The Scared Stiff

14

Carlos appeared around five-thirty in the afternoon. By then I’d swum, in the bathing suit Esilda had brought me, boxer-style, very colorful, with matadors waving capes fore and aft. I’d also dealt with lunch, and dozed a bit in one of the chaises, and was feeling very comfortable and at home, pleased to be around Maria.

In midafternoon, she’d showed me her studio, a bare concrete room at the opposite end of the house from my guest room and about twice its size. It looked mostly like an auto repair shop, with its acetylene torches and stacks of pipe and all the tools scattered around, including an array of hacksaws on the wall over the workbench. I looked at it all and said, “You should be covered with scars.”

She laughed. “For the first few months, I was, but that was years ago.”

I looked at what was apparently a work-in-progress, a two-foot-high twist of metal clamped in a vise at the end of the workbench. It was a kind of spiral that bent in on itself, as though in pain. I don’t know why it seemed so strong, but it was hard not to go on looking at it. I said, “I now realize you don’t do your work justice, hanging it in a row on the wall out there. One at a time, it’s more powerful.”

“That isn’t display,” she said, dismissing the work on the wall with a careless wave of the hand, “that’s storage. I send photos to Friedrich, and then sometimes he asks me to ship this one or that one.”

“He can tell from pictures?”

“Now he can. And the dealers in Europe.”

I looked at the bending spiral again. “I’ve never understood abstraction,” I said. “I don’t mean to look at, I mean to make. How do you know when it’s right?”

“The emotion,” she said, and shrugged. She wasn’t really interested in talking about her art, just I guess in doing it. “Come back out in the sunlight,” she said.

So I did, and was still there in my matador trunks when Carlos came home.

I hadn’t really been thinking about Carlos all day, not in the aura of this strong woman, but now I looked at them together and I just didn’t get it. I know it’s a common thing for couples to look completely mismatched, so that only they themselves know why they’re a team, but Maria and Carlos took that notion to extremes. Here was this dramatic sophisticated woman, this artist, and over here in this corner we have a slob in a torn white T-shirt whose belly is so fat it lies on his belt buckle. He came out to the patio, nodded at us seated there on adjoining chaises, and said, “You met.”

“Ernesto is very amusing,” Maria told him. “He thought I was in Caracas to see my drug dealer.”

Carlos hid his amusement very well. “Huh,” he said.

“Come for a swim, darling,” she said.

“I got to shower,” he said, and nodded at me. “Tell Esilda we want drinks.”

“Beer?” I asked, as I stood up from the chaise.

“She knows what we want. You tell her what you want.”

“Okay.”

Maria swam again, arms rhythmically moving, legs slowly scissoring, black-sheathed body thrusting smoothly through the clear water. Carlos went into the house, and I walked over to the kitchen entrance and inside, to find Esilda seated weeping in front of a small TV set that stood in the corner of the counter. It was a Spanish-language soap opera, fiercer and more passionate than American ones. The three people raging around what looked like a Holiday Inn motel room with the drapes drawn shut seemed somehow to have hurt one another deeply. They were discussing it.

Esilda wiped her eyes and looked at me. I was sorry to tear her away from her fun, but I was on a mission, so I told her Carlos and Maria wanted drinks, then pointed at myself: “Cerveza.”

She nodded, got to her feet, and abandoned the trio in the motel room without a backward glance. Over at the counter, she poured white wine into a graceful long-stemmed glass, then combined half light rum and half Coca-Cola in a heavier cut-glass tumbler. Seeing me still standing there, she made a shooing gesture that I should get out of her kitchen, so I did.

Outside, Maria was still swimming laps. I considered joining her but felt too lazy, so I sat instead. Every once in a while, a grungy motorboat would go slowly by, out there on the river, and one did now, so I watched it until it was out of sight.

Then I looked for a while at Colombia, which was the land on the other side of the river. Some of the riverside over there had been cleared for grazing, and scrawny cattle moved around picturesquely against a background of mountainous jungle. Where the land hadn’t been cleared, the jungle petered out as it approached the river, becoming a kind of messy savanna. Bird calls electrified the air from time to time, but which side of the river the birds were on I couldn’t tell.

Esilda came out with a silver tray. Because it was the cocktail hour, I suppose, she had poured my beer into a frosty glass stein with a handle. She turned the tray so I could take it, and I said, “Gracias.” She smiled, put the tray on the round white table near the chaises, and went back into the kitchen.

Maria, seeing the drinks arrive, got out of the pool, wrapped herself in a golden towel that made her look like a creature who would have been worshiped in this part of the world a few thousand years ago — and who’s to say they would have been wrong? — and came over to pick up the wineglass. I’d known the wine was hers. She raised the glass to me: “Salud.”

“Prosit,” I said, and she laughed, and we sipped from our glasses, and Carlos joined us.

Well, he’d shaved, and his flattened hair suggested he’d showered, but he was now wearing only red bikini swimming trunks, so I can’t say he’d made an overall improvement. In fact, at first I thought he wasn’t wearing anything at all, because his belly hid the trunks in front, and it was only when he turned away that you could see that crimson globe behind.

Arriving, he said nothing to me at all but went over to kiss Maria lightly on the lips — I hadn’t expected that — then picked up his drink and held it toward her and growled, “Salud.”

“Cheers,” she said, smiling fondly at him, and they clinked their glasses together.

He downed about half his drink, put the glass down, nodded at me, and went over to hurl himself into the pool with a huge splash. He did walrus and whale imitations for a while in there, while Maria lay back on the chaise beside me and seemed to go to sleep. I spent the time sipping my beer and wondering if Carlos would be able to get word to Arturo that I needed to spend some time with Lola before Tuesday. I’ll ask him when he comes out of the pool, I decided.

But when he came out, wrapping himself in another of the golden towels and now looking like the Sun King, picking up his drink on the way by and then sitting on the edge of the chaise on my other side, he had things he wanted to say to me, so he went first. “Tomorrow we gotta go to church,” he said. “It’s expected. Ten o’clock. You’ll meet people. You know how to do that.”

“Sure.”

“You want to go to the funeral?”

For just a second, I couldn’t think what funeral he was talking about. Then I remembered: mine, of course. I said, “How could I? I don’t dare go back to Sabanon.”

“I got a chauffeur suit,” he said. “You wear it, with the hat, you stay in the car. You don’t go in the church, but you see it all from outside. And the procession, and in the graveyard.”

A chauffeur in the funeral procession. I would get to go to my own funeral. “You’re on,” I said.