The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  Mr. Valdez looked up to the driver’s mirror and tilted his head. There was nothing to see. He was disgusted with himself, like a fat man opening the fridge again. He reached up and flicked the mirror sideways so it showed nothing but a reflection of trees and he stared straight ahead through the windscreen, out across the broad, level parkland at the back of the university campus. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He loosened his grip on the steering wheel. He found under his fingers some little crack, some irregularity in the underside of the ivory plastic, and he began to worry at it with his fingernail. Pick. Pick. Pick. As if to smooth it away and make the unseen blemish disappear so every tiny part of his beautiful car could be as beautiful as every other part, seen or unseen, visible or invisible.

  The tree above his head was filled with creepers and they in turn were crowded with small white blossoms. Baritone bees moved among them, setting off a tiny avalanche of dusty, spent anthers. Valdez saw them falling on his hands, on the sleeve of his jacket, on the polished leather seat of his car, spotted and gappy, filling in like a persistent snowfall. He knew they must be landing on him too, graying his hair, marking the passage of time like the scattering of dust that finds its way into lost tombs. He kept his hands on the wheel.

  And then, across the park, on another path, he saw a straggle of kids, walking along carrying their books and folders, laughing, dodging about, forming and reforming as they walked in line like geese jostling in the sky. Caterina was with them. He spotted her at the back of the line. He recognized her shining hair and the way she walked, flat-footed, in those schoolboy shoes and that coat, that awful, dreadful coat she wore to hide herself in the hope it might dampen the glow of her loveliness and make her unnoticeable. It didn’t work. From the other side of the park, she shone amongst all those others who were lovely only because they were young, all beautiful, all exactly as beautiful as each other in exactly the same way, like one of those nineteenth-century oil paintings where the handsome hero stumbles upon a pool of Naiads, each one gorgeous in her loveliness, each the image of the others. And then there was Caterina, who was different and who would never be the same.

  She broke off from the group with a wave and began to walk, diagonally, across the grass toward him. As she came Mr. Valdez saw, on the path behind her, the quick, shuffling outline of Dr. Cochrane following the group of students but watching Caterina, watching where she went until his eye fell on the lovely green car waiting under the trees. Dr. Cochrane looked away quickly, pulled his hat down over his eyes and fixed his gaze on the path. There was no other car in the city like that one. Mr. Valdez knew he had been recognized and Mr. Valdez did not care.

  She was coming toward him like a wave of wind across a cornfield, soft and rhythmic and beyond his power to hold or contain, and he didn’t care about anything else. He didn’t care that Cochrane had spotted them and leapt to conclusions. He didn’t care that Cochrane was right. He didn’t care who knew. He didn’t care that Caterina was too young for him, too innocent, too pure, too gauche, too much a child ever to be the mother of his children. He didn’t care that she would never fit in at the polo club. He didn’t care that she would tire of him, that she would still be young when he had grown old and she would betray him with the same enthusiasm that Maria had betrayed the banker Marrom. He didn’t care that his plan had not worked, that he had Caterina but still the words did not come. He didn’t even care that his seduction had backfired, like a fly trying to woo the fly paper—and succeeding. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was that she was coming across the grass toward him, waving, smiling, curling a twist of hair from her mouth where the wind had blown it, young and real and his if he wanted her and, yes, he wanted her.

  Caterina put her hand on the hot handle of the passenger door and Mr. Valdez leaned across apologetically to pop the button.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “a lady shouldn’t have to open the door.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I like you even when you forget to be adorably old-fashioned.”

  “Good manners are never out of fashion,” he said, “even if I forget them.” And then he astonished himself by saying: “I like you too.”

  The weight of that hung between them like a thundercloud waiting to break and, if Caterina had been wiser, if she had been hard, if she had been two years older, if she had not been Caterina, she would have made light of it with some silly, belittling comment like: “Ah, but I really like you” and it would all have been forgotten, like a scraped knee or a broken vase. Instead, she said: “Chano, thank you!” as if he had brought her diamonds, as if he had drenched her in flowers again, and this time meant it, so now, when she kissed him and said: “I like you too. Very much. Very, very much,” it was like an oath that had been notarized before a magistrate and could not be denied.

  She took her lips from his only slowly and smiled and said: “Where are we going?”

  “I have somewhere special to show you. And I brought a picnic.” He turned the key and, as they rolled quietly together, all three of them, Valdez and Caterina and the lovely, mint-green, fish-green car, he reached up and adjusted the mirror again and then they were back at the road.

  She said something as they drove along but, with the top down, the wind snatched her words away. He tilted his head and leaned toward her, inviting her to say it again, and she turned sideways in her seat and yelled: “I said,” her words separate and careful and distinct, “I said, if there were a public execution in town, would you go?”

  He burst out laughing at that. Through the trees on the other side of the road the Merino appeared in sunny flashes. He said: “Hanging or shooting?”

  “Could be a guillotining.”

  “Or a breaking on the wheel.”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter how it’s done. What I’m asking is, would you go?”

  He wondered if this was a trick question, something that might be taken as an indication of character, something that demanded a response and a reaction just as “I write” had done, something which, like that, might decide his fate. “No. I would not go. It’s a disgusting idea.”

  “Oh, I’d go. I’d go in a minute. I’d love to go.”

  “Caterina! For God’s sake. You’d go to see a man die?”

  “No. I don’t think that’s why people went to such things. Nobody went to see a man die. People die all the time. Dying isn’t such a big thing.”

  He slowed the car so he could hear what she was saying: “So why did they go?”

  “Not for the dying. That happens every day.”

  “For the killing?”

  “Yes, maybe for that. No, I think they went to see how they died—everybody dies but this is somebody who knows it’s about to happen right now, right there. And there’s the whole business of how they take it: do they kick and struggle and fight and resist or do they simply give in and let it happen? Do they hold on to their dignity?”

  “Being killed is not very dignified.”

  “It all ends the same way. It’s not very dignified losing control of your bowels in a hospital bed. But then there’s the chance that remaining calm and aloof and contemptuous in the face of death might be seen as childishly weak and obedient—just doing what you were told. If I were dying in a bed, I think I’d want my family around me. I’d want somebody to hold my hand. But, if I were being executed, I’m not so sure. I haven’t decided. I can’t make up my mind if a friendly face in the crowd would help to give me a bit of backbone or if it would be so sad that it would make me blub. Anyway, I’d go. I’d go for the color. I’d go for the feeling, to feel it and write it down. Like the way the light is coming through those trees, like the sound of the tires on the road just now and how hot it is, even when the wind comes rushing along as we drive. Don’t you want to feel and write down what you feel?”

  He did. More than anything Luciano Hernando Valdez wanted to feel and he wanted to write but there was nothing to write; nothing but the same scra
wny yellow cat crossing the same road and nothing to feel in the whole world except for the joy of that girl sitting beside him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes? Is that all?”

  “Yes.” He smiled at her and, when he should have told her the truth, he nodded like an idiot and said: “Yes,” again.

  “So that’s it? ‘Yes.’ I’m sitting in this wonderful car, next to this wonderful man, a man who—it’s been said—is the foremost novelist of his generation, a respected teacher who even likes me, and all the deep insight I get is ‘Yes’? Chano, I want to be a writer. Teach me.”

  “But ‘Yes’ is all there is to say. I can’t teach you to be a writer. You are a writer. You feel and you want to write down what you feel. That’s what it’s about.”

  “And stories.”

  “Yes,” he said, “and stories.”

  “You are a wonderful storyteller, you know.” She kissed her fingers and brushed them over his knuckles where he gripped the steering wheel. “Tell me a story.”

  “We’re here,” he said. Mr. Valdez turned the car off the highway and into a dirty side road which ran between once-white houses where chickens scattered as they passed. Before long, the road turned to dust and he slowed to a crawl and tiny stones popped from beneath the car’s taut tires until they reached the trees where it was shady and the road was damp and gently rutted.

  “Are we still here?”

  “We are nearly still here.” Almost everything she said made him smile. The engine stilled and the handbrake gave its rough, creaking laugh.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?”

  “To tell the truth, no, I’m not.”

  There was nothing to see. The road had run out in a narrow strip of grass, grazed short by animals and walled behind by trees and bushes. Mr. Valdez got out of the car and took from its tiny and useless boot a picnic basket with a hinged lid. Caterina noticed the price tag was still attached.

  “I think it’s down here,” he said and he began to push his way between the trees where there was still the ghost of a path. He turned back to see if she was following and, when she held out her hand to him, he took it, edging between the bushes with his shoulder to make a way for her. “I’m nearly sure this is it.”

  A little further on and they found the outline of a wall, like one of those lost cities deep in the jungle that speak of forgotten rituals and blood sacrifice and catastrophe and collapse, places where thousands walked for generations and loved and played and fought and made music and cowered before dark gods and where, now, there are only spiders and cats and sudden stone faces scowling from blank mounds of earth and young men hung with cameras who look up to the sky, to invisible necklaces of satellites strung around the world, and plot their position—in spite of all the proof around them that none of it matters. Mr. Valdez followed the path, broad enough for a goat, tripping over tree roots, trying to hold her hand and offer a gallant support until the wall vanished. He was puzzled for a moment until he realized that they had simply reached the corner and there, only a little ahead of them, was a gap which marked the gate.

  “I knew this was the place,” he said, as if someone had doubted him and he had been proved right. He kicked away the weeds which had choked the gate, lifted it on its hinges and jerked it open enough to make a space to squeeze through.

  “Chano, this is a graveyard.”

  “Yes.” He was halfway through the gap in the gates.

  “Why have you brought me to a graveyard?”

  “You’re not frightened, are you? A minute ago you were planning to go to an execution just for the experience.”

  “I’m not frightened, but look at it. Do you want us to have our picnic in there?”

  Jammed in the gate, one hand in front of him holding the picnic basket, one hand extended behind him, he turned his head away from her and looked into the little cemetery and saw it as it was; lost, unvisited, forgotten and overgrown, not as he had remembered it. The four rows of graves, all lined up to face the east so the rising sun of the dawning day of glory would wake the dead, each outlined with an ankle-high wall of marble, each roofed at the head end with a three-sided covering like a house lacking its last wall, were unkempt and covered in rough tufts of grass. Creepers and ivy were spilling over the outer walls. The gravel paths were almost vanished.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Of course you are right. What was I thinking?”

  “There might be snakes.”

  “Yes, there might be snakes.” He began to squeeze back through the narrow gap in the gates. The iron left a streak of rust grazed into the front of his shirt. “Would you mind if I left you here just for a moment?” he said. “There is something I need to do.” He put the picnic basket on the ground, stooped, took something from it and forced his way through the gates again. “It’ll just be a moment. Just over there. I won’t be far. I won’t leave you.”

  Mr. Valdez walked a little more slowly than usual, with a heavy tread, careful not to put his foot down where the creepers were knotted together, sticking closely to the last clear places in the path, places where snakes would not linger, making his way to the far wall of the cemetery where a small white mausoleum with blind windows on either side of a bronze door that curled and whipped with fin de siècle foliage and marble columns, as plain and elegant as eggshells, was beginning to disappear under a surge of weeds.

  He reached up and hauled at a long rope of leaves which had coiled itself over the roof and it came away in a shower of dust and dirt and spiders and shriveled brown blossoms that fell with a murmur of past summers. He stopped. It was pointless and impossible. If he labored for days, if he survived the snakes and the spiders and the filthy dust that was already itching its way down his neck and between his shoulders like the loose hairs scattered by a bad haircut, if he cut and dragged and stacked and burned, he could uncover the tomb, but when he left again, in that very moment, with the flick of a hidden green switch, the grass and the vines would begin to grow, climbing back toward the sun and burying everything again. It was as it should be.

  Mr. Valdez gathered a handful of scattered leaves, wadded them together and scrubbed at a sharply chiseled stone plaque by the door until the dirt that filled the frame and smoothed the script was gone. It took some time. He felt the ache in his arm. He grew hot and breathless and, when he stopped and stood back, because he had to rest, pretending that he was checking his work, he found that Caterina was there, worming her hand into his.

  “Torre Blanco,” she said, reading the plaque.

  “My mother’s family. My grandfather, the Admiral, is buried here.”

  “And your grandmother?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. I never knew her. He brought me up. You saw his sword.”

  “The hero.”

  “I always thought so.”

  “But not now?”

  “Still. Why should I change my mind? The dead don’t let us down. They don’t alter.” Mr. Valdez let go of her hand and picked up the bottle of toffee-colored rum from where he had left it beside the door of the tomb. “I brought this for him,” he said. “A libation for the ancestors.”

  “Are you going inside?” She was trying not to sound afraid.

  “No. The door is locked. I have no key.” He opened the bottle with twist. “It will just have to go here, on his doorstep.”

  They stood in silence together, holding hands as he emptied the bottle, pouring it over the locks, splashing it across the threshold like an arsonist.

  The last of the rum dripped from the upturned bottle. The marble step shone with it, leaving tracks in the dust and dirt as it trickled away. The fumes of hot, burned sugar rose up and filled the air and perhaps a few drops managed to wash under the locked bronze door, enough to moisten the Admiral’s long-dry lips.

  Caterina took his hand again. “If he had been out there,” she nodded to the humble graves that lay open to the sky, “you could have poured it straight down to him.”

&nbs
p; “It doesn’t matter. They can’t drink. Not even if it pours right into their mouths.” And then, for no reason that he could have explained, he said: “I’m sorry. This was silly.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Are you ready for that picnic you promised me?”

  They walked back to the gate, squeezed through, collected the basket and went from tree to tree, down the goat track to the car.

  When they pushed through the last line of bushes, Valdez said: “I’ll take you home.”

  She was disappointed. “What about the picnic?”

  “I’m filthy.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We can clean you up.” She took the handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket—there was always a handkerchief in his pocket and, thank God, he had left his jacket behind in the car.

  “Rub your hands together,” she said. “Keep rubbing. And your fingers. Rub between your fingers. Most of it’ll come off.” She stood in front of him, very small and very young, reaching up to brush his face with his own handkerchief. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “Take off your shirt,” and, when he did, she dusted his shoulders and turned his shirt inside out and shook it and rubbed the collar. “That’ll do. You’ll be more comfortable now.” And without waiting to be asked, she sat down on the grass and opened the basket while he did up his buttons.

  She found the camera he had brought and it delighted her to think that he had wanted to keep a record of the day.

  “Chano! Stand still, let me take your picture. Smile for me.”

  But he turned his back to her, his shirt still half buttoned. “I’m a mess. I’m covered in dirt, my hair’s full of cobwebs. You can’t take my picture like this.”

  “Yes, I can.” The camera clicked.

  “Don’t. Caterina, don’t. Please.” He glanced back at her quickly, over his shoulder, a stupid, coquettish pose, like a model trying too hard to look alluring, checking if it was safe to turn around.

  “All right. I’ll wait until you’re pretty again.”