What We Become (19 page)

“Please, there's no need. It's too hot.”

Closing the wardrobe, he went over and gave her the glove. She took it with barely a glance, holding it in her hand as she tap-tapped the fingers lightly against her leather bag. She remained standing, deliberately ignoring the only chair in the room, as composed as if she had been in the lounge of a hotel where she was a regular guest. Glancing around her, she took in every detail: the sun slanting through the window onto the chipped floor-tiles and the battered trunk plastered with labels from ocean liners and the odd third-rate hotel offering full board and lodging; the Primus stove on the marble-topped chest of drawers; a shaving kit, a tin of tooth powder, and a tube of Sta-Comb brilliantine arranged next to the washbowl. On the bedside table beneath a kerosene lamp (the electricity at the Caboto boardinghouse was switched off at eleven at night) were his French passport, a book of matches from the
Cap Polonio
, and a wallet, whose meager contents (seven fifty-peso and three twenty-peso notes) were, thankfully, thought Max, not visible.

“A glove is important,” she said. “It shouldn't be abandoned without good reason.”

She continued to look around her. Then she removed her hat very calmly, even as her eyes appeared casually to alight on Max. She tilted her head slightly to one side, and once more he could appreciate the long, graceful outline of her neck, which seemed even more exposed.

“An interesting place we went to last night . . . Armando wants to go back there.”

With some difficulty, Max returned to what she was saying.

“Tonight?”

“No. We have to attend a concert this evening at the Teatro Colón. . . . Would tomorrow suit you?”

“Of course.”

Mecha Inzunza sat down on the edge of the bed with perfect poise, ignoring the empty chair. She was still clasping her glove and hat, and a moment later she laid them to one side, together with her bag. Her skirt had ridden up, revealing more of her long, slender legs beneath the silk stockings.

“I once read something about women losing their gloves,” she said.

She seemed genuinely pensive, as if she had never given the matter any thought before.

“Two gloves isn't the same as one,” she went on. “Two would be casual neglect. One is . . .”

She left her words hanging in the air, fixing Max with her eyes.

“Deliberate?” he ventured.

“If there is one thing I like about you, it's that you could never be accused of being stupid.”

Max held her bright gaze without flinching.

“And I like the way you look at me,” he said softly.

He saw her frown as though considering the implications of his remark. Then Mecha Inzunza crossed her legs, placing her hands on either side of her on the coverlet. She seemed vexed.

“Really? . . . You disappoint me.” There was a note of coldness in her voice. “I am afraid that sounds conceited to me. Inappropriate.”

This time he did not respond. He simply stood motionless before her. Waiting. After a moment, she shrugged indifferently, as one might give up faced with an absurd riddle.

“Describe how it is I look at you,” she said.

Max smiled suddenly, with apparent candor. This was his most winning expression, one he had rehearsed hundreds of times in front of mirrors in cheap hotels and seedy boardinghouses.

“It makes one pity men who have never been looked at that way by a woman.”

He could scarcely conceal his dismay when Mecha Inzunza rose to her feet, as though ready to leave. He tried desperately to
think what he had done wrong. To discover the offending word or gesture. But instead of collecting her things and leaving the room, she took three steps toward him. Max had forgotten that he still had shaving foam on his face, and was surprised when she reached out to caress his cheek, and, scooping up a blob of the white froth with her forefinger, deposited it on the end of his nose.

“You make a handsome clown,” she said.

They flung themselves at each other, without preamble or hesitation, violently, stripping off anything that got in the way of the skin and flesh, finding their way to each other's body. As they drew back the bedcover, the woman's scent mingled with that of the man's smell left on the crumpled sheets from the previous night. An intense battle of the senses followed, a lengthy clash of pent-up passion and desire, unleashed mercilessly on both sides. Max had to summon every ounce of self-discipline as he fought on three fronts to maintain the necessary calm, controlling her responses, and muffling her cries so as not to alert everyone else in the boardinghouse to their tussle. The patch of sun from the window had slowly moved until it framed the bed, and from time to time they would rest their exhausted tongues, mouths, hands, and hips, drunk on the other's saliva and smell, their mingled perspiration gleaming under the dazzling light. And whenever that happened they would peer at each other with defiant or astonished eyes, amazed by the ferocious pleasure enveloping them, panting like a couple of wrestlers pausing during a bout, the blood throbbing in their temples, only to hurl themselves at each other once more, with the hunger of someone finally able to resolve, in an almost frenzied way, a complex personal vendetta.

For his part, during the flashes of lucidity, when he clung to particular details or thoughts that allowed him to steady himself briefly, Max was struck that morning by two remarkable things: in the throes of passion, Mecha Inzunza whispered obscenities improper for a lady; and on her warm, smooth flesh, deliciously
soft in all the right places, there were bluish marks that looked like bruises left by blows.

It has been a while since the lights came on in their paper lanterns, after the sun had dipped behind the cliffs encircling the Marina Grande in Sorrento. In that artificial light, less precise and reliable than the one that has just gone out in a final blaze of violet where sea meets sky, the most recent traces of age on the face of the woman sitting opposite Max Costa seem to fade. The soft lights illuminating the tables at the Trattoria Stéfano eradicate all trace of the intervening years, restoring the once sharply defined, remarkably beautiful face of Mecha Inzunza.

“I could never have imagined chess changing my life in this way,” she is saying. “In fact, it was my son who changed it. The chess part is purely incidental. . . . If he had been a musician or a mathematician, the result would have been the same.”

It is still pleasantly warm on the seafront. Her arms are bare, and draped over the back of her chair is a lightweight cream jacket. She is wearing a long and flowing mauve cotton dress that shows off her still-slender figure in a way that seems, deliberately, to flout the fashion for short skirts and garish colors, which even women of a certain age have recently adopted. She is wearing the pearls in three strands around her neck. Sitting opposite her, Max remains motionless, showing an interest that goes beyond simple politeness. It would require close scrutiny to recognize Dr. Hugentobler's chauffeur in the calm gentleman with gray hair leaning forward slightly over the table and listening attentively. In front of him is a glass that he has barely touched, in keeping with his old habit of staying sober when the stakes are high. He is impeccably dressed in a dark double-breasted blazer, gray flannel trousers, a pale blue Oxford shirt, and a brown knitted tie.

“Or maybe not exactly the same,” Mecha Inzunza continues.
“The world of professional chess is complex. Demanding. It requires extraordinary things, a special way of life. And it very much shapes the lives of the people in the players' entourage.”

She pauses once more, pensive, tilting her head as she runs her finger (with its short, unpainted nail) along the lip of her empty coffee cup.

“In my life,” she says at last, “I have experienced moments of radical change, upheavals that marked the beginning of new chapters. Armando's death during the Spanish Civil War was one of those. It gave me back a certain kind of freedom which I did not necessarily want, or need.” She looks at Max with an ambiguous expression on her face, perhaps of resignation. “Another was when I discovered that my son was extremely gifted at chess.”

“I hear you gave up your life for him.”

She places her cup to one side and leans back in her chair.

“Perhaps that's a slight exaggeration. A child is something you can't explain to others. Did you ever have one?”

Max smiles, remembering very clearly her asking the same question in Nice, almost thirty years before. And he gives the same reply.

“Not that I know of. . . . Why chess?”

“Because that was Jorge's obsession since he was a child. His joy and his despair. Imagine watching someone you love with all your heart, struggling to solve a problem at once imprecise and complex. You long to help him, but you don't know how. So you try to find a person who can do for him what you cannot. Chess masters, analysts . . .”

She glances about her with a wistful smile, while Max continues to follow her every word and gesture. Farther along the tiny quayside, toward where the fishing boats are, the tables at the next restaurant, the Trattoria Emilia, are empty, and a bored-looking waiter is chatting to the female cook in the entrance. At the far end of the beach, a group of Americans can be heard laughing
and talking loudly on the terrace of a third establishment, over the background voice of Edoardo Vianello singing “Abbronzatissima” on a jukebox or record player.

“It's a bit like a mother whose son is addicted to drugs. . . . When she realizes she can't stop him from taking them, she decides to supply them herself.”

She is staring into the distance beyond Max and the beached fishing boats, toward the far-off lights that encircle the bay and the black slope of Vesuvius.

“It was unbearable to watch him agonizing in front of a chessboard,” she goes on. “It still upsets me even now. To begin with I tried to discourage him. I'm not one of those mothers who push their children to extremes, projecting their own ambitions onto them. Quite the opposite. I tried to get him away from chess. . . . But when I realized I couldn't, that he was playing secretly and that this could come between us, I didn't hesitate.”

Lambertucci, the owner, comes over to ask if they need anything, and Max shakes his head. “You don't know me,” Max had instructed him that afternoon when he called to reserve a table. “I'll arrive at eight, after the captain leaves and you put the chessboard away. Officially, I've only been to your restaurant a couple of times, so avoid being familiar this evening. I want a quiet, discreet dinner: pasta with clams followed by grilled fish, and a good chilled white wine. And don't even think of wheeling out your nephew with his guitar to murder “O Sole Mio” the way you usually do. I'll explain what it's about some other time. Or maybe not.”

“Sometimes after I punished him,” Mecha Inzunza continues, “I would go into his room and find him lying on the bed, staring into space. I realized he didn't need to see the pieces. He was playing chess in his head, using the ceiling as a board. . . . And so I decided to support him, in every way I could.”

“What was he like as a boy . . . ? I read somewhere that he started playing chess very young.”

“To begin with he was a very nervous child. He would cry inconsolably if he made a mistake and lost a game. I, and later his coaches, had to force him to think before making a move. He was already showing signs of what would later become his style of play: dazzling, brilliant, and fast, always ready to sacrifice pieces when mounting an attack.”

“Another coffee?” asks Max.

“Yes please.”

“In Nice you used to live off coffee and cigarettes.”

She gives a faint, leisurely smile.

“Those are the only old habits I hold on to. Though in moderation now.”

Lambertucci arrives to take their order with an inscrutable expression and an almost exaggerated politeness, glancing sideways at Mecha Inzunza. He seems to like what he sees, and winks discreetly at Max before joining the waiter and cook from the restaurant next door, to chat about business. Every now and then, he turns his head, and Max knows what he is thinking: what is that old charlatan up to this evening? Dressed to the nines, as if it were perfectly normal, and accompanied.

“Many people think chess is all about brilliant improvisation,” Mecha Inzunza says, “but they're wrong. It requires a methodical approach, exploring every possible situation in search of new ideas. . . . A great chess player memorizes the moves from thousands of his own and others' games, and tries to improve on them with new gambits or variations, studying his predecessors like someone learning languages or algebra. That is why they depend on their entourage, the assistants, coaches, and analysts I told you about this morning. Depending on the moment, Jorge may have several people in his entourage. One is his coach, Emil Karapetian, who goes everywhere with us.”