What We Become

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “I recovered the necklace a week later, in Montevideo. Armando went to fetch it for me.”

  The image of her husband stood out for an instant among Max’s memories. Since Buenos Aires, he had seen him in photographs in illustrated magazines, even a few times on newsreels in the cinema, his famous tango playing in the background.

  “Where is he?”

  He glanced about uneasily as he spoke, wondering how Armando de Troeye’s presence might complicate matters. But he was relieved when he saw her shrug, gloomily.

  “He isn’t here. . . . He’s far away, now.”

  Max was a resourceful fellow, toughened by the many scrapes he had gotten into over the years. More than once, his calm under pressure had saved him from disaster by the skin of his teeth. Just then, while he was trying to think quickly, the awareness that revealing his unease might bring him uncomfortably close to a French prison gave him added resolve. A way of regaining control of the situation, or of limiting the damage. Ironically, he thought, the necklace can save me.

  “The necklace,” he said.

  He spoke without knowing what he would say next. Simply another attempt to gain time, to establish a defensive point. But it was enough. She touched the pearls again. There was no incipient laughter this time; instead she recovered her look of defiance. Her triumphant smile.

  “The Argentinian police were extremely helpful when my husband reported the pearls missing. They put him in contact with their Uruguayan counterparts, and Armando traveled to Montevideo to recover the necklace from the man you had sold it to.”

  Max had finished his cigarette, and was holding the smouldering end in his fingers, looking around purposefully for somewhere to put it. Finally he stubbed it out in a heavy, crystal ashtray on a nearby table.

  “Have you given up dancing, Max?”

  He turned to face her, at last. Looking straight into her eyes with as much serenity as he could muster. And he must have done so with sufficient aplomb, because, after posing the question in a sour voice, she continued to contemplate him, then nodded in silent affirmation of some thought he was unable to make out. As though at once surprised and amused by the man’s composure. His cool audacity.

  “I live a different kind of life,” he said.

  “The Riviera isn’t a bad place to do that in. How do you know Suzi Ferriol?”

  “I came here with a friend.”

  “Which friend?”

  “Asia Schwarzenberg.”

  “Ah.”

  The guests were beginning to head toward the dining room. The young blonde who had been speaking in French walked past, leaving a whiff of cheap perfume in her wake, followed by her companion who was studying his pocket watch.

  “Mecha. You are . . .”

  “Leave it, Max.”

  “I’ve heard that tango. A thousand times.”

  “Yes. I imagine you have.”

  “I’d like to explain a few things to you.”

  “Explain?” Her eyes flashed once more. Two golden darts. “That doesn’t sound like you. When I saw you, I thought you might have improved somewhat over time. I prefer your cynicism to your explanations.”

  Max thought it wiser to say nothing. He remained by her side, erect and apparently relaxed, four fingers of his right hand thrust into his jacket pocket. Then he saw her smile faintly, as though laughing at herself.

  “I was observing you for a while,” she said, “before I came over.”

  “I didn’t see you. I’m sorry.”

  “I know you didn’t see me. You were concentrating, pensive. I wondered what you were thinking about. What you were doing here, and what you were thinking about.”

  She isn’t going to give me away, Max decided. Not tonight, anyway. Or not until after the coffee and cigarettes. And yet, despite that momentary certainty, he knew he was on treacherous ground. He needed more time to think. To figure out whether Mecha Inzunza’s arrival on the scene would make things difficult for him.

  “I recognized you at once,” she was explaining. “I just wanted to decide what to do.”

  She pointed toward a flight of stairs on the other side of the entrance that led to the upper floors. At its foot were large fig trees in pots and a table where a waiter was clearing away empty glasses.

  “I noticed you as I came down the stairs, because you didn’t sit. You were one of the exceptions. Some men sit, others stand. I usually mistrust the latter.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I met you. . . . I scarcely recall having seen you sit. Not on the Cap Polonio or in Buenos Aires.”

  They walked a few paces toward the dining room, pausing in the doorway to check their places on the seating plan. Max kicked himself for having failed to check beforehand all the names around the table. And there she was: Mrs. Inzunza.

  “And what are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I live nearby, because of the situation in Spain. I rent a house in Antibes, and I occasionally visit Suzi. We’ve known each other since high school.”

  Inside the dining room, the guests were taking their places around the table, where the silver cutlery lay shining on the tablecloth beside candelabra with red, green, and blue spirals of glass. Susana Ferriol, who was attending to her guests, glanced at Mecha and Max with a look of faint consternation—surprised to see him (Max was sure his hostess wouldn’t have remembered his name) conversing with her friend.

  “What about you, Max? You still haven’t told me what brings you to Nice. Although I think I can imagine.”

  He smiled. A world-weary, affable smile. Calculated to the millimeter.

  “Perhaps your imaginings are mistaken.”

  “I can see you’ve perfected that smile.” She was looking him up and down now with a mixture of scorn and admiration. “What else have you been busy perfecting all this time?”

  He spots Irina Jasenovic from a distance, near Sorrento cathedral: sunglasses, patterned miniskirt, flat sandals. She is looking in the window of a clothes store on Corso Italia. Max stays close by, watching her from the other side of the street until she continues walking toward Piazza Tasso. He isn’t following her for any particular reason; he simply feels the need to observe her discreetly, now that he knows she might be secretly linked to the people on the Russian player’s team. Curiosity, perhaps. A desire to get closer to the center of the intrigue. He has already managed to do that with Emil Karapetian, whom he came across after breakfast in one of the small lounges at the hotel, surrounded by newspapers, his ample frame ensconced in an armchair. The sum of their encounter was a polite exchange of greetings, a comment about the mild weather, and a brief chat about how the games were going, which prompted Karapetian to leave the newspaper open on his lap (even where chess is concerned, he seems averse to conversations requiring anything more than monosyllables), and speak for a moment, somewhat diffidently, with the courteous, gray-haired gentleman with the friendly smile, who it seems is an old acquaintance of his protégé’s mother. And when Max finally stood up, leaving Karapetian in peace, with his nose once more buried in his newspaper, the only conclusion he drew was that the Armenian has a blind belief in Jorge’s superiority over his Russian opponent, and that regardless of the outcome of the Sorrento contest, he is certain that in a few months’ time Keller will be the world champion.

  “He is the chess of the future,” he concluded, encouraged by Max, in what was his longest monologue in the entire conversation. “After his contribution to the game, the Russian’s defensive tactics will smell of mothballs.”

  Karapetian doesn’t seem like a traitor, is Max’s conclusion. Certainly not a man who would sell his former disciple for thirty pieces of silver. And yet, life has taught Dr. Hugentobler’s chauffeur, to his own detriment and to that of his fellow men, how flimsy the ties are that prevent human beings from lying or betraying. How easy it is, moreove
r, for the traitor who is still undecided to receive a final push, a helping hand, from the very person he is about to betray. No one is immune to this, he concludes with almost dispassionate relief as he strolls along the Corso Italia, keeping his distance from Jorge Keller’s girlfriend. Who can look themselves in the eye in a mirror and say, I have never betrayed, or I will never betray?

  The young woman has sat down at one of the tables outside the Fauno bar. After reflecting for a moment, Max saunters across to her and strikes up a conversation. Before doing so, he instinctively glances around. Not because he is expecting Soviet spies to be lurking behind the palm trees in the square, but because that kind of vigilance is part of his old training. I may be a mangy, toothless old wolf, he tells himself perversely, but that doesn’t mean my hunting grounds are any less fraught with peril.

  Memories of young women, he thinks as he sits down. What he has retained. What he knows. She is a generation or several generations younger, he concludes, looking down at her miniskirt, her bare knees, as he orders a Negroni and talks about the first thing that comes into his head.

  “Sorrento is a nice town. . . . Have you been to Amalfi yet? What about Capri?” Old, tried and tested smiles, polite gestures rehearsed and deployed a thousand times. “There are fewer tourists at this time of year. . . . I promise, you won’t be disappointed.”

  Not particularly pretty, he notices again. Nor ugly. Just young-looking, fresh-faced, like an ad for Peggy Sage. In brief, the allure of a twenty-something-year-old for whoever finds twenty-something-year-olds alluring. Irina has taken off her sunglasses (oversized, white frames), and the only makeup she is wearing is the thick black eyeliner around her big, expressive eyes. Her hair is tied back in a ribbon that has the same op-art pattern as her skirt. A plain face, friendly looking now. Chess doesn’t confer character, Max reflects. On either men or women. A superior intellect, a mathematical brain, a prodigious memory can just as easily produce an ordinary smile, an anodyne word, a vulgar gesture as the men and women for whom such things are as habitual as the course of life itself. Even chess players are no more intelligent than the rest of us mortals, he had heard Mecha Inzunza say a couple of days earlier. Theirs is simply a different kind of intelligence. Wirelesses that pick up different frequencies.

  “I never imagined Mecha looking after her son in this way, among the chess-playing world,” Max said, testing the ground. “My memory of her is very different. From before all this.”

  Irina appears interested. She leans forward, resting her elbows on the table, next to a glass of Coca-Cola with ice cubes floating in it.

  “Is it a long time since you two last met?”

  “Many years,” he says. “And our friendship goes back even ­further.”

  “What a lucky coincidence, both of you being here in Sorrento.”

  “Yes. Very lucky.”

  The waiter brings his drink. The young woman gazes at Max, intrigued, while he raises his glass to his lips.

  “Did you ever meet Jorge’s father?”

  “Briefly. Just before the war.” He sets the glass down gently on the table. “Actually, I knew her first husband better.”

  “De Troeye? The musician?”

  “That’s right. The one who composed the famous tango.”

  “Ah, of course. The tango.”

  She gazes at the horse-drawn carriages stationed in the square, awaiting prospective customers. The drivers idling in the shade beneath the palm trees.

  “That world must have been fascinating. Those clothes, that music. Mecha said you were an exceptional dancer.”

  Max waves his arm in a gesture that is midway between a polite protest and dismissive modesty. He learned it thirty years back, from one of Alessandro Blasetti’s films.

  “I wasn’t bad.”

  “And what was she like then?”

  “Elegant. Very beautiful. One of the most attractive women I ever met.”

  “It feels strange to think of her like that. She’s Jorge’s mother.”

  “And how is she as a mother?”

  A silence. Irina touches the ice in her glass with her finger, but doesn’t drink.

  “I’m not the best judge of that.”

  “Too possessive?”

  “She shaped him, in a way,” Irina says, after remaining silent for a moment. “Without her sacrifices, Jorge wouldn’t be what he is. Or what he could become.”

  “Do you mean he would be happier?”

  “Oh, no, please. Nothing of the sort. Jorge is a happy man.”

  Max nods, politely, while he takes another sip of his drink. He needn’t dig far to remember happy husbands whose wives, in another life, deceived them with him.

  “She didn’t want to create a freak, the way some mothers do,” Irina adds after a while. “She always did her best to bring him up like a normal boy. Or at least to make that compatible with chess. And she succeeded, to some extent.”

  She says these last words hurriedly, glancing around the square, as though afraid Mecha Inzunza might appear at any moment.

  “Was he really a gifted child?”

  “Just imagine. He learned to write at the age of four from watching his mother, and by the time he was five he knew all the countries and capital cities in the world by heart. She realized his potential very early on, but also the potential dangers. And she worked hard to avoid them.”

  Her face seems to tense for a moment when she says the word hard.

  “She still does,” Irina adds. “Constantly . . . as if she is afraid he will fall into the abyss.”

  She doesn’t say an abyss, but rather the abyss, Max notices. The noise of a Lambretta backfiring as it passes close by appears to make her jump.

  “And she is right,” she adds, gloomily, almost in a whisper. “I have seen many people fall into it.”

  “Surely you exaggerate. You’re young.”

  She gives a brisk, almost savage smile that seems to age her by ten years. Then her face relaxes again.

  “I’ve been playing chess since I was six,” she says. “I have seen many players end badly. They become caricatures of themselves, away from the chessboard. Being the best requires an inhuman effort. Especially if you never make it.”

  “Did you once dream of being the best?”

  “Why do you speak in the past tense? I still play chess.”

  “I’m sorry. I had no idea. I assumed that an analyst was similar to the team of bullfighters in Spain whose job it is to assist the matador. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  She gazes down at Max’s hands. The age spots. His clipped, manicured nails.

  “You don’t know what it is to lose.”

  “Excuse me?” Max stifles a chuckle. “I don’t know what?”

  “It’s obvious from your appearance.”

  “Ah.”

  “Sitting in front of the chessboard and seeing the consequences of a tactical error. How easily your talent and your chances go up in smoke.”

  “I understand . . . but appearances can be deceptive. Failure isn’t exclusive to chess players.”

  She seems not to have heard him.

  “I also knew all the countries and capital cities in the world by heart,” she says. “Or the equivalent. But things don’t always turn out the way they should.”

  She is smiling now, almost valiantly. For her respectable audience. Only a young girl can smile like that, Max reflects. Sure of the effect it will have.

  “It’s difficult, being a woman,” she adds, her smile fading. “Even now.”

  The sun, whose rays have been moving from table to table across the terrace, lights up her face. Squinting, she puts on her dark glasses.

  “Meeting Jorge gave me a fresh opportunity. To experience all this at close hand.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Do you thi
nk your age gives you the right to ask impertinent questions?”

  “Of course. There have to be some advantages.”

  Silence. The noise of the traffic. A distant horn blast.

  “Mecha says you were a very handsome man.”

  “I’m sure it’s true. If she says so.”

  The sun is touching Max now, and he can see his reflection in the girl’s big dark glasses.

  “Oh, yes,” she says impassively. “Of course I love Jorge.”

  She crosses her legs, and Max looks for a moment at her bare knees. Her flat leather sandals reveal the arch of her foot and her toenails painted dark red, almost purple.

  “Sometimes I watch him playing,” she goes on, “moving a piece, taking risks the way he does, and I think I love him madly. . . . Other times I see him make a mistake, something we have prepared together, which he decides to change at the last moment, or hesitates over. . . . And at that moment I detest him.”

  She falls silent for a moment, as though pondering the truth of what she has just said.

  “I think I love him more when he isn’t playing chess.”

  “That’s normal. You’re young.”

  “No. Youth has nothing to do with it.”

  The silence that follows is so long that Max assumes their conversation is over. He calls the waiter’s attention, asking for the bill with a snap of his fingers.

  “Do you know something?” Irina suddenly blurts out. “Every morning, when Jorge is playing in a tournament, his mother comes down to breakfast ten minutes early, to make sure everything is ready for when he arrives.”

  Max thinks he notices a tone of displeasure. A tinge of resentment. He has an ear for such things.