The Casanova Embrace

by Warren Adler

  Who am I, she wondered, an errant thought that intruded, as she actually got on her knees before him, unloosening his pants, kneeling before his erection, like a supplicant before a shrine. You are beautiful, she heard herself say, her eyes greedy for the sight of him as she kissed and caressed his manhood, feeling his hands on her hair. She was growing shivery with pleasure, the orgasmic urgency beginning, a sensation so rare in her life that she cried out with pleasure, unable to control the sounds in her throat.

  Then she was being half-lifted to the bed and she felt his fingers undressing her, removing the pantyhose that she so ceremoniously had put on just a few hours earlier. She lay back watching his body loom over her, saw the depths of the silver flecks in the gray eyes, the wonderful smile. A gift, she thought. It is my gift. And then she drew him inside of her as he plunged, gently at first, sliding inward, filling her up with a largeness that perhaps she had longed for, suffered for, wanted. The power of it, the pleasure of it made her gasp as he lingered for a moment and she moved her body to meet his, waited, drew back, returned again until he was moving into her with a hardness that she knew had never touched her experience before. I am being born again, her mind told her, as she began to tremble and shake, waves of pleasure unfolding like some vast repetitive surf responding to the cosmic pull of the moon. Inside of her, she felt his throbbing, the beat of his blood as it gained strength, then hesitated, like the tremulous flight of a predatory bird who glided, then moved downward toward its prey, an explosion of energy. She heard some inchoate sound, felt his shudder and the receding surf, feeling the inner spring of her body lose its tension, uncurl, search for silence and repose.

  When she had recovered her sense of self, she wondered whether he had watched her and was suddenly ashamed.

  "Look what you have done to me," she said, conscious now that her dress lay creased above her waist. He, too, was still wearing his shirt, the tie still neatly knotted.

  "I don't know myself," she said, despite her disarray, feeling beautiful nestled in his arms, his hardness disappearing now, her mind responding to the details of hygiene.

  "You are wonderful," Eduardo said.

  "It is you who are wonderful." She was determined now to tell him. "I have never been moved like this. I swear. Never." She watched his face. Then he turned away.

  "I meant it," she said. She had expected him to respond. But he said nothing, watching her, almost clinically. Had she moved him? she wanted to ask.

  "I want to stay here forever," she heard herself say. I need this man, she told herself secretly. He was disengaging, now standing up, immodest about his nakedness. She looked at his penis, a beautiful gladiator in her imagery, glistening in repose, and she lifted her hand to caress it.

  "You are beautiful," she said again, rising to kiss it. Then he moved away into another part of the apartment and she heard water running. Lying there, she could not believe she was the same person who had awakened in her bed that morning.

  She looked about the apartment. It was sparsely furnished. The double bed on which she lay was actually a mattress on a Harvard frame. A bridge table piled high with papers, and books were everywhere, a forest of odd-shaped columns. There were bookshelves along one wall, crudely made, brackets stuck into the wall with shelving painted the dull white color of the walls, which were barren of pictures. Beside the bed was a night table with a reading lamp, and along the windowed wall, three piles of newspapers nearly reached the ledge. She noted that some were written in Spanish, some English. The blinds were slightly awry, furthering the transitory impression. It seemed incongruous and she could not place the neat handsome man in such a tumultuous environment. It was a cell, more like an animal's cage. On one of the chairs at the bridge table was a grease-stained box which once had contained a pizza. She noted, too, that no telephone was visible. She was so absorbed in her survey that she did not see him return.

  "The den of an exile," he said. His voice startled her. Recalling her modesty, she stood up and primly patted her dress. He had apparently showered and his curly hair had blackened with the dampness. He looked younger.

  "It needs a woman's touch," she said, suddenly embarrassed as he stared at her. She saw her shoes, like stray bricks from a ruin, on the carpetless wooden floor. Beside them, her pantyhose lay in a crumpled heap. Gathering them up quickly, she went into the bathroom. It was damp from his shower and the one towel on the rack was wet. A ring of dirt circled the white porcelain sink, above which lay a thin sliver of soap from a tiny bar, perhaps from some hotel. A single toothbrush, the bristles worn, lay in the porcelain holder. In the mirror, she saw that her eyes had filled with tears. Everything is changed, she thought. Her old life was dead. Removing her dress, she washed with great fastidiousness, as if the careful cleansing might erase the guilt that had begun to tug at her.

  When she had put herself together, repairing her makeup, she came into the room where he was standing against the wall. He had raised the blinds and was staring into the street, watching the cars move along Massachusetts Avenue. She caught him in profile, deep in thought, intent on some probings. Hesitating, she watched him, a stranger. There was an illusiveness about him, something uncapturable. Perhaps, she wondered, it was because she had only received enough information to sense him, not yet to know him, which is what she wanted now. To know him. To really know him. She moved beside him and kissed his earlobe. He put his arm around her, still staring into the street. She followed his eyes, wondering what was absorbing him.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "Occasionally, I think I see the Cordillera."

  "The what?"

  "The Andes. The spine of Chile. Sometimes, I see a mirage."

  She looked out the window.

  "It is only a parking lot." She wished she could also see the Cordillera.

  "Yes," he sighed and continued to stare out of the window.

  She reached for his hand, kissed his fingers.

  "I will make you happy, Eduardo."

  He looked at her, his eyes clear and bright.

  "I feel.... "she hesitated, feeling again the pang of guilt, remembering her children, Claude, her neat and ordered life. She had betrayed them all. A weight materialized in the pit of her, lay there, temporarily formidable, indigestible. I must not think about it, she warned herself. I must separate my life, my needs....

  "I feel like a woman," she whispered. "For the first time in my life. I feel like a woman." She remembered her pleasure now in his arms, the waves of ecstasy. Moving away from her, he looked at his watch. The gesture made her sad. Time is the enemy, she knew, sighing as her mind filled with the impending details of her ordinary life. The children would be coming home from school.

  "I must go now," he said, looking at his watch. The act pained her. "They will be wondering." She wanted to ask 'who?', the sudden sense of possession compelling, the urge to be curious an irritant. Who dared to preempt "her" time?

  "Yes," she agreed, searching for her pride. She did not want to mention her children, her home. Like his, it was another world, not theirs.

  "We must have more time together," she whispered as they walked toward the door. It was another unintentional articulation. Why must I put a voice to every thought, she wondered. Claude would have been more calculated, subtle, choosy in his use of words. There seemed a great void between them. It was as if she had taken the first bite of a beautifully prepared and delicious concoction and someone had taken it away from her. It had titillated her hunger and she wanted to finish it.

  "When?" she asked as they stood in the elevator.

  "I will call you," he said.

  "When?"

  "Soon."

  "But you have no telephone," she said, feeling instantly ashamed of revealing what she had discovered, as well as the illogic of her response.

  "In my business, the telephone can be an enemy," he said with an air of finality.

  She watched as he hailed a passing taxi, then opened the door for her when it pu
lled up the sloping driveway. She had expected him to drive her back to her car. But she shrugged off her disappointment and slid into the back seat, lifting her hand in a half-hearted wave of farewell. Again she felt a pang of loss, but she forced herself to concentrate on the problem of finding her car and she gave the driver directions to the restaurant.

  III

  Knowing what he knew, Dobbs felt a rare sense of anticipation as he looked at the formidable materials strewn across the table that dominated one side of his office. He had asked for every available bit of data on Eduardo Allesandro Palmero. He was after the distilled essence of the man, the core of him. Before, it had only lapped at the edges of his consciousness, as if his mind were a remote ocean beach. Now the waves were crashing, dominating in their power. He wanted to know more, if that was possible.

  He did not merely want summaries. He wanted raw data as well, information gathered routinely or in white heat. Was he being professional, he wondered, or was there something in himself demanding the knowledge? Or was it pique at his own miscalculation, his inability to understand the real motives of the human animal? Is this what they call a crisis of confidence, he speculated, a reflection of his own impotence, or ignorance? It was not the wasting of a human life that burdened him, only his blindness to the possibilities of how it might occur.

  Three women. Eduardo's women, Marie LaFarge, Frederika Millspaugh, Penelope Anne McCarthy. Moving a chair closer to the table, he settled comfortably and fingered the material. Then he sighed and began sifting and shuffling until he found something that triggered a response--a tiny landmark, a detail in a map, something that might synthesize his own mind and heart with those of Eduardo. It was important to know what had gone wrong. He had been so sure of his actions. The surveillance. The entire scenario seemed so logical. Why had this happened? He looked at the mass of files before him. One must always go back to the beginning. He broke a seal, opened the file.

  Born in Santiago in 1936, weight eight pounds, completely bald at birth, skin pink, healthy, a moneyed family, landed aristocracy on his mother's side, a huge home in Santiago's suburbs where the ground sloped upward to the Cordillera and the view of the Pacific was spectacular. The wealthy always took the best locations to build their monuments and pursue their diversions. The father, Manuel, had been also born in Santiago, his father before him a Neapolitan fisherman who arrived penniless in 1901. A migration of necessity, Dobbs mused, noting that the DINA analyst had suggested an escape from the Carabinieri rather than a legal immigration. In those days, one did not bother with the fine legal points of immigration.

  There was also the hint of another family, left in a Naples slum, but, if true, that did not stop the grandfather from finding solace in the arms of Rosa, who at fourteen seemed to have been bartered for the grandfather's labor aboard her own father's fishing boat. He was fifty at the time. Dobbs imagined himself, fifty-five now, already dry. Comparisons were odious, he knew, wasteful. It was, in addition, unprofessional. Rosa had been the mother of Manuel, but she had died of diphtheria before she was twenty and somehow her husband had wound up with her father's boat.

  The Latin mind could embroider lavishly, Dobbs knew. But antecedents carried clues and they were beginning to emerge.

  The DINA material told of still another wife, Concetta, sixteen. So, he is getting interested in older women, Dobbs chuckled, the thought dispelling for the moment the odd self-pity aroused in himself. Four additional children emerge, half brothers and sisters, duly recorded by the birth registrar at the Church of Cabrine, honoring the saint of the fisherman. And there are two additional births recorded. Two different mothers. Apparently, the grandfather was an honorable man, accepting the responsibilities of his fornications.

  Energies apparently remain to acquire a fleet of fishing boats, a moderate monetary success, enough to send Eduardo's father to the University, then to law school, to gather expertise in marine law--no small thing in a land with little else than copper and two thousand miles of coastline.

  Dobbs had never been to Chile, but he had read enough to imagine it, the Cordillera stretching into the infinite blueness of the sky, the incredible blue Pacific and, in between, the lush land in the south and the dry craggy earth to the north. It is the mountains, the diet, the iodine in the fish, and the earthquakes that make them crazy, he had been told.

  The father, Manuel, had married Carlotta Ramirez. The DINA analyst included clippings from the leading paper of Santiago, evidence of the lavish fanfare of the event. There is a picture of Eduardo's mother, stiffly resplendent in her bridal gown, and a report of a reception for three hundred people. So, the son of the Italian fisherman does pretty good for himself, Dobbs thought, shifting in his chair. The analyst describes their house, a gift from the bride's parents, their beachside villa, also a gift. There is an element of envy in the report. The bureaucrat's eye-view of the gentry. They are newlyweds. He is twenty-four. She is eighteen and they have six servants, the analyst says--bitterly, it seemed to Dobbs, who wondered whether it was his own inner voice that had embellished the sarcasm.

  So, the stage was set, Dobbs thought, getting up to stretch his legs, as if he needed some respite before plunging again into the mists of Eduardo's past.

  Eduardo, like his father, was the first son. Other children follow, three daughters. Obviously, the DINA had interviewed all the servants, gardeners, and maids, who gave their version of the early days of the Palmero household. Can one reconstruct a man's essence from this, Dobbs wondered, continuing to read. The mother was indulgent, spoiled, materialistic, short-tempered, aloof, cruel to the servants. The father was away on business often. The young Eduardo was bookish, withdrawn, but athletic, excelling in sports and scholarship. Dobbs pictured him in his mind, the tanned skin glowing, the lean body graceful as it moved in the woman-dominated household.

  The prince of privilege was given anything he wanted, including the indulgence of his mother, whose meager fount of affection began and ended with Eduardo. Even the sisters were indulgent through their jealousy. Did he manipulate them even then, Dobbs wondered, feeling his figurative nose warm to the scent. Then as the daughters disappeared into convent schools, the mother began to travel.

  There was one maid, Isabella. The interrogators found her in a mountain town where the Trans-Andean Railroad chugs over the Cordillera to Buenos Aires. Dobbs paused, knowing that he had reached the first clearing in the trail, searching the woman's words, so scrupulously recorded by the DINA agents. Mutual enemies make strange bedfellows, Dobbs observed, his mind floating into the past, seeing Isabella's skin soften, lighten, grow supple, young....

  Eduardo had not noticed her at first. Perhaps it was simply that at thirteen it did not occur to him to notice her since the house was always filled with women, sisters, his mother, multitudes of female servants, and his life was filled with other things. Not that he was oblivious to the female form and the stirrings it could arouse. But he lived mostly in his imagination then, and the women in his dreams were those that he had met in his books, sweet and lovely, while the women in the household with their pots of creams, their manufactured scents, their hairpins and curlers, their sloppy bathroom leavings, dampened any ardor he might have felt in his adolescent heart. Attendance at a boy's school gave him an even more distorted view, and watching the older boys masturbate confused him further, although his curiosity deepened as his body matured.

  She seemed to have been employed in a single role, to keep fresh flowers neatly arranged in vases throughout the house. He hardly had ever looked at her, although he seemed always to come across her heavily laden with either fresh-cut or decaying flower stems as she padded barefoot, like a frightened kitten, through the house. She was taller than most of the other young servants, with jet black hair which fell madonna-like and glowing from a central part.

  They were at the dinner table, the long polished rectangle laden with overabundance, his father's chair empty, the sisters chattering, while his mother sat sullenl
y at her end of the table. It was school vacation time and the girls had brought home friends who raised the decibel level with their endless high-pitched patter. Squat uniformed servants scurried about, pouring, serving the varied menu, carrying deep steaming dishes from which the family helped themselves in turn. When his father was absent, Eduardo was always served first.

  He might have seen her peripherally as she puttered at a vase at the far corner of the room, one of his mother's prized Mings in which she was placing bunches of yellow autumn flowers. His gaze, he remembered, had just floated upward as his mother reached, with the long silver spoon, into a bowl of steaming vegetables. Her general annoyance and ill-humor, combined with her abstracted indifference, caused some of the vegetables to drop from the spoon onto the bare feet of the serving woman, who promptly dropped the dish with a resounding crash. It might have been a simple accident if it had not triggered a reaction in Isabella, who turned suddenly, her fingers caught on a stem, and the Ming vase crashed to the polished tile floor.

  The sudden explosion and the reality that it was a priceless Ming seemed to draw all the anger and annoyance that had been congealing in his mother's mind. She stood up, the cords in her neck bulging as she stood towering over Isabella, from whose face the blood had drained, turning the pink glow to an ashen white.

  "You dirty little bitch," his mother screeched, slapping the girl repeatedly on both cheeks.

  "Forgive me, mistress," the girl mumbled, lifting her face as if welcoming the blows as penance.

  "That was priceless, you whore," his mother cried. "Look what this monster has done!"

  "That clumsy little devil," one of his sisters said.

  His mother grabbed the girl by the shoulders and began to shake her, the silken hair flowing as if caught in the eddy of a heavy wind.