The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini (6 page)

Malgiolio was one of the ones who wept. In those days he was quiet and wrote Symbolist poetry in the manner of Verlaine and Rubén Darío. That's not to say he didn't enjoy the woman. He was one of the ones who tried to locate her again, Indeed, a little field trip of eight boys came down to the area a few days later. But either they couldn't find the right door or, if it was the right one, the door was locked or the room empty. I don't remember the exact details, only that they couldn't find the woman and ended up going to a regular whorehouse, where they were made fun of and it cost them a lot of money and where one boy—was it Malgiolio or Schwab—got the clap and for weeks he cried every time he had to pee.

But that Saturday afternoon, which began with my trains and ended with the Indian whore, was a wonderful time of good-fellowship. After the last of us had descended the stairs, Pacheco's servant Boris entered with several hampers of food: cold chicken sandwiches, potato salad, apples, buckets of lemonade and a large chocolate cake. Looking back, that menu seems absurd, but at the time it felt exactly right. After all, we were having a party, and that was what fourteen-year-old boys ate at parties. We stuffed ourselves and then had a fight with the apple cores in which I was hit in the eye.

About half an hour after the last boy had joined us and we were done eating, the door opened to reveal Pacheco with the whore standing beside him. She was truly mammoth, well over six feet tall and at least three hundred pounds. She wore a black beaded slip that reached her ankles and her great breasts ballooned forth out of the skimpy black lace. We stared at her with fear and astonishment. Schwab, who had sworn he was eager to have another go, hung back behind us all.

She returned our stare, looking at each of us, staring right into each boy's eyes and holding them for a moment. None of us knew what to do. Her face was wide and flat, almost like the blade of a shovel, and her eyes were slits.

“Were there really so many?” she said at last. “White cake, white cake, you were very sweet.” She said this without sarcasm, but neither did she seem particularly warm-hearted. She was like someone after a large meal and I almost expected her to belch and rub her stomach. Then Pacheco took out some money and gave it to her. She counted it once, then once again, licking her finger as she turned over the bills. When she was satisfied, she took a few steps farther into the room with her hands on her hips and leaning back so her breasts and belly stuck out like great black pillows. The money was in both hands, the bills protruding from between her fingers. She began to hum slightly and as she hummed she began to sway from side to side. Slowly she began to dance. She was barefoot and her feet made a scraping sound on the floor. Her humming grew louder and Pacheco started to clap to the rhythm of her movements. Several others also began to clap, although to tell the truth, I found something frightening about this. She was so huge. It was like being in a cage with a female bear. The song was very simple: five ascending notes in the first phrase, then three ascending and two descending in the second. She repeated this over and over.

As she danced, she reached down and plucked at the fabric of her black slip where it covered her knees. Then she began to pull it up while sliding it from side to side across her legs. Her humming grew louder, both violent and nasal, and between the phrases she would snort through her nose to catch her breath. I don't believe it was a regular song, or at least I didn't recognize it. She continued to lift her slip until her genitals were exposed. As I say, she had no pubic hair and her bronze-colored pudendum glistened as if oiled. Then she spread her legs and toed-out her feet, and we saw that on the inside of her left thigh was tattooed a cock—a great fat red cock with bright red balls and a black bush of pubic hair hanging downward and nearly reaching her knee. As she tensed and relaxed the muscles of her leg, the cock itself appeared to dance, twisting and heaving, while the rest of her body grew still and her humming grew louder. I really expected a vagina to be tattooed on the other leg, but there was nothing, just this cock by itself which quivered and undulated to the husky sound of those five notes repeated over and over.

I don't know how long it lasted. At first some of the boys cheered and laughed, but after a while all grew quiet as we watched her performance. Most of us stood still, but about five or six, including Malgiolio, went to her, forming a ring around her; and as she danced, they circled her first to the left, then to the right, with their heads bowed and seemingly staring at the floor or perhaps her great bare feet. As I say, several were in their school uniforms and one still wore the little blue beanie with the tiny black brim. For that matter, I still wore the engineer's cap that went with my model railroad. But I had the sense that the dancing boys were her creatures, that she had hypnotized them, and I remember tensing myself and even pinching the skin on the inside of my wrist to keep from falling under a similar spell while I watched that tattoo of a great red cock heave itself about her leg, as the boys continued their circle and the woman continued her song. Really, her thigh was so thick that its circumference was probably greater than my waist.

At last she stopped. Her song had no conclusion, just an end. She brought her thighs together with a clap and let the black slip fall back over her knees. Then she began to yawn, great open-mouthed yawns, like big cats in zoos. Still yawning she turned and patted Pacheco's cheek and, without another glance at us, she slowly climbed the stairs with the money sticking like thistles from her fists.

Pacheco stood facing us. “I have given you a little something. Are you grateful?” he asked. No one answered. We were still too caught up by her dance. “Now you will always remember each other. I suppose you think this has made you men. It hasn't, but perhaps you will whine a little less.”

All of a sudden we felt released, and we laughed and whistled and clapped our hands. Pacheco was always saying serious things to which we paid little attention. Every boy has a constant game in which he plays the hero, and this Saturday afternoon it seemed we had taken part in Pacheco's game, for which we were grateful. All of us? Well, I was grateful, or at least I thought I was. And years later, when we formed our group and committed ourselves to biannual dinners, I felt that the root of our decision was not that we had been in school together or had similar interests and backgrounds or were even particularly close to one another, but rather the beginning, the event that tied us together, was that afternoon when Pacheco had hired the whore. Even at forty-nine, I still vividly remember being pressed to her immense greasy chest while she gyrated her hips very slowly and methodically. It was almost like chewing. Others thought the same, and much later Malgiolio said how the whore had eaten our childhood. But I didn't think anything so grand. I was a fourteen-year-old boy in a black and white striped railway cap. I was simply amazed.

—

Such were our sexual beginnings. At fourteen we boys were so similar as to be like a series of ditto marks. It was only later that we grew more defined and individual: one entered the church, another the military—doctor, lawyer, used car salesman. As for me, I am someone who has spent his adult life on the periphery of literature in the way that a small animal will remain just beyond the glow of a campfire, observing the strange doings of the human creatures settling in for the night. I am not an artist but a journalist, and even though my essays and interviews with Borges, Mailer, Günter Grass, and others may someday be collected and published in book form, I am not a critic but a reviewer. It is my job to compare a new book to what has already been written, not to speculate on the paths literature may take in the future. But the hardest task in any writing is to present the truth so it can be seen as true. One cannot just give the history of an event in a straightforward manner and expect it to be believed. That history must have a shape. It must have direction and movement.

Of course I am a romantic. That is my curse; it italicizes all my observations. Always at the book review I am being asked to tone down if not my opinions, then my prose. But to be a romantic, doesn't that mean seeking and even finding connection among apparently random phenomena? There must be pattern. The events of a life are not a series of scattered actions like dust thrown into the wind. Something must link them. And so in writing I am not merely giving the history of one evening at Dr. Pacheco's but of our lives as influenced by Pacheco. Detachment, I struggle for detachment. Those hours with the whore had linked us together. We did not brood about this event. It was hardly mentioned between us and if someone did mention that Saturday afternoon it was casually and certainly without shame or guilt. It had pleased us all. That is why it seemed such a pity to begin our group without Pacheco, and why, once he had joined, I felt he should give the next dinner. Our meetings had in a sense begun with him and so I had waited impatiently for his turn. Yet how unfair, now that his turn had finally arrived, that only three of us would apparently be his guests.

Constantly nagging me as I write is how to give a true sense of that evening. The violence in the city, the soldiers, the shooting made those few hours seem unconnected to the normal course of our lives. We had not just gone to Pacheco's for dinner, we had stepped outside of time and reality as we knew it. Although we had some anxiety, we felt safe at Pacheco's, partly because we had always seen him as a leader, someone who was never in doubt what to do next. His admission about the photograph—that he kept it on the mantel “to remind me of the woman I chose to destroy”—was startling not just for what it said, but also because of the careful way he said it: that he didn't accidentally destroy, but chose to destroy. And then to have this followed so quickly by the arrival of the soldiers led me to think, foolishly of course, that they had come to punish Pacheco and that suddenly he was not in control.

My misconception lasted only a moment, but it should be emphasized that we were not men accustomed to violence. The interruption of these soldiers, even for the most mundane reason, was frightening. I myself have never owned a gun, have never been hunting or even fishing, and all at once here were automatic weapons being waved about and a man screaming out in the hall. Really, my impulse was to scream as well.

In the world of violence, it was something quite small. A soldier had been shot and wounded, apparently by a sniper. The lieutenant heard that a surgeon lived nearby and had the man carried to Pacheco's house. But even this, that a man lay on the marble floor of the hall writhing in pain from a bullet wound, even this made us afraid—partly because of its own violence and partly as an interruption of our sedate and sedentary world. At the same time, the fact that a soldier needed help was—and this seems almost comical—reassuring news, since, originally, when the soldiers burst into the library, I had felt in mortal danger. After all, these were young men, inexperienced and extremely nervous. Wasn't I right to be frightened? And I'm positive that Malgiolio and Dalakis were frightened as well.

Later, Pacheco poked fun at my response, saying I must have a guilty conscience. “About what?” I asked.

“Some little thing. Perhaps you ate too much or went out with a girl too young for you or had a spiteful thought. And when the soldiers arrived, you thought you had been found out.” And he laughed again.

My first sight of the wounded man was a great pair of black boots, one of which seemed wet, and a smear of blood on the floor around him. Blocking me from the rest of him were the green-clad backs of half a dozen soldiers as well as Pacheco himself down on his knees investigating the man's wounds. But though I couldn't see the wounded man, I certainly heard him as he continued to scream, a short, barking, indignant sort of noise which he made over and over. Because of all the marble, his screams seemed almost theatrical as they echoed off those cold surfaces and mixed with the thick smell of the flowers.

“Get my bag and some sheets,” Pacheco told Señora Puccini.

Although I was astonished at the blood, the furor, the nervous soldiers, Pacheco seemed entirely calm. He knelt by the injured man, discovering the degree of his wounds and talking to him quietly. Three soldiers stood at the open door with their weapons pointed out at the street, which was now nearly dark. Other soldiers, perhaps seven or eight, stood around the hall watching their wounded comrade but, even more, staring at the grandeur of the hall itself, gawking at the bawdy tapestry and the Roman busts, gaping up at the chandelier. As before, I was struck by their youth. They looked like teenagers just out of school, and very briefly I had the impression that these were the comrades we'd been expecting for dinner, yet cast back to that time when we were all classmates and just beginning our explorations of the world. But then they stood aside and I saw the boy on the floor. He was dark and black-haired and his mouth formed a perfect “0” as he continued his astonished protest. Although his body was still as he lay on his back, his head swung violently from side to side as if he were scanning the room for the source of his pain. Indeed, at one moment his eyes fastened on mine and I thought he would speak, but then he again jerked his head and I stepped back out of his vision.

Dalakis and I stood by the library door. I suppose he was as amazed as I was. In his clumsy and bearlike way, he kept jostling me as he peered at the wounded man through his thick glasses with a mixture of repulsion and grief. Looking back into the room, I saw Malgiolio smoking a cigarette by the fireplace. He seemed still to be studying the photograph. I didn't realize at the time that he was frightened as well.

Señora Puccini reentered the hall from a door on the right, carrying a battered-looking black leather bag and several white sheets. Even in the midst of this clamor she appeared cold and distant. She made her way between the soldiers without even glancing at them. As I looked at her, I couldn't help but see the beautiful face of the girl in the photograph imposed over hers. But what had been confident and even brazen in the photograph now appeared hard, as if she aspired to the condition of stone. After giving Pacheco the bag, she didn't linger but left the hall to return to the kitchen. A sergeant began tearing the sheets into strips. Pacheco took a syringe from his bag and gave a shot to the wounded soldier, who was still screaming, but more faintly, almost mechanically. Then Pacheco began to investigate the man's wounds, which were apparently in his leg and shoulder.