The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

  Mr. Valdez dropped the magazines on the table with an enraged roar and tore the big white envelope open, hunting for something else, some explanation for this lunacy. He found it. A letter from Correa—oh how Marta Alicia Cantaluppi had thrilled to type it, carrying the final draft to the editor’s desk before her like a monstrance in the saint’s day procession—and he had addressed it in his own hand.

  It said: “My dear Valdez, I can never thank you enough for choosing The Salon to publish your latest story.”

  “But I didn’t, you fool. I didn’t!”

  “The whole world of literature has been holding its breath and waiting for a word from you, waiting and wondering as the weeks turned to months and the months to years …”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  “… with no word from our foremost writer and, now, the waiting has ended in this triumph. With ‘The Pedlar Miguel Ángel’ you have truly opened a new ‘chapter’ …”

  “Jesus!”

  “… in the history of the national literature and …”

  There was another page and a half of that unctuous drivel until it ended with:

  “You asked to be recompensed for your work at our usual rates. I need hardly explain that such a thing is simply unthinkable. There can be no usual reward for such exceptional writing and no reward, however exceptional, can ever be adequate. Therefore, I trust you will accept the enclosed check, not as payment for something which it is beyond my power to purchase but in recognition of an art which belongs already to the whole world.”

  Correa’s huge signature took up the whole of the bottom half of the page in a swirl of violet ink, and stapled to the back there was a stiff, yellow cashier’s check which offered to pay to the account of Mr. L.H. Valdez the sum of 250,000 coronas.

  Mr. Valdez tugged it free and held it up to the window. “Well,” he said. “That should soften the blow.”

  PLAZA UNIVERSIDAD HAD recovered like any other burns victim. Everything was back in place, everything was much as before and there was nothing to show for what the madman Miralles had done except for the newness of it. New railings had been set in amongst the old. Cranes came in the night and brought new concrete planters to replace the ones with chunks blown out of them. Municipal gardeners brought new plants in thin wooden crates, and in a few days they grew back just as they had been, but there was an uncomfortable freshness about the place. New paving slabs marked the spot where Miralles had stood, there were new steps in the staircase leading up to the university gates and there were other places where the stone and the concrete had been washed and scoured so it stood out perfect and pale, like tight, pink new skin emerging from under a scab. People looked away politely without mentioning it, as they would from any disfigurement, and pretended there was nothing to notice, but when they came down the steps into the square they avoided the new slabs and walked on the old, dusty ones instead, as if what was not there on the bright, white concrete might touch them somehow, might stick to their shoes and taint them.

  Caterina was just like all the rest, and when Mr. Valdez arrived in the square he saw her coming down the steps, hugging the left-hand side, away from the leper-white treads on the right.

  For the first time since he met her downstairs in the Phoenix she was dressed as a girl. No more torn jeans, nor workman’s jacket. She wore a skirt—still of denim but a skirt all the same—and a white blouse with her hair tied back in a severe and formal pony tail and, Mr. Valdez noticed, she had dumped the stupid playground sneakers and she wore instead a pair of simple black pumps. It was a gift to him, a putting away of childish things. She had dressed nicely for him so they could go together and choose a ring, the way she would have covered her head in her little mountain church, because it was appropriate, because it was the thing to do.

  When she saw him across the flower beds she gave a little skip and almost broke into a run, but she held back, smiled secretly at him because she knew he had seen through her new persona, said “goodbye” to the girl beside her and came to him quickly through the crowd.

  “Hello,” she said. “This is nice,” and she stood in front of him, holding her face up to be kissed.

  He failed to kiss her. He had kissed her often, of course, but for enjoyment, to savor the taste of her and not like this, in a show of gentle, easy affection, not in public with people looking on.

  “Hello.” He offered his arm, and if she was disappointed she did not show it and they walked out of the square together, side by side.

  “Surprised?” he asked.

  “Chano, everything is a surprise these days.”

  “You look nice.”

  “Surprised?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I always thought you looked nice.”

  “Yes, but not with clothes on.”

  “Even with clothes on. Especially with clothes on.”

  Long weeks before, on that first day in the Phoenix, she gave him that tiny piece of paper with two tiny words written on it: “I write.” His life story. Her death sentence. Now it was in his wallet, still there, still treasured, not forgotten but not read, like the books on his mother’s shelf, valuable for what they represented but not for what they were. He remembered how it had burned and glowed on the day he got it and now there was another bit of paper that threatened to ignite in his suit pocket: that check from Correa, smoldering there, fizzing like a running fuse and ready to explode.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about my day?” she said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not used to this new mode of domestic conversation.” He heaved a deep breath and tried to sound bright and interested. “So tell me,” he said. “How was your day?”

  “It was lovely, thank you. Wonderful, actually. I worked very hard at pretending to listen to Dr. Cochrane’s lecture but I spent most of the day thinking about you and that was very nice and I wasted a little more time thinking about, oh, silly things like diamonds and that was quite nice too. And I had a coffee with Erica.”

  “Who’s Erica?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “We really don’t know anything about each other, do we?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “No, we don’t. I feel like I know you because I’ve read your books. Every one of them, over and over. Dr. Cochrane calls me an aficionada.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “But it’s worse than that, Chano, I’m a fan. You’ve been talking to me since I was a child—in your books—and, God help me, I’ve talked back to you. You don’t know what that’s like. You don’t know what it means.” She laid her hand on his chest, on the thin, silver-gray suit fabric over his beating heart. “This wonderful man, who wrote such words, who knew so much about life and about people and the world, this man who told me such wonderful stories and, suddenly,” but her voice dropped to a whisper and a truck rumbled past and she turned her face down to the pavement.

  “And suddenly?” he asked. “Suddenly what? I couldn’t hear you.”

  “Forget it. It’s OK.”

  “No. Please. Tell me.”

  She looked him, drilling into him with her gaze, and said: “Suddenly, after all this, suddenly I feel him, this wonderful man, suddenly I feel him moving inside me.”

  The shock of it must have shown in his face.

  “You can’t imagine what that means, Chano. You’re not a fan. I love you insanely, but we barely know each other.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s enough. We can do this.”

  “Do we dare?”

  “I can dare anything. If you’re brave enough, I am brave enough.”

  “Oh, I am brave,” she said, which was true. Valdez was a liar and a coward but she was brave. “I am brave and I will dare anything and then there will be time enough for you to learn that Erica is the girl I share a flat with.”

  “I knew that,” he said, which was another lie.

  “Of course you did. Of course.”

 
“So you had coffee with …?”

  “With Erica! Erica! Erica!”

  “I knew that.”

  “Yes. I listened to Dr. Cochrane talking about transcendental numbers, I thought lovely, filthy thoughts about you and I had coffee with Erica. That was my day.”

  “And what did you talk about?”

  “Oh, this and that. A little of this and a bit more of that.”

  “Did you, for example, mention the fact that you and I are about to be married?”

  Caterina smiled a secretive smile and she said: “I wanted to. It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch, but I decided not to. I still can’t believe it. I can hardly believe you want me.”

  “Oh, I want you.”

  “Yes, but that way—enough to marry me.”

  “But did you tell her?”

  “No. I said that, didn’t I? Would you mind if I had? Chano, you sound like some horrible man trying to lure little girls into his car and making sure that nobody knows where they are. Why shouldn’t I tell? Is it a secret?”

  “I just asked.”

  “Who have you told?”

  “Nobody. My mother. Obviously.”

  “And nobody else?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody at the university?”

  “No.”

  “Not Dr. Cochrane?”

  “No.”

  “What about those other teachers I used to see you with?”

  “No. Not them either.”

  “You’re not exactly enthusiastic, are you?”

  “I’m not like you. I have no Erica.”

  That made her a little afraid. It made her wonder if that was what their married life would be like: not parties and drinks and a houseful of eager students sitting at his feet, not a kitchen table packed with poets and authors, arguing all night, drinking wine, passing the coffee pot round, but something much less, both of them locked away together, alone in that flat until the sex ran out. She pretended not to have thought of it and, instead, she said: “Well, I haven’t told anybody either. It’s so astounding that I can’t quite believe it myself, so how could anybody else believe it? I’m going to wait until I’ve got that ring on my finger. It’ll be all right to speak of it then, won’t it?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Chano, do you love me?”

  He said it again: “Of course,” and then, because he realized how disappointing that sounded, because he remembered her stupid shoes and the way her hair fell across the pillow, because of the smell of her in the night, because she could still feel joy, because she would never be able to dance the tango, because of the day that the bomb went off and how he had feared for her, because it all came back to him so sharp and bitter-sweet and in spite of a tiny pang of adulterous guilt when he thought of his beautiful car, he said: “I love you more than I have ever loved anybody or anything.”

  THEY HAD WALKED together almost all the way back to the river, toward Paseo Santa Maria where, down the hill to the left, all the smartest jewelers of the city had congregated together for generations. There is somewhere like it in every city in the world, some little quarter where the very best shops of one kind or another are found and the shops which are not found there are, obviously, not of the best. It is a badge of pride to buy one’s jewelry from the arcades of the Paseo Santa Maria. For the jewelers it is a badge of pride to occupy premises there and a matter of honor to pay the inflated rents which, after all, are reflected in the prices that customers of quality are honored to pay. Commerce and snobbery meet in a happy symbiosis.

  But down the hill and a little to the right, away from the jewelers, there was a quiet square where lovely old houses, a little down at heel, stood around a well kept garden with iron railings surrounding shaded flower beds and neat gravel paths. Mr. Valdez knew that garden well. It was the garden outside the Ottavio House and, God alone knows why, he decided that the garden outside the Ottavio House was the place to take Caterina.

  After he said: “I love you more than I have ever loved anybody or anything,” which was true, at least in part, he said: “There’s something I need to tell you. We should talk.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you.” What could it possibly be? What could he possibly need to say after saying: “I love you more than I have ever loved anybody or anything”?

  “We need to talk.” And that signaled urgency, panic, emergency, yet he held off.

  “Let’s go down here,” he said and he led her toward the back gate of the garden where there would be quiet and seclusion and a place to sit and, although she could see it, with its railings and its flowers, it seemed a long way off.

  “There? The gardens? Chano, what is it? Look, if you’ve changed your mind, you only have to say. Just say it. I told you we can go on as we are. It wasn’t my idea. I won’t hold you to it.”

  “I haven’t changed my mind. Can we just stop for a minute and sit down quietly?”

  “Sit down. Oh God, what’s wrong? Chano, tell me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong. I just want to talk to you. There’s something I want to tell you and I don’t want to say it walking along the street.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “No. Can you just come with me?”

  It was only a few steps to the garden gate, just a few more to the dark green iron bench under the pepper trees, but it took forever, walking in silence because there was something important to be said—but not yet—so that meant nothing could be said. By the time they sat down together, he was sorry he had ever begun this.

  Caterina sat beside him, twisting her body toward his, one leg crossed over the other, like one of those old-fashioned equestrienne portraits of a grand señora riding side-saddle over her husband’s estates.

  He looked at her and said nothing, pushing his fingers through his hair.

  “Just say it, Chano.”

  But still he could not find the words. At the other end of the long gravel path through the garden, at the side closest to the Ottavio House, a place she did not know was there, a place she had never even heard of, the iron gate squeaked open and he saw Dr. Cochrane come in and take a seat close to where the gardener was pruning some overhanging branches, his hat tilted down, his cane in his hand, his newspaper folded, the crossword puzzle ready to be filled with kisses.

  “Do you remember that story you read to me?”

  She looked relieved. “You don’t like it? You hate it. Is that all? Oh, thank God. That doesn’t matter. Well, it matters, of course, but I’ll get better. I know it’s rubbish but I will try to get better.”

  “It’s not rubbish. It’s very far from rubbish. In fact, I liked it so much that I sent it to a friend of mine.”

  “Oh God.” She looked mortified. “Who?”

  “Oh, you don’t know him. He lives in the capital. His name is Correa and he runs a little magazine.”

  “Which little magazine?”

  “Oh, a little magazine called The Salon.”

  She clapped both hands to her mouth and squealed like a twelve-year-old.

  “And Correa agrees with me that it’s a very good story. So good that he has decided to publish it.”

  She did not move. She sat very still with her hands peaked over her nose like a pilot’s oxygen mask. Mr. Valdez saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.

  “There’s nothing to cry about,” he said, and he gave her his handkerchief—the white one from his trouser pocket, not the blue one from the breast pocket of his suit. “But there’s something else I have to explain to you.”

  Caterina was smiling now and dabbing at her eyes and laughing.

  “First, I want to give you this.” He opened his wallet and took out Correa’s check. “It’s your payment for the story.”

  He held it out to her between two fingers, still folded shut, and she took it from him the way bomb-disposal men pick up tiny bits of machinery, opened it, read it and read it again.

  “That can’t be right,” she sai
d.

  “No, believe me, it’s right.”

  “This is a check for quarter of a million!”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I could buy a car with that. I could pay my rent for years to come.”

  “Buy whatever you want with it. Put it in the bank, save it up for a rainy day. Do whatever you want except, please, don’t use it to travel—I want you near me—and don’t waste it on rent. You can live with me.”

  “Chano, this is amazing. Thank you. Oh, thank you.”

  “Wait. Didn’t your mother tell you, ‘There’s no misfortune that doesn’t come with good’? Well then, you are about to find out that there is no good that doesn’t come with misfortune.”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “Caterina, I am so very sorry but there’s been an awful mistake. I wanted to help. I wanted to help you. I sent your story to The Salon and—I can’t think how this happened—somehow or other Correa got it into his head that I wrote it. He decided that it was my story.”

  She was suddenly sad. “Oh,” she said. “That’s why they paid so much.” She was making an effort to be brave about it, like a schoolboy whipped by the teacher who refuses to let his classmates see his tears. “Well, it was nice while it lasted. You never miss what you’ve never had.” She held out the check. “You’ll just have to give it back to him. Do you think he might print the story anyway? I mean, he’d pay a lot less, obviously. I wouldn’t care if he paid nothing at all, if it comes to that.”

  He looked at her for a moment, willing her to understand, hoping that she might guess. “No. It’s not like that. The fact is, he has printed it. Your story is leading the new edition of The Salon.”

  She still didn’t understand.

  “Caterina, your story is leading The Salon but it has my name on it.”

  She looked at him. She looked at her feet. She looked back at him. “But what does that mean?”