The Love and Death of Caterina

by Andrew Nicoll

Genres: General Fiction; Thrillers

Synopsis

Caterina is beautiful, sensuous, gifted - a woman alive with possibility. When she walks into a room, no one can look away. Luciano Valdez - celebrated writer and respected university lecturer whose life is teetering on the edge of despair - believes Caterina to be the most astonishing woman he has ever met. Convinced she will reignite his life and work, Luciano finds himself falling in love with her, with devastating consequences ?

Release date: April 28, 2011

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

ONLY A FEW weeks after it happened, Luciano Hernando Valdez was almost unable to believe that he had ever been a murderer. It was an act he had often contemplated in his novels, of course, but those had not been murders, not truly murders. Men died, women too sometimes, but because they deserved to die. Invariably it was an affair of honour over a wronged wife, a sister ruined, a husband betrayed, or because death at the point of a knife or kneeling, blindfold, in some stinking shack in the barriada was the inescapable last act in an opera of tragedy and lust and revenge and redemption. Reading the novels of Mr Valdez, one felt the bloodied victims he left oozing life on the floor of a forgotten tango hall or dumped in a public fountain at midnight would have been disgraced for ever if he had imagined some less brutal end for them or, worse yet, if he had allowed them to live out their days in solitude as shopkeepers or cinema projectionists or provincial priests. Much better for a fictional character to make his exit in a bloody flourish with his head full of holes but his honour intact.

Real people are different, as Mr Valdez discovered.

But let’s go back a little, to before he had made that discovery.

Mr Valdez was sitting on his usual bench beside the steps that lead down from the square to the river. The Merino was looking particularly sluggish that day as it flowed, green as sap and every bit as sticky, towards the distant sea. It seemed to Mr Valdez that, just under the surface, it still carried with it the dark shadows of the interior, as if, somewhere upriver, the little people of the jungle had gazed into its pools with their black eyes and the blackness stuck.

Mr Valdez had a book open beside him on the bench and a notepad of yellow, lined paper open on his knee. There was nothing written in it, which was hardly surprising, since Mr Valdez was holding his pen between his teeth like a literary pirate preparing to board the defenceless page.

He sat staring across the river at a floating tree which had remained in exactly the same place, like an anchored liner, for over half an hour.

‘It must be stuck,’ said Mr Valdez to himself. But then a pelican, which had sat with its wings folded on a branch overhanging the river, flapped gracelessly into the air and the whole tree sank at one end, rebalanced itself, bobbed and sent out a single, greasy ripple across the surface of the water.

‘Remarkable,’ said Mr Valdez, inwardly, since the pen in his mouth made speech impossible.

Far away a steam whistle blew three sharp whoops and Mr Valdez turned his head a little to the left. Halfway across the river, it seemed almost on the horizon, almost at the edge of the world, he knew they must be changing flags, running down the three bars of white and gold and red and replacing them with three stripes of white and red and gold. It hardly mattered. Either flag would do. Each would hang just as flat and limp as the other, all the way across the river and all the way back.

‘Remarkable,’ thought Mr Valdez, although he had seen it happen a thousand times before on a thousand other sunny mornings.

Only a little further along the shore, two giant cranes stood ready to begin the day’s work. Shoulders hunched, legs firmly planted, their huge derricks dipped right down to the quayside, they looked like a pair of vast iron golfers ready to drive a ball across the river and into enemy territory. They gave a cough. Machinery began turning. The cranes began to lift.

Little by little the golfers turned into donkeys and then, tottering across the square, came Señor Doctor Joaquin Cochrane, the learned Dr Cochrane whose Scottish name could not disguise the flat nose, the shovel teeth, the plum-black, flat-iron-smooth hair of his Indian ancestors.

‘Mr Valdez! Mr Valdez!’ His cane slipped a little on the mosaic pavement as he hurried forward. ‘Mr Valdez. Oh, I feared you had not seen me.’

Smiling weakly, Mr Valdez took the pen from between his teeth and folded it shut between the blank pages of his yellow notebook. ‘Señor Dr Cochrane,’ he said. That was all.

‘May I sit down?’ said the doctor, sitting down on the bench just as Mr Valdez snatched his book away. ‘How inspiring it is to see you here, pen in hand, drawing inspiration of your own from the mighty Merino.’ The doctor pointed his cane from horizon to horizon in case anybody had failed to notice the river in front of them. ‘The mighty Merino – should I not say “our” Merino – the scene of so many triumphs by my courageous ancestor, the great Admiral Cochrane, in his struggle for the liberty of our people.’

Silent, as if he still held his pen between his teeth, Mr Valdez thought: ‘Your ancestors sailed the Merino sitting on a log with the piranhas nibbling at their toes,’ but he smiled and nodded and said: ‘Are you well, Dr Cochrane?’

‘Thank you, yes, I am well. And your latest novel, it progresses?’

‘Yes, it progresses.’ Mr Valdez folded his hands over the notebook on his knees and locked his fingers together.

‘I cannot tell you enough that which you already know but which cannot be adequately expressed, I cannot say often enough what an ornament you are to the faculty of our poor university, how the presence of such a great author as yourself, the eminent Luciano Hernando Valdez, enhances its reputation as a seat of learning and,’ Dr Cochrane seemed to have forgotten his plans for the end of that sentence so he smiled and made another slow sweep of the river with his cane and smiled again.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And the novel progresses?’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Valdez. ‘Yes, it goes well.’

‘Good. Yes. It progresses. I am delighted. And you are here, every morning, with your notebooks, creating in ink people, lives, cities that will last longer than the pyramids. It is an immortal achievement.’

‘Well, I …’

‘Forgive me. I have embarrassed you. I behave like a school-girl but how could I pretend that I am not an aficionado? Only last night, when I was reading again for the tenth time – as if for the first time – your heroic Mad Dog of San Clemente, I realized an amazing thing.’ Without waiting for encouragement, he said: ‘I realized that, when the landlord, Carlos, is murdered in front of the whole town and the people line the streets to watch and do nothing and he is stabbed two times at the fish stall and runs away to the hat shop where he is stabbed two times more and then he crawls to the steps of the Post Office where three more blows finish him off, then I saw.’

Mr Valdez said nothing. In spite of himself he may have cocked an eyebrow or the brim of his hat may have overemphasized a tiny movement of his head, but it was enough for the doctor.

‘Yes, I know. I see you are testing me, but I know. Seven stab wounds ending in death. They represent the seven deadly sins, do they not? I am right?’

He said it questioningly so Mr Valdez had no choice but to say: ‘You are a very perceptive reader.’

Dr Cochrane gave a little bow. ‘And as a reward for my devotion, may I, would it be too much to ask, might I hear a few words from your current work?’

‘Oh, no! I don’t think. That is. I.’

‘I understand. You need say no more. Would you, could you, say even a word about the theme?’

‘Forgive me if I say only …’

‘I understand. But the title. Even to know that, it would be a flavour to hold in the mouth.’

‘I am superstitious, like a mother waiting to bring forth. Forgive me. I cannot. Truly.’

Dr Cochrane looked down at the tip of his cane where it rested on the dusty pavement and sighed.

‘But perhaps, you would permit me to buy you coffee, to make it up to you? Breakfast? Have you eaten?’

‘That would be delightful. And we could talk more about your books.’

‘Yes,’ said Valdez, ‘but let’s stick to those already on your shelves.’ He stood up easily and waited, hands crossed in front of him over the large yellow notebook, like a footballer waiting to deflect a free kick. He was a slim man, tall and fit, but Dr Cochrane made a less graceful picture, planting two hands on the silver top of his cane and hauling himself off the bench with a groan.

Mr Valdez cupped a steadying hand round the doctor’s elbow and they walked off together towards Café Phoenix, the shadowy cavern of mirrors and moulded wood panelling where the university set liked to take its coffee.

At the corner of the square, an early workman had leaned his ladder against the green cross flashing from the wall of the chemist’s shop.

He had already unscrewed the iron sign that said: ‘Square of May 15’ and another, stamped ‘Square of the September Revolution’, was waiting at the bottom of the ladder. There, on the wall, pale where it had been protected from the grime of the city, the two men saw ‘Square of the Black Horse’ cut into the stone in a sharply chiselled Roman script.

Dr Cochrane tutted and shook his head. ‘May 15. September Revolution. Black Horse. Who cares? For me this will be always the Square of January 18. The old Colonel, I liked him a lot. I knew him, did I tell you?’

‘Yes,’ said Valdez, ‘you told me.’

‘Well, I think he deserves a bit of loyalty, that’s all. Don’t you think? Anyway, that’s what I think.’

‘I think everybody knows what you think. I think everybody knows that you knew the old Colonel and liked him a lot. Maybe, if nobody knew, the Chair of Mathematics might have been yours by now.’

‘That is a remark unworthy of the man who wrote The Killings at the Bridge of San Miguel.’ Dr Cochrane looked wounded as he shifted his cane to his left hand and leaned on the door of the Phoenix. ‘And, anyway, mathematics is above mere politics.’

‘Not in this sad little country of ours,’ said Valdez. ‘Here, each new revolution changes everything. They start with pi and move on from there.’

IT WAS AT the Phoenix that Mr L.H. Valdez, acclaimed literary figure, teacher, polo enthusiast, dandy, lover, cynic, author of over a dozen novels that were not only best-sellers but also ‘important’ works of fiction, first met the young woman he would murder just a short time later.

Coming in from the street, his eyes took a little time to become accustomed to the cool shadow of the café. He hesitated, but Dr Cochrane, in spite of his cane, forged ahead between the tables. ‘Jungle eyes,’ thought Valdez. ‘Undoubtedly the eyes of an Indian.’ They made their way to the back of the room where Costa from Classics and De Silva, who taught law, were hunched over a tiny chessboard with Gonzalez the Jesuit, uncomfortably close to their elbows, snooping like a poker cheat.

‘Good morning, colleagues and friends,’ said Dr Cochrane. ‘Move up now, make a little room. Valdez has offered me breakfast and – yet more nourishing – his conversation.’

The little group shuffled along the brown benches on polished trousers.

‘Now you have to move your bishop. You have to!’ said De Silva.

‘I don’t “have to” do anything of the sort.’

‘Costa, you touched it. You have to.’

‘I did not touch it.’

‘Don’t be stupid, you touched it.’

‘Stupid? Nice. That’s nice. A nice game of chess and now it’s “stupid” is it? I moved the board so that Cochrane could sit down, that’s all.’

‘And are you denying that you touched the bishop?’

‘Don’t talk to me as if you’re addressing a class on contract law.’

‘Costa, you touched the bishop!’

‘By accident!’

‘The rules are simple and clear; clear so anyone can understand them, simple for the avoidance of doubt.’

On a normal day, Valdez would have enjoyed that little quarrel. He would have watched it carefully, observed the jabs of fingers, traced the trajectories of tiny bullets of rainbow spit, made lengthy mental notes of every silly, angry word just in case, please God, there might come a day when he could write them down again in a story. Even now, when hope was almost dead, when he struggled day after day with a clean page and left it, sometimes hours later, with no mark on the paper, like an impotent lover, limp and embarrassed, he might still have paid attention. But there was the girl.

She was a waitress, but the only thing that gave her away was a pad of flimsy paper with a slip of carbon under the top leaf. No crisp white shirt, no smart black skirt, nothing to mark her out from the bunch of laughing students – the sons and daughters of dentists and accountants and colonels, all trying to look like Che – she was serving at a table in the opposite corner. She wore jeans.

Mr Valdez disapproved of jeans, but all the students wore them and she wore hers indecently low so a tempting blush of shadow or curve or imagination, hinting at something wonderful, appeared, briefly, at the waistband.

‘On a plumber, that would be disgusting,’ thought Mr Valdez as he traced the shape of her with his eyes, faded blue cotton taut over the curve of her arse and a line of pale flesh that slid in an elegant parabola to an improbably tiny waist and a narrow back.

‘She’s a child,’ Valdez told himself. ‘An infant.’ But then she turned round and, in spite of himself, Mr Valdez gasped for, although she was slim and dainty, the girl had amazing, beautiful, impossible breasts – the sort of breasts he had imagined existed only in the pages of those magazines he purchased at that little shop behind the church on his monthly visits to Punto del Rey, astounding, miraculous breasts, like peaked cannonballs hung in bags of ivory silk.

‘The face of an angel and the body of Lilith!’ Mr Valdez looked quickly at the floor, at his shoes, over at the angry chess game. He discovered a sudden fascination with the polished head of Dr Cochrane’s cane and fixed his gaze on that as if his head had been held in a vice and he looked and he looked and he looked at that until she stood at his shoulder. And then she said: ‘May I take your order?’

At the other end of the table the squabbling stopped and the priest let the air blow out between his teeth like a man who sees the gates of Heaven across an uncrossable gap. Mr Valdez did not look up. He dared not look up. He could not. He was afraid to move his gaze from Dr Cochrane’s cane.

‘Coffee,’ said Costa.

‘Coffee,’ said De Silva.

‘Black,’ said the priest.

‘Yes, yes,’ Dr Cochrane said enthusiastically.

‘Three coffees for my friends and another for me and some rolls – soft rolls – and ham and two boiled eggs.’

And then there was a moment of silence, a drip or two of embarrassment before she said: ‘And anything for you, Mr Valdez?’

She said his name. She said his name and that meant she knew his name, she knew who he was and she said his name because she wanted him to know that she knew.

‘Coffee,’ he said and looked up. ‘Coffee.’

The girl repeated the order, made a tick on the notepad and smiled and walked away.

‘Just tell me again. Just try to explain. Tell me what it’s like,’ said the priest.

De Silva gave his hand a friendly pat and said: ‘Best not to think about it. They ask too much of you, those clerical bastards with their stupid rules. Better just to cut your balls off than make you wear them and never use them. Best not to think of it.’

Around the table they looked at one another like men discovered in something shameful and they looked again and studied the backs of their hands, except for Dr Cochrane, who was too old or too weak or too stupid to feel the electricity of her passing.

‘Pretty girl,’ he said. ‘The waitress. Did you notice her? Quite pretty.’

They looked at him as if he were an idiot.

‘Caterina. That’s her name. One of my best students. I’m surprised to see her here but I suppose she’s hard up, needs a little money, like the rest of us.’

All of them, except Dr Cochrane himself and, perhaps, the priest, heard those words, ‘hard up, needs a little money’, and, for a moment, thought exactly the same thing. Valdez was the first to drive the notion from his head. Anything that could be bought with coin could never truly be his, and he had already decided that he must possess this Caterina completely.

‘She seems to know you, Valdez,’ said the doctor.

‘Yes. I can’t think how.’ From the far end of the table the others looked at him enviously.

‘Like me, she is an aficionada, I’m afraid. Whenever she comes into class there’s always one of your novels piled on the top of her textbooks. This week it’s The Fisherman Chavez, I think.’

Mr Valdez held his empty notebook a little more tightly, until he felt the yellow paper start to squeak under his fingers. ‘Really?’ That was all he managed to say before Father Gonzalez made a face like a simpleton again.

‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘she’s coming back.’

The others stiffened, afraid to follow his gaze. They sat, facing inwards across the table at Dr Cochrane, who smiled a welcome to her. Even when she put the cups down on the table – ‘Coffee, coffee, coffee and your rolls, Dr Cochrane. Ham. The eggs. Coffee for you, Mr Valdez’ – even then they sat rigid in their places, terrified to move when she passed so close in case (Oh, please God, let it happen – no, don’t) some part of her might brush some part of them.

‘Let me know if there’s anything else,’ she said, and left.

They all turned to watch her go and De Silva made a hungry growl. ‘Let me know if there’s anything else? Dear God, I can think of a few things. You know, I’ve seen shows where they charge money to watch and I’m telling you it’s nothing – nothing! – compared with her just walking across the room.’ He seemed to realize he had said too much and shrugged apologetically. ‘Of course, that was when I was in the Navy,’ he said.

‘Of course, that was when we had a navy,’ said Costa.

‘We’ve still got a navy.’

‘So all we need now is a coast.’

‘We’ll get it back. Those bastards can’t hang on to it for ever. Next time they start something, we’ll get it back. Señor Colonel the President isn’t going to take any crap from that bunch of sheep-shaggers. I’m telling you. Five years – at the most – and we’ll get the coast back and then you’ll be glad we kept the Navy.’

Costa said nothing.

‘You will! I’m telling you.’

Costa was trying not to laugh.

De Silva glanced down at the chessboard, coiled his finger against his thumb and flicked his king over. ‘Aww, shut up and drink your coffee,’ he said.

‘Our friend is right,’ said Dr Cochrane, shovelling eggs eagerly. ‘The survival of our Navy is essential to the survival of our national pride. Ours is a nation with seawater in its veins. The waves of our stolen coast truly lap at the edges of our most distant jungle clearings and wash even the heights of our snowy mountains.’

‘Are you getting this down?’ De Silva asked from the corner but, before anybody could reply, Dr Cochrane had begun again, talking proudly of ‘my glorious ancestor, the Admiral’, and the national destiny.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t stay,’ said Valdez. ‘Enjoy your coffee, gentlemen. My treat,’ and, nodding to Father Gonzalez because his mother had engrained in him a proper respect for the clergy, he stood up and turned towards the door.

The coffee he hurried to finish had scalded his mouth and he was painfully aware that a single, dark brown spot stained his shirt front just above the pocket, but he had noticed Caterina sitting at the cash desk and decided.

She did not look up as he approached and that suited him. Mr Valdez was uncertain how he would have responded if she had turned those eyes upon him.

Even when he put his yellow notebook down on the counter and reached for his wallet, she still ignored him, flicking her pencil over some quick arithmetic on her order pad. That suited him too. He had some time to breathe her in, taste the glory of her.

Mr Valdez felt five seconds pass, or maybe just two, and in that time he suffered a revelation. He saw – and he knew for certain he was the first man who had ever seen this – a halo of pearl that glowed around the girl’s body. It was a thing of quite extraordinary loveliness, a thing he had seen only once before in his life, and then only in a picture. It mimicked exactly the almost invisible, shimmering aura that Velazquez had painted around the invitational arse of his Venus as she flaunted herself on a couch of silken drapes. It meant ‘sex’, the holiness of it, the sacrament of pleasure and lust and heat. Mr Valdez had imagined it was a beautiful conceit but, no, it had been real all along, perhaps visible only to a fellow artist but undeniable, nonetheless. And, though it glowed only from the delicious, welcoming, bounce-some backside of the goddess, it whipped and curled around every portion of Caterina. He saw it and, in that – one and two, breathe in and out – moment, Mr Valdez knew that he must bathe himself in that glow, that it would make him a man again, complete him and, finally, break the dam that was holding back his words.

Caterina finished her sums and put down her pad.

‘I’d like to pay now,’ said Valdez.

She pulled a piece of thick, pulpy paper from a clip at the side of the cash drawer, ran her finger down it and said: ‘I think that’s right,’ as she handed it to him.

Valdez was almost afraid to touch it, as if, having touched her, it might spark fire from his skin. He didn’t bother to read it but simply folded it up inside a large note.

‘Keep the change,’ he said, ‘Caterina.’

She was shocked. ‘It’s too much. Half of that would be too much.’

‘No, no. Please permit it. Dr Cochrane told us you are one of his best students and working to pay your bills. That is to be encouraged.’

‘You’re kind. Thank you.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. His mind was tumbling over itself. Had he done enough to make an impression? Would a moment longer be too much? But she already knew of him. She was an aficionada, Cochrane said. She knew his name. So, was she disappointed to meet him face to face? Had he made himself ridiculous? How long could he keep looking at that beautiful face without kissing it or worse yet, letting his eyes wander to there, or there or, NO!

‘Well, I must be going,’ he said.

She only smiled a little and nodded weakly and said: ‘Yes,’ and ‘Thank you,’ again.

Mr Valdez picked up his notebook, with the front cover firmly closed. ‘The university. Work. You know. Perhaps I’ll see you there.’

She nodded and Valdez stepped out the door and into the little calle. He had gone only a few steps into the street and his eyes were still adjusting to the sunshine when he heard the door of the Phoenix bang and the girl appeared at his side.

She was holding out a piece of paper, like a relay runner, ready to pass it on, fast, with no touching. ‘Mr Valdez, your receipt! You left your receipt!’ She pressed it into his hand and, before he could say anything, she fled back to the café.

Valdez looked down at the paper in his hand. It was blank except for two words in pencil: ‘I write.’

MR L.H. VALDEZ, the celebrated author, the pole star around which the rest of the faculty rotated, who had already willed his desk to the national museum, whose portrait – wearing a snowwhite Panama hat of distinctive style – appeared in the windows of no fewer than fourteen bookshops in the capital, was due to lecture on Shakespeare. The Sonnets. That morning he would explain, not poetry, of which he knew almost nothing, but obsessive love, of which he knew even less outside the pages of his novels. That mattered little. Like all teachers, he need be only one lesson ahead of his pupils and he was smug behind a carapace of reputation.

The lecture bored him. He had delivered it so many times before that he knew it by heart, spotted the signposts that indicated this wise observation, that witty insight or pointed the way to a long avenue of brilliant wordsmithing and on to his heart-breakingly beautiful conclusion.

He recited without incident and stood before the students like a confident tennis pro, facing the children of the beginners’ class, forcing them to squint into the sun and effortlessly batting away expected, predictable questions. And nothing that he said, nothing that he quoted, nothing that he read aloud was half so important as those two words, scrawled down with a blunt, grey pencil on a scrap of damp paper.

I write.

He could feel that tiny sentence burning its way through the leather of his wallet, through his shirt, through his flesh until it burrowed between his bones and into his heart.

I write.

‘I write,’ he thought. ‘I write too.’ But that was not quite true. ‘I wrote.’ That would be more accurate. ‘I wrote this and this and this and I will write. I will write again.’

While he stood, regurgitating the old lie that Shakespeare was by no means unnatural in his appetites, that the experience of intense male friendship can be found everywhere in literature from the Iliad to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Mr L.H. Valdez decided to turn his critical eye fully on Caterina’s note.

‘I write.’

Not the shortest sentence it was possible to create but pretty near. Impersonal, in spite of the aggressive personal pronoun, something René Magritte might have inscribed on the side of a pencil: ‘I write’ or ‘This is not a writer’, either would do. A bald statement of fact, then?

No, not that. The author of this piece did not intend to convey simply that she makes marks on a page. One could not infer ‘shopping lists’ as the next phrase in the sentence. No, a confession of that magnitude could be followed only by a word of great moment: ‘stories’ or ‘poetry’.

And yet – he wanted to stop wasting his words on Shakespeare and direct the class instead to study the epic that was glowing inside his wallet – she had chosen not to say more.

In the lecture inside his head, the lecture not given, Mr Valdez pointed out that the sensitive critic can reveal as much from what is not said as from what is. In this case the author had said: ‘I write.’ She had not said: ‘too.’

This was a message addressed to the foremost author of his generation. How could she have written ‘too’? That would be to put herself on a level with him. Impossible. Unthinkable. But it was still a message semaphored from the foothills to the mountaintops, a flag waved, a rocket sent up to say: ‘See me. Notice me, please.’

She was so far below as to be almost out of sight and she had no idea that, up on the summit, he had already begun to slide down the far side, clutching at rocks as he fell, tearing his hands open, kicking up pebbles, scrabbling.

I write. She meant it as a plea for attention. For a man clinging on over an empty chasm, it sounded like a promise of rescue.

WHEN HE LEFT the lecture hall at a little after noon, Mr Valdez walked across the courtyard that separates the Faculty of Arts from Modern Languages. The long, narrow lawns of coarse grass, imitations of something someone had once seen in a mezzotint of a Cambridge college, were always kept green and damp. Water trickled off between their brick edges and soaked into the yellow gravel paths where laburnum trees – another affectation – cast a feathery shade on the park benches that lined the way. Mr Valdez hated those benches. Their brass plaques offended him. He thought them tasteless. He thought them pointless. He thought them silly and, above all, tedious.

‘In Memory of Professor So-and-So’ or ‘An Affectionate Tribute to Dr Such-and-Such’. Ghastly. Better no monument at all than a park bench left outside for pigeons to shit on while cigarette butts piled up around the legs. Mr Valdez shuddered at the thought.

He looked at those benches as the natives of the interior looked at cameras, as if they somehow held the power to capture a man’s soul, as if the nobodies they commemorated were denied even the oblivion of erasure and, instead, faced their eternity disturbed by an intermittent chorus of questioning ‘Who?’s.

Mr Valdez sprang up the three stone steps at the end of the path, little dusty bits of gravel crunching under the thin soles of his expensive shoes, and p. . .