“Yes! I love him.”
“And when they come for you and do vile things to you—things that can’t be spoken—when they do things to you that no woman should ever have to bear, when they leave you ugly and don’t kill you, what will you say then?”
Caterina tried to twist her hand away. “Stop saying these things!”
“What will you say then, child?”
“I will still love him.”
Dr. Cochrane let go of her hand. “Then get in the taxi with me. If you really want to know.”
THE CAB WAS closed and hot. Dr. Cochrane told the driver his address and sat back in the seat, burrowing into the corner with his hat down. He might have been asleep, but for the hand he kept slipped through the worn leather strap that hung down from above the door. It was a clear signal that he did not wish to say more, and for the second time that evening Caterina found herself forced into silence, waiting for something momentous to be said.
The headlights cut through the hot night. The windows misted up and Caterina had no idea where they were going but the taxi driver knew the way, following some mental map the way the eels come swarming out of their nests in the far Sargasso Sea to sniff their way back to the same rivers year after year.
Lights loomed up against the glass, the neon signs of bars and shops streamed past, and then they were on the highway, cars and lorries jostling by on every side, flat, harsh signs screaming overhead and off again, down the broad curve of an exit ramp to a set of traffic lights, across a junction, left, left and into a quiet side street on a hill.
“You’ve gone past it,” Dr. Cochrane shouted. “Here! Stop here!”
Not trusting his handbrake, the driver swung the wheel sharply so the taxi came to a halt across the width of the street, defying the hill.
Dr. Cochrane was not a nimble man and drink had made him clumsy. The cab was listing on the hill like a sinking liner. Even if he could have reached the passenger door on his, the uphill side, he could never have opened it. Instead he scrambled to the door on the downhill side, urging Caterina, “Forgive me child. No, I can manage, thank you. I’m fine,” ahead of him, getting tangled in her legs and stumbling out on to the pavement.
Caterina waited quietly while he paid the driver and then they walked off together, still side by side but not, now, arm in arm, down the hill a little to Dr. Cochrane’s gate. Caterina did not know where to go, she did not know what to expect. Walking slowly beside Dr. Cochrane she was paying too much attention to her new surroundings to notice the car, with two detectives inside it, parked four doors down the hill.
“I can see why men find you attractive,” Dr. Cochrane said.
She hesitated. “Some men do.”
“Chano Valdez does.”
“It would seem so.”
“And the boys at university?”
“Some, I suppose.”
“You never …?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“No.” She didn’t even bother to insist.
“We’re here,” Dr. Cochrane said. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and drew out his house key from his pocket on the end of a long silver chain. “Please go up. I don’t want to keep you waiting.”
He took a long time to come up the stairs, shifting his cane to the other hand so he could grip the banister rail and then his painful, limping climb, a step at a time, stopping at every tread, rocking his weight on his hips, climbing again.
“Come in,” he said, although it took half a dozen attempts to get the key in the lock. “Come in and let me offer you a refreshment.”
“Perhaps a coffee,” she said. Caterina was growing impatient. She had come only for the sake of his story, after all, not for his coffee.
“Would you, niña? I don’t think I could,” and he collapsed into a fat green chair with his leg thrown out in front of him like a dead log. He was still wearing his hat.
Caterina found the kitchen, found the coffee, boiled the kettle and returned a few minutes later with everything on a tray.
Dr. Cochrane thanked her. “I think I am beginning to sober up,” he said and made a fish face. “I can feel my lips again and that is always a good sign.”
Caterina waited until he had taken a sip before saying: “You were going to tell me something—do you remember?”
“Was I?”
“Something important.”
He made no reply.
“About Chano and his mother. You were there. Remember? You were there.”
Dr. Cochrane put his cup back in his saucer and looked at her angrily. “Yes, I remember.”
“Have you changed your mind?”
“Have you changed yours?”
“No.”
“You love him? Fiercer than death? Knowing it could kill you. Or me.”
She nodded at him across the shadowed room. He saw the glow of the street lamps shining in her hair as it moved.
“Am I still drunk enough to tell you this? Once you know a thing, child, you can’t unknow it, you understand that? You can’t unknow it!”
She nodded again.
“Oh God.” Dr. Cochrane dragged his hand down his face. “You need to know this,” he said. And then, with a deep sigh, he began to speak. “It was more than forty years ago. A long, long time ago. When I was young. Valdez was my friend. He felt as I did. He believed as I did. He wanted to find a better way. He was a wealthy man from one of the best families in town, generations of them, piling their money up—a lawyer, and he wanted to use his money and the law to help the poor, help make the world a better place. Just a little better. Nobody wanted to listen. He made enemies. He got noticed. That was a bad thing.
“I warned him. I begged him to stop. He didn’t listen. Soon they were watching him. Other people vanished—people we knew—just disappeared, and they were getting closer and closer. They wanted to frighten him. There was a policeman outside the house all the time.
“Valdez and Sophia used to get into their car and drive. I don’t know where they went, I don’t know what they said, but in the car they thought they were safe. Nobody listening. Nobody watching. They were wrong. There was always somebody watching. They used to come out of the house with little Chano in his pajamas wrapped in a blanket. They used to carry him away into the night and drive. I only watched. I was his friend and I only watched. It was what I could do. Look at me. I am small and lame. What else could I do? I stood in the street and I watched the policemen watching. I thought I was helping, do you understand?”
“You did what you could,” she said.
“I wish. I wish to God I’d never bothered. I wish to God. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do. I had some mad idea that I might step in if they came for him, fight them, die with him at least. Anything. And then it came to the last night. We had talked about it, he and I. I don’t know what he told her. I don’t know what he told Sophia.
“They got in the car with Chano in the back and they drove off. I saw them come out of the house together, Sophia carrying the boy, and she laid him on the back seat, still asleep, and she closed the door and they drove off together. The police had stopped following them—at first they used to follow just so they would know they could not escape, but they stopped that. Once they knew that he always came back, once they knew that he didn’t stop and he didn’t meet anybody, they let him drive around as much as he liked, the way little boys do with bees on a thread, just for the fun of it. Go in that cupboard, niña, find me some brandy.”
Dr. Cochrane held out a trembling coffee cup and Caterina poured. He drank and held the cup out again.
“I stood there like an idiot in the bushes, watching and waiting. I never knew if the policemen knew that I was there or not. They might have been playing with me too. I don’t know. Eventually I had to pee. I was standing there, with my, with my hands full when the car came back. Valdez was gone. Sophia was driving. And Chano was sitting beside her in the front seat, the top of his head barely showing thr
ough the window—as if that was ever going to fool anybody. The moment she pulled into the drive the policeman knew what had happened. He ran across the street. He was crazy. He was screaming. He hit Sophia. I was standing there, pissing in a bush, and he hit Sophia. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous? Fumbling round in the dark, trying to do my trousers up while my friend’s wife was getting beaten up across the street. Pathetic.
“But little Chano wasn’t pathetic. He was a tiger. He came out of the car to defend her. And I just stood there. Long after I’d finished what I was doing, when I had no excuse for doing nothing, I stood there in the bushes. That little boy went to his mother and I did nothing.
“The policeman was standing over Sophia with his gun out when Chano came and kicked him in the legs and then he swung round, with his gun in his hand, this huge, black lump of metal, just swung round and smashed that little kid in the face. Hit him right in the mouth. Chano flew backward and landed in the street.
“That was too much even for a coward like me. The kid—my friend’s son—was lying on his back on the pavement with blood spurting from his mouth and I took my cane in my hand and I pushed out from behind my dark little bush and went to help with all the haste of a terrified snail. Sophia was lying on the ground and the policeman was standing over that little boy with his gun pointed down at him and the hammer cocked and I was halfway across the street and each of us was about half a second away from a bullet when Sophia sat up and screamed: ‘For Christ’s sake, Camillo, don’t do it. He’s your son!’ And then both of them looked up and saw me.”
Caterina sat in the dark and said nothing.
“Yes,” said Dr. Cochrane. “That was exactly how I felt too. And now you are like me; you cannot unknow it.”
“But that doesn’t mean it was true. She was desperate. She only said it. She wanted to save her son.”
“Of course, child. Of course you are right, but she could not have said such a thing unless she thought Camillo would believe her. There must have been something at the root of it and even that would not have been so bad. Very few of us manage to cling to your high moral standards. A discreet little indiscretion is not so very terrible.”
“What happened then?” Caterina said.
“Camillo looked up from the boy and looked at me. I was standing there in the middle of the street, in the middle of all that screaming and shouting, with all those houses round about where nobody came to the door and nobody opened their curtains, where everybody sat inside staring hard at their televisions and reading their papers and noticing nothing, and I stood there waiting to be shot. But instead, the policeman put his gun away and ran. I think in those days he still had a soul, something in him that could be touched. He ran past me and got in his car and drove off and then I went to help Sophia. Naturally she never forgave me.
“She sat there in the kitchen of her house, holding little Chano while he screamed and soaked blood into her blouse. Blood. Blood everywhere. I waited with her until the doctor came and stitched the boy’s lip together again. When he was finished she ordered me from her door and told me never to return. She expected to hear from her husband. She didn’t want me around to remind anybody of what she had said—not that I would have done. But Valdez disappeared. She never heard of him again. It was then, I suppose she began to build his shrine and entomb herself inside it like a penitential sacrifice.
“That’s what you have to know about the man who will be your husband. He is damaged goods, child. Locked up for years in a mausoleum dedicated to the glory of a father he never knew with a mother like that. It’s not his fault he has no love left. We must love him all the harder.”
WHEN MR. VALDEZ left the Ottavio House he walked home alone all the way back to his flat and he complimented himself that not once did he stop and check who was walking behind. Through the dark little side streets where the sound of his heels on the pavement echoed back from the houses on either side, along Cristobal Avenue, where the cars cruised by, jammed in tight together, one after another, where the pavements were crowded, where he was jostled, where he imagined the touch of the pickpocket or the pistol in his ribs, by an effort of will he never once glanced behind him. He closed his door and turned the key in the lock and relief swept over him as it does over a drowning sailor who manages to throw his arms around some floating piece of timber, as if it would save him, as if it could defy the waves and the gales, as if a few planks of wood and a brass bolt could stand up to a bullet or a boot or the crushing weight of a search warrant.
He had not pleaded. He had not wept or whimpered or cried out or visibly trembled. He had kept control of his bladder and his dignity. He had that much to be pleased about. But Mr. Valdez was bitterly afraid. In the garden he had been afraid that Caterina might leave him and afraid that he might turn into a husband. In the Ottavio House he was afraid of Camillo, afraid of what Camillo might say and do, afraid of what Camillo might do to Caterina unless he spoke up for her, afraid of what might happen to him because he dared to speak up, afraid every step of the way home, and he was sick of it. The warm pulse of life was throbbing painfully in the stump Caterina had somehow kissed back into life and he wanted it to stop. He wanted to go back to a time before, when he was cut off from life and other people, but it was too late for that. He had tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and he knew that he was naked. There was no way back to the time when he did not know.
Foolishly he thought of dragging furniture through the house and piling it against the door—as if it would do anything but add a few moments of miserable terror to his ordeal. It was pointless. He knew it was pointless. If Camillo wanted it he could simply make him vanish like a rabbit in a magic act, like his father.
And then, for a moment, the fear subsided again. He thought of Caterina. He had defied Camillo for her sake. He had refused to betray her. He knew she must be warned. But he did not warn her.
To warn Caterina, he would have to leave the flat again, go out in the dark again, walk down the avenue again, down that grubby side street to a place he had never visited but which Camillo knew all about, a place where, even now, Camillo might be waiting to catch him, and that wouldn’t help Caterina.
“That wouldn’t help her at all,” he told himself. “It will have to wait until morning. If she’s not in the Phoenix I can find a way to bump into her or get Cochrane to pass on a note. Get that business with the check sorted out and tell her. Safer. Far better to wait.”
That was how he excused himself. Dr. Cochrane, who called himself a coward, would have been ashamed to say such things even to himself, but suddenly Mr. Valdez wanted to be safer. Safer seemed the thing to be. Safer was the thing to do.
He poured himself a lot of brandy in a tumbler and he was surprised to notice that, as he drank it, his hand did not tremble. He was surprised to notice that he had noticed.
Mr. Valdez took off his shoes, clumsily, with the toe of one against the heel of another in a way that would ruin the leather, and he walked through the flat to stand at the big window that looked down the avenue with its long strings of moving lights.
It looked like civilization. To the untrained eye it looked as if the jungle had been cleared, the snakes forced out of their holes, the jaguars chased away with smoke and drums, but Mr. Valdez knew that what had come in their place was something far, far worse, far more vicious and something that did not fear to walk out in the light.
And then Mr. Valdez did something he had not done since he was a boy. His hand found the hilt of his grandfather’s sword. He tugged it from the brass scabbard and it came out quietly through the collar of sheepskin, still oiled to protect against the faraway ocean it had not tasted for decades. It spoke to him of ancestry and blood, pride and honor, and he moved with it across the room, holding it, moving it, presenting it just as he had been taught to do, and he heard his grandfather saying: “Keep the tip up” and “Bring the leg back” and “That’s the way, boy. Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.”
Mr. Valdez could dance. In his silent flat he heard the Tango of Death and he moved on the balls of his feet, like a cat with one long, vicious claw.
I have no friends
I have no lovers
I have no country
Nor religion
I have only bitterness in my soul
And sickness in my heart.
A tawny cat who ended up where he had begun, crossing the road and going into the whorehouse only so he could come out again, over and over and over, stalking the flat until he finished, with the tip of his sword poised against the fabric of a cushion on his beautiful leather couch, pricking it but not piercing it and wondering if the warm thumbprint of flesh between Camillo’s collar bones would feel that way.
He was sweating. He was hot. Mr. Valdez drank some more brandy and went to bed. He took the sword with him. When he lay down alone in a bed that smelled of Caterina, on a pillow that smelled of Caterina, the weight of it comforted him.
WITH DR. COCHRANE asleep in his chair, Caterina got up to go. She took the coffee cup from his fingers and left it, sticky with brandy, on the shelf by the window. She looked down into the street. She had no idea where she was, no idea how to reach home, but she knew she had to find Chano and kiss him and make things right.
She shut the door quietly and went down the darkened stairs and out into the street. The policemen had already gone. They had seen enough.
Caterina stood at the edge of the pavement, deciding which way to go and she chose “downhill.” It was the way she had come and it was what her father had taught her to do. If she got lost in the mountains, Pappi told her, go down. The rain goes down and the rain would turn into a stream and the stream to a river and where there were rivers there were always people and they would bring her back to him.
People were easier to find in the city. In the city they grew as thick as weeds, they filled the houses and clogged the streets, they swarmed like ants but they lived lonely lives—far lonelier than the most solitary mountain shepherd. He might walk into town once a month to get drunk or buy a pair of trousers but people would know his name. His neighbors would know all about him though he lived two valleys away and if, one fiesta day, he failed to appear they would come looking.
The Love and Death of Caterina Page 29