He concentrated. He turned his face into the wind and fixed his eyes on the horizon. It was flat. It was constant. Far ahead there was a squadron of pelicans flying along the river in an undulating line. Somehow they managed to match their movements to the very opposite of whatever the river was doing. If it rolled like olive oil in a bottle, they dipped to meet it. If it dropped away, they climbed a little with an easy flick of prehistoric wings. He felt the boat rise and fall under him as if it were plowing through breakers.
His agony went on. He gripped the rail. His palms were slick with sweat, his mouth thick with spit. He was looking ahead to the end of the harbor wall and the little lighthouse stuck on the very tip of it like an icing-sugar castle. They would be in the river after that. There would be wind. It would strike the side of the ship. There would be waves in the river and the waves and the wind would act on the motion of the ship. He was ready. But then a sudden swirl of smoke, greasy with the smell of diesel, whipped down from the funnel and Dr. Cochrane tasted bile at the back of his throat.
He stood there like that, a clammy sweat leaking from beneath his hat band, for almost two hours until it was time for the flag-changing ceremony that marked midstream.
For those few moments when he stood bareheaded, waiting for the whistle toots which would signal that the flag, out of view behind the bridge, had been properly dipped, properly hoisted, like a widow changing her loyalties with a new wedding ring, Dr. Cochrane was convinced he would vomit at any second.
The heat of the sun beat down on his bare head while the breezes of the river mopped his sweating brow with cool kisses. It was agony. He looked about for some place he could throw up discreetly. Not over the rail. The First Class deck was sharply stepped over Standard Class and, even in his distress, Dr. Cochrane took pity on the family below, sitting in the sunshine with their picnic. He thought of fleeing through the First Class saloon to the toilets but he knew he could never make it without disgracing himself so he did the only thing he could do. At the very moment of the third and last blast on the whistle, just as the ferry lurched forward again over the imagined border, Dr. Cochrane puked in his hat. Retching at the sight of it, he carried it like a sick-room basin and quietly, trying not to attract attention, he placed it under one of the wooden benches that lined the deck and returned to the rail, where he slumped in an agony of nausea and humiliation.
“Here, wash your mouth out.” There was a hand on his shoulder and a glass of water held in front of his half-closed eyes.
“Just spit it on the deck. In this heat it’ll be gone soon. You’ll feel better for it.”
Dr. Cochrane did as he was told. “Thank you,” he said.
“No, no. Thank you for coming. I know what it costs you.”
“I feared you were not aboard.”
“I waited until we were back across the line. I hid. I’m good at hiding. They can’t touch me here.”
“Old friend, they could reach you anywhere if they knew where you were.”
“You worry too much. I’m small fry.”
“They don’t forgive, they don’t forget.”
“Here. Take a little of this brandy. Just a drop. It’ll settle your stomach.”
If the captain of the ferry had chosen that very moment to fill his pipe, if he had turned to the mate and said: “You have the wheel, Pedro,” and walked out on to the wings of his bridge, as sometimes he had to do when getting into dock was proving particularly troublesome, he could have looked down and seen two friends, one of them foolishly hatless, shoulder to shoulder, sharing a flask. Nothing odd about that. Nothing to attract attention.
But if the captain had known his patriotic duty, he would have turned his ship around and radioed ahead to have Camillo and half the battalion of police waiting for his return.
“I feel a little better now,” said Dr. Cochrane. He handed back the silver flask. “Thank you.”
“Good. Why don’t we sit down on one of these benches in the shade?”
“Yes. But not that one. Let’s move round a little.”
Dr. Cochrane collapsed onto the bench, its wooden slats pressing uncomfortably into his backside, the hot, painted metal of the First Class saloon pressing against his back.
“I do feel better,” he said. “A little better.”
“Good. And how are things?”
“Much the same, you know. Nothing much changes. We go along just as always. The faces change but only at the top of the tree. The truth is one colonel’s uniform is much like another.”
“It’s the same across the river. Everything changes and it always stays the same. Living over the Merino is like looking back from inside a mirror.”
“It’s hard to believe we could have cared so much,” said Dr. Cochrane.
“No. No, not really. Hope is a powerful narcotic.”
They were quiet for a while and then, as old men will do sometimes, they found themselves holding hands.
“Anyway, how is the boy?”
“Good. Very good,” said Dr. Cochrane. “But he’s not a boy any longer, you know.”
“I know, I know. It’s just. Well, you understand.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Did you bring a book?”
“There is no book this year, I’m afraid. He’s working on something—I saw him only the other day, sitting at the side of the river and scribbling away madly in his notebook, filling it with page after page of wonderful things. It’s coming along. Perhaps next year. I’m sure it will be ready for your next birthday.”
“I am so proud of him, old friend.”
“And well you should be. He’s a national treasure. Nobody understands us like Chano. We read his books and it’s as if he’s right there, talking to us of ourselves.”
“Do you think that? I’m glad. I like to think that. Those books are the only way I have to know him and it’s good to think that he really is that man. Is he happy?”
“Is he happy?” Dr. Cochrane was amazed. “Are you? Am I? How can I tell you that? Ask me about the weather or the next month’s Lottery numbers. Ask me something easy.”
“But he is well?”
“He is well and admired and honored and wealthy and—more—he is safe.”
“That’s all I wanted. All I ever wanted.”
“I know.”
“And still no wife.”
“No. He is very busy. Too busy for a wife.”
“But …?”
“Oh, no! Oh, put your mind at ease about that. Your Chano is very much a ladies’ man. Rather too much for his own good.”
Dr. Cochrane decided not to mention anything about the Ottavio House. A man who was content to see his colleagues in such a place might, all the same, be uncomfortable to have his father hear of it.
“That’s good. That’s good. Not that there is anything wrong with. Well, with that kind of thing.”
“I am not offended,” said Dr. Cochrane. “My own father would not have been delighted to have a mariquita for his heir.”
There was a moment’s awkwardness. “And his mother? How is Sophia?”
“Just the same. Still sad. She never,” Dr. Cochrane’s sentence lost its way, as Dr. Cochrane’s sentences often did, “well, she never, really.”
“No. She never did. She couldn’t. I’m sorry.”
“It was for the best.”
“Was it, Cochrane? Nearly forty years and for what? Nothing’s changed. And, you know, in all that time, I don’t think they tried to kill me even once.”
“But if you had stayed, they would have. They would have killed you and they would have done worse. They’d have made you talk and they’d have used the boy to do it. The boy and Sophia. They are alive now because they think you are dead—them and God knows how many others. Me. You saved my life!”
They looked straight ahead, so as not to look at each other, to where the bow of the ferry was nudging through the syrupy waters of the Merino toward the opposite shore.
After a time,
Dr. Cochrane said: “Have you any more of that brandy?”
“Of course. And I brought sandwiches. And birthday cake.”
“I don’t think I could. My stomach, you know. But you go ahead. I will toast your anniversary in your own excellent brandy.”
“This is what we’ve come to, eh, Cochrane? Two firebrand revolutionaries, two comrades, two dangerous enemies of the state, eating birthday cake on a filthy old ferry.”
“One of us is eating birthday cake. I’m too busy throwing up in my hat.”
“Yes, I wondered about your hat.”
“I can get another one,” said Dr. Cochrane.
“Yes, and for the record, I am officially not laughing.”
All the way across they sat together in the sunshine talking for hours of their lives, how they lived, what they hoped for in the days when they still had hope and, eventually, because all journeys eventually end, they reached the other side of the river.
“So that’s it for another year,” said Dr. Cochrane.
“I suppose so. I should go. Thank you again for coming. Thank you for watching over them. You are a good friend.”
“I am happy to do it,” said Dr. Cochrane.
“You know, I’ve noticed, you never ask what I do, where I live, how I make my living. You never even ask my name.”
“If I don’t ask, you won’t tell me. If you don’t tell me, I won’t know and, if I don’t know, they can’t make me tell.”
“We worry too much. Sometimes I think, I’m almost sure, I could come back. I could cross over. But I’m afraid to go.”
“I’m crossing over right now and already I’m afraid. I’ll be sick all the way. Stay here, Valdez. Stay here.”
THERE IS SOMETHING indescribably indulgent about a coffee tower. As cakes go, a coffee tower, properly made and well presented, is the closest thing there is to a logical proof for the existence of God. On the one hand, the atheists argue, given an infinite supply of flour and butter and endless batteries of eggs and millions of copper pans of boiling water all jostled together in an eternal kitchen from the day the stars were born until now, it is possible that choux pastry could simply have happened. More complicated things have simply happened, after all—bedbugs and bacteria and blue whales, for example. But then they would also have to believe that an infinity of bakers had dolloped the newborn choux out onto immemorial parchments and, over endless, uncountable millennia, baked them into buns and pierced them to let the steam escape and cooled them and filled them with the thickest, most perfectly coffee-scented cream, rich and soft and brown as the thighs of that new girl who has just started work at the Ottavio House.
A Florentine biscuit, with its almonds and its glacé cherries all cemented together in a circle of bitter chocolate, is wonderful enough but there is something gravelly and random about a Florentine and there are bits that can stick in the teeth, nuts that unerringly pierce the suspect filling.
A coffee tower will never do that. A coffee tower never disappoints. It sits, shivering on its tiny paper doily, fresh and bright and chill, cowering like a captured cloud and crowned with a little chocolate disc, waiting to be devoured like a virgin bride.
Father Gonzalez, if he was wise, would put aside all his theology and his dogma and his encyclicals, he would take the Catechism and the Spiritual Exercises and throw them out the window and, instead, in front of every doubting unbeliever, he would place a clean white saucer with a coffee tower in the middle of it and simply say: “Here is proof. See you at church on Sunday.”
Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez was sitting now in front of just such a coffee tower, at a table in the Members’ Dining Room of the Merino Polo Club, looking out across a tray of cakes and through the French windows to the terrace.
The terrace was England, or what she imagined England to be; old stone and small, modest flowers in becoming, ladylike hues. Nothing extravagant. Nothing ostentatious. Everything a calm dignity.
A few people stood there, looking down at the polo field with its faraway noises of horses and hoof beats, its grunts and cries, the thwack of the mallets, the polite applause. She had spent most of the afternoon down there already, sheltering from the sun under an enormous and beautiful hat, sitting in a deckchair on the edge of the field, knees together, legs locked and tilted a little to one side in that graceful, uncomfortable slant she had learned as a girl when her ankles were slim and in a perfect, one to one-and-two-thirds ratio to her calves. After so long it should be easier, less achingly painful. Life was unfair. Mrs. Sophia Antonia de la Santísima Trinidad y Torre Blanco Valdez had learned that lesson long ago too.
Polo was so noisy and distressing, she found. Everything about it was a fuss and a bother; those nasty hard balls, all that impolite barging about, jangling, creaking harness, sweat and lather and long, ugly strands of drool arcing and flicking from the bridles of the ponies. No, she was almost sorry she had ever permitted Chano to get involved, but his father, his father …
Still, she had done her duty. Nobody could ever accuse her of failing in her duty. She had sat there for hours in the heat, bored to the point of actual distress. She had struggled, all ungainly, out of that ridiculous deckchair, forced at last to accept a helpful arm from a nice young man, and made her way to the ladies’ room and then, as if to prove her devotion, she had returned to watch the end of the game and see Chano lift the cup. She had done her duty.
And now this was to be her reward. A proper table, with a proper cloth and nice, heavy cutlery and thin cups, nice thin cups with gold rims and painted roses. She deserved it. Just a little more waiting, just a little, until Chano was showered and changed and fit to be seen with his mother and all this would be hers. Mrs. Valdez fiddled pointlessly with the silver spoon in her saucer. It chimed cheerfully against her cup. She admired the sugar lumps in the bowl. Real sugar lumps, random, irregular sugar lumps broken from real loaf sugar. The real thing.
“Coffee, Mrs. Valdez?”
A waiter. A real waiter. Not a boy making a little extra money to get himself through university but a proper waiter with a little silver in his nicely oiled hair, trousers nicely pressed, clean nails, somebody who took a little trouble, somebody who deserved a tip.
“Coffee, Mrs. Valdez?”
And there, behind him, sitting alone at a table for two, a man chewing his fingernails, a man wearing brown shoes with a black suit, a man who looked away quickly when he saw that she had noticed him, a man who looked down at the table where there was no coffee, no cakes, no cutlery, a man ignored by every waiter in the room.
“Coffee, Mrs. Valdez?”
She raised just a finger in refusal. “No. No thank you. I will wait.”
The waiter withdrew with a bow. She was so happy. He had called her by her name, not “Madam” but “Mrs. Valdez.” He knew who she was. How wonderful. She went back to looking out the French windows with a smile.
And that was how Chano found her when he came upstairs from the locker room. She was facing away from the door, every perfect hair in place, her back cut in half by the rail of her chair, a fine gold chain glinting on her neck.
Walking toward her across the dining room, Mr. Valdez had a sudden moment of recollection; seeing his mother again like that, her hair piled up and her shoulders appearing from the bench seat in the front of his father’s car, his father sitting beside her at the wheel, the soft, rhythmic “schlubbbb” of lampposts passing the open window. In those days, Mr. Valdez remembered, he could control traffic lights with the power of his mind, making them flick from red to green all the way along Cristobal Avenue to their house on the hill. There were frightened, whispered discussions in that car—never in the house, always in the car, all of them bundled in together at any time of the day or night, driving without arriving, never going anywhere but home. Looking back now, Mr. Valdez understood how his parents had tried to make things seem ordinary, but their fear seeped into the back seat and under the blanket where he lay s
leeping. He knew somehow—he could not think how—that his father was in danger. He was afraid. There was the scent of warm plastic in his nose, the upholstery of the seat he lay on. It was dusty red and stamped with a pattern like woven rattan and he prayed there, offering God his power over traffic lights in exchange for his father’s life.
His father had vanished, but Mr. Valdez lost his ability to control the traffic lights. Every time he got in a car, he remembered why he did not believe in God.
“Hello, mother,” he said.
She held her face up to receive a kiss. “Hello, darling. Well done. I thought you played so well. You were wonderful.”
He had been wonderful. He was wonderful. Mr. Valdez was well aware of just how wonderful he was, with his perfect blazer and his perfect hair and his perfectly polished shoes.
“Oh, you smell good.”
And his perfect sandalwood cologne. But he would have preferred to have his wonderfulness acknowledged by someone rather more discriminating than his mother. For her, everything he did was “wonderful.” It had always been “wonderful.” Every glue-dabbed, paint-blotched creation he had carried home from school was “wonderful,” just like his novels. Exactly like his novels, in fact. Not more wonderful in any way. A paper calendar, a cardboard cat, a novel that made grown men weep, they were all equally valuable because he had made them and she treasured them all.
Mrs. Valdez had an entire shelf of his novels in her flat. He made sure that she always got a copy of everything he wrote. She made sure that they were always on display, in view but out of the sunlight, always dusted. Mrs. Valdez showed them to everyone who came to visit. She pointed them out to her friends but she never lent them. She conversed knowledgeably about them; plot, character, those particularly vivid passages of description. Perhaps even Señor Dr. Cochrane would have regarded her with honor as another aficionada, but she knew nothing more of her son’s books than what appeared in the review columns of the Sunday papers. She never read them. Mr. L.H. Valdez knew all of this. When he lovingly autographed his third novel with a personal dedication, he delivered it to her flat with a 5,000-corona note slipped between the pages halfway through the book. It was still there when he checked three weeks later. Six months after that, on another visit to his mother’s house, Mr. Valdez took the money away again and tucked it back in his wallet.
The Love and Death of Caterina Page 7
