The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  The whole town filled with heat that soaked into the walls and the pavements and lay there and stank. The dogs howled, the babies cried and, in the prison, the governor opened up the fire hydrants and turned the hoses on the prisoners.

  In the cinemas they put huge blocks of ice up on the stage and fanned them with electric fans until they melted away and dripped down into the orchestra pit where the mice lived and the piano stood, furred in dust. Still nobody came.

  There was sweat—more than usual—and heat—more than usual. The tango halls smoldered. The smoke of cigars hung there all night and it was still there again the next night. There were fights and the mate of the steamer Medusa went out one night on shore leave and didn’t come back.

  Underneath the Hall of Justice the investigations went on with kicks and punches and flat-handed slaps, teeth knocked out and thumbs tied tight behind the back.

  “Ask him again,” said Camillo. “Keep asking him until he talks.” They all talked. They always talked.

  THERE ARE PEOPLE in the barriada who live their entire lives immersed in a sea of misery. From the moment they are born until the moment they die—which is usually a mercifully brief parade of moments—they know nothing but suffering and want. Often there is not enough to eat. There is sickness but there is never a doctor. They have nothing, but what they have is enough to attract the wolves. They must do as they are told, obey orders whether they come from the gangster or the policeman and, for the people of the barriada, there is very little difference. In the daytime there is no work and nothing to do but sleep. In the nighttime the dogs bark and there are gunshots, which are bad, or there is waiting for the gunshots, which is worse.

  All summer long the sun beats down on their little tin sheds until the rusty walls glow skin-liftingly hot. The filthy ditches that run past their doors slow to a trickle, clog, solidify and fester so the stink rises up like a fist and the flies come up in angry clouds whenever the children run past.

  In winter there is rain and the roofs leak, even on the little shacks where industrious mothers have spent all summer raiding the rubbish dumps and cutting up plastic milk cartons to make shingles. The rain drums on polythene sheets and drips into the tin houses with xylophone plinks. The earth floors turn to mud and the ditches rush with water until a stick or a can or a discarded nappy jams there, gathering more sticks and leaves and mud and half-chewed chicken bones, all knotted and knitted together into a dam. Then the ditches fill and overflow their uncertain banks and the water finds an easier way down the hill, even if that means it must take a house or two along for the company.

  But in the middle of all that misery, sometimes the people are happy. Sometimes it is springtime and flowers appear suddenly at the side of a path where nobody ever planted flowers, and for a while they look beautiful.

  Maybe one day, somehow, by some miracle, a kid gets his hands on a football and runs with it to a bit of open ground, humped and furrowed like a plowed field, and plays, hangs in the air like a mosquito and flicks the ball from his toe, straight through the posts. Or a beautiful girl, in that one, brief, summer after she becomes a woman and before she becomes a mother, squeezes herself into a tight yellow T-shirt, bright as sunshine, and walks out into the calle, nose pointing to the sky, titties pointing to the sky, and all the men stand at their doors to watch her pass and blow on their fingers and say “Aiy.”

  Sometimes there would be a lucky ticket in the lottery, sometimes, against the odds, Atletico Club would win, sometimes Santa Ines would hear and prayers were answered, sometimes the electricity stolen from somebody else’s cable would stay on.

  The people of the barriada could wring every tiny drop of happiness out of those things and make them last. That glorious overhead flying kick would fill their conversation for months and, years later, when she was fat and flat-footed, when she was a grandmother and well into her thirties, they would remember the girl in the yellow T-shirt and how beautiful she had been. In the barriada they have the gift of happiness. In spite of it all, they expect it.

  But Mr. Valdez, standing in front of the long mirror that filled the entire wall of his bathroom, did not expect to be happy. Mr. Valdez had much, much more modest expectations. He insisted that his mirrors were free of smears, his limestone tiles warm, his towels plump as clouds and as white, his steel taps gleaming, his English shaving brush standing to attention, like one of those silly soldiers sweating under an enormous fur hat outside the Palacio Presidencial, his razor here, his cologne just there. He expected all those things but he did not expect them to make him happy. Even on a day like today when his morning shower was as needle-sharp as he had wished and exactly as warm as he required, when he had shared it with a beautiful girl with impossible breasts in a final, mad outpouring of joy after two mad days of joy, he did not expect to be happy. And yet he was happy.

  Now he stood there, holding Caterina, drinking in the smell of her hair, nuzzling that caramel-scented place in the nape of her neck, biting her ears so she squirmed against him and giggled, watching her watching him, and now Mr. Valdez felt happy. It astonished him.

  That was not the first morning Mr. Valdez had made love in the shower but Caterina made it new again.

  He stopped himself from wondering if it might have been the first time for her. He would not ask it—not even of himself. It was irrelevant, and not in the way that such things were irrelevant in the Ottavio House.

  It was simply not worth considering. Caterina made it not worth considering.

  She squirmed away from him again and, when he failed to chase her, she came back, put her arms around his neck and kissed him, standing face to face, belly to belly, unselfconsciously ignoring the mirror for the first time, not performing any longer, not caring how she looked, simply being with him.

  “Now stop that,” he said. “I’m an old man.”

  “No, you’re not, Chano. Oh no, you’re not.” She brushed him with her finger tips and Mr. Valdez was amazed to feel his body stir in response.

  She kissed him again. “You are absolutely beautiful. Even this,” another kiss, “is beautiful.”

  “Even what?”

  “That mark on your lip.”

  “Is there something on my lip?” Mr. Valdez went to the mirror and rubbed at his face with a fingertip, as if searching for some stray toothpaste or a blob of dried shaving foam.

  She ducked under his arm. “No, silly. Here.” She kissed him again holding his top lip between her two lips. “Here. Look,” and, with the very edge of a nail, she traced a horseshoe shape under his nose. “Even your scar is beautiful. Where did it come from?”

  Mr. Valdez was watching in the mirror. “I don’t have a scar.”

  “Just a tiny one.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Chano, you do. It’s hardly noticeable. You needn’t be vain about it.”

  “But I don’t have a scar.”

  “Chano!”

  “I don’t. What are you talking about?”

  “Suit yourself.” She was chilly now.

  “I don’t.”

  “Look, the whole world knows that L.H. Valdez has a scar on his lip.”

  “I don’t.”

  “It’s in all your pictures. It’s on thousands of books—millions—all over the world.”

  “Why are you saying this? It’s not true.”

  “Fine.”

  “I don’t have a scar. I don’t. I’d have remembered. I’d have made up some story, a piranha attack, a jealous husband, saving a busload of orphans from jaguars.”

  “Fine.”

  “I don’t have a scar.”

  “Chano, I’m getting dressed now.”

  He barely heard her. While Caterina was looking for her underwear, moving the bedroom chair, searching under the bed, Mr. Valdez was still staring at himself in the mirror. When she was pulling on her jeans, he was rubbing at his lip with a stiff finger. When she was sitting on the wrecked bed and lacing up those silly canvas shoes, he was wi
ping the mist of his breath from the mirror so he could look at himself again.

  She called to him from the door. “I’m going now.”

  He said nothing.

  “I said, ‘I’m going now.’” She waited. “Call me.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

  “Will you call me? Will you?”

  “Of course. I said I would.”

  She was standing in that little vestibule—alone. “Maybe I’ll see you at the university.”

  In the bathroom the sound of the door slamming made him jump. Mr. Valdez walked naked through his empty house and took The Killings at the Bridge of San Miguel down from the shelf in his study. He opened the back flap and studied his picture there. There was nothing to see.

  It was him—a younger version of him—but there was no scar. Mr. Valdez took the book back to the bathroom. He held it up to the mirror, his face side by side with his face. They were the same. There was no scar. He went back to his study. He emptied his shelf and looked at every book in turn, scanning the pictures inside each one, holding them up to the mirror. They were all slightly different, each a year or so apart, all alike. None of them had a scar.

  Mr. Valdez left his books piled up on the bathroom floor and went to the telephone. It rang for a long time before it was answered and Mr. Valdez said: “Mama, do I have a scar on my lip?”

  “YOU HAVE A rare gift for finding useful little bits of happiness.”

  “Actually, that’s true,” said Caterina. “I do. But I know how this works. You just tell me something bland but nice, something nobody could disagree with, and I’m expected to say how amazing and insightful it is.”

  “Shhh,” said Erica, “cynics and doubters block the channels with their negative vibrations. I cannot be expected to work if I am surrounded by negative energy.”

  Caterina leaned forward across the table and peered down into her own outstretched palm. “You see, that just adds to my doubts. That’s not exactly in tune with the scientific method. Two plus two is always four even if you add them up in front of an audience of unbelievers. Tell me something else.”

  She looked down and saw the lines and folds in the pale skin of her palm and they reminded her of that lump of mud on her windowsill at home, drying out to a disappearing of dust, just a million tiny brown specks, all that was left of a ground-down mountain with nothing to show of what it had once been, light enough to blow away, soft enough to melt in the rain, the marks of her father’s hand vanishing.

  “A new man has come into your life.”

  “Well, we both know that.”

  Erica held her hand by the fingertips, unfolding it, opening it out on the table like a dissection specimen. Her skin was pale and white and soft when his had been dark and hard-worn with calloused ridges at the joints where reins and hoes and ax handles had rubbed. How gently he had held her.

  “Already I can see you have given this man more than he deserves.”

  There was a wine glass on the table, with a candle flame reflected in it. With her free hand, she reached out and took a long swallow. “Is that what you see?”

  “It’s all there in your hand.”

  “Look in the other one.”

  “It only works with the left. Always the left.”

  “So that’s what you see?”

  “How can the lines lie?”

  Caterina emptied her wine glass. “You don’t expect me to comment on that do you?”

  “Of course I do. If you don’t tell me, how am I going to know what you’ve been up to?”

  “But it’s none of your business what I’ve been up to.”

  “How can you say such a thing? Of course it’s my business. My best friend disappears into Bluebeard’s Castle and survives to tell the tale—that is top-quality gossip and I am entitled to share.”

  “It’s private.” Caterina was smiling. She wasn’t offended. She hadn’t slammed the door completely. But she sounded firm.

  “Private? Don’t I tell you everything?”

  “Erica, you say that as if you had things to tell.”

  “All right. I live like a nun. That’s not the point. But if you don’t tell me …”

  “What?”

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll just have to make it up.”

  “Make it up then.”

  “Mine will be juicier.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.”

  Erica feigned horror. She clapped a hand over her open mouth. “You! Well, listen to you. I’m lost for words.” And then, when Caterina said nothing, she said: “You’re really not going to tell me anything, are you?”

  Caterina laughed and poured herself some more wine.

  Far away on the edge of town, slipping almost silently between rows of white-painted rail fence on his way to the polo ground in his beautiful green car, Mr. Valdez would have been delighted with that.

  L.H. Valdez made his career on word-of-mouth recommendations. Breathless professors in airless lecture halls talking of things that fashion demanded they should praise and pretend to understand, students in grubby flats, sitting up all night talking of all the books they would never, ever write, and of course the women. There were drawing rooms and coffee shops and boudoirs where L.H. Valdez was discussed in tones of hushed admiration far beyond anything in the literary salons of the capital.

  “Between ourselves, in absolute confidence.”

  “My dear, I’d die first.”

  And, with every whisper, every shared secret, his reputation grew and he became more desired. He was coveted, like the latest, most fashionable handbag, like those essential shoes. There were women who could not hold their heads up in society unless they could say they had spent a night, or two nights or a week of nights with L.H. Valdez, women who would think their lives wasted unless they could sob out their disappointed secrets to a few envious friends. He knew of course. They were blatant. They were flagrant.

  “Tell me, wasn’t that better than Letitia?” the one after Letitia would say.

  “I know you didn’t do that with Estella. She wouldn’t let you. She told me,” said the one after that. The mutterings. They spoke of him as he might speak of a polo pony, comparing, rating, like horseflesh, like the conversations he had in the ice-clinking comfort of Madame Ottavio’s garden. It was all very discreet of course, all hidden inside the secret world of women, kept away from anxious husbands, but Mr. Valdez was sick of it. He went from one to the other, or they passed him round. He could not decide which and he didn’t care. But already he did care about Caterina and he cared very much what she said.

  When he was making the turn between stone pillars and into the broad, curving gateway of the polo club, far away, in the middle of town, Caterina was saying: “It’s private.”

  A beam of sunlight came through the window and struck her where she stood in the kitchen, glass in hand, already, so early in the day, a little drunk, surrounded by gaudy flowers beginning to fade and the faintly fishy smell of old water standing too long in tin buckets.

  “It’s private.” The sunshine flooded her hair and kissed its way down her impossible, extravagant body, over her thick faded jeans, down to her childish socks. She stood there like a holy statue: the Madonna of the Kitchen, a wine glass in her hand, still warm from the bed of her lover, but a holy thing who understood the holiness of things.

  Caterina was no saint and she was certainly not a prude. When Mr. Valdez demanded “everything” she had given it. Everything. She had a country girl’s easy, matter-of-fact acceptance of the mechanical joy of it. She had terrified him with her simple, straightforward “Wouldn’t you rather …?” But she understood that, somehow, this was different and sacramental.

  The priests would call it “an outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible grace,” but Caterina never spoke like that.

  “It’s private,” she said.

  And, just as she said that, Mr. Valdez took one hand from the bone-white steering wheel of his lovely green car
, looked in the driver’s mirror and, faintly, gently, he brushed one finger over his lip.

  OUTSIDE THE FLAT, down in the shadows at the bottom of the canyon, where the dogs lay panting, where yesterday’s newspapers had come to die, where an old man lay on his back on the pavement with piss staining the front of his trousers and a brown bottle rolling from his fingers toward the gutter and making music as it rolled, there, parked between two bins, there was an old blue car.

  It was the sort of car that nobody would want to steal. It was dusty. The tires were bleached and dull gray with tiny splits crackling the sides. There was only one hub-cap left and the plastic steering wheel was worn right through so that a sort of shabby sponge poked out of it. It was an invisible car, a poor man’s car, but that car had two large, thick aerials sticking out of the roof and its enormous engine was serviced twice a week in a well-equipped garage at the back of the Central Police Barracks. There was a rough blot of gray plastic putty where the mechanics had repaired a bullet hole in the wing, close to the driver’s door, and there was a dent where Commandante Camillo drove the gunman’s head into the bonnet with his fist. Nobody bothered to repair that.

  Commandante Camillo was sitting in that car amongst curled and blackened banana skins, crushed cans and balls of waxed paper spotted with chili sauce. The ashtray was full and he had thrown his last two cigar butts on to the floor because his training forbade him to leave the signs of a long watch piled at the pavement edge. All the time that Caterina had been with Mr. Valdez, Commandante Camillo had been sitting outside in that car, waiting, thinking, making connections in his head. For two whole days, that girl, that kid, in that house, with Valdez. Dio, what a waste. What a lesson he could teach her, give her the taste of a real man. When she left, he waited a little and pulled out into the traffic without looking, without signaling, finding the gap with the hairs on the back of his hands, driving slowly behind her, speeding up to pass her, waiting for her, watching her come closer in the mirror, watching her walk away reflected in the window of the furniture store across the street, until she got home. He watched her walking. It was incredible.