A Game for the Living (12 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Theodore had thought of taking Ramón a bottle of Strega, which he was very fond of, but decided not to bring any gift at all, lest Ramón take it as conciliatory, or worse, patronizing. He climbed the dreary stairway slowly, listening even on the third floor for Ramón's voice among the voices and murmurs he heard from everywhere. Arturo was with Ramón again, and had answered the telephone when he called. “Yes, of
course
you can come! Please do!” Arturo had said hopefully, but there had been a dissenting mumble from Ramón in the background.

He knocked.

Footsteps came to the door, and Arturo opened it with a smile of greeting. “Welcome, Don Teodoro, welcome!” he said warmly, his round face with its usual two-day growth of beard full of joy at the sight of him.

Ramón got up from a chair. He was neatly dressed and shaven, as if he were about to go out. “Hello, Teo.”

“Hello, Ramón. Well, you are looking better.” He walked to Ramón and extended his hand.

Ramón shook it politely.

“He is better. He is tired, you know. But they didn't hurt him this time. Not at all,” Arturo said, locking his short fingers together nervously.

Ramón looked only superficially better, Theodore saw. He was thinner, and there were hollows under his eyes. “Inocenza sends her greetings.”

Ramón said nothing.

“He has not been out. Not since yesterday,” Arturo said, putting away a broom in the kitchenette corner.

The room looked unusually clean and orderly.

“Damn, I forgot to bring your bird, Ramón! He's doing very well, but I didn't want you to think I'd stolen him from you.”

“You have my bird?” Ramón said, astonished. “I thought that janitor stole it!”

“Didn't Sauzas tell you? I had it all the time.”

Ramón smiled dazedly and passed a hand over his hair. “The janitor here has the key. I thought he gave it to those kids—” Ramón gestured with a wave of his hand at the door. “Those kids in the house here.”

“No, Ramón. The bird is fine.” Theodore knew that the unwashed, unruly children in the house bothered Ramón, mainly because he pitied them. But they were always playing annoying pranks on Ramón and perhaps everyone in the house.

“You see, Ramón?” Arturo said, smiling, trying to coax as much pleasure as possible for Ramón out of the fact that his bird was still alive.

“You're spending a lot of time here, Arturo,” Theodore remarked. “How is the shop these days?”

“Oh.” Arturo made an effacing gesture and smiled at both of them as if he did not want to talk about it.

The assistants came and went in Arturo's shop, but they were all alike, good-for-nothings who worked with a tongue-in-cheek attitude and talked about their girl friends with each other all day long. Theodore had used to drop into the shop every now and then, and Ramón would always be at work on a chair or a table leg, and Arturo was usually reading a newspaper on an old sofa that someone had brought in years ago and never called for. Arturo could do masterly work, but as a master he did not like to work. He preferred to teach Ramón, which in fact he had done, starting from scratch, when Ramón had asked him for a job three or four years ago. Ramón had had nothing but perseverance, but this Arturo appreciated, and Theodore knew that Arturo wanted to leave his shop to Ramón when he died. It had been a curious choice of work for a young man as handsome and intelligent as Ramón, Theodore had often thought. Now he recognized a martyrdom in it that he had been unaware of before.

Ramón was standing by his bed, watching him, his handsome head erect. On the low table at the head of the bed lay Ramón's old gilt-edged black Bible.

“I'm glad to hear that you weren't treated badly, Ramón,” Theodore said.

“Oh, not in the least,” Ramón said, with subtle sarcasm.

“I phoned several times to find out what was happening.”

Ramón's eyes flinched. “Well—they just don't believe me.”

Theodore wondered whether to tell Ramón that he had seen one of the psychiatrists. He decided against it. He glanced at Arturo, who was looking at him with a puzzled anxiety. From down the hall came the sound of the toilet being flushed. Theodore turned slightly, and was met by the grey wall just four feet from Ramón's single window. “What are your plans, Ramón?” Theodore asked, turning again. “Are you going back to work soon?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe I'm keeping you, Ramón. Were you going out?” Theodore asked.

“Oh no, not at all!” Arturo said. “Sit down, Don Teodoro. Sit down, if you please.”

Theodore sat down on the bed, but felt at once depressed by the surroundings and the atmosphere and wished he were standing again. “And how are your daughter and granddaughter, Don Arturo?”

“Very well, thank you. Uh—the little one is cutting her first tooth!” Arturo put a forefinger up to his own teeth. Then he straightened and pulled his waistcoat down. “Well, I must be going. No, no, you are not running me off, Don Teodoro. I'm supposed to see a customer at twelve o'clock, and it's nearly that now.”

Ramón seemed about to protest, then accepted it with resignation —though Theodore was not sure he was not going to announce his leaving with Arturo until he said good-bye at the door and closed it after the man.

“I'm glad you have such a good friend,” Theodore said, with a smile.

Ramón looked at him blankly.

“Don't you appreciate friends, Ramón?”

“You were not my friend when you thought I had killed her.”

“Well, Ramón—how could I have been? Would you have been my friend if you thought I had done it?”

“No.”

“Well, then. I apologize, Ramón. We were both distraught. How could we not have been?”

Ramón only looked at him disappointedly.

Was this the time? Theodore could not imagine progressing with Ramón if he postponed it. “I don't believe you're the murderer, Ramón. I believe you may think you are—to that extent I believe you. I talked with one of the doctors last night. Dr. Rojas.”

“Rojas,” Ramón murmured, smiling. He crushed out the little cigarette that he had just lighted.

Theodore watched him as he walked slowly around the room. Ramón's walk seemed different, the way his hands hunt at his sides, the way he held his head, somewhat higher than usual. “Well, Ramón, what do you intend to do?”

Ramón continued to walk slowly. “Why do you worry about me? Don't trouble yourself. The city'll be the same, the people the same, the buildings, the
policía,
as if nothing has happened. You'll be the same—but I didn't expect it of you, Teo, that you'd be the same affectionate, kind, naïve Teo—whom I have to protect from a peddler selling bogus silver jewelry on the street!” Ramón finished, laughing.

Theodore smiled, too.

Ramón sat down on his bed.

“I worry about you because I like you, and you are my friend, Ramón.”

Ramón looked at him and said calmly: “But I killed her—and I'm not your friend anymore.”

Theodore did not move. He felt an alarming power of convincing in Ramón, an insidious thing, like being swayed from an entrenched position by a good argument. And suppose he
had
done it? In that moment of passion and rage that was supposed to extenuate a crime? Would it be possible to forgive him through understanding him? Theodore wanted to forgive him, in the abstract. But now he simply did not know what to think about Ramón. He did not feel sure about one thing or the other. Theodore went to the head of Ramón's bed and picked up his Bible. He held it out towards Ramón, who had jumped up. “If I asked you to swear that you killed her—would you swear it, Ramón?”

Ramón looked at the Bible and said: “That's not the kind of thing you swear on a Bible!”

“But would you?”

“I swear it. I don't want to touch the Bible, but I swear it,” Ramón said.

“Then I don't believe you.”

“What do I care what you believe or not!”

“All right, don't care!” Theodore said hotly.

Ramón suddenly gripped the Bible. “There! You see? I swear it! I killed her!” He looked defiantly at Theodore, then thrust the Bible from him.

Theodore replaced the Bible on the little table. What had he learned now? That Ramón had really killed her or that Ramón was insane?

A stubborn, angry silence filled the room.

Then Ramón said: “I can't understand you, Teo. But that's a small matter, isn't it?”

“I'm not vindictive. Maybe that will help you to understand. I don't want to think you killed her, Ramón—but even if you had, I don't think I'd be vindictive. You think that's foolish, I know. You've often thought I was foolish.”

“Yes. And emotionless—comparatively speaking.”

“That doesn't matter much, what you think of me. I offer you my friendship, in spite of the fact you may have killed her. I just don't know, Ramón. I want to believe that you didn't—”

“Therefore you believe I didn't. That's the way you believe in God and Christ, or anything else, just what you want to believe and nothing more!” His voice rose in nervous anger.

“I would be the same, Ramón, if I thought you'd killed her. That's what I wanted to say.” Theodore was trembling. He felt he had committed himself to a pledge he could never take back. “You've always made fun of my philosophy of life—called it no philosophy at all. It has some elements of Christianity—”

“The few you choose to have!”

“I try to practice what I believe in.”

“So you would forgive everybody? Every murderer, every thief?”

“No. No, I would not,” Theodore said, feeling suddenly defeated and resentful because he did not deserve the defeat, and did not know how to turn it his way. “It's because I don't believe you're an evil man, Ramón. Some men are evil.”

“Who is and who is not? Whoever you decide?” Ramón asked, flinging his hands out. “You must remember my threats to Lelia. I made no secret of how I felt, did I, Teo? She was a torture to me, and yet I loved her. We have had some fine, friendly talks about that, haven't we, Teo?” he asked, his voice on a strange note of remorse and hysteria.

“Yes,” Theodore said.

“You remember I said once I could kill her, Teo?”

Theodore did remember, but he was silent.

“You see? You don't choose to remember!” Ramón cried triumphantly. “But it's true, Teo!”

And did it matter? Did a threat prove anything? Theodore walked a couple of steps in the room and turned again. “I think there are worse crimes than murders—especially murders of passion. There the emotions are involved. It's a momentary thing—and usually the murderer feels remorseful. He's a human being at least! But take the men who exploit their fellow men, crooked landlords, crooked politicians—who exploit thousands of people and know what they're doing and do it all their lives, with calculation, too. They're the real criminals, the men who should be ashamed before their wives and their children and their God. You're not one of those, Ramón. Not at all.”

Ramón was walking about restlessly, smoking. “The answer to that one is simple, Teo. Such men have no consciences. Else they couldn't sleep. And then they'd die. And the world would be better off, I'll grant you.”

Theodore also lighted a cigarette. What more could he say? Ramón might reject his friendship in his words, Theodore thought, but the friendship would remain. Theirs was that kind of friendship. Even if they did not see each other for weeks now, each would miss the other's dissonance in his life. Theodore went to Ramón, clapped him on the shoulder and smiled. “Ramón, I have an idea. If you'd like a change of scene for a few days, why don't you come and stay at my house? There's an extra bedroom and bath, and you could be completely alone if you wished—read, play the gramophone, take walks, even eat your meals alone. Or with me.” He waited. “We might take a trip together a little later—to Lake Pátzcuaro or somewhere.”

“No, Teo. Many thanks.”

“I would like to go somewhere out of this town myself, but I feel we should be around to help Sauzas. Something new may turn up.”

“Oh, nothing new will turn up,” Ramón said with a sigh. He laughed suddenly, like a boy. “How could anything new turn up?”

Theodore laughed, too, with a sense of relief. “Well, Ramón, think it over. You may change your mind. I'll be going.” He walked to the door. When he turned, Ramón was standing where he had been, looking at him. “
Adios,
Ramón.”

“
Adiós.
”

Theodore went quickly down the stairs. An elderly woman in black was struggling up with a
bolsa
of groceries, holding to the banister. Theodore took the centre of the stairs to let her pass. At the next landing, he almost collided with a priest in a black robe and hat. The priest looked at him quizzically, and on an impulse Theodore stopped.

“I am looking for the apartment of Ramón Otero,” said the priest. “I am Padre Bernardo.”

“He is two flights up. The first door on the left as you leave the stairs. Did he send for you?”

“No,” said the priest, who had a weak, drooping mouth, which the sadly drooping lines of his eyebrows followed above his small brown eyes. “I am coming to pay him a visit.”

“Because I am his friend—is the reason I asked,” Theodore said. “Are you his priest? Does he confess to you?”

“Sometimes to me, sometimes to another.”

“Did he confess the murder?”

“
Sí,
” said the priest without emotion.

“And do you believe him?”

The priest gave a slow, worldly shrug and said: “
Sí.
I must believe. He tells me so.”