THREE HOURS LATER, when Mr. Valdez went into the kitchen to make coffee, Caterina woke up. She was awake when he came into the bedroom and took his blue-black cotton dressing gown from the hook behind the bathroom door but she kept her eyes closed and lay still, sprawled across the bed with her hair tumbled around her face like a cloud and an annoying village-idiot trail of spittle tickling its way from the corner of her mouth. She could not decide if it would be more suggestive of sleep to let it roll its way into the crumpled pillow or to snap her jaws and lick her chops like a labrador. She chose to do nothing.
Mr. Valdez did not notice. He was not watching her. He wanted only to get across the room, cover himself and go without waking her. There was more to it than a newfound modesty imposed by his mother. There was more to it than the echo of his failure from the night before. Mr. Valdez planned to serve her coffee and eggs and rolls from the stock he kept in the freezer and Mr. Valdez was an aesthete with a fear of the ridiculous. He knew he could not arrive, naked, carrying a tray.
He went back to the kitchen. He clattered about. His espresso machine hissed and bubbled and, after a decent interval, she took that as a cue to rise.
Caterina had her own toothbrush now, but she had no dressing gown. She came into the kitchen with her hair scraped back off her face, wearing a nearly-white T-shirt and yesterday’s underwear. She looked like a goddess and she smiled at him and kissed him but there was something missing, a chilly gap that had not been there the night before, like the space where a tooth used to be, and teeth do not grow back.
“This is nice,” she said. “Thank you.”
“I was going to bring it to you. Sleep well?”
“Not really. I missed you.”
He looked at her disbelievingly over his coffee cup.
“I did. Really. I’m like an old woman. I’m getting used to you.”
“I had hoped to keep the magic alive for just a little longer. Say until we get married.”
“You don’t understand,” she said and she was right. Mr. Valdez had no idea of the way she loved him then. He told himself that he loved her, he knew he loved her because she had made the warm blood flow again into that amputated stump where once, long ago, he had been connected to the world, but he loved her with a reasonable love, because she was young and beautiful, because she gave him sex, because she held out to him the prospect of children, sons, companionship in old age, the possibility that he might not die alone in this flat and lie undiscovered until neighbors whom he did not know complained of the smell on the landing.
Like the rest of us Mr. Valdez was unable to conceive of a world where he might not exist, where that lamp would go on burning, where those trees would go on growing, where rivers would flow, cities grow up and turn to dust again, where stars would roll endlessly across the empty sky and all without him. But it was the measure of his love that there was a part of his mind where it was possible to imagine a world without Caterina in it. Even without her, he would survive. His life would be less lovely, it might not be sweetened with children to brighten his old age, but life would go on. He knew it.
But for Caterina it was very different. She was an aficionada, obsessed with the stories he had written, an orphan wandering the world and searching for a place to shelter. Caterina was crippled too, but not like Valdez. He gloried in his cold, dead scar, but Caterina had spent years looking for the missing part of herself, the part that died clutching at a handful of mud in a mountain field, and she counted herself as blessed that he had noticed her. He had no friends and any one of the small circle which gathered round Valdez, his university colleagues, Maria Marrom, even his own mother would, if they were honest, have to admit that Caterina was worth ten of him but she would not have believed it. She wanted to give the rest of her life to making him happy because she believed that would make her happy. She wanted his children because it would be an honor to bear his children and she wanted to sleep in his bed because she could not sleep without him. It was a mad love. She was besotted with him.
And yet, there at the table he could say something stupid and cynical like that, something about how the magic had gone. It was astonishing. More astonishing yet, she bore it.
“Anyway,” she said. “You were up very early. What have you been doing?”
“I wrote.” He sounded proud of himself and he said it with a smile of accomplishment.
“You wrote? Oh God, that’s fabulous.” She was so sincere, so enthusiastic, that she almost sounded mocking. “I haven’t written anything for ages. Not for days. What did you write? Tell me. I want to know all about it.”
“It’s not done yet. I don’t like to—not before it’s ready. I’m very superstitious that way.”
“Please.”
“Maybe. Maybe later.” As if he had been responding to some outlandish request from a fractious child.
“Lots.”
“Lots?”
“Lots and lots. It was like a dam bursting. It just came pouring out.”
“Oh God, I love that. When it happens to me.” She was suddenly modest, as if what she wrote and how she wrote it was not fit to be mentioned in his company. “I love that,” she whispered.
“I feel like I’ve turned a corner. You know?”
“Yes, when it takes on a life of its own.”
“Yes,” he said, “like taking dictation.” Oh, what a storyteller he was. All that excitement for less than a dozen words. In bald percentage terms, of course, his output of the night before had been prodigious, but that was all it was: less than a dozen words. The other half of that sentence came spurting from the end of his pen and the beautiful Angela suddenly appeared on the page and then nothing. Nothing again. Nothing in the bedroom and nothing at the desk. It was as if somebody had opened the door of a prison and then slammed it again. It was like the profound silence that rushes back after an echo, like the darkness that comes after a lightning flash, something even less than there was before.
Mr. Valdez had sat there for hours fighting that full stop, trying to find a way past its blockade, until, sick with fright and close to tears, he decided to make breakfast and now breakfast was over and another day loomed and that blank page would scream at him again.
“Are you going to the university today?” he asked.
“Yes. Dr. Cochrane on transcendental numbers.”
“Too good to miss.”
“A mathematical roller-coaster ride. Are you going?”
“Later. I should have a shave.”
“And I need to get some fresh clothes. Maybe I should keep some here.” She left a big question mark hanging on the end of that sentence.
He said: “Do you want a lift?”
“No. It’s OK. I’d like to walk.” She carried her coffee cup to the sink and rinsed it, standing there, flat-footed, her underwear sagging unbecomingly behind her, a spot with a greenish white head boiling up on her shoulder and still that glow of beauty fizzing and sparkling all around her, the way that rainbows hang over waterfalls. “Better hurry,” she said.
“Yes. I’ll come down with you.” He left his cup on the table and followed her to the bedroom where he pulled on a sweater and a pair of cotton trousers, enough to be decent when he went with her to the street.
The lift took a long time to come and there seemed to be nothing to say as they waited. Standing there, he felt her finger against the palm of his hand and he gripped it instinctively, as a baby does, but only for a moment and then he dropped it again. It was as if, despite everything, despite even their decision to marry, he remained afraid that they might be seen together.
“We should have taken the stairs,” she said.
“But, if we go now, the lift will arrive.” Mr. Valdez said that the way that everybody says it, as if all the moments they had wasted from life’s pitiably small store of moments, tiny shavings of time which they could have spent dancing or kissing or eating peaches or reading a book or writing a book, had actually been well used in waiting for a lift but would be rendered meaningless, would be needlessly squandered and wasted, if they stopped waiting and did something else instead.
She looked up at him. He glanced down and caught her doing it and looked away again, watching the doors doing nothing. The lift arrived. They got in it and closed the doors. Downstairs the postman had already come. He had already pushed open the big bronze doors into the lobby, taken a bundle of letters from his sack and, standing in front of the wall of named and numbered metal boxes, delivered each one as his oath demanded. The large white envelope which had flown from the capital, the one stamped with the letterhead of The Salon and the printed plea “DO NOT BEND,” he folded double and jammed into the box marked “L.H. Valdez,” and by the time the lift arrived at the lobby, the doors to Cristobal Avenue were closing softly behind him.
Mr. Valdez said: “I have been thinking.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t get you a ring. You should have a ring.”
For Caterina the thought of it was almost as wonderful as the thing itself, and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Perhaps, after classes, we could go and choose something.”
She only said: “Oh Chano!” and then, because the lobby was empty and they were alone, he kissed her.