaining “his” story and what it meant and its themes, its “mythic tropes, memes and dream symbols,” and setting out exactly where it fitted in the canon of L.H. Valdez stories, from his first, green efforts to this mature, accomplished masterpiece, the crowning achievement of a master storyteller.
The Love and Death of Caterina Page 25