The Casanova Embrace (5 page)

When she had put herself together, repairing her makeup,
she came into the room where he was standing against the wall. He had raised
the blinds and was staring into the street, watching the cars move along Massachusetts Avenue. She caught him in profile, deep in thought, intent on some probings.
Hesitating, she watched him, a stranger. There was an illusiveness about him,
something uncapturable. Perhaps, she wondered, it was because she had only
received enough information to sense him, not yet to know him, which is what
she wanted now. To know him. To really know him. She moved beside him and
kissed his earlobe. He put his arm around her, still staring into the street.
She followed his eyes, wondering what was absorbing him.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Occasionally, I think I see the Cordillera."

"The what?"

"The Andes. The spine of Chile. Sometimes, I see a
mirage."

She looked out the window.

"It is only a parking lot." She wished she could
also see the Cordillera.

"Yes," he sighed and continued to stare out of
the window.

She reached for his hand, kissed his fingers.

"I will make you happy, Eduardo."

He looked at her, his eyes clear and bright.

"I feel.... "she hesitated, feeling again the
pang of guilt, remembering her children, Claude, her neat and ordered life. She
had betrayed them all. A weight materialized in the pit of her, lay there,
temporarily formidable, indigestible. I must not think about it, she warned
herself. I must separate my life, my needs....

"I feel like a woman," she whispered. "For
the first time in my life. I feel like a woman." She remembered her
pleasure now in his arms, the waves of ecstasy. Moving away from her, he looked
at his watch. The gesture made her sad. Time is the enemy, she knew, sighing as
her mind filled with the impending details of her ordinary life. The children
would be coming home from school.

"I must go now," he said, looking at his watch.
The act pained her. "They will be wondering." She wanted to ask
'who?', the sudden sense of possession compelling, the urge to be curious an
irritant. Who dared to preempt "her" time?

"Yes," she agreed, searching for her pride. She
did not want to mention her children, her home. Like his, it was another world,
not theirs.

"We must have more time together," she whispered
as they walked toward the door. It was another unintentional articulation. Why
must I put a voice to every thought, she wondered. Claude would have been more
calculated, subtle, choosy in his use of words. There seemed a great void
between them. It was as if she had taken the first bite of a beautifully
prepared and delicious concoction and someone had taken it away from her. It
had titillated her hunger and she wanted to finish it.

"When?" she asked as they stood in the elevator.

"I will call you," he said.

"When?"

"Soon."

"But you have no telephone," she said, feeling
instantly ashamed of revealing what she had discovered, as well as the illogic
of her response.

"In my business, the telephone can be an enemy,"
he said with an air of finality.

She watched as he hailed a passing taxi, then opened the
door for her when it pulled up the sloping driveway. She had expected him to
drive her back to her car. But she shrugged off her disappointment and slid
into the back seat, lifting her hand in a half-hearted wave of farewell. Again
she felt a pang of loss, but she forced herself to concentrate on the problem
of finding her car and she gave the driver directions to the restaurant.

Knowing what he knew, Dobbs felt a rare sense of
anticipation as he looked at the formidable materials strewn across the table
that dominated one side of his office. He had asked for every available bit of
data on Eduardo Allesandro Palmero. He was after the distilled essence of the
man, the core of him. Before, it had only lapped at the edges of his
consciousness, as if his mind were a remote ocean beach. Now the waves were
crashing, dominating in their power. He wanted to know more, if that was
possible.

He did not merely want summaries. He wanted raw data as
well, information gathered routinely or in white heat. Was he being
professional, he wondered, or was there something in himself demanding the
knowledge? Or was it pique at his own miscalculation, his inability to
understand the real motives of the human animal? Is this what they call a
crisis of confidence, he speculated, a reflection of his own impotence, or
ignorance? It was not the wasting of a human life that burdened him, only his
blindness to the possibilities of how it might occur.

Three women. Eduardo's women, Marie LaFarge, Frederika
Millspaugh, Penelope Anne McCarthy. Moving a chair closer to the table, he
settled comfortably and fingered the material. Then he sighed and began sifting
and shuffling until he found something that triggered a response--a tiny
landmark, a detail in a map, something that might synthesize his own mind and
heart with those of Eduardo. It was important to know what had gone wrong. He
had been so sure of his actions. The surveillance. The entire scenario seemed
so logical. Why had this happened? He looked at the mass of files before him.
One must always go back to the beginning. He broke a seal, opened the file.

Born in Santiago in 1936, weight eight pounds, completely
bald at birth, skin pink, healthy, a moneyed family, landed aristocracy on his
mother's side, a huge home in Santiago's suburbs where the ground sloped upward
to the Cordillera and the view of the Pacific was spectacular. The wealthy always
took the best locations to build their monuments and pursue their diversions.
The father, Manuel, had been also born in Santiago, his father before him a
Neapolitan fisherman who arrived penniless in 1901. A migration of necessity,
Dobbs mused, noting that the DINA analyst had suggested an escape from the
Carabinieri rather than a legal immigration. In those days, one did not bother
with the fine legal points of immigration.

There was also the hint of another family, left in a Naples slum, but, if true, that did not stop the grandfather from finding solace in the
arms of Rosa, who at fourteen seemed to have been bartered for the
grandfather's labor aboard her own father's fishing boat. He was fifty at the
time. Dobbs imagined himself, fifty-five now, already dry. Comparisons were
odious, he knew, wasteful. It was, in addition, unprofessional. Rosa had been the mother of Manuel, but she had died of diphtheria before she was twenty
and somehow her husband had wound up with her father's boat.

The Latin mind could embroider lavishly, Dobbs knew. But
antecedents carried clues and they were beginning to emerge.

The DINA material told of still another wife, Concetta,
sixteen. So, he is getting interested in older women, Dobbs chuckled, the
thought dispelling for the moment the odd self-pity aroused in himself. Four
additional children emerge, half brothers and sisters, duly recorded by the
birth registrar at the Church of Cabrine, honoring the saint of the fisherman.
And there are two additional births recorded. Two different mothers.
Apparently, the grandfather was an honorable man, accepting the
responsibilities of his fornications.

Energies apparently remain to acquire a fleet of fishing
boats, a moderate monetary success, enough to send Eduardo's father to the
University, then to law school, to gather expertise in marine law--no small
thing in a land with little else than copper and two thousand miles of
coastline.

Dobbs had never been to Chile, but he had read enough to
imagine it, the Cordillera stretching into the infinite blueness of the sky,
the incredible blue Pacific and, in between, the lush land in the south and the
dry craggy earth to the north. It is the mountains, the diet, the iodine in the
fish, and the earthquakes that make them crazy, he had been told.

The father, Manuel, had married Carlotta Ramirez. The DINA
analyst included clippings from the leading paper of Santiago, evidence of the
lavish fanfare of the event. There is a picture of Eduardo's mother, stiffly
resplendent in her bridal gown, and a report of a reception for three hundred
people. So, the son of the Italian fisherman does pretty good for himself,
Dobbs thought, shifting in his chair. The analyst describes their house, a gift
from the bride's parents, their beachside villa, also a gift. There is an
element of envy in the report. The bureaucrat's eye-view of the gentry. They
are newlyweds. He is twenty-four. She is eighteen and they have six servants,
the analyst says--bitterly, it seemed to Dobbs, who wondered whether it was his
own inner voice that had embellished the sarcasm.

So, the stage was set, Dobbs thought, getting up to stretch
his legs, as if he needed some respite before plunging again into the mists of
Eduardo's past.

Eduardo, like his father, was the first son. Other children
follow, three daughters. Obviously, the DINA had interviewed all the servants,
gardeners, and maids, who gave their version of the early days of the Palmero
household. Can one reconstruct a man's essence from this, Dobbs wondered,
continuing to read. The mother was indulgent, spoiled, materialistic,
short-tempered, aloof, cruel to the servants. The father was away on business
often. The young Eduardo was bookish, withdrawn, but athletic, excelling in
sports and scholarship. Dobbs pictured him in his mind, the tanned skin
glowing, the lean body graceful as it moved in the woman-dominated household.

The prince of privilege was given anything he wanted,
including the indulgence of his mother, whose meager fount of affection began
and ended with Eduardo. Even the sisters were indulgent through their jealousy.
Did he manipulate them even then, Dobbs wondered, feeling his figurative nose
warm to the scent. Then as the daughters disappeared into convent schools, the
mother began to travel.

There was one maid, Isabella. The interrogators found her
in a mountain town where the Trans-Andean Railroad chugs over the Cordillera to
Buenos Aires. Dobbs paused, knowing that he had reached the first clearing in
the trail, searching the woman's words, so scrupulously recorded by the DINA
agents. Mutual enemies make strange bedfellows, Dobbs observed, his mind
floating into the past, seeing Isabella's skin soften, lighten, grow supple,
young....

Eduardo had not noticed her at first. Perhaps it was simply
that at thirteen it did not occur to him to notice her since the house was
always filled with women, sisters, his mother, multitudes of female servants,
and his life was filled with other things. Not that he was oblivious to the
female form and the stirrings it could arouse. But he lived mostly in his
imagination then, and the women in his dreams were those that he had met in his
books, sweet and lovely, while the women in the household with their pots of
creams, their manufactured scents, their hairpins and curlers, their sloppy
bathroom leavings, dampened any ardor he might have felt in his adolescent
heart. Attendance at a boy's school gave him an even more distorted view, and
watching the older boys masturbate confused him further, although his curiosity
deepened as his body matured.

She seemed to have been employed in a single role, to keep
fresh flowers neatly arranged in vases throughout the house. He hardly had ever
looked at her, although he seemed always to come across her heavily laden with
either fresh-cut or decaying flower stems as she padded barefoot, like a
frightened kitten, through the house. She was taller than most of the other
young servants, with jet black hair which fell madonna-like and glowing from a
central part.

They were at the dinner table, the long polished rectangle
laden with overabundance, his father's chair empty, the sisters chattering,
while his mother sat sullenly at her end of the table. It was school vacation
time and the girls had brought home friends who raised the decibel level with
their endless high-pitched patter. Squat uniformed servants scurried about,
pouring, serving the varied menu, carrying deep steaming dishes from which the
family helped themselves in turn. When his father was absent, Eduardo was
always served first.

He might have seen her peripherally as she puttered at a
vase at the far corner of the room, one of his mother's prized Mings in which
she was placing bunches of yellow autumn flowers. His gaze, he remembered, had
just floated upward as his mother reached, with the long silver spoon, into a
bowl of steaming vegetables. Her general annoyance and ill-humor, combined with
her abstracted indifference, caused some of the vegetables to drop from the
spoon onto the bare feet of the serving woman, who promptly dropped the dish
with a resounding crash. It might have been a simple accident if it had not
triggered a reaction in Isabella, who turned suddenly, her fingers caught on a
stem, and the Ming vase crashed to the polished tile floor.

The sudden explosion and the reality that it was a
priceless Ming seemed to draw all the anger and annoyance that had been
congealing in his mother's mind. She stood up, the cords in her neck bulging as
she stood towering over Isabella, from whose face the blood had drained,
turning the pink glow to an ashen white.

"You dirty little bitch," his mother screeched,
slapping the girl repeatedly on both cheeks.

"Forgive me, mistress," the girl mumbled, lifting
her face as if welcoming the blows as penance.

"That was priceless, you whore," his mother cried.
"Look what this monster has done!"

"That clumsy little devil," one of his sisters
said.

His mother grabbed the girl by the shoulders and began to
shake her, the silken hair flowing as if caught in the eddy of a heavy wind.

"I will not have this! I will not have this!" his
mother cried. Eduardo could see the harried faces of the servants poking out of
the kitchen.

"You illiterate, incompetent little whore!" his
mother screamed, repeating "little whore" until her anger reduced the
epithet to a long piercing shriek.

Finally, Isabella's stoicism crumbled and a low cry seeped
from her chest, stirring him to compassion. He assumed it was compassion, since
he empathized now and could feel and understand the girl's pain.

"Enough, Mama!" he cried, standing up and banging
on the table. Perhaps it was the sound of a male voice or simply the emphatic
crack of his fist, but it was enough to cause his mother to take her hands off
the girl. She must have been frightened by the outburst and had run screaming
from the room while Isabella slumped to the floor like an injured animal
whimpering with mortification and fear. Finally, one of the older servants
lifted her from the ground and led her away through the kitchen door.

That night he relived the incident in his mind, feeling
again the empathy and compassion for this girl who was hardly more than his own
age. But beyond the pity, beyond the knowledge of her suffering he recognized
in himself for the first time a kinship with the servants. He felt ashamed for
his mother, his sisters, and he determined that his father must intervene to
stop any further abuse. What was a vase compared to a human being?

The next day he searched the grounds of their estate for
her. He found her puttering in a flower patch, kneeling in the soft earth. When
she saw him, she stiffened and burrowed deeper in the earth with a trowel,
ignoring his presence, her long hair spilling over her face, the ends almost
touching the ground.

"You mustn't be afraid," he said kneeling beside
her. She continued to work, ignoring him.

"I apologize for my mother," he said gently.
"Really, she will forget all about it soon. I know she will." He
doubted that. His mother held an endless supply of scorn and vindictiveness,
especially for servants, a fact well known in the household. Whatever enmity
was left was reserved for his father, whom Eduardo adored.

"She will send me away," the girl said finally,
swallowing hard to keep back her tears. Life in the poor villages was a
terrible struggle. In a rich household, one ate regularly.

"It wasn't your fault," Eduardo said. He patted
her arm. The touch of her flesh warmed him, confusing his motives. She was bent
over and her full breasts pressed tightly against her blouse. Despite his
compassion, he was conscious of searching the fabric for the outlines of her
nipples.

"I was not careful," she said.

"It was an accident."

He felt the power of his own protection, seeing her even
now in a different way, confused by a new implication. She is beautiful, he
decided, as she glanced up at him, her large dark eyes reflecting her
vulnerability.

"It will be all right," Eduardo insisted.

"She will send me away," the girl repeated.
"Nothing can stop it." Servants were always being discharged, some
for cause, others out of pique, or simply to reinforce the authority of the
family over their lives. For Isabella, the fear was both tangible and logical.
He stood up, towering over her. Still on her knees in the flower beds, she
looked up at him.

"I will not let them," he said. It was a solemn
commitment. "I swear on my life." He had actually put a hand over his
heart. Then he turned from her and walked swiftly back to the house. For the
first time in his life, he felt the power of his manhood. Without turning, he
knew her eyes were following him.

That night his mother did not come down for dinner and he
took her dinner tray to her bedside. It seemed a perfect ploy for ingratiation.
She was always especially vulnerable when she was wallowing in self-pity.
Reclining on a bubble of pillows, she was doing her nails. She wore a brocaded
bed jacket and her hair had been fastidiously done in an upsweep by one of the
servants. Actually, she was quite beautiful. And she always pretended to be
sick on the eve of his father's return. He was still not of an age when he
could grasp the complex relationship of his parents. When they were together
publicly, they were stiff and polite. Privately, behind their bedroom door,
they shouted and argued. Finally, his father's absences became increasingly
longer and his mother's irritability increased. Dutifully, Eduardo kissed his
mother's cheek after he had arranged the tray securely over her blanketed
thighs.