The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini (10 page)

Pacheco paused to sip his wine.

“And what did that mean?” asked Dalakis.

“Perhaps nothing, but it roused my curiosity.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I touched her foot again, very lightly with the back of my hand, then I let my hand brush against her ankle. My chair was such that I could sit in that position quite easily. And her chair was such that her foot and my hand were concealed by the folds of her skirt. In any case, I hardly made any further movement, just shifted my hand slightly so I could touch her ankle. She was wearing stockings, of course.”

“Did she move?” asked Malgiolio.

“Not a whisker.”

“Ha,” said Malgiolio with a little explosion of breath, then he lit another of his colored cigarettes.

“I sat like that for some minutes, not turning or giving any sign that I knew she was there. The music played. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the young man whom I had seen with her before. He was her fiancé—dark-haired and handsome and quite athletic. As I watched him, still without shifting my head, I slowly turned my hand and grasped the girl's calf just above her ankle. It was then that I became aware of her breathing. Absurd, don't you think? A young surgeon taking advantage of a girl at an outdoor concert?

“But there was an intensity both within me and, or so I guessed from her breathing, within her as well. I massaged her calf, took my hand away, then massaged it again. She didn't move, didn't move forward, didn't move back. From the gardens, the wind blew the smell of lilac. I slipped my hand upward to the underside of her knee and thigh. Did her breathing grow louder? Perhaps not, but I could sense her behind me, almost feel her quivering. As I describe it, I realize that it seems that just a few minutes went by, but actually it was fifteen or twenty. But it was like nothing, so intent was I on the touching of her leg in its silk stocking. I was scarcely even aware of the music, just of a swirl of notes, and the rich smell of the blossoms which the wind blew to my face. As I touched the underside of her thigh, I massaged the muscle, squeezing and releasing it, while slowly I continued to thrust my hand further along her leg. She didn't move although I could feel the constant shiver of her muscles. The farther I reached, the more contorted became my arm behind me. I wasn't worried about anyone seeing. There was no one on the other side, and in that darkness I doubt anything would have been visible. At last I stretched my arm as far as I could and with the tips of my fingers I touched the silk of her underwear between her legs, but just barely, just a slight flickering of my fingers.”

He fell silent. I glanced at Dalakis, who was making deep lines on the tablecloth with his thumbnail.

“And she didn't move?” insisted Malgiolio.

“Neither forward nor back. My arm by this time was quite uncomfortable. I tried to move it farther without actually tipping in my chair, but another inch and I would have landed in her lap. I had also begun to worry that someone might notice her breathing, which seemed to mix with the strings and clarinet as if it were part of the music itself. And I was struck that she refused to move forward to let me increase her pleasure, that I could only thrum my fingers on the silk above her vagina.”

Dalakis sat back in his chair so hard that it creaked dangerously. “Didn't it strike you that she was a child?”

“She had stopped being a child many years before. I could feel her, feel the heat and her wetness.”

“What happened next?” asked Malgiolio. There was something repulsive about his eagerness. One imagined his erection.

“Nothing. The music came to an end. I moved my hand and more lanterns were lit. The girl, her aunt, and the young man left during the interval.”

“Did she make any sign to you?” I asked.

“None. Perhaps she was a little red in the face. Clearly, she was embarrassed and never once turned in my direction. I, of course, stared at her constantly. How could I not? I had become hungry.”

As Pacheco said these words, the room went dark. It was as if I had been struck blind. Our chairs scraped on the marble floor and a fork or some utensil fell, making a clattering which echoed through the room.

“How irritating,” said Malgiolio, as the spark of his cigarette moved impatiently through the air. “They've blown a transformer somewhere.”

This was how the radical left often made itself felt, blowing up a generator or overhead power line. Sometimes the lights would be out a few minutes, sometimes for most of the night.

I heard a clinking noise as Pacheco's glass touched his plate. “We'll have light in a minute,” he said.

It could hardly have been more than that when the door opened and brilliant light poured in from the hall and moved toward us. It was Señora Puccini. She was carrying two large candelabra held out in front of her, each with at least a dozen candles. Her middle-aged face seemed brilliant and beautiful, like a star within its miniature solar system. I couldn't look at her without thinking of Pacheco's story and it seemed I could almost hear the clarinet from the Brahms quintet swishing through the darkened room like a length of rope being swirled around and around above our heads.

T
he meat course was a roast saddle of veal, a great brown log of a thing, half of which rose off its silver platter on the snapped remnants of ten flimsy ribs like a severely mutated praying mantis. Malgiolio ate steadily, his small hands and teeth aspiring to the mechanical, a robot whose sole purpose was the ingestion of organic matter. Yet at the end of thirty minutes, he'd hardly bruised that spaniel-sized slab of meat. Dalakis took a slightly greater than normal amount for the average person, the excess being destined not for his belly but for his brown suit, which was soon flecked with escaped fragments of food. Pacheco ate quickly and without apparent interest. I took two or three bites just to feel myself part of the occasion. With the veal came a vegetable mixture consisting of peas, chestnuts, and something I couldn't recognize. The candlelight reflected off the silver platter making the veal sparkle like the promise of resurrection.

But while the food remained marvelous, our attention had shifted elsewhere. Certainly I didn't announce to myself that I was now more interested in this relationship between Pacheco and his housekeeper, but I was aware that some additional thing was competing for my attention and at first I wasn't sure what it was. Then I realized. Partly it was the discrepancy. On one hand was the description of Antonia Puccini as she had been twenty years before and on the other was the Señora Puccini who kept bringing us mountains of food without seeming aware that we were in the room. I felt that if I collapsed at her feet, she would step over me without once looking down.

Beyond that, the evening was too peculiar to let me concentrate on my food to the exclusion of all else, although that would have been unlikely in any case. I admired the food as a piece of theater more than as something to eat. Malgiolio, I think, would have kept eating in an earthquake. Perhaps Dalakis as well. But I am easily distracted. The lights, for instance, never came back on and soon we were surrounded by half a dozen great candelabra which threw light and shadow over our plates, the table, and our faces as if paralleling the emotions going on underneath. Then there was the trouble in the city. Occasionally we heard sirens, even gunfire, although the stone walls of the dining room almost completely excluded the outside world. Also, the fact we were so few was a constant reminder of the disequilibrium of our times, that we were only one quarter of our usual number with no sense of the future, how we would get home, or what we would find when we got there.

Additionally, we were curious. Pacheco said how he had developed a hunger for this girl and, as he talked about that evening at the concert, we developed a hunger as well. All of us responded differently. Dalakis, for instance, was quite disapproving. Yet he knew well enough what Pacheco was like. His own wife, the woman from whom he had been separated for seventeen years, had once been Pacheco's lover and presumably she had told him stories. At least Pacheco never tried to appear better than he was. If he wanted something, he pursued it. Dalakis's wife had been only sixteen when she had taken up with Pacheco, who was perhaps eighteen at the time. Her parents tried to stop them from meeting but after a month or so Pacheco and the girl just ran away. Three months later she returned home without Pacheco or any explanation. Of course, the parents wanted no part of her. She went to live with an aunt or older cousin, I forget which, and about two years after that she married Dalakis. It was doomed from the start, one might say.

Malgiolio, on the other hand, was eager for the story, and throughout the meat course he kept pressing Pacheco to say more. Pacheco would smile and change the subject but I didn't have the sense he was refusing to tell, just that he was teasing Malgiolio. Indeed, I thought he wanted to tell his story just as much as Malgiolio wanted to hear it. Malgiolio's interest was partly prurient and partly because he likes to collect bad marks against people. He is a man who has thrown away his life, who is manifestly imperfect, and whose main ambition in middle age is to seek out imperfections in others. Of course he thinks everyone reaches for the biggest piece of cake and would steal from the church poorbox if they could be sure not to be caught. For him to believe that men are not motivated by selfishness, greed, and spite would, I think, make his personal failure more difficult to bear.

I hardly know why we put up with him except that in his cynicism he's extremely hard to deceive. Oddly enough he was once a poet. True, he wasn't a good poet, but he attacked his art passionately, and in his youth, much like Rimbaud, he hoped to embrace the unknown through a total derangement of the senses. You know that letter of Rimbaud's where he says that in order to become a seer and a poet he has been degrading himself “
le
plus possible
”? That was also Malgiolio, and he had terrible experiences—raped in jail when he was seventeen, thrown out of the army for theft—and gradually whatever ability or interest he had in poetry just slipped away. His last poems, again like Rimbaud's, were completely incomprehensible; but while Rimbaud's were obscure, Malgiolio's were just gibberish, an accumulation of words without meaning. Sometimes, however, I feel he really did become a seer, but instead of using his ability as a poet it turned him against poetry and he took that job at the hotel, rising in time to become assistant manager before quitting when he won the lottery. So perhaps we put up with him as a failure and a victim, which flatters our magnanimity. Also, to argue against him is often to argue in favor of goodness, altruism, and virtue; and even if the arguer, like myself, doesn't quite believe in those things, defending them against Malgiolio makes them seem true for a while.

And then there was my own interest in Pacheco's story. Why do I find my feelings so difficult to describe? I have always wanted to be a writer, a novelist, but instead I am a journalist. As a matter of fact, I'm not a very good journalist. I tend to be shy and dislike asking people embarrassing questions. So I'm a book reviewer. But I've spent a lot of time thinking about the sort of novels I want to write and what they would be about and how I want them to affect people. In truth, I doubt that I have much imagination, and sometimes I think the effort needed to invent a plot is beyond me. Oh, I could make up a simple enough plot and fill my book with believable characters, but the trouble with being a book reviewer, as well as being a man of taste, as I tell myself, is that even though I can't write great literature, I can recognize it. Consequently, I couldn't stand to write and publish a book, then watch it be pushed aside as trivial. Better to remain silent.

But always I'm keeping an eye out for potential subjects and if a good enough story fell into my lap, then I believe I would begin to write, or at least take notes. As Pacheco spoke of his first encounter with Antonia Puccini, I found myself becoming alert, as if hearing bits of a history that I might use. And so I too was taken up and pressed Pacheco to tell more.

Furthermore, I was interested because Pacheco himself has always interested me. He is someone who makes his own rules and ignores the rules of the world around him. Well, partly we admire that and partly we wish to see him caught. For if he gets away with it and is not punished, then we become fools for pursuing our own little lives and never taking chances. Is any of this true? Am I again deceiving myself? At the moment, however, let it suffice that I thought these to be the sources of my interest.

But perhaps I am saying too much too quickly. We were eating in a large, echo-ridden room lit by candlelight; we had heard part of a peculiar story and wanted to hear more. I didn't say to myself, Aha, here is the story for my novel. But right away I found myself attentive; my curiosity was aroused. Yet even as I put down these words, I question myself. Who knows what all my reasons were or if I will discover them myself? Although I loved Pacheco, I was also one of those waiting for his punishment. No, no, not waiting. Perhaps just listening with half an ear, believing it something that would inevitably come.

As I say, Pacheco seemed to want to tell his story but he also appeared to be waiting. Beyond that, he seemed to dislike Malgiolio's pressure. Malgiolio is the sort of person who, if he says the meat has too much salt, you think it has too little. If he says the room is too hot, then you think it cold. You should see his hands, which are small and white with thick fingers, hands which appear to have grown without the benefit of sunlight, more like tubers than hands. And so I believed that a portion of Pacheco's hesitation was a result of Malgiolio's eagerness. But in retrospect, I think he was also waiting for a sign from Señora Puccini. Perhaps “sign” is too strong a word. But certainly she knew we had been discussing her and I think Pacheco wanted to see some response, some wrinkle in the wall of her indifference.

When Pacheco at last began his story, it was ostensibly in response to questions asked by Dalakis: “Why couldn't you have forgotten her? Why couldn't you have left her alone?” Señora Puccini entered the dining room as Dalakis was still speaking, which made him look embarrassed and lower his head.

Another red wine had come with the veal, I forget what kind, and as Pacheco listened to Dalakis, he tilted his half empty glass, seeing how close the wine could approach the brim without sloshing onto the white tablecloth. Then he abruptly drank off the rest of the glass and sat back in his chair. “Can't you understand, I couldn't forget because the hunger was already within me. I would think of how my fingers had brushed that moist silk and everything else would be pushed from my mind.”

And there she was as he spoke—a middle-aged woman in a black dress leaning over the table, replacing the gravy boat with another, picking a yellow blossom off the tablecloth, filling Pacheco's glass with more wine. We all looked at her but it was as if she were alone in the room.

“I slept very little that night,” Pacheco continued. “I kept thinking of the girl, seeing her face and dark hair. I indulged in the most extreme sexual fantasies. I would remember how I had actually felt her quivering, yet how she had refused to move either toward me or away.”

As Pacheco said these words, Señora Puccini put a few dishes on the cart and wheeled them from the room. The wheels squeaked and the dishes sparkled in the light of fifty candles. When she closed the door, Pacheco paused, and it was here, I think, that he decided to continue his story, to tell everything, for a whole variety of reasons, to tantalize poor Malgiolio, to upset Dalakis, and perhaps even to give me material for a fiction. He began in a rush, leaning forward with his hands on the edge of the table.

“In the morning there was no question but that I had to locate this girl and have her, over-sweep her if you will. Hunger becomes too trivial a word. I wanted to devour her. I expect this strikes you as excessive, so I will describe it as clinically as possible. Of course, I had desired other women and pursued them with a fair amount of success, but this girl, this Puccini creature, occupied my mind as few had done in the past. I say I wanted to over-sweep her; in fact, I was amazed at having been myself over-swept, at having lost myself in my own desire. It seemed as if my self, my ego if you will, had been pushed aside and all that remained was this extreme sexual tension which left me with a rapid heartbeat and a shortness of breath. Well, this was a new experience, and to some degree I was infatuated with the experience itself.

“Although I didn't know the girl, I had seen her fairly often and I knew where I could learn more about her. My plan was simple: discover her name and address, then find her and confront her. I had enough confidence in my persuasive skills to believe that if I could speak to her, then I would ultimately have my way with her.”

“But what if she didn't want you?” interrupted Dalakis, leaning toward Pacheco and bumping me in the process. His tie, I noticed, lay across the gravy in his plate.

“But she did want me,” said Pacheco, “or at least she too had felt passion and perhaps even desire. She hadn't pulled away, she hadn't actually said no.

“I had a friend, a lawyer in town, who I believed could give me further information about the girl. He was a bachelor like myself and often we had been interested in the same women. Oddly enough, such competition has never bothered me as long as I get what I want. What does it matter who else has had the woman as well? In any case, I recalled that several times when I had seen Antonia, my lawyer friend had also been in attendance. His nickname was Paco and his business consisted of looking after the estates of people who had little or no interest in handling their own affairs. In this business Paco did very well.

“The morning after the concert I was at the door of his office when he arrived at ten. I'm sure I had patients to see but I simply forgot about them. Paco was a portly fellow with a fondness for blue suits and ivory-handled walking sticks. He's dead now, unfortunately—a boating accident some time after I left the south. He had thick black hair and rosy cheeks that made him look like a schoolboy. On the little finger of his left hand, he always wore a ruby ring.

“He invited me in, obviously curious about what I wanted at such an hour. I tried to appear nonchalant and had worked up a little story about needing his advice about investments. But once in his office, I couldn't be bothered with pretense and I asked him directly about the girl, saying I had seen her at the concert the previous night.

“I expected him to laugh, since even in the midst of my infatuation it struck me as absurd. But Paco took it quite seriously. He knew of course what I wanted and he dealt with the problem as an engineer might deal with the problem of building a bridge. He had an old-fashioned office, meant to soothe his rich and elderly clients, with a lot of brass and leather, ceiling fans, dark woodwork, and shelf after shelf of leather-bound law books, which he never opened. He poured me a small sherry and told me the girl's name was Antonia Puccini, that her parents were deceased, that she lived with her aunt at such and such an address, that she taught at a local primary school and had been engaged to a young man, a second cousin, for the past year and had been inseparable from him for several years previously. He also told me that she had no money. Although the aunt appeared wealthy, she had inherited the money from her husband and it would go back to his estate after she was dead. This young man, this second cousin, also had very little money but he had a good position in the city government, worked hard, was ambitious, and everyone predicted a great future for him.