The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  THERE WAS NO stench of sulfur when Commandante Camillo entered the courtyard garden, no rolling thunderclap to announce his arrival, no crashing chords or Grand Guignol effects like the final scenes of Don Giovanni. Nothing. He was simply a man in a crumpled suit, shambling toward retirement, less sure of his place in the world than he felt he deserved. Angry. Nature had forgotten to fit him with any of her usual warning signs. The wasps flash yellow and black to advertise their venom, the viper has her zigzag of diamonds, the shark his sickle fin, but Commandante Camillo was as ordinary as a mushroom. Only experience could mark him out from the rest as a killer.

  But for some reason, when he arrived in the garden a cold breeze came up from the river and over the wall to greet him, just for a moment, so the flames in the lamps knelt to acknowledge him, like penitents before the altar. Mr. Valdez saw it happen and he seemed to know instinctively what it meant. In that moment he felt every flame in Hell dip too, as if in salute to one they were ready to welcome. When he turned and found Camillo standing there he was not even slightly surprised.

  Quickly Mr. Valdez turned round again. He concentrated on measuring out the ice and the lime and the gin. He knew it wouldn’t save him.

  “Hello, Valdez.”

  He did not look up from the ice bucket. “Good evening.”

  “Could you make me a brandy and ginger?”

  “I’m sure one of the girls would make a far better job of it.”

  “Yes, but I’d still like you to do it. It would be a nice, friendly thing to do. I’ll be sitting over there.” He nodded into the shadows.

  Mr. Valdez did not feel friendly. He didn’t feel like doing the nice, friendly thing, performing that simple service that a whore might have done. He felt afraid—properly afraid—and threatened and intimidated and belittled, exactly as Camillo had intended. There was nothing to make him pour that brandy. Camillo was not holding a gun at his head—not literally—and for a moment Mr. Valdez considered not pouring the drink. There was no need. He could simply walk away, find his own chair, sit at his own table and then what—sit and glare across the garden at Camillo, defy him? What if he came over? What if he insisted? What if he stood there and demanded, ordered, with his jacket flung back and the butt of his pistol on show? So what if he did? Camillo couldn’t just gun him down. Not there. No, not there, but he could, later, somewhere else. He could. Mr. Valdez poured the drink, dutifully, and took it to the table.

  “Your drink, sir,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Camillo emptied almost half the glass in a single swallow. It was a tall glass. He put it down on the table with a lip-smacking sigh. “I’ve wanted to have a word with you for some time.”

  Mr. Valdez had no idea how to respond to that. There was a tightness in the back of his throat.

  The policeman said: “I’m a bit worried about the company you keep.”

  “I’m touched by your concern.”

  “Don’t be smart. Please. Some of us are looking out for your best interests.”

  “Then, in the interests of not being smart, I’d better say nothing.” Mr. Valdez leaned back in his chair, the way Camillo had done before, legs flung out in front of him, feigning relaxation. He held his long green glass gripped in one hand, resting on his stomach, and with his left hand he worried at his upper lip.

  Commandante Camillo said: “What do you know about Dr. Joaquin Cochrane?”

  “Nothing. That’s the truth. He works at the university, teaches math. That’s all.”

  “I never like it when people tell me that they are telling the truth. It makes me suspicious. What else?”

  “He walks with a stick.”

  “What did I tell you about being smart?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “You don’t know that?”

  “Of course we know that. We know everything, Valdez. We always know everything. I want to know what you know.”

  “I have no idea where Cochrane lives.”

  “What about his girlfriend?”

  “If Cochrane has a girlfriend, I don’t know her.”

  “Yes, you do. She’s your girlfriend too.”

  Mr. Valdez stopped rubbing his lip and took a big drink.

  “You didn’t know? Oh, that was something you didn’t know. Not so smart now.”

  Mr. Valdez put his glass down. “Which girlfriend?”

  “You know which girlfriend. The little one with the big tits. Caterina. We’ve been watching her for a while. Since before she spent the night at your place. They met up earlier tonight, her and Cochrane, in the gardens right outside here, and they went off together arm in arm. You didn’t know that either.”

  Mr. Valdez was suddenly hopeful. The lime juice had tightened and dried in his throat and he was bitterly afraid but there was hope because there was something that Camillo did not know. Camillo did not know that Caterina had been with him in the garden. Valdez saw and understood: she left him, she met Cochrane and Camillo saw them together. He said: “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “No, you’ve got that right. You thought she was, but she’s Cochrane’s girlfriend—and she’s up to those pretty tits in trouble, so if you’re wise, you’ll tell me what you know.”

  “She’s a student. She’s interested in writing. She came to my house because I agreed to help her. That’s all. I was coaching her.”

  “That’s a new word for it.”

  “She is one of Dr. Cochrane’s students, that’s all.”

  “She’s a terrorist. He’s been a political agitator all his life and he’s got her dragged into it. I’m going to have them and, if you don’t want to go down with them, you’d better start telling me lots of interesting things—things that will make me more interested in them than I am in you.”

  Somehow Mr. Valdez found the courage to look the policeman in the face. He remembered what Caterina had said about going to her execution, about being brave right up until the very last. He knew what he was going to say before he said it but not why he said it. Even in that moment he was unsure if he wanted to stand in the way between Caterina and Camillo, protect her with his own flesh, or if he hoped that by daring to act like a character from a novel by L.H. Valdez, he might save himself. He said: “Camillo, I’m going to tell you the truth now. I’m going to tell you something I wouldn’t admit to another soul. You frighten me. You and people like you, you frighten me. But I don’t care what you do, I’m not going to hand anybody over to you. Not the girl, not Cochrane, nobody.”

  Mr. Valdez was an artist and he knew, as soon as he had said it, how pathetic that sounded. He saw from Camillo’s face that he knew it too.

  “You would give me anybody. You’d give up anything. You’d do anything I said.” Camillo swallowed the last of his brandy. “I bet you’d even get me another drink if I told you to.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” In spite of himself, Mr. Valdez found he was touching his lip again.

  “I know a lot more than you think, Chano, son. I even know how you got that.”

  Valdez snatched his hand away from his face. “Unless you’re going to arrest me, I’ve had enough of this.” He stood up from the chair.

  “That’s it. Run away home to Mama. I’ve got man’s business to be about.”

  All around the garden, the lamps flared again.

  A CHILD OF six years old knows that he has lived a lifetime of experience, knows that he understands the world and all its works and that there is nothing more to learn about the ways of men. A boy of fifteen knows as much and a man of twenty-one and a father of fifty. Sometimes it is necessary to live to a great age, sometimes even for more than one lifetime, before we find out how little we know, how much there is to learn and how infinitely surprising are all our fellow travelers.

  To understand is to forgive, as the proverb says, and those who have suffered most have most to forgive, and who suffers more than men like Dr. Joaquin Cochrane?
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  There could hardly be a man more unlike L.H. Valdez. Dr. Cochrane, short, shuffling, stiff-legged, Valdez, even if he was feeling his age, still an athlete.

  Valdez a man of words, Cochrane who played with numbers. Valdez commanding attention, demanding to be noticed, reveling in adulation, insisting on it as his right, Dr. Cochrane keeping to the shadows, hugging the skirting boards of life.

  Valdez believing in nothing, boasting of his uncaring uncertainties, Dr. Cochrane nursing his passionate, secret zealotry.

  Valdez squandering himself endlessly, lovelessly, until when love came late it was a stranger and it frightened him. Cochrane always alone but always ready to love, like a filled lamp waiting for the match.

  Valdez a ladies’ man, very definitely a ladies’ man, and Cochrane not, Cochrane most definitely not, and yet, because life is infinitely surprising, it was Cochrane who sat across the table from Caterina, restlessly turning the salt cellar.

  They sat there in that little restaurant for almost four hours, and long before that time was up, Dr. Cochrane decided that he liked this young girl.

  They spoke of her village in the mountains and how small it is, how far away from everything, how clear is the air. She told him that she missed the stars and the long, bright smear of the Milky Way cutting across the sky but it comforted her to think that, when she saw the moon, the same moon was shining on her mother.

  Dr. Cochrane spoke of his ancestor the Admiral, but it was all new to Caterina and she could listen without forcing interest—for a while at least.

  They spoke of food and books—especially the books of L.H. Valdez—and, most of all, they spoke of love. Love in general and her love in particular.

  He said: “I blame myself. I am your teacher. I should have stepped in. I could have prevented this.”

  “But this is what I want. He is what I want.”

  “My dear, I believe you. Truly I do. Valdez is a great catch and, forgive me, there are many women—many, many women—who have tried to do what you have done. Believe me, making L.H. Valdez care is no mean accomplishment. I have tried for years. I have loved him for so long, you see, but he pays no attention to an old man like me.”

  Caterina looked down at the tablecloth, suddenly embarrassed. She could think of nothing to say beyond: “I am sorry.”

  Dr. Cochrane laughed. “Am I so obvious? All these years I thought I was hiding myself.” He put his hand on hers. “No, child, not like that. Not that way. As a father. No, that’s not right either. As an uncle perhaps. A secret uncle.” He smiled. “Or a fairy godmother!”

  Caterina smiled too. She felt he had given her permission, as if he would understand that she was laughing at what he said and not at what he was. Dr. Cochrane made her feel at ease in a way that Valdez somehow never did. With Valdez there was always the feeling of sharing a cage with a tiger. It was exciting but it was uncertain and it’s hard to love a tiger.

  “Men like me,” he said, “men such as I am, we find ourselves disapproved of.”

  “I understand.”

  “But Chano’s father was kind to me.” Dr. Cochrane was afraid he had given the wrong impression. “Oh, not in that way, you understand, but he was good to me. Kind. A good friend.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nobody knows,” he said, which was almost true. “In those days people simply disappeared. They still do, of course, but for different reasons. Or the same reasons. I suppose nothing really changes except the people who do the disappearing, and they are always more or less the same. Anyway, the point is that he was a good, brave man. He made Chano what he is.”

  “But he wasn’t there,” said Caterina. “How could he?”

  “Tell me about your father.”

  “He’s dead too.”

  “And how did that change your life?”

  Caterina nodded. She understood and she knew that he was right.

  “Child, things which are not there can shape us just as much as those that are. A man who loses his eyes is not the same thing as a man born blind. They see the world very differently.” Dr. Cochrane poured himself more wine. “You are so young,” he said. “How often have you fallen in love?”

  “Until now, never.”

  “And how often after this?”

  “Never!” She was shocked.

  “Can you be so sure? Just like poor Sophia, denying herself for so many years. What a waste.”

  “And you,” she asked, not too unkindly, “how often have you loved, Dr. Cochrane?”

  “Child, I fall in love almost every day. And I have my heart broken every other day. But I don’t mind. That’s the price on the ticket of admission to life. That’s the price poor Chano Valdez has decided not to pay.”

  “Until now,” she said.

  “Until now,” he agreed politely. “But I am glad to pay it. I would pay it twice over and pay it gladly for the cabeceo alone, even if I never got another dance.”

  Dr. Cochrane talked. Dr. Cochrane was good at talking. He ordered brandy and that helped with the talking.

  Outside the restaurant the darkness deepened. Shadows filled the streets and thickened and crept up the walls and the orange street lamps blotted out the light of the friendly stars and only made the darkness blacker. Caterina felt it.

  Dr. Cochrane talked and she smiled at him, pretending to listen, looking over his shoulder, across the street, listening instead to the stories she could hear muttering along the pavements in ways that Valdez was deaf to, ways he had long ago forgotten. She looked through the dark, down an alley to where, three streets away, a young man was stealing morphine from an ambulance to help his father die. And, up on the hill, she saw a beautiful woman leave her beautiful house in her beautiful car, watched her drive all the way to town where she parked, tossed the keys to an old man selling newspapers on the street corner and simply walked away.

  “I blame myself. I blame myself. Maybe, if Sophia had responded differently. Maybe if she had been hard and brutal—as hard as she pretends to be—if she had forgotten him instead of raising monuments to him, maybe if she had married again, but she knew I saw. My fault. All my fault.”

  Dr. Cochrane stopped talking for a moment, gulped wetly and said: “I feel sick. Time to go home.”

  CATERINA AND DR. Cochrane left the restaurant as they had arrived, arm in arm. When they met in the garden and he bowed and doffed his hat and offered his arm, that had been a gesture of old-fashioned courtliness. Now Dr. Cochrane linked his arm through hers for support and he leaned on her a little too heavily. His leg was painful and that last brandy had made his cane unsteady and his voice loud.

  “I am not myself a Freemason,” he said.

  “Shhh, there’s no need to shout.”

  “No. You are quite right. Thousand apologies.” He began again, just as loud as before. “I am not myself a Freemason but I belong to a sort of Freemasonry.”

  “Is it a secret association?”

  “In this ignorant, backward, nasty little country, yes, it has to be a secret,” he confided noisily.

  “Then don’t you think you should try to keep it quiet?”

  Somehow, almost in the middle of his last, long anecdote, Dr. Cochrane had become suddenly very drunk. His walk was uncertain and his stagger transmitted itself to Caterina. More than once she had to stop and steady herself to keep from bouncing along the wall.

  “Absolutely!” Dr. Cochrane held his finger to his lips in a gesture of silence. “I can keep a secret.” He tugged on her arm and hissed: “That is why the cabeceo is so important. Important to men. Men like me, you understand. You do understand? You understand what I’m saying.”

  “Yes, I understand.” Caterina really had no wish to discuss it. She did not condemn, but she saw no reason to go on and on.

  “We need the cabeceo,” he said. “We need it to identify one another. We need it for signaling to one another. We need it for asking and agreeing. Secretly. That flash of the eyes,” he gave a ridiculous,
moon-faced look, “so subtle, almost unnoticed, but it is seen and recognized and understood. It is enough.” And then he said: “Freemasonry” again and: “I can keep a secret.”

  “Can we talk about something else?” she said. They were arriving at a street corner and she was looking for a gap in the traffic which would be wide enough to cross the road in safety while dragging a drunken cripple.

  “Some of the happiest nights of my life have been spent in tango halls, you know. Special tango halls. No ladies.”

  Caterina half dragged, half carried him across the street, looking for a taxi rank where she could abandon him in good conscience. But she wanted to take her time. There was something she needed to know.

  “Why did you say you blame yourself?” she asked, casually.

  “Blame myself for what, child?”

  “You said you blamed yourself for the way things turned out. With Chano and his mother. ‘I was there,’ that’s what you said.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That. Did I say that?” and he swallowed a belch, daintily. “I think I may be a little drunk, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “But I can keep a secret. I have been keeping secrets for more than forty years.”

  They arrived at the taxi rank and Caterina knew she had missed her chance. They would make their farewells, Dr. Cochrane would get into his taxi and wake up in his own bed in the morning with his sore head and his secret, still safe, inside it.

  She gave him a little peck and said: “Well, goodbye then. I’ll leave you here. Thank you for looking after me.”

  But Dr. Cochrane took her hand and gripped it. “Do you love him?” he said.

  “Of course!”

  “But do you love him? Do you love him hotter than Hell and longer?”

  “I said it, didn’t I?”

  “Say it again. Do you love him?”