The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini (22 page)

“You're the doctor, aren't you? We've never actually met but I've seen you at the hospital. I wanted to ask if we could use your hall for some of our wounded. We have several medics to do most of the work but if you could just take a brief look at one or two of the more seriously wounded it would be a great help. We don't seem to be able to get through to the hospital.”

With hardly a glance at Carrera, Pacheco walked slowly over to the captain. “I want to know this man's name. He has insulted me, my guests, and my servants.”

“My name is Captain Quatrone,” said the captain, looking just as angry, “and I have been doing my job.”

“Is it your job to threaten and abuse defenseless people? I want you out of my house.”

Quatrone clicked his heels and made a sarcastic bow. I doubted he would apologize or that he regretted any of his actions. Colonel Carrera appeared somewhat confused as to what was happening but I felt he cared little for the captain, most likely because of his dark skin. Carrera was a wealthy man whose family has been in the military for generations. He affects a stuttering way of talking, which makes him sound both bored and surprised at the same time.

“Really, Captain,” said Colonel Carrera, “I don't see by what right you've threatened these people. Obviously those were not your instructions.”

Carrera had crossed the hall and was standing by the fountain with Pacheco and Quatrone. We three guests had remained by the marble bench. About twenty soldiers were scattered around the hall watching the little scene being played out by their officers. Some were grinning.

“Our men were being fired at from the roofs,” said Quatrone. “I decided to search the houses.”

“I think you had better leave, Quatrone,” said Carrera in a low voice.

Quatrone made a sharp salute, nodded to his lieutenant, and walked quickly to the door, his heels clicking on the polished marble.

“Wait,” said Pacheco.

Quatrone stopped but kept his back to the doctor. Pacheco walked over and stood directly behind the captain who, after a moment, slowly turned. Pacheco tilted his injured face down toward Quatrone. It had stopped bleeding but the bruise and dried blood looked dreadful.

“You see this?” asked Pacheco.

“What about it?”

“I won't forgive it.”

Captain Quatrone glanced at the colonel, then back at Pacheco. He seemed to be trying to conceal a smile. “It's part of the night,” he said at last. “There is much danger about. You must be more careful.”

“Is this a threat?” asked Pacheco.

“It is a description of the city. As for your warnings or forgiveness, why should I care? I have my own work to do.”

“Quatrone,” said the colonel, “you had better go.”

Without another word, Quatrone turned and left the house. His men straggled out after him, some still smiling, others looking indifferent or uncertain.

Once the door was shut, Pacheco turned to Carrera. “Colonel,” he said, “come and drink a glass of wine with us. This was supposed to have been a banquet for my friends but events have interfered.”

“Perhaps a small one,” said Carrera. He had a little stick like a riding crop that he kept slapping against his leg. “You still haven't answered my question about the wounded men.”

By now we had begun to move back toward the dining room. “By all means,” said Pacheco, “bring them here. But if Quatrone winds up among them you must allow me the pleasure of letting him suffer.”

Carrera appeared embarrassed. “This is a night of great change. Quatrone is very eager.”

“Just what's going on in the city?” I asked as we resumed our places at the table. Despite my apparent interest, the outside world, even with the constant intrusion of soldiers, seemed unreal to me, or at least not as real as Señora Puccini, who was even then filling the colonel's glass with wine. Schwab's dishes had been cleared away and Carrera was sitting in his place.

“It remains a confusion,” said Carrera, holding his wine glass up to one of the candles. “Did you know that General Colecchia was murdered this afternoon?”

“Not the minister of the interior!” said Dalakis.

Even though Dalakis's response struck me as exaggerated (what other General Colecchia was there?), we were all surprised. There were men in the government one thought of as secure from attack. Always they traveled with an armed escort and were rarely observed in public. Colecchia was one of these. We would only see him on television or when his armed caravan passed rapidly from one part of the city to another.

“What happened?” asked Pacheco.

“He was blown up, or rather his car was blown up and he was inside it. You see, the air force or part of the air force has mutinied in an attempt to overthrow the government. Some army regiments have joined with them, which is neither here nor there, since basically they have been defeated. But arms have also been distributed through the labor unions and they have taken the opportunity to make a little rebellion. They've been responsible for this constant shooting. I'm told there're also students involved.” He paused to sip his wine, and gave Pacheco a small but appreciative nod.

“We heard some of this from Schwab,” said Malgiolio. “But he implied it was very inconsequential.”

“Schwab was here?” asked Carrera in a voice that seemed more attentive.

“We were schoolboys together, all of us,” continued Malgiolio. “Schwab was to have come earlier but was delayed. He stopped to pay his respects.” It was clear that Malgiolio was proud of the connection.

Carrera carefully set his wine glass back on the white tablecloth. “He is a man with many enemies,” he said.

“But what's going on in this neighborhood?” asked Dalakis. “Why can't we go home?”

“There is no way you can leave this house while the curfew is in effect,” said Carrera. “All I know is that we've been dealing with snipers and street barricades, most of it pretty minor, but until we can finish with these air force regiments we can't quite wipe up the rest. Even as I say this, I'm partly guessing, because communications are poor.”

It turned out that Carrera didn't know much. His own responsibility was this sector of the city, which he and his men had tried to close off, but the result was they knew little about what was happening elsewhere. Because of the mutinous regiments little trust was put in radio communications. Indeed, the military airways seemed crowded with specious orders, claims and counterclaims so that no one knew whom to believe. Several runners had been sent out to other sectors but they hadn't returned.

Dalakis found all this shocking but I felt that his sympathy for the army had been dulled by the abuses of Captain Quatrone, although I'm sure he would have apologized for Quatrone as well if he hadn't been afraid of infuriating Pacheco. As for Malgiolio, his anxiety grew increasingly apparent. From his earlier position that any kind of trouble could only create opportunities for someone like himself, he had retreated to a dull fear for his own life. Pacheco, on the other hand, didn't seem to care one way or the other. He smoked his constant cigarettes and gave only half an ear to what Carrera was saying. It upset him that innocent people had to suffer but as for who ruled the country, he was the sort of person who believed that all the generals, army, air force, or whatever, were cut from the same cloth, while if the labor leaders turned out successful, then that just meant another sort of idiot in power.

As for me, politics is not one of my interests. My free time is spent reading, which means living in other people's worlds. Still, I have known the country was getting worse and that we are saddled with a government which doesn't care for its people, other than the rich, of course. My sense of this comes mostly from the jokes I hear at the club. For instance there was the joke about the president going on a fishing trip. He catches a nice little trout. Grabbing it around the middle, he slaps it two or three times across the face. All right, says the president, where are the others?

In recent years these jokes have increased and grown more bitter, so it seemed that an eruption was inevitable. But is it my solipsism that keeps me from being able to separate the dinner at Pacheco's from the events in the city? Most likely the events at Pacheco's would not have occurred had there not been this upheaval in the streets. The story would never have been told. But it seemed more than that—not just that our lives were the result of that violence, but that the violence was the result of our lives, that this trouble around us had erupted in part from Pacheco's story. It puts me in mind of those lines from
Julius Caesar
:

A lioness hath whelped in the streets;

And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead;

Fierce fiery warriors fight upon the clouds,

In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,

Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol.

My friends at the paper would say I am being too romantic, making connections where none exist. They would say that perhaps I am inventing this to hide from myself my own bad feelings against Pacheco, my wish to hurt him. Of course I only need to express this improbability to show how foolish such an argument would be. Yet there does appear to be a connection between the personal and public. For instance, look at Malgiolio. He takes no responsibility for his personal life and has no interest in the public. In varying degrees this might be true of all of us. If one is not absolutely destitute and downtrodden or physically handicapped, one probably gets the life one deserves. From this it follows that one gets the sort of government one deserves. I mean, if my fellow citizens are fighting in the streets, am I not to some degree responsible?

But perhaps I was being romantic again. Things happen to a person; that is, life deals you a set of cards and you play them as you are able. If I do the best I can and make no trouble for my neighbors, then surely I cannot be blamed either for my existence or my government. There are forces that buffet us through life that no mere individual can withstand. Better to stick to my books and musings about literature and leave the government to those who know best. That certainly was what I'd believed for years, but this evening I had begun to wonder, foolishly perhaps, if it wasn't that sort of thinking which had helped bring about this current state of affairs.

The others had continued to talk about what might be occurring in the city and I listened, occasionally interrupting with a question. Carrera was a very gentlemanly officer, really someone of the old school, and was one of those men who remained polite even if he intended to kill you. Indeed, he was probably more dangerous than Captain Quatrone, because he would speak with great gentleness but if you went against him, he would act without hesitation. This is a trivial example but when we played cards—poker mostly, but also bridge or whist—he was without mercy.

After we had been talking about ten minutes, I asked, “By the way, do you know anything of Colonel David Kress? He's one of our group and was supposed to be here tonight.”

Carrera folded his hands before him on the tablecloth and grew more somber. “I . . . I'm afraid I have rather unfortunate news about that,” he said in his stuttering drawl. “Colonel Kress's regiment was one of those army regiments that attempted to join up with the air force regiments in the south. I know nothing about him personally but they were blocked just outside of the city and there was some fierce fighting. I don't know the details but I heard they'd been defeated. And even if Kress is alive he'll certainly have to face a court-martial or even worse, that is unless he gets away. But where could he go?”

We met this news with general silence. Kress has always been popular—a kind man who looked out for the men under his command and who has a very strong sense of connection to our group. When one of us needed assistance in moving or to borrow something or needed help in any way, Kress was the person one could count on. The fact that he might be dead seemed to suggest more than anything that the group had been broken asunder, that whatever happened after tonight, it would be different—a different group, a different city. Certainly, much of this destruction was due to the violence around us, but I also wondered if it didn't also stem from ambivalent feelings within the group itself. Maybe this was even what Schwab had been referring to, that we needed to take more responsibility for our past selves, which meant taking more responsibility for our present ones. It was hard to understand that, hard to know what it meant. All we knew for certain was that tomorrow would be different and that what we had taken for granted had become suspect and fragile.

There seemed nothing to say. During the whole evening we had made one exclamation of surprise after another and now here was this information about Kress. Carrera looked at us sympathetically. “I'm sorry to bring bad tidings. I didn't know Kress personally but I always heard well of him.”

“I never thought he was particularly political,” said Dalakis.

Carrera finished his wine. “It's hard not to be these days.”

He got to his feet and there was general talk about whether he would have another glass of wine or even eat something, then further talk about the casualties in his regiment. Several of his men had already gone to see about bringing back a few of the wounded. Pacheco said he would need bandages, antibiotics.

But I continued to think about Kress, whom I hadn't seen since our last dinner six months ago. He had been one of the ushers at my wedding and some weeks later he had met us at that small ski resort in Switzerland where I had gone with Cora to spend our honeymoon. He had been married himself less than a year and his wife came with us. Her name was Dorothy or Delores, I can't remember. We made quite a jolly foursome.

That first evening of his visit we had had dinner in the lodge. It was one of those great pine buildings with a large central hall going up five or six stories and balconies all around. While we were at dinner we talked cheerfully about the next day's skiing. Kress, although affectionate with his wife, was constantly glancing around at other women and actually made contact with one. I have never known whether this was someone he had met previously or if they just made eye contact and came to some agreement. Moments later he excused himself to go to the rest room. In ten minutes he had still not returned and his wife thought he might be sick. Although I had noticed this other woman also leave the dining hall, I went off to the rest room to look for him. Of course he wasn't there. I glanced around through various meeting halls and function rooms, then, looking from a window, I happened to see Kress's rented car down in the parking lot, a large Citroën. And there he was with this woman, making love to her in the backseat. I remember standing by the window and looking down, seeing only a confused tangle of arms and clothing.