The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

Then an extraordinary thing happened.

  While Mr. Valdez was looking at the roof of the university and laughing at himself because what he took to be the jagged prongs of a lightning conductor pointing at the threatening sky suddenly folded its wings and flapped clumsily toward the Merino, he found himself wondering if one of those people in the square might be Caterina. It suddenly occurred to him that she might be dead. She might be maimed. She could be suffering and he was afraid for her. Such a thing had never happened before. It was as if the gland that supplies empathy had suddenly switched itself on for the first time in his life.

  Mr. Valdez was alarmed. He had never before cared for anyone—not even for Mama. Not since his father. When he realized how easily the people that he loved could disappear from his life, Mr. Valdez had amputated that part of himself. From time to time, he touched the white scar over the stump and found it cold and numb and that satisfied him. Nothing could grow there. It felt nothing and that suited him because the other way was too dangerous. It was too much. It was too painful.

  Everything he wrote about in his books, all the jealousy and the pain and the sacrifice, it all came from love or some misguided notion of what it meant to love, and Mr. Valdez had imagined all of it. He had imagined whole towns and filled them with hundreds of people and none of them had ever existed but he made them breathe on the page because he imagined them so completely. And, more than that, he imagined how they felt. He imagined it utterly. Mr. Valdez might not have met the characters in his books, he might not be on close personal terms with dentists or bar girls or landlords, but he knew and understood that such people existed. He knew that, somewhere, there was a dentist and a bar girl and a landlord. But he had no idea of how they felt and yet he had created those feelings, dragged them up from his imagination and written them down so that other dentists and bar girls and landlords could read his books and say: “Yes, that is how it is.”

  It was a remarkable secret. It was as if the guides in the Sistine Chapel had turned to the latest tour party and revealed: “When Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni painted this, he was stone blind.”

  But now, sitting in his lovely car, amidst the stink of petrol fumes and the unbearable heat, Mr. Valdez looked down at the imagined scar that marked the place where he had cut himself off from humanity and saw that it had grown pink and tender. He felt the blood pounding in it and it hurt. Mama was to blame for that, with her talk of grandchildren and marriage. She had sparked something. But she had spoken of those things before and he had never paid her any attention. Nothing had changed, except Caterina.

  He imagined her now, naked on a hospital trolley before he had seen her naked, shrapnel piercing her before he had pierced her, and he was afraid again. He was afraid that this might be love and he understood what that meant: the jealousy, the longing to possess and the dreadful vulnerability that went with it, the pain of another’s pain against which there could be no defense.

  The car in front gave a little jolt and began to move. A gap opened up. Mr. Valdez put his car into gear and moved off behind it, up the ramp and on to the highway. Soon the traffic was moving, not quickly but smoothly. He reached the junction that leads off to Plaza Universidad but it was blocked, a row of plastic signs across it and flashing lights and three policemen standing beside their motorcycles making churning scooping movements with their arms as if to push the traffic further on.

  The radio said that the university would be shut all day and perhaps again tomorrow. The students would have to wait a little longer for his Romeo and Juliet. That didn’t matter. It wouldn’t go bad. And now, with the day off, he could write.

  He followed the broad curve of the next junction and it brought him out at the other side of the university where, by some miracle, there was a parking space waiting for him, right outside the Bar America, and there, sitting at a table in the sunshine with a tiny cup of coffee, was Mrs. Maria Marrom dangling a pretty blue shoe from her toe.

  She pushed her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose and looked at him behind the wheel of his gorgeous, green car. “Hello, Chano,” she said. “I’m glad to see you’re all right. What a terrible thing.”

  “Terrible. Just terrible.” And it was terrible. For the first time in his life, Mr. Valdez began to understand how terrible it was and the thought of it chilled him. Between the florist’s and the traffic jam he had learned to care for “poor souls in trouble.” He wanted a cure for that and perhaps Mrs. Marrom was the cure.

  “People died, Chano.”

  “I know, darling. It’s awful.”

  “Why would anybody do such a horrible thing?”

  “Oh, all sorts of lunatics get all sorts of mad ideas all the time.”

  “But it could have been us. You might have been killed. I might have been killed.”

  “Or Ernesto.”

  Maria pushed her sunglasses back up her nose and agreed. “Yes, even Ernesto.”

  “But don’t you think,” said Mr. Valdez, “that the best way to fight these madmen is not to give in to them? Don’t you think that, as much as they revel in death, we should,” he pretended to struggle for the right word, “we should celebrate life?”

  Mrs. Marrom did not say anything. She raised her tiny cup to her mouth and took a careful sip that left no trace of lipstick on the porcelain.

  “Certainly, that’s what I think, Maria. That’s the only human response after such a dreadful thing. We ought to offer one another a little comfort.”

  This was the moment. This was the cabeceo. The glances had been exchanged but behind her black sunglasses it was impossible to guess what Maria Marrom might be thinking.

  There was a handbag on the table in front of her, too tiny to be of any practical use and more expensive than could ever be justified. She reached for it and took out a few coins, stood up and smoothed her dress down over her knees.

  Mr. Valdez picked up the freesias from the front seat, wrapped his jacket gently round them and placed them carefully in the back. By the time he reached the passenger door, Mrs. Marrom was waiting there, bobbing her tiny handbag from the end of a finger like a pendulum measuring his lateness.

  She sat down elegantly and swung her legs into the car just as she had been taught to do, just as her mother had been taught to do, the only way that a lady could possibly get into a car. He closed the door quietly, with two hands, and it made the sort of heavy, resonant click that comes only with real quality.

  She said: “I think you’re right, Chano. You are absolutely right. We should comfort one another. We should comfort one another all day and as hard as we possibly can.”

  At the traffic lights, he turned to look at her and saw the front doors of the Merino and National Banking Company reflected in her dark glasses. Ernesto would be working there right now, the stupid man. Maria sat like a statue, gazing fixedly at something else.

  All the way down Cristobal Avenue they said nothing, not when he turned the car down the ramp into the car park, not when they rode up in the lift together, not even when they went to the kitchen to find a bottle of wine.

  Mr. Valdez laid his jacket on the table, unfolded it, took out the freesias and put them flat on the top shelf of the fridge.

  “Not for me, Chano?” Maria had an amazing knack of putting a moue into her voice.

  “Silly girl. How could I give you flowers? You’re a married woman. What would Ernesto say?”

  She turned round and piled her hair on her head, exposing her neck and the collar of her dress. Mr. Valdez found the zip and it came down in a single, effortless glide so the dress fell in a pool at her feet and she stepped out of it naked, or nearly naked.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I have something much nicer to give you.”

  AFTERWARD SHE SAID: “I know you have someone else, Chano.”

  “Maria, what a thing to say.”

  “It’s true. The flowers.”

  “I always have flowers in the flat.”

  “Chano, don’t lie to me
. If they were for you, why would you put them in the fridge? You are keeping them fresh for someone else.”

  “My darling, why be jealous? It’s not very fair. You have someone else.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Ernesto?”

  “Oh, Ernesto. Yes, there is always Ernesto. I didn’t count him.”

  She was quiet for as long as it would have taken to smoke half a cigarette, if she had been the sort of woman who smokes cigarettes on an afternoon like that. Then she said: “You should settle down, Chano.”

  “Everybody seems to be telling me that these days.”

  “Well, it’s true. You should settle down. I should settle down. None of us is getting any younger.”

  He gave a hurt little snort and she pinched him under the sheets. “Oh, don’t worry, you’ve lost none of your youthful vigor. There are boys of twenty who would look at you with envy, you big, strong, lovely man. But it’s different for women. I’ll be an old lady soon. It’s different for an old lady. It’s not dignified.”

  She was being kind and that irritated Mr. Valdez. The day was turning out to be full of new experiences for him: he had found himself feeling sympathy for strangers, he had realized that he might be falling in love, and now, it seemed, Maria was dumping him. Nobody had ever dumped L.H. Valdez before. It was scandalous. It was an outrage. Maria was simply saying the things he had already decided for himself—admitting that she was past her best and there was no point in dragging this thing on—but that was beside the point. It was his place to make kind and self-deprecating comments. It was for him to be gentle and sensible and soothing and she was so bad at it. Really bad. He was not soothed. He could not see the sense of this.

  Mr. Valdez wondered if all the women who heard him make these little speeches had felt as he was feeling now. This loss, this humiliation, this abandonment and anger, this sudden wave of chilly loneliness. Had they felt this too?

  “Ernesto is a good man,” he said.

  “There are worse husbands. Yes. He is a good man. Not the man you are. Not a tenth the man you are. But we have to be sensible. Time to tidy away the toys and go in for supper.”

  Lying in his bed there beside Maria Marrom, Mr. Valdez knew he had no cause for complaint. He did not love her, in fact she had become tiresome to him. She was a bore and, now that there was Caterina, he had no need of her. But that wasn’t the point. That was not the point. Maria had let him down. He wanted to go back to this morning, back to a time before he felt things. Maria was supposed to cure that and she had let him down. That was it. That was the point. She had let him down.

  Mr. Valdez lay staring at the ceiling and marveled at the strange sensation of tears rolling into his ears.

  Maria kissed him lightly. “Shh, darling. No crying. It’s only wounded pride. Soon it will barely even sting.” When he did not respond she kissed him again, threw back the sheet and found her shoes at the side of the bed.

  Mr. Valdez closed his eyes. He heard her heels squeak on the tiled floor and the rustle of her dress as she struggled with that awkward zipper. She said: “Well, goodbye then, my darling.” He did not open his eyes again until he heard the door close behind her.

  Lying there, like a cold corpse, the sheet flung over his face, Mr. Valdez realized that Maria Marrom had left his flat without showering. She had never done that before. She was meticulous in her routine: washing without soap, drying herself on a fresh, unused towel, restoring her makeup to perfection, refreshing her perfume with perhaps an extra tiny squirt brushed through her hair so she smelled of nothing and nobody but herself, and then a final sweep of the room to make sure nothing had been left behind. And now, when at last she had decided to slip back into the role of the dutiful wife, she was leaving with his stink on her. Was that a last gift to him? Was she clinging to the last fading souvenirs of something, like wedding flowers pressed in the back of a missal? Was it recklessness? Was she defying Ernesto or telling him: “I was his. I was”?

  It was embarrassment, Mr. Valdez decided. Simply a rush to escape the awkwardness of his girlish tears, that was all. No more than that.

  There was a poison in his system that he could not vomit up and he wanted to cry it out.

  There was mourning still to do, even if he had no idea what he was mourning. The end of Maria? No more afternoons like this? He knew there must be more, but not with Maria, and finally, one afternoon, it would be the last afternoon. This was just one from a dwindling stock. But he could not know how many were left. Nobody did. That was the terrifying part.

  He stood up. His feet whispered like sandpaper on the tiled floor as he walked to the shower. It was an old man’s noise, the sound of a defeated shuffle. Mr. Valdez wanted the tears to come again and this time with water running down his face so he could hide them even from himself. But there was nothing. He was empty, except for the pain and the fear.

  He turned on the tap and let hot water hammer down on his head like jungle rain. Mr. Valdez turned his face up into the stream.

  WHEN THE FLOWERS Mr. Valdez had ordered were loaded in the van, Caterina was still lying in bed. She lay as she had before, on a pile of pillows, one leg pulled up and bent at the knee as if in the shape of a number 4, like a ballerina frozen in mid-pirouette. She was asleep. She lay with one hand spread open on a big yellow notebook, exactly like the big yellow notebook Mr. Valdez had used except that his was empty and hers was crammed with words.

  Caterina was sleeping because she had been writing almost until dawn. Every night she wrote until she fell asleep and, if she woke up in the night, her face pressed against the wire spine of her notebook, she would start again.

  She loved stories. From the time she was too small to know what a word was, she would lie in the crook of her father’s arm and look up into his face with eyes like a surprised kitten, watching his mouth, following the movement of his lips and the miracle of the noises that came from them. And then, when she was only a little older, the words took on a meaning and exploded inside her head, like fiesta fireworks against the black velvet sky, shooting pictures across her brain.

  When he came in from the fields, stooped and exhausted, she would run to him and hold his hand although it was covered with mud and walk with him into the house and wait quietly until he had eaten his soup before she asked for another story.

  She loved stories. She saw them everywhere. She took the stories they told her in church and spun them out, adding more events, more happenings, extra characters. Mama told her that was a blasphemy and she must not do it, but she walked home from church with Pappi and he laughed and asked for more. She read stories in the faces of the people in the village. She made it her business to imagine happy stories for the people who were sad and misfortunes for the people who were cruel.

  At school she discovered that numbers had stories to tell as much as words. Number 6 and Number 4 were lovers who longed to make ten, like 7 and 3, like 8 and 2 but 9 and 7 disliked each other.

  She remembered the day she had learned about pi, a magical, secret number that nobody knew, that just went on and on forever, never changing, just rolling out, not repeating but wandering on down smaller and smaller paths without any end. And Fibonacci: 1 plus 2 makes 3, 2 plus 3 makes 5, 3 plus 5 makes 8, up and up and up, great towers of number, every third one an even number, every sixth one a multiple of the sixth, every eighth one a multiple of the eighth, every seventh one a multiple of the seventh and every single one of them in a perfect ratio: each one of them 1.6 times larger than the one before. She remembered the day Señora Arnaz had told them that and then solemnly marched every child to the front of the class to prove that the distance from the floor to their belly buttons, and the distance from the floor to the top of their heads was a perfect, beautiful, magic, mystic, sacramental Fibonacci number.

  And then, one day when she was still quite a little girl, Pappi did not come home from the field. It grew dark. Mama lit the lamp and he still did not come home so they put on their coats and w
ent out looking. He was in the field when they found him, lying on his face as if he had suddenly fallen asleep because he was just too tired to keep working for even one more day. His hand was clawed into the ground and, when they picked him up to take him home, a lump of earth from the field came home with him, gripped tight in his fist so the shape of his fingers and the lines of his palm were squashed into it.

  Caterina made up a story about that. She wondered if he scrabbled at the dirt in pain or if he held the earth in his hand because it was his and he loved it and there was nobody else to love and be there with him when he died. She did not tell anybody else about that story. The lump of earth from his hand dried out, cracked and whispered away to dust. She brushed it outside and she did not bother with stories any more. She stuck to numbers and the numbers brought her to university and at university she was so lonely and so afraid that she began to tell herself stories again. She wrote.

  When the flowers Mr. Valdez had ordered at last arrived at Caterina’s flat it was lunchtime. She was up and out of bed but she was not dressed and she hurried to the door, wrapping a chenille robe around herself as she went. It did not fit. It was indecently short and, in spite of the belt, Caterina instinctively held it shut with one hand gripping the lapels. A moment or two earlier she had been naked, the way the cat in the yard was naked, the way the pigeons on the window ledge were naked, natural and innocent. Now, wrapped in a worn pink dressing gown with coffee stains down the front, with everything hidden that the artists and the pornographers would want on show, now she suddenly crackled with heat.

  There was another knock. “I’m coming. I’m coming,” she said but, when she got to the door and turned the key in the lock, there was nobody there.

  A voice from the stairs said: “There’s more on the way,” and Caterina saw at her feet three buckets of blooms crowding the doorstep.

  For a moment she was too astonished to say anything, and when she said: “Hang on!” the door to the street had already banged shut.