What We Become (37 page)

“Despite his fame?”

She gave a bitter laugh. Almost silent.

“Because of it, you ought to say. Have you forgotten what Spain is like? The paradise of envy, barbarity, and treachery.”

“Still, it seems absurd. Why Armando? I didn't think he was active in politics.”

“He never took sides. He has as many Republican friends on the left as he does monarchist friends on the right. Add to that the jealousy over his international fame. And finally some statements he made in
Le Figaro
about the chaos and lack of authority in the Republican government, which brought him a few more enemies. As if that weren't enough, the head of the secret service is a communist, and a composer, as mediocre as they come. Need I say more?”

“I thought Armando's fame would ensure your safety. Influential friends, success abroad . . .”

“That's what he thought. And so did I. But we were wrong.”

“Were you there?”

Mecha nodded. The military uprising took place when they were in San Sebastián, and when Armando de Troeye saw which way the wind was blowing, he convinced her to cross the border into France. They had planned to meet up in Biarritz, but before that, he said he wanted to drive to Madrid to deal with a few family matters. They arrested him shortly after he arrived. Denounced by the concierge.

“Have you heard from him?”

“Only a letter written three months ago from the Model Prison. As far as I know he is still there. I've made appeals through friends, and Picasso and the Red Cross are doing what they can. We are attempting a trade-off with another prisoner in the nationalist zone, but so far without result. And that worries me. There is a lot of talk about executions on both sides.”

“Do you have enough funds to keep up this lifestyle?”

“We saw what was coming in Spain, so Armando took precautions. And I know the right people who will make sure things remain as they should until this madness is over.”

Max stared at the flashing lighthouse, without saying a word. His mind was on people whose money protected them, and what he understood by things remaining as they should, from the point of view of Susana Ferriol's dinner guests. He thrust the thought
aside, experiencing the familiar age-old pang of dim resentment. In fact, he concluded, the idea of Armando de Troeye betrayed by his concierge and marched off to prison by left-wing militias wasn't so absurd, given the way the world was. Someone occasionally had to pay the price in the name of, or on behalf of, the right people. And it wasn't such a high price. Even so, Mecha wasn't far off the mark when she described the situation in Spain as madness. Traveling on his Venezuelan passport, Max had visited Barcelona on business a few months earlier. Five days had been enough for him to witness the sorry spectacle of the Republic plunging into chaos: Catalan separatists, communists, anarchists, Soviet agents, all protecting their own interests, killing one another miles from the battlefront. Settling scores with more ferocity than when fighting the fascists. Envy, barbarity, and treachery, Mecha had said with clearheaded precision. The diagnosis was correct.

“Fortunately, I have no children,” she was saying. “It's hard to flee with them in your arms when Troy is burning. Do you have children?”

“Not as far as I know.”

A brief silence. Rather cautious, he thought he noticed. He anticipated her next question.

“And you didn't marry, either?”

He smiled to himself. Mecha couldn't see his face.

“Not as far as I know.”

She didn't laugh at his joke, and another silence followed. The lights in Nice shimmered on the still, dark water beneath the parapet wall.

“I thought I saw you once, from a distance. Three years ago, at the Longchamps racetrack. . . . Is that possible?”

“Yes,” he lied. He had never been to Longchamps.

“I asked my husband for the binoculars, but it was too late. I lost you.”

Max was gazing into the darkness toward the now invisible hills
around Le Lazaret. Susana Ferriol's villa stood out in the distance, amid the shadows of the pine trees. He would have to approach from there, he thought, the day he made his move. From the sea, it should be fairly easy to climb over an unobtrusive part of the wall. In any event, he would need to look at everything more closely in daylight. Make an exhaustive study of the terrain. Find the way in, and more importantly the way out.

“My memories of you are strange, Max . . . the Old School Tango. Our brief adventure.”

Gradually he returned to her words. To her profile in the darkness.

“That tune has haunted me for years,” she was saying. “I hear it everywhere.”

“I imagine your husband won his wager with Ravel.”

“Do you really remember that?” She seemed surprised. “The tango versus the bolero? It was terribly amusing. And Ravel was a good sport. The night of the premiere in the Salle Pleyel in Paris, he admitted defeat and invited us to dinner at Le Grand Véfour, with Stravinsky and a few other friends.”

“Your husband composed a magnificent tango. It's perfect.”

“In fact all three of us created it. Have you ever danced to it?”

“Many times.”

“With other women, naturally.”

“Of course.”

Mecha leaned her head against the seat.

“What happened to my white glove? Do you remember? You used it as a handkerchief in your jacket. Did I ever get it back?”

“I think so. I don't recall keeping it.”

“What a shame.”

She was holding her cigarette in the hand resting on the steering wheel, and each beam from the lighthouse illuminated curls of smoke drifting upward.

“Do you miss your husband?” Max asked.

“Sometimes.” Mecha hadn't replied immediately. “But the Riviera is a good place to be. A sort of foreign legion that only allows in people with money; Spanish fugitives from one side or the other or both, Italians who dislike Mussolini, rich Germans fleeing the Nazis. . . . What most bothers me is not having been able to go to Spain for over a year. That cruel, stupid war.”

“There is nothing to stop you from traveling to the nationalist zone if you want. The border at Hendaye is still open.”

“When I say cruel and stupid, that goes for both sides.”

The tip of her cigarette glowed once more. Then she rolled down the window and flung it into the darkness.

“In any event, I was never dependent on Armando.”

“You mean only for money?”

“I see that your fine clothes can't mask your impertinence, my dear.”

He knew that she was looking at him, but he kept his eyes fixed on the distant glimmer of the lighthouse. Mecha shifted restlessly in her seat, and once again Max felt her closeness. Warm, he remembered. Slender, soft, and warm. He had been admiring her naked back at Susana Ferriol's house, the low-cut ivory-colored satin dress, her bare arms, the curve of her neck as she tilted her head, her gestures as she spoke to the other guests, her pleasant smile. Her sudden seriousness when, from the far end of the table or of the main hall, she became aware of his eyes on her and turned her gaze on him.

“I was a young girl when I first met Armando. He had experience, and imagination.”

A violent rush of remembered images jostled in Max's mind. A surfeit of sensations, he reflected. He preferred the word
sensations
to
emotions
. He did his best to collect himself. To listen to what she was saying.

“Yes,” Mecha went on. “Armando's imagination was the best thing about him. To begin with.”

She had left the window open to the night breeze. After a moment, she rolled it back up.

“He used to tell me about other women he had known,” she resumed. “For me it was like a game. A challenge. It excited me.”

“He also beat you. The bastard.”

“Don't say that. . . . You don't understand him. It was all part of the game.”

She stirred again, and Max could hear the soft rustle of her dress against the leather seat. When they were leaving Susana Ferriol's place, he had lightly touched her waist as he politely ushered her first through the main door, before going in front of her down the steps. During that tense moment, absorbed by the strangeness of the situation, he had not noticed his sensations (or perhaps they were emotions after all, he decided). Now, in the shadowy intimacy of the car, as he remembered the way her evening dress hugged her hips, he felt an all too real, overwhelmingly physical desire. An astonishing hunger for her skin, her flesh.

“We ended up progressing from word to deed,” she was telling him. “Watching and being watched.”

He returned to her words as though from a long way off, and for a while he didn't realize that she was still talking about Armando de Troeye. About their strange relationship, to which on at least two occasions Max had been a witness and an unexpected participant in Buenos Aries.

“I discovered, or he helped me discover those dark excesses. Desires I never imagined in myself. . . . And that fueled his own.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Now, you mean? Today?”

She fell silent for a moment. Apparently surprised by his interruption, or his question. Her voice sounded sad when she spoke again.

“That last night, in Buenos Aires . . .”

She broke off, abruptly. Opening the door, she stepped out of
the car and walked beneath the shadows of the pine trees until she reached the parapet wall overlooking the rocks and the sea. Max stayed where he was, apprehensive, before finally joining her.

“Promiscuity,” he heard her say. “An ugly word.”

Outside in the night air, the twinkling lights in Nice were smothered at regular intervals by the flashing lighthouse. Mecha gathered the tuxedo jacket around her, revealing the tassels of her light shawl. Max shivered in his shirtsleeves and vest. Without a word, he took a step toward her, prizing the lapels of the jacket out of her hands, and reached into the inside pocket for his cigarette case. As he rummaged around, he inadvertently brushed her breast, hanging free beneath her silk shawl and satin gown. Mecha did nothing to stop him.

“Money made it all easy. Armando could afford to buy me anything. Any situation.”

Max tapped his last cigarette against the lid of the cigarette case. He had seen enough that last night in Buenos Aires to have no trouble imagining to what situations she was referring. The momentary flare of the lighter illuminated the pearl necklace close to his hands cupped around the flame.

“Thanks to Armando, I discovered pleasures that drew out my pleasure,” she added. “Made it more intense. Dirtier, perhaps.”

Max shivered, uncomfortable. He didn't want to hear about this. And yet, he concluded with irritation, he had taken part in it himself. He had been a necessary collaborator, or accomplice: La Ferroviaria, Casa Margot, the blonde tango dancer, Armando de Troeye soused in alcohol and cocaine, slumped on the sofa at the Hotel Palace while they coupled shamelessly before his bleary eyes. Even now, the memory of it aroused his desire.

“And then you came along,” Mecha had continued, “on that dance floor that swayed to the ship's roll. With your winning smile. And your tangos. Appearing on cue. And yet . . .”

She moved, withdrawing in the distant glow of the lighthouse,
its beam circling over the rocks at Le Lazaret and the walls of the villas closest to the sea.

“What a fool you were, my dear.”

Max leaned over the parapet wall. This wasn't the conversation he had expected that evening. No recriminations or threats, he noted. He had spent part of the time preparing to confront that other matter, but not this. Anticipating the understandable rage and recriminations of a wronged, and therefore dangerous, woman, but not the strange melancholy that imbued Mecha Inzunza's words and silences. It struck him that the word
wronged
was inappropriate. At no moment had Mecha felt wronged. Not even when she had awoken that morning in the Hotel Palace in Buenos Aires to find him gone and her pearl necklace missing.

“That necklace . . .” he began to say, falling silent as he became conscious of his own awkwardness.

“Oh, for God's sake,” she said with infinite disdain. “I would throw the damned thing into the sea this instant, if there were anything left to prove.”

All at once, the taste of tobacco turned sour on Max's tongue. At first he was taken aback, mouth half-open as though in midsentence, then he was overcome by a strange and sudden tenderness. So like remorse. He would have moved closer to Mecha to stroke her hair, had he been able. Had she let him. And he knew she wouldn't.

“What do you want, Max?”

A different tone now. Harder. Her moment of vulnerability had lasted only the space of a few words, he reflected. With an unease unlike the one he habitually experienced, and which up until then he would have deemed impossible in him, he wondered how long his own would last. The warm throb he had noticed a moment ago.

“I don't know. We . . .”

“I wasn't referring to us.” Her wariness had returned. “I'm asking you once more what you are doing here, in Nice. At Suzi Ferriol's house.”

“Asia Schwarzenberg . . .”

“I know who the baroness is. You couldn't possibly be involved. She isn't your type.”

“She's an old acquaintance. There are such things as coincidences.”

“Listen, Max. Suzi is my friend. I have no idea what you are up to, but I hope it doesn't involve her.”

“I am not up to anything. With anyone. I told you I live a different kind of life now.”

“Good. Because I won't hesitate to turn you in at the slightest suspicion.”

He laughed between gritted teeth. Unsure.

“You wouldn't do that,” he ventured.

“Don't run the risk of finding out. This isn't the dance floor on the
Cap Polonio
.”