Mr. Valdez was terrified. He had once more the sensation of clawing at rocks, kicking up gravel as he scrabbled for a foothold, sliding down a mountain slope where nothing was certain, and then he thought of Caterina. He imagined Caterina pulled from the river and the thought of it almost made him sick. He knew he could not face that nightmare. He knew he could still feel and thanked the God in whom he did not believe for it.
“You OK?” Costa said. “You look a bit gray.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “They were pulling a body out of the river as I came in. It upset me more than I realized.”
“You have the tender soul of the artist,” said Dr. Cochrane. “It is the price you must pay for genius.”
Mr. Valdez said nothing. It would have been immodest. He dragged flat palms down his face and, as he wiped the sweat from his lip, he was amazed to feel, like a cold wire under his skin, the faint trace of a scar.
BEFORE MR. L.H. Valdez left his flat that morning, before he took his usual seat on the bench overlooking the Merino and watched a dead man hauled out of the river, before, as usual, he had written nothing in his notebook, he shaved.
That was something of a moral victory for Mr. Valdez. He had come to hate shaving. In the past, when he was much, much younger, perhaps a week before, a shave had been one of the great joys of his life. Mr. Valdez enjoyed shaving so much he was almost guilty about it and he was glad that he could do it alone, behind a locked door. Now it made him afraid. Now he left the bathroom door open so that the sound of tango could come stalking in from the radio in the kitchen.
His fear was unlike the fear of Father Gonzalez. Father Gonzalez was afraid because he knew, but Mr. Valdez was afraid because he did not know. Every morning he stood in his elegant limestone bathroom, looking out from a reflection of his elegant limestone bathroom, wiry and sand-golden, broad of shoulder, narrow of waist, a triangular outline pointing down into the soft towel knotted around his waist like a warm snowdrift, and he felt a little stab of fear. Every morning Mr. Valdez leaned forward across the sink to where Mr. Valdez leaned forward across the sink, each examining the other’s lip, but every morning it was the same: nothing to see.
The water in the sink was very hot—as hot as he could bear with his soft, writer’s hands. Steam rose in clouds but the tile shelf above the basin caught it and condensed it into silver beads or wafted it away, clear of the mirror which never, never misted over. And yet, he could not see.
Mr. Valdez had a dark blue wash cloth soaking in the basin. Without putting his hands in the scalding water, flicking with his fingertips as the jaguar claws surprised fish from jungle pools, he caught the cloth, drained it, juggled it hotly from hand to hand, wrung it out and wrapped it across his face. Mr. Valdez had the empty taste of steam in his mouth. He tilted his head back. They looked down their noses at one another. The man in the mirror was masked, like a robber, like an executioner. Mr. Valdez regarded him with distrust. Mr. Valdez regarded him with distrust.
He unwrapped the damp cloth from his face. He took his fine English brush, soaked it in the basin, gave it one, wet-dog flick of the wrist so the water scattered from it and rubbed it on the soap. That daily miracle fascinated him. Like the Feeding of the Five Thousand, when a few loaves and a few fish became a feast for a multitude, the merest touch of soap could be transformed into mountainous clouds of clotted lather by the magical bristles.
He swirled impasto brush strokes of foam across his face. He rinsed his razor in the hot water and he began to shave, cheeks and chin and throat, the edge of his jaw, the upward curve to his ear, the thumb-wide strip of bristle that ran downward from his mouth, until there was nothing left but his lip. Short careful strokes, with the grain of his beard, backward to catch any straggling hairs. Short, fearful strokes, taking the soap away, baring the skin until there was nothing left but skin, nothing to see. He looked at himself with relief. He looked at himself and he was still frightened.
There is a gem called alexandrite and it shines with a lustrous green, except at night. At night, when the lamps are lit and there is no sun, alexandrite is red. Some things can’t be seen, not because they are not there and not even because they are too small to be noticed, but because we cannot grasp them. Valdez understood that.
Before Mr. L.H. Valdez left his flat that morning, before he took his usual seat on the bench overlooking the Merino and watched a dead man hauled out of the river, before, as usual, he had written nothing in his notebook, in a moment of elation after he had reassured himself that, for another morning at least, there was no scar, Mr. Valdez wrote a letter.
Still wrapped in his towel, Mr. Valdez sat down at his desk. He took from his briefcase a large brown envelope. He opened his wallet and there, beside a fold of pulpy gray paper with the words “I write” written on it, he found a small green stamp, stuck it on the envelope and wrote the address.
It was the simplest thing in the world.
It was the beginning of the end.
Four days later, only a little later than promised, that same brown envelope arrived in the capital, where it was delivered to the offices of The Salon.
Miss Marta Alicia Cantaluppi had been secretary to the editor for only eleven months, but when she opened that envelope and read the great, rolling, spiking signature of L.H. Valdez, she knew enough to take that letter to the boss and, without even knocking, she opened the door of his glass office and walked right in.
SEÑOR JUAN IGNACIO Correa flattered himself that, under his guidance, The Salon was recognized as the finest magazine in the country—among serious magazines, of course. Naturally, Rafael Salvade of The National Review knew that to be untrue and Fernanda Maria Espinosa had not given up all hope of motherhood and destroyed three marriages—two of them her own—to make The Reader the second-best literary journal in the country.
So, when Marta Alicia Cantaluppi burst into his office that morning, Señor Juan Ignacio Correa felt entitled to snort like a horse and slap his pen down on the desk. Even when she held up an apologetic hand and said: “I know. I’m sorry, but you need to see this,” he was not calmed.
It was only when he read the note she held out in front of her that he began to smile. He took it from her hand and he read it again. He cleared a space on his desk, laid the blue notepaper flat on his blotter and read it again and then, without lifting his eyes from the page, he said: “Marta, my dear, call Fernanda Maria at The Reader and Salvade at The National Review. Tell them I have booked the best table in The Grill for dinner tomorrow night and they are invited.”
Poor Correa. Every time Marta Alicia left his office he would look after her and enjoy her magnificent wiggle, but this time he missed his chance. For the rest of that day, as the sun chased the shadows round three sides of his office, Correa sat reading and reading and reading. At six o’clock, when Marta Alicia folded her spectacles into their aluminum case and cleared her desk exactly as she had been taught at college, Correa bid her goodnight with a wagging finger and warned: “Not a word, mind you. I’ll hear of this if it gets out,” and he was so engrossed in his reading that, for the second time that day, he forgot to enjoy her departure.
Before he left the office, Correa took the papers from his desk and locked them in his safe—a safe that had been tested in twenty-four hours of fire and which had survived being dropped from a crane in a plunge of five stories.
Lying in bed that night, with dots of red and blue dancing on his eyeballs while a night bird in the garden harped on its one-note song like a rusty gate, Juan Ignacio Correa regretted the move to the seventeenth floor of his block. At 2 a.m. he rose from his bed, dressed and drove back to his office and made his way through silent corridors, switching on the lights as he went, waiting at every corner until the shadows had fled.
He drove home with the envelope lying on the passenger seat beside him and when he stopped at traffic lights rocking in the breeze above a deserted junction, he was careful to lock all the doors.
Correa crawle
d back into bed beside his wife and left the envelope lying on the cabinet at his head, pinned down by the alarm clock. Ten ticking minutes later he reached out, put the envelope under his pillow and slept until morning, when he rang the office and told Marta Alicia he would be late to work.
She was unconcerned. After eleven whole months as secretary to the editor, she knew that it was she, and not Juan Ignacio Correa, who made The Salon what it was, and she got on with the business of running the magazine until lunchtime when he finally showed up, carrying a second suit over his shoulder.
Señor Correa had lingered on his way to work. He rose late after his night excursions, breakfasted well and stopped on the way into town at his favorite Turkish barber’s, where Mehmet worked his usual miracles, kissing his neck with an open razor, plucking at stray hairs with a taut string, singeing his ears with a candle flame. Señor Correa had the relaxed, replete air of a man who knew that next month’s edition was in the bag. He was untroubled. He was unassailable. He walked to the office and spent the rest of the afternoon standing up at a draftsman’s table, designing endless versions of next month’s magazine, smiling and taking time to enjoy Marta’s wiggle every time she got up from her desk.
Normally, of course, Correa and his staff would keep those designs secret—as secret as the nineteen-year-old hairdresser whom he visited on Wednesday nights—but on that day he was designing his own monument and when, after seven attempts, Correa was satisfied, he took his final version to the big Xerox machine in the corner and ran off two copies.
Correa folded them into envelopes and addressed them: one for each of his guests. Then he put the envelopes into his briefcase, changed his suit and took a taxi to The Grill.
There is some doubt about which is the foremost literary journal in the country. Correa, Fernanda Maria Espinosa at The Reader and Salvade at The National Review would each have expressed a firm view on that matter and none of them would have agreed, but there could be no debate about The Grill. The Grill was the most fashionable restaurant in the city and it had become so by the childishly simple ruse of being deeply unfashionable for forty years.
Down a narrow street, through an archway that opened off one of the very best squares in the city, The Grill had changed not so much as a lavatory seat since it opened. Not a doorknob, not an ashtray had been altered and so the place went from the very height, the dernier cri, of Art Deco luxury to a dusty old relic and back to a charming, bedazzling, authentic antique.
Actors, singers, musicians, soft-spoken businessmen who used to be gangsters, authors, footballers with their garish girlfriends, the beautiful starlets of the telenovelas with beautiful boyfriends—some rather too beautiful, who found themselves gazing longingly at those gorgeous footballers—they all came to The Grill.
Getting any table there was an accomplishment, but only someone like J.I. Correa could call no more than a day in advance and secure the private dining room at the back; much to the horror of the Ambassador of Ireland, who found his little party suddenly bumped. Fernanda Maria simply could not resist.
She regretted it as soon as she took off her coat, and when he arrived, Salvade realized instantly that Correa had summoned them to gloat, but to flee would only have made the old bastard’s triumph all the greater. He stood his ground and clamped fingers hard around the stem of his martini glass.
Smiling coldly over the fish course, Fernanda Maria said: “Now, Juan, darling, why have you asked us here?”
But the editor Correa simply summoned more wine and said: “My dear, why spoil this lovely meal with shop talk?”
Salvade of The National Review stayed silent and sullen and drank more than he should but he cracked between mouthfuls of the tenderest steak. “Come on,” he said. “Something’s up.”
Correa ignored him with a smile and poured him another enormous glass. He ignored them again over dessert, talking of nothings like the perfect host, reveling in their misery with a well-mannered, sadistic glee.
But Señor Correa faced the dilemma that faces all torturers: that inflicting more agony might mean no more agony can be inflicted. So it was only over coffee, when they crumpled their napkins, when they looked ready to stalk away, that he finally relented.
“Children, children,” he soothed. “My dear colleagues. Friends.”
They harrumphed. They took a little brandy.
“Have you heard the story of Howard Carter who, in 1922, uncovered the perfect, intact tomb of Tutankhamun?”
“I know he died of something horrible,” said Fernanda Maria. “The curse of the Pharaohs.”
“I’m sure you are right,” said Correa. “It was before my time. But I have heard it said that when, at last, he broke into the tomb and pushed a candle into the gap, they asked him what he could see and he said: ‘Wonderful things.’”
Salvade poured himself more brandy. “Is there a point to this?”
“There is. There is! Imagine then my delight when, like Carter, I opened an envelope and found this.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a piece of blue notepaper. “Imagine my disbelief. Imagine how I read and reread these few, brief words over and over again. Imagine, if you can, how happy and how unworthy I counted myself when my little candle exposed this wonderful thing.”
Salvade sniggered into his brandy. “Tell us again about exposing your unworthy little candle.”
That was too much for Fernanda Maria. Her patience was exhausted and she stretched across the table as if to snatch the letter away. “Oh, for God’s sake, come on! What does it say?”
Correa held up a calming hand, much as Marta Alicia did only the day before. “My darling, it says this. It says: ‘Dear Correa, it’s been some time since we have spoken and I’m sorry I have had nothing to show you. I am sending you a short story which I hope you will consider for the favor of publication at your usual rate.’”
Salvade waved his glass around and said: “So who’s it from?”
“Oh that’s the surprise, my friends. That’s why I asked you here. Look under your plates.”
“What?”
“Under your plates. Look under your plates.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Fernanda Maria.
“It’s pathetic.” But they both looked. They lifted their plates, they found the envelopes that Correa had so carefully prepared, and inside each envelope was a facsimile copy of the front page of The Salon with its masthead in that elegant Roman script and, underneath, where the picture should go, where decks of headlines should advertise the more or less interesting articles inside, it said:
“VALDEZ”
Just one word in the biggest, blackest type that would fit on the page.
They looked at him with mouths agape and he gazed back with palms spread wide in triumph.
Salvade said: “You bastard!”
And Correa, smiling, replied: “He’s back, darlings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
THE CAR MOVED under the shadowed trees like a mermaid swimming through waving groves of kelp, dappled by distant sunlight, shining with a metallic marlin-gleam. Last night’s rain had dampened down the dust of the track and the car rolled slowly, quietly over the firm earth, leaving a trail of heartbroken music as it passed.
Go away! I never want to see you more.
Just let me try to live in peace.
Don’t say that I’m already
drunk like yesterday.
The pain and grief of loving you
hurts more than alcohol can ever do.
My cup is filled with non-existence
and in it I will drown despair.
Go away! The sight of you brings back the hurt.
Leave me now, now that I can do no more.
Mr. Valdez let the car roll to a stop in the shade of the very last tree in the avenue and waited. The steering wheel gleamed as white as bleached bone in his grip. He kept both hands there, holding on tightly because he knew that, if he let go, even to adjust the radio, his fin
ger would fly to his lip. It had become a habit with him, rubbing, tracing, following but never finding the thing he could sense but never see. Time and again he startled himself as if he had suddenly awoken from a trance, touching his lip and wondering how long he had been doing it, catching himself at it as if he had been exposed in something shameful, and then his hand would fly up and he would push his fingers through his hair, as if that were what he’d always intended and the lip-stroking was no more than a moment’s diversion on the way. In the great effort to avoid touching his lip, Valdez had taken to rubbing his brow. He had discovered there quite a deep furrow leading in a diagonal flare to the middle of his left eyebrow. It was alone, he noted. There was no mirror image on the right side of his brow and that troubled him until he realized the mark was caused by the way he slept.
There was a fold in his skin where he pressed the left side of his face into the pillow. It was simply another scar, scored into his skin over decades instead of branded there in a momentary assault, visible this time but unnoticed and unremembered, like the other. It was a mark of old age. It was just as terrifying as the other one, the secret one, the unseen one, the one with the unknown meaning.
The Love and Death of Caterina Page 20
