The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  Dr. Cochrane kept looking down at the worn floor. There was a hatch there, some way for the mechanics at the depot to reach deep into the guts of the machine, outlined in an edge of aluminum with a hinged ring sunk flush into it. Dr. Cochrane examined it intently. He trailed his eye along every line, round every angle and every curve, running through equations and formulae in his head, choking down the bile that was rising in him as the bus lurched and swung.

  “End of the line!” the driver shouted. The bus slowed, stopped with a high-pitched fart of brakes and a final, shuddering death rattle as the driver killed the engine. The door banged and he jumped down from the cab, stretching his arms over his head, groaning. Dr. Cochrane watched him walking with a slow, aching stride, patting his pockets for cigarettes and matches. When he reached the pallid cone of light falling from the street lamp, the damp stain of sweat down his spine stood out in an ugly stripe. The light cut him in half so his feet and his trousers shone and his face was hidden in shadow with just the burning dot of his cigarette to show where his mouth was.

  Dr. Cochrane stood up and walked as quickly as he could to the front of the bus. He hooked his cane over his arm and swung himself from the dirty pole in the door, down two painful steps and on to the pavement. He hurried the length of the bus, keeping it between himself and the driver, and crossed the street into a narrow passage between two buildings.

  He worked his way around, like a hunter moving through the woods when the wind was against him, leaning on his cane, tapping in the dark, discovering broken pavements and tin cans and broken bottles, straining his eyes in the lost light of uncurtained windows, the nebulous gray of unseen TVs that laughed at him as he passed. Slowly he was coming back the way he wanted to go, hidden by the houses, out of sight of the bus driver. He heard the engine start again, the bus shaking itself like an old dog, and he cursed. “I might just have waited,” he said. And he leaned a little more heavily on his cane until he was sure the bus had gone.

  The street was silent. Dr. Cochrane limped between two bare and scrubby gardens, back to the bus stop, where he crossed the street and started the long climb up the hill in the dark. He was very afraid. He stopped often, because his leg hurt, because he was out of breath, and when he stopped he listened hard in case there was somebody climbing up the narrow path behind him. Nobody came. He heard dogs barking to each other in the night and the sound of a distant siren but nobody came. Dr. Cochrane stood in the darkness, straining his eyes. He concentrated on a gap in the trees where the lights of the houses shone through in a yellow glow, watching. If somebody was following up the path, no matter how quietly, they would pass there. He waited for their shadow. Still nobody came. After a little time he walked on up the hill until he came to a place where bindweed had knotted itself into the links of a broken chain fence and an old FC Atletico shirt had been draped over a post like a flag. With one last fearful look behind, Dr. Cochrane picked up the shirt, pushed through the gap and, holding his cane before him like a talisman, went down the hidden path on the other side.

  THE GOSPELS SAY: “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” Father Gonzalez knew the truth. Father Gonzalez knew that he was a coward and knowing that did not make him free.

  First thing in the morning, in the dark of winter or in bright summer dawns when the sun tiptoed gently over the mountain tops without even waking the everlasting snows and came tobogganing down into the streets of the city, trailing promises of Heaven, Father Gonzalez was afraid. He stood in his robes, surrounded by his brother monks, at the altar the Spanish had built over the rock where the old gods once bathed in blood, and he poured out the blood of his God and he was powerfully afraid.

  More than anything else Father Gonzalez was afraid that he would be discovered. Whatever happened, whatever it cost, nobody must ever know. Nobody must know the hold that the Commandante had over him. Nobody must know what he had done for that man. Nobody must know why—but God knew. God already knew and yet, every day, he took God in his own two hands and held Him in his mouth. The terror of it passed, of course. Every morning, when he did not die right there at the altar, when he was not struck down like Ananias, when the lightning bolts did not fall from the sky, the fear passed off, for a little.

  He ate his breakfast waiting for the fear to return. He walked to the university knowing that it was waiting for him there.

  He sat all day at his desk, St. Max Kolbe smiling down at him from the wall beside the window. He was afraid to raise his eyes from the desk and meet that serene smile. The students entering his class read hope, laughter, encouragement in that face but Father Gonzalez looked into those eyes and saw them burning with scorn. He looked away. He looked deep down into the papers on his desk but he was still afraid. He was afraid that the phone might ring. He feared the voice that might be there and what it might demand of him. He feared that the phone would not ring and then the waiting would simply go on.

  And at night, when he lay in that little room, as quiet and bare and white as the inside of an egg, lying on the bed whose boards would one day go to make his coffin, the fear raged all around him, curling across the floor and boiling up the walls until, at last, he fell asleep and woke to be afraid again.

  Sometimes he was cheated even of that, dreaming that he was already awake and already afraid until the terror of it dragged him back out of sleep and left him to lie there, for the rest of the night, with the dark drumming against his eyeballs. Sometimes he slept until dawn and woke in warmth and comfort to a moment of real peace until he realized that he was not afraid and remembered that he should be. On mornings like that he would pretend to himself that he was still asleep but it never worked, it never worked.

  Father Gonzalez was unafraid when the knock came. He was lying on his back somewhere down at the bottom of a deep, velvety pit, so far down that dreams could not disturb him with their fluttering daddy-long-legs feet and the night silence meant only that; silence and not the moment of waiting for a scream.

  When Father Gonzalez woke to the knock, he knew there had been two knocks before it. He remembered how they had reached him, the way the sound of a blossom opening thousands of miles away finds the swallows and warns them it is time to fly toward the spring, the way a throbbing, echoing, trombone note, ringing out in endless depths of a chill black ocean, can find the whale and call him to his wife.

  At the first knock, Father Gonzalez stirred. At the second knock he was rising up out of his own warm blackness, faster and faster, accelerating toward awareness like a ping-pong ball released from the bottom of a swimming pool, streaming bubbles as it comes. At the third knock he sat up in bed and his heart gave a little leap of terror and joy because, for a moment, he thought it might be like Christmas morning. He thought, for a moment, that the waiting might be over and the midnight knock might bring with it a bullet and rest.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “You’re needed.” There was a light under the door. “They need a priest. There’s a boy waiting in the vestibule. He knows the way.”

  “I’ll come,” said Father Gonzalez. Under the door, the shadows of feet moved away.

  Father Gonzalez got out of bed and put on the shirt and the trousers he had left draped over his hard wooden chair only a few hours before. He reached into his narrow wardrobe and took down from the shelf his priestly stole of violet silk and a leather case, cylindrical, about as long as his hand, split along its length, hinged and snapped shut with a brass fastening.

  He went out into the corridor, walked its length to the stairs, turned out the light behind him and carried on down to the front door where a skinny boy was waiting on one of those uncomfortable wooden chairs that people are made to wait on.

  The boy stood up when he saw Father Gonzalez on the stairs. He was thin and scared and breathless, with huge, deer’s eyes and an Atletico shirt that was too big for him and sagged over the shoulders. He said: “Hello, Father.”

  Father Gonzalez said: “Hello. Tr
y to speak quietly. We shouldn’t disturb the others.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “My grandfather’s. He is very sick. He’s been sick a long time. I think he’s going to die.”

  “Is that what the doctor says?”

  “There is no doctor.”

  “Oh.” He ruffled the boy’s hair. “Then you are probably wrong. I bet there’s nothing to worry about. I bet he won’t die.”

  “He says he is. He told me to get you. We have to hurry.”

  The boy took him by the elbow and pushed, the way you would push at a reluctant wheelbarrow, urging him on, hurrying him to the door. Father Gonzalez could feel the terror jangling in him like an electric charge. He recognized it. It was familiar to him. He took the boy’s hand: “It’ll be all right. I have a car. Show me the way.”

  They drove. Sitting in the passenger seat the boy was too small to see through the windscreen. He knelt, leaning forward, with his hands on the dashboard, pointing the way. “I ran through there,” he said, “between those shops.”

  “I can’t drive through there. We’ll have to go round.” Father Gonzalez went to the end of the street and turned right but behind the row of shops there was only another alley and no way for the car to go. “Why did you come that way?”

  “There’s a stairway down the hill.”

  “And where are we going?”

  “Up the hill.”

  “Up the hill where, son?”

  “Up the hill. I don’t know the address. It’s where we live. I know the way.”

  Father Gonzalez took the keys out of the ignition with a sharp twist. “Then it looks like we walk from here. Come on, show me the stairs.”

  The boy scrabbled at the handles and ran from the car heading into the shadows between the buildings before Father Gonzalez even had time to lock the doors. Halfway down the alley he stopped and yelled back: “We need to hurry. Please. Please!” The only sign of him was a ripple of light shining back from the gutter puddle he had disturbed as he ran. “Come on!”

  “Son, you need to wait. I’m old. I can’t go as fast as you. I can’t see where I’m going.” Father Gonzalez was going carefully along the alley, one hand on the damp wall, groping his way through the darkness, when the boy came out of the shadows and took his hand.

  “I know the way. I’ll show you. It’s OK. Come on or my granpa’s going to Hell.”

  Father Gonzalez gripped his little hand until he felt the bones crunch and tugged on his arm. “Now you stop that! Who’s told you that nonsense?”

  “He did. My granpa says he’s going to Hell unless you come.”

  “Your granpa is wrong. Nobody who wants to be friends with God is going to Hell and the very fact that he’s calling for me to come proves that he wants to be with God.” How easy it was to say these things and they were easy because he knew them to be true. He believed them. He despised the good and the respectable who dared to put a limit on God’s generosity. He fought them, as he would fight the foulest heretic. This little boy, the old man dying somewhere in the dark at the top of the hill, there was a place reserved for both of them in the unfinishable glories of Heaven, but not for him. He knew there was no place for him. Father Gonzalez was glad of the kindly mask of darkness. “Now come on,” he said. “Show me the way.”

  They found the foot of a cracked and broken concrete staircase and began to climb. Toward the top of its thirty-seven steps—Father Gonzalez counted every one—there was a shattered water-pipe sticking out and the last three steps slumped into the hole it had gouged in the underlying earth. At the very top of the stairs there was another street, with a lamppost still lit, the last symbol of civic authority, leaning over like the battered flagpole on a forgotten fortress, but still burning, still hopeful.

  After that there was nothing.

  Father Gonzalez said: “Where are you taking me?”

  “It’s not far now. We just run down here, along this fence.”

  “I can’t run.”

  “We need to hurry. Along this fence then up a little hill and down the other side. Please, Father. Please come. You need to come now.”

  “I know where we’re going. This is Santa Marta. You should have told me.”

  “You wouldn’t have come into this barriada.”

  “But I would. Of course I would. I know the way. I could have come in the car. We could have been there by now. Come on, show me.”

  Father Gonzalez slipped and stumbled along the broken mud path. Ahead of him the boy’s worn gray track shoes shone white in the darkness and the huge number 7 on the back of his football shirt glowed like a beacon as he trotted ahead. Somewhere off to the right a girl screamed as if she were being murdered—then burst out laughing. The rusted fence ran out. They came into a brief patch of open ground where the path opened out into a dusty delta of tracks like a backward-pointing arrow where all the tracks out of the barriada merged in the path to town. Then there was grass underfoot and then a jumble of little houses, thrown down anywhere, jammed into every tiny scrap of ground. No streets, just rat runs between the buildings, broad enough to shoulder a way through or as wide as a rope of washing.

  These places grew like a tumor. Somebody would flatten a bit of ground, maybe close to the roadside, maybe on some abandoned bit of concrete, and throw up some walls and make a roof and sell the roof so somebody else could start again. And then there were walls to build against and more roofs and more walls until the shacks spread and multiplied, piled on each other like moss on a log, clambering up to the light.

  The boy ran ahead. “We’re here,” he said but Father Gonzalez had lost him in the tangled knot of houses. Now he felt the fear rush back. He was hot, breathless, the long muscles down his shins screamed at him and now he was lost in Santa Marta in the middle of the night. How he wished he had taken more time to dress. How he wished he had clipped on his dog collar. It might have been a protection, a passport.

  He stood, spinning dizzily in a tiny plaza, no bigger than a tablecloth, where four doll-sized houses nudged each other and greed or hurry or bad planning had left no room to fit a fifth. The bit of ground had become a useful dump and indescribable, unknowable things had been piled there in a fetid pyramid that quaked and trembled under his shoes. Father Gonzalez had no idea how he had found his way into that place and he could not find his way out. A dog began to bark furiously on the other side of a wall. A man swore at it and told it to shut up. His wife joined in: “Good God, what use is it swearing at the dog, you fat fool?”

  Father Gonzalez wanted to yell, wanted to make some noise to bring the boy back to him, but he was afraid of who else might come. And then, where there had been only a dark murmur somewhere in the darkness, something so faint and so normal and so much a part of the velvet night that he hadn’t even noticed it, like the sound of a sleeping fire, suddenly there was music and men singing; cracked uncertain voices at first, men embarrassed to sing in front of their mates then, as the tune picked up, stronger, confident.

  We’re on the march,

  This road we’re treading

  It leads to freedom

  It leads to freedom.

  We’re on the march,

  This road we’re treading

  It leads to freedom and liberty,

  We’ll wave the scarlet banner triumphantly.

  “Here!” A skinny hand shot out and grabbed him by the shirt front, bony fingers hooked in above his pounding heart. “Granpa, we’re coming.”

  “What’s that singing?”

  “I don’t hear any singing.”

  “Yes, you do. You must. Listen.”

  “Who brought you up, Father? You don’t know much. This is Santa Marta. In Santa Marta you don’t hear nothing, you don’t see nothing, you don’t know nothing. In here.”

  The boy ducked down through a curtain of heavy plastic sheets that might have been sliced from fertilizer bags and Father Gonzalez was in a room with an old man dying on
the earth floor.

  There was light enough to see by. It came from a paraffin lamp, beaten out of used drinks cans, that had been left burning by the old man’s head. Father Gonzalez had seen one like it before. There were stalls in the market where they could be bought for 75 centavos—if you had 75 centavos—and the man would shred an old shoelace for a wick at no extra charge.

  Father Gonzalez knelt on the floor. The old man’s diagnosis was undoubtedly correct: he was dying. He lay under two blankets with the boy’s thin blue nylon coat tucked up under his chin. His nostrils seemed to have receded so his nose was hooked and sharp like a hawk. His lips were as pale and gray as the rest of his face and his eyes stood out like boiled eggs under bruised blue lids. Father Gonzalez had seen dying before and he read the unmistakable signs of it again. There was no hope.

  The boy stood just at the edge of the lamplight. He said nothing. He was concentrating very hard on trying not to cry.

  “Why don’t you say the Our Father, son? That might help.”

  The boy held his hands in front of his face, like an angel in a picture book, the way he had been taught half a lifetime ago. “Our Father,” he said. “Our Father. Our Father. Our Father,” whispered sobs between his teeth.

  Father Gonzalez took the stole from his pocket, unrolled it from its rubber band and kissed the gold cross stitched at its midpoint. He looped it round his neck and opened up the little leather case he had brought with him. Inside there was a bottle of oil, specially blessed by the bishop for use in extreme unction. He poured a tiny drop into his hand and wiped it, gently, so gently across the old man’s eyes and he said: “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by sight.”