The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini (25 page)

“Does your wife know about it?” asked Dalakis.

“She knows there's someone I see, that's all. If she heard the details, she wouldn't believe it. You see, in my own house I'm a bit of a tyrant. The food has to be just right, my clothes must be perfectly cleaned. And my wife, she too has sexual desire and sometimes I just laugh at her. I'll see her wanting me to touch her and I'll just laugh.”

“You're a commendable fellow,” I said.

“I don't make any apologies for my life,” said Malgiolio. He was still standing by the mantel, a short, round-faced, pudgy man with elaborately combed wisps of black hair, cigar in one hand, brandy in the other. “I am condemned to live within the limits of my nature. I'm mean and selfish and small-minded, but all on a petty scale. It's like what Pacheco was saying. I grew up thinking pretty well of myself, thinking I was a decent person. Well, there came a day when I had to admit that I wasn't very good after all. What could I do? Die? I had to tolerate myself. I had to go on living. It's like when I had all that money. I knew I should invest it. I could have eked out enough to support me and my family for the rest of my life. But no, I gobbled it down, I deprived myself of absolutely nothing. It was the best year of my life. And now, after all this time of not having a job, of living off my family, of having to put up with constant humiliation, I know if I had it all again I'd do exactly the same thing, just splurge with it, throw it away on trifles.”

Malgiolio kissed his fingertips, made a little blowing noise, then looked at us with a foolish grin. He had always struck me as a proud man, but now I saw that what seemed to be pride really existed to conceal his ridiculous obsessions. One asks how it begins, the slightly peculiar taste growing more peculiar with each passing year. After telling us such dreadful stories, I wondered how he expected us to meet him again in six months' time. Both Dalakis and I felt embarrassed. There was coffee on a table by the door, strong espresso, plus a little silver pitcher of hot milk. Dalakis went and poured himself a cup, then poured one for me as well.

As Dalakis handed me the cup of coffee, he asked, “Tell me, did you ever think of your wife like that? I mean, obsessively?”

Although I realized he was trying to change the subject, I had no wish to bare myself as they had done, and Pacheco too for that matter. “I guess I got over it,” I said.

“But you never wanted to remarry?”

“I suppose I still might. After all, forty-nine is not so old. But I'm comfortable by myself, comfortable with my habits. And there are women I see.” I was speaking somewhat dishonestly and tried to correct it. “The trouble with Pacheco's obsession or even yours, Malgiolio, is that there's nothing comfortable about it. Obsessions are disruptive. After I lost my wife, I thought my life was over. It took a long time to get past my own grief and once I was recovered, I had no wish to lose myself over someone else. I suppose an older man may be just as obsessively passionate as a younger one, but an older man usually knows the pitfalls and so will try to avoid the occasion. I was passionate about my wife. That is a rich feeling, but it's not always a pleasant one.”

I reminded myself of an inferior Polonius, but even so Dalakis sympathetically nodded his head.

Malgiolio had sat down on the other end of the couch, still holding his brandy and cigar. “Was your wife buried here in the city?” he asked. “I don't remember the service.”

“No, she had no other family, just some cousins and an aunt. I buried her in Switzerland, in that little ski resort town. There was a cemetery on a hill behind the church. Actually, they had to put her coffin in a sort of crypt until the ground thawed. I flew there again in the spring when they buried her. Have you ever seen a ski resort when the grass is green and there are flowers everywhere? All that mechanical apparatus, the lifts and so on, look rather ghostly. It was a pretty cemetery, but I wondered how many had died as she did.”

“And how did she die?” asked Pacheco. Without my noticing, he had entered the library and was standing by the door.

Again, it is difficult to remember exactly what I felt when he asked that question. I have to put myself once more in that library, see the three of them looking at me: one kind, one mocking, one clinically curious. What did I feel? Fear and foreboding, I expect.

“She fell,” I said. “She hadn't had much experience skiing. There were trees. She was going too fast. We were racing actually. She fell and hit her head against a tree trunk. It knocked her completely unconscious. She never woke up. I remember sitting in her hospital room for one day, two days. Then the doctors turned off the switches.”

“And where did you bury her?” asked Pacheco.

“I was just telling Luis, I buried her in that ski town, a little cemetery behind the church.”

“Did Kress go to the funeral?” asked Pacheco. “You said he had gone skiing with you.”

“Yes, I suppose he must have. I'd forgotten. Both he and his wife came to the funeral.”

Pacheco walked to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a thimbleful of Benedictine. From the hall I heard the soldiers, some talking, one making a rather dreadful whimpering noise. My friends continued to look at me.

Pacheco toasted me with his glass, then drank. “Why are you lying, Batterby?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your wife is not dead. As you well know, she's been living in Europe for many years. I saw her within the past six months, as a matter of fact. She was in Barcelona. We had dinner together. She is still beautiful, Batterby. She asked about you. She wondered if you ever thought about your son. He's in the university now. She wanted to know how you've been. I said you seemed fine but that your friends sometimes worried about you.”

S
o you see, I had lied. For many years I had put it about that my wife was dead, that I was a childless widower. How embarrassing to think I hadn't been believed. Yet in a way I wasn't lying. Of course I've known all along that my wife wasn't killed in a skiing accident, but in her betrayal and desertion it was as if she had died. And so I had come to tell the world she was dead. In fact, I had been talking about her death for so long that she actually seemed not among the living. Consequently, when Pacheco confronted me with my fabrication, my immediate response was to think him the liar. Then there was a moment of true surprise which, even now, looking back, I'm certain I'm not inventing. Seconds afterward I caught hold of myself and realized the sort of deception I had been living and I felt ashamed. Yet I also hated Pacheco for exposing me. Both Malgiolio and Dalakis looked at me with surprise and embarrassment, while Malgiolio even wore a little smile as if to indicate I was no better than he was, even though I hadn't judged him or thought him worse than anyone else. But you see why in this narrative I have been writing as if Cora were dead, because that is what she was until the moment of Pacheco's accusation.

I responded to Pacheco's words with a weak joke: “Well, it seemed she was dead; even when we slept together she seemed dead.”

But that particular moment, the moment when my deception was laid bare, seems carved into the very flesh of my brain— Dalakis in the armchair to my left shifting uncomfortably so the leather squeaked; Malgiolio at the other end of the couch on my right with his aggressive smile, his lips slightly parted to show his little teeth; Pacheco with his bruised cheek lighting a cigarette in front of me by the mantel near the photograph of the young Antonia Puccini; and all those thousands of books like a vast symphony of mockery for me, the unwriter. The closest of the Piranesi prints above the mantel showed one of his prison scenes. Surely there was never a prison like that one, with its catwalks and many different levels and great open spaces. The prison I personally felt myself in was much smaller, more like the prison cell of that man in Dalakis's story who spent all those years learning the false Serbo-Croatian—walls covered with meaningless words, men conversing in impossible tongues.

Surrounded by my oldest friends, what I wanted most was to get away from their questions and curious looks. I felt as if I had glanced into a mirror and instead of seeing the face I'd known all my life, I saw another: a meaner, more culpable face. I wanted to be by myself and for the first time the fact of the curfew made me feel trapped and claustrophobic. Wasn't I too a victim of the city's violence? For my lie would not have been exposed had it not been for this evening, these stories, these men.

“But she's not dead,” Pacheco persisted, flicking his match into the fireplace.

“She's dead to me,” I answered, “and she's been dead for twenty years.” I wanted to add that he'd killed her, but I kept silent.

“You've been lying all this time,” said Pacheco. “You had a wife who loved you and you damaged her life and your own as well.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that he was no one to accuse me of damaging someone's life, but instead I excused myself, saying I had to visit the bathroom. Then I hurried into the hall. I did have to visit the bathroom, but beyond that specific need nothing could have kept me with my friends at that moment. Leaving the room, I could feel their eyes like fishhooks gouging my back.

The hall seemed full of soldiers, although perhaps there were only fifteen of them. Four were lying on stretchers, while the others were lounging on the marble benches or gawking at the tapestry. One man was standing in the fountain amusing his friends with some obscene joke that involved the statue of the nude girl. Several medics were tending the wounded. They all looked at me suspiciously, as if I were some criminal or anarchist, and one soldier even moved his rifle lazily in my direction. I hurried across the hall and climbed the stairs. There were candles on almost every step and I made my way around them.

I felt humiliated and craved punishment, something to obliterate my thoughts, which were so confused that I moved forward half unconsciously, like an escaped cart rolling down a hill. Even though my wife wasn't truly dead, I had successfully buried her within my own mind and here she was resurrected again. I entered the bathroom. One candle stood on a shelf above the commode and after I had finished my business I blew it out, leaving me in darkness. Then I opened the door to the balcony overlooking the street and crouched down behind the railing.

The street was full of soldiers shouting and calling to each other. Their rowdiness and the fact that quite a few appeared to be drunk greatly surprised me. Beneath me to my left a soldier was leaning against the body of the dead horse drinking from a bottle which he had tilted up to catch the last few drops. Another soldier began to shoot his automatic weapon up at the leaves, while still another was waving a pistol. In the distance I could see the red glare of fires but the noise in the street kept me from hearing anything from any other part of the city.

Up the street to my right, the soldiers had broken into a house. A second story window had been smashed and clothes and furniture were now being thrown through the opening and heaped into a pile on the cobblestones. Other soldiers were crowding around the doorway with bottles of wine. One raised a bottle and smashed the neck against a railing, then lifted the jagged bottle to his mouth and drank—more accurately, he poured the wine in the direction of his mouth. All those men running in and out of the house, appearing at the windows and even on the roof, looked like ants busying themselves with the carcass of an animal. A soldier began sloshing something from a can onto the mound of clothes and broken furniture. Then there was a great whoosh as the whole pile ignited in flames. In the sudden light I saw Captain Quatrone leaning against one of the houses across the street with his arms folded across his chest.

I knelt behind the balustrade so I couldn't be seen, but even so I had a great desire to attract their attention. I wished they would break into this house and shoot us all. For years I had been living in a kind of eternal present, shutting off all the past which disagreed with me, letting through only the most censored memories. As for the future, nothing was thought out. It simply happened, like the turning of a page. In filling my life with books, I was repeating the existence I'd led as a child when I filled my life with electric trains—surrounding myself with other people's stories in order to obliterate my own.

Again, I began to remember that party in the country where I had seen Pacheco making love to Cora, my wife. Of course it was after my wedding. Of course I had lied to Schwab and the others. Perhaps they'd even known it. Fleeing the sight of Pacheco and Cora I had joined the croquet players playing a midnight game illuminated by huge flambeaux. At one point I saw Cora looking for me and I hid. Then I began to drink more and more until finally I passed out in one of the many sitting rooms on the first floor of the house. When I awoke it was just dawn. I felt sick, and, as I recalled what I had seen, I experienced a renewed sense of horror. You see, I'd thought we were so happy. Again I remembered her eyes when he had been making love to her, how dead and distant they had seemed. But perhaps I had invented it; perhaps I was the victim of some nightmare hallucination. Hung over and still half drunk, I began to search the house. People were sleeping everywhere—singly and in twos and threes, on couches, chairs, sprawled on fur rugs, upstairs in the bedrooms. I moved with great stealth, as if intent on catching my wife in the commission of a crime, which indeed was the case.

After almost an hour I found them in a maid's room on the fourth floor. Next to the room was a large walk-in closet with a door opening onto the hall. I entered it and stood in the warm darkness, which smelled of wool and mothballs. The door to the maid's room was partly open. Putting my eye to the crack, I watched Cora and Pacheco. Why was I such a coward that I couldn't rush into the bedroom and kill them both? I kept thinking of all those comedies I'd either seen or read where cuckolded husbands peeked from behind doors at their erring wives. The thought of being a comic figure was terrible to me.

Pacheco had a beard at that time and he stood in front of the mirror in his shirtsleeves combing the beard with a small ivory comb. My wife sat on the edge of the bed. She was naked and sat almost primly with her hands in her lap. They were talking about me. It seems ridiculous. There she was, naked and pawed over after a night of giving herself to another man, and she was saying that she didn't want to see him anymore because she wanted to be faithful to her husband. I nearly laughed.

Pacheco didn't turn but continued to comb his beard. He asked her if they couldn't keep meeting in some secret manner during the two or three months he had to be in the capital. He offered to rent a room. Perhaps they could meet once a week or every other week. Again she refused, saying that she wanted to make her life with me. She had a high voice, clear and rather childlike. It had been one of the things which had attracted me to her.

Pacheco spoke calmly but a trifle mockingly. He expressed some surprise at her wish not to see him anymore. But what about sex? he asked. Did she really plan to content herself with my lovemaking? Wasn't that a trifle like cold mutton? She smiled, then looked away. Maybe I would improve, she said. After all, he had taught her many things which perhaps she could teach me. But wouldn't I be suspicious? Pacheco inquired. No, she said, I had no suspicion. I would do whatever she asked. Pacheco laughed and said I must be the perfect husband.

That was enough. I crept out of the closet, then I went downstairs, located my car, and drove back to the city. My rage increased with every hour and I greatly regretted not confronting the two of them. When my wife returned that evening she too was angry. How dare I leave her to be driven home by friends, didn't I realize she felt humiliated? Without saying a word, I struck her in the face. She fell and I began to kick her, while she tried to curl herself up. Every time she attempted to get to her feet, I struck her again until I was exhausted. She didn't cry but lay curled in a sort of knot. “So I'm a terrible lover,” I told her, “so you think I might improve.” She didn't cry; I was the one who cried. Then I ordered her from the house. She had friends she could stay with or she could go back to Pacheco. I didn't care. She left that night. Several times after that she tried to see me. She said she wanted to talk. But of course I refused. A month or so later she took her things and I stripped the house of all sign of her. After a while I heard she had gone to Europe, but to me she was dead. Indeed, I was already telling people she was dead.

Is what I am saying true? Yes, those bare facts are accurate, although presumably there are parts I forget. What is not mentioned is the pain I felt, the constant grief. You see, I had loved her. Pacheco had returned to the south and I believe that if I had seen him I would have killed him. How odd to think it must have been the previous spring that he had met Antonia Puccini. Then, inexorably, the years passed and my anger seemed to diminish. Several times I received letters from my wife but I refused to read them. I met other women. I made another life for myself. Pacheco mentioned a son. Naturally years ago I'd heard she had borne a child but I never believed it was mine.

I heard a noise behind me and turned and saw Dalakis making his clumsy way toward me through the bathroom. Raising a finger to my lips, I warned him to be quiet. He bumped into a chair, then caught it before it fell. How oafish he was. I motioned to him to crouch down and he lowered himself to his knees, making little groaning noises all the while.

“I wanted to see how you were,” he said, crawling to the balcony.

My impulse was to push him away, even strike him, but Dalakis was probably the most harmless person of my acquaintance and my anger only made me feel worse.

“Leave me alone, Carl,” I said, “I'll come downstairs in a moment.”

“They've broken into a house,” said Dalakis, no longer paying attention to me but looking down at the soldiers, who were still shouting and throwing things into the fire. “How could they do that? Look, they're drunk.”

“We're probably safe enough,” I said. “Colonel Carrera will look out for us.”

“Yes, but what about those people over there?” Dalakis raised himself so his head just poked above the balustrade.

“Maybe no one was home,” I suggested. Dalakis spoke loudly but I didn't think his voice could be heard over the shouting in the street.

“But why are they doing it? Don't they realize that they are government soldiers? How can they behave so badly?”

There was nothing to say to that. Most soldiers come from the poorer classes and the ones stationed in the city were usually country boys who viewed the general citizenry with suspicion. Pieces of furniture were still being thrown from the windows of the house down the street and the fire continued to burn merrily. I glanced at Dalakis. The light from the fire shone on his face. He looked shocked, indignant, and close to tears.

“Make sure you stay down,” I told him. “Don't let them see you.

Dalakis turned, heaved himself around, and sat down with his back to the balustrade. I knew he had decided his main duty was to talk to me, that the city could wait, and I dreaded his words.

He spoke in a rush. “I came to tell you I'd always known your wife wasn't dead, but that I didn't care. I understand completely why you did what you did.”

“What do you mean?” I wanted neither Dalakis's sympathy nor his understanding.

“Your wife had written to my wife. I knew she had gone to Europe and that both our wives had had affairs with Pacheco. I knew that we suffered from the same condition.”