Conversation in the Cathedral (47 page)

*

“And when are you getting married, Sparky?” Santiago asked.

The waiter came over to the car, placed the tray on the window. Sparky poured Teté’s Coca-Cola, their beers.

“I’d like to get married soon, but it’s hard right now because of work,” he said. “Bermúdez left us practically bankrupt. Things are only just now getting back into shape and I can’t leave the old man alone. It’s been years since I’ve been working without a vacation. I’d like to do some traveling. I’m going to make up for it on my honeymoon, I’m going to visit at least five different countries.”

“You’ll be so busy on your honeymoon that you won’t have time to see anything,” Santiago said.

“Stop your dirty talk in front of the squirt,” Sparky said.

“Tell me what the famous Cary is like, Teté,” Santiago said.

“She’s not chicha and she’s not lemonade either,” Teté said, laughing. “She’s a colorless girl from Punta who never opens her mouth.”

“She’s a great girl, we get along very well,” Sparky said. “One of these days I’ll introduce you, Superbrain. I would have brought her along one of these times, but, I don’t know, can’t you see all the problems you make for us with your foolishness?”

“Does she know that I don’t live at home?” Santiago asked. “What have you told her?”

“That you’re half nutty,” Sparky said. “That you had a fight with the old man and moved out. I haven’t even told her that Teté and I see you in secret, because all of a sudden she might come out with it at home.”

“You’re always asking us what we’re doing but you never tell us anything about yourself,” Teté said. “That’s not fair.”

“He likes to play it mysterious, but it won’t work with me,
Superbrain
,” Sparky said. “If you don’t tell me what you’re doing, who gives a damn. I just won’t ask you anything.”

“But I’m dying with curiosity,” Teté said. “Come on, Superbrain, tell me something.”

“If the only thing you do is go from your boardinghouse to the newspaper and from the newspaper to your boardinghouse, when do you go to San Marcos?” Sparky said. “You’ve been telling us a lot of tales. That’s a lie about your attending the university.”

“Have you got a girl friend?” Teté asked. “You can’t make me believe you don’t go out with girls.”

“Just in order to prove that he’s different from everyone else, he’ll end up marrying a black, Chinese, or Indian girl.” Sparky laughed. “You’ll see, Teté.”

“Tell us at least about the boyfriends you have, come on,” Teté said. “Are they still all Communists?”

“He’s gone from Communists to drunks.” Sparky laughed. “He’s got a friend in Chorrillos who looks like he was just let out of the Frontón jail. The face of an outlaw and a breath that makes you seasick.”

“If you don’t like newspaper work, I don’t know what you’re waiting for to make up with papa and come to work for him,” Teté said.

“I like business even less than I do newspaper work,” Santiago said. “That’s fine for Sparky.”

“If you’re not going to be a lawyer and don’t want to go into business, you’re never going to have any money,” Teté said.

“The problem is that I don’t want money,” Santiago said. “What for, anyway? Sparky and you are going to be millionaires; you’ll give me something when I need it.”

“You’re on tonight,” Sparky said. “Might a person know what you’ve got against people who want to make money?”

“Nothing, it’s just that I don’t want to make money,” Santiago said.

“Well, there’s nothing easier in the world than that,” Sparky said.

“Before you two get into a fight, let’s have some chicken,” Teté said. “I’m dying of hunger.”

*

The next morning she woke up before Símula. It was only six on the kitchen clock, but the sky was already light and it wasn’t cold. She swept her room and made the bed quite calmly, as always, she tested the water in the shower with her foot for some time and finally got in little by little; she soaped herself, smiling, remembering the mistress: footsies, breasties, behindy. She came out and Símula, who was making breakfast, told her to go wake Carlota. They had breakfast and at seven-thirty she went out to buy the papers. The boy at the newsstand was teasing her and instead of answering his bad manners in kind, she joked with him for a while. She felt in a good mood, there were only three days left until Sunday. They wanted to be awakened early too, Símula said, take their breakfast up right away. Only on the stairs did she see the picture in the newspaper. She knocked on the door several times, the mistress’s sleepy voice yes? and she walked in talking: there was a picture of the master in
La
Prensa,
ma’am. In the semidarkness one of the two forms on the bed sat up, lighted the lamp on the night table. The mistress threw her hair back and while she was placing the tray on the chair and moving it over to the bed, the mistress was looking at the newspaper. Should she open the curtain, ma’am? but she didn’t answer: she was blinking, her eyes fastened to the newspaper. Finally, without moving her head, she stretched out her hand and shook Miss Queta.

“What do you want,” the sheets complained. “Let me sleep, it’s
midnight
.”

“He left, Queta.” She was shaking her furiously, looking at the
newspaper
with surprise. “He took off, he went away.”

Miss Queta got up, rubbed her swollen eyes with both hands, leaned over to look, and Amalia, as always, felt ashamed at seeing them so close together like that with nothing on.

“To Brazil,” the mistress was repeating with a horrified voice. “
Without
coming by, without calling. He took off without saying a word to me, Queta.”

Amalia was filling the cups, trying to read, but she only saw the mistress’s black hair, Miss Queta’s red hair, he’d gone away, what was going to happen.

“Well, he probably had to leave in a hurry,” Miss Queta was saying, covering her breasts with the sheet. “Now he’ll send you a ticket. He certainly must have left some note for you.”

The mistress had fallen to pieces and Amalia watched how her mouth was trembling, the hand that clutched the newspaper was crumpling it: that bastard, Queta, without phoning, without leaving her a cent, and she sobbed. Amalia turned half around and left the room: don’t act like that, girl, she heard while she flew down the stairs to tell Carlota and Símula.

*

He wiped his mouth, carefully cleaned his body, rubbed his head with a towel soaked in cologne. He dressed very slowly, his mind a blank and a thin buzzing in his ears. He went back to the bedroom and they had covered themselves with the sheets. In the shadows he could make out the hair in disarray, the rouge and mascara stains on the sated faces, the drowsy restfulness in their eyes. Queta had curled up to go to sleep already, but Hortensia was looking at him.

“Aren’t you going to stay?” Her voice was indifferent and opaque.

“There’s no room,” he said from the door, and he smiled at her before leaving. “I’ll come by tomorrow maybe.”

He hurried down the stairs, picked up the briefcase on the rug, went out onto the street. Sitting on the garden wall, Ludovico and Ambrosio were chatting with the policemen from the corner. When they saw him they stopped talking and got to their feet.

“Good evening,” he murmured, giving a couple of ten-sol notes to the policemen. “Get something to protect yourselves against the chill.”

He scarcely glimpsed their smiles, heard their thanks, and got into the car: to Chaclacayo. He rested his head on the back of the seat, pulled up his jacket collar, told them to close the front windows. He listened, motionless, to the sound of Ambrosio and Ludovico’s conversation, and from time to time he would open his eyes and recognize streets, squares, the dark highway: everything was buzzing in his head, monotonously. Two flashlights fell on the car when it stopped. He heard commands and good evenings, made out the silhouettes of the guards who were opening the main door. What time tomorrow, Don Cayo? Ambrosio asked. Nine o’clock. The voices of Ambrosio and Ludovico were lost behind him, and from the entrance to the house he could make out figures pulling the garage doors open. He sat at the desk for a few minutes trying to jot down in his notebook the business of the following day. In the dining room he poured himself a glass of ice water and went up to the bedroom with heavy steps, feeling the glass trembling in his hand. The sleeping pills were on the bathroom shelf, beside the electric razor. He took two, with a long swallow of water. In the dark he wound the clock and set the alarm for eight-thirty. He pulled the sheets up to his chin. The maid had forgotten to draw the curtains and the sky was a black square dotted with tiny bright spots. The pills took between ten and fifteen minutes to put him to sleep. He had lain down at three-forty and the phosphorescent hands of the alarm clock said a quarter to four. Five more minutes of wakefulness.

H
E GOT TO THE NEWSPAPER OFFICE
a little before five o’clock and was taking his jacket off when the telephone in the back of the room rang. He saw Arispe pick up the receiver, move his mouth, take a look at the empty desks and look at him: Zavalita, please. He crossed the room, stopped in front of the table piled high with cigarette butts, scraps of paper, photographs and rolls of galley proofs.

“The dummies on the police beat don’t get here until seven o’clock,” Arispe said. “You go, get the facts and give them to Becerrita later on.”

“General Garzón 311,” Santiago read on the paper. “In Jesús María, right?”

“Get on down there, I’ll get word to Periquito and Darío,” Arispe said. “We must have some pictures of her in the morgue.”

“The Muse knifed?” Periquito asked in the van while he was loading his camera. “That’s quite a story.”

“She used to sing on Radio el Sol some years back,” Darío the driver said. “Who killed her?”

“A crime of passion, it would seem,” Santiago said. “I never heard of her.”

“I took pictures of her when she was elected Carnival Queen, quite a woman,” Periquito said. “Are you on the police beat now, Zavalita?”

“I was the only one in the office when Arispe got the news,” Santiago said. “It’ll teach me a lesson not to get in on time anymore.”

The building was next to a drugstore, there were two patrol cars and people gathered in the street, there comes
La
Crónica,
a boy shouted. They had to show their press cards to a policeman and Periquito took pictures of the front, the stairs, the first landing. An open door, he thinks, cigarette smoke.

“You’re new to me,” a jowly fat man dressed in blue said, examining his card. “What happened to Becerrita?”

“He wasn’t at the paper when they called us.” And Santiago smelled the strange odor, sweaty human flesh, he thinks, rotten fruit. “You don’t know me because I work in a different section, Inspector.”

Periquito’s bulb flashed, the man with the jowls blinked and moved aside. Through the people who were whispering, Santiago could see a piece of wall with light blue paper, dirty tiles, a black coverlet. Excuse me, two men drew apart, his eyes went up, went down, and very quickly went up, the figure that was so white, he thinks, not pausing at the clotted blood, the red-black lips of the twisted wounds, the tangle of hair that covered her face, the mat of black fuzz bunched between her legs. He didn’t move, he didn’t say anything. Periquito’s rainbows were flashing right and left, could he take a picture of the face, Inspector? a hand drew the tangles aside and a waxen, intact face appeared with shadows under the curved lashes. Thank you, Inspector, Periquito said, crouching
beside
the bed now, and the gush of white light burst forth again. Ten years dreaming about her, Zavalita, if Anita knew she’d think you’d fallen in love with the Muse and would be jealous.

“I can see that our reporter friend is new,” the jowly man said. “Don’t faint on us, young fellow, we’ve got enough trouble already with this lady here.”

The faces veiled by smoke relaxed into smiles, Santiago made an effort and also smiled. When he touched his ballpoint, he discovered that his hand was sweating; he took out his notebook, his eyes took another look: splotches, breasts that overflowed, nipples that were scaly and somber like moles. The smell poured into his nose and made him nauseous.

“They even opened up her navel.” Periquito was changing his bulbs with one hand, biting his tongue. “What a sadist.”

“They opened up something else on her too,” the man with the jowls said soberly. “Come closer, Periquito; you too, young fellow, do you want to see something awful?”

“A hole in the hole,” an affected voice said and Santiago heard tenuous little laughs and unintelligible comments. He took his eyes away from the bed, took a step toward the man in blue.

“Could you give me some information, Inspector?”

“Introductions first,” the one with the jowls said cordially and gave him a soft hand. “Adalmiro Peralta, Chief of the Homicide Division, and this is my adjutant, First Officer Ludovico Pantoja. Don’t leave him out either.”

You tried to revive your smile, keep it on your face while you were taking notes, Zavalita, while you watched the hysterical scratching of the pen as it ran over the paper, slipping along with no direction.

“One favor for another, Becerrita will explain.” While you listened to Inspector Peralta’s laughing and confidential voice. “We get you the scoop and you people give us a few plugs, which we can always use.”

Laughter again, Periquito’s flashes, the smell, the smoke all over: there, Zavalita. Santiago nodded, the notebook folded over, tight against his chest, scribbling lines now, dots, watching letters take shape like hieroglyphics.

“We got the tip from an old woman who lives alone in the next apartment,” the Inspector said. “She heard shouting, came out and found the door open. They had to take her to Emergency, her nerves were all shot. You can imagine the fright she must have got when she found this.”