The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini Read online

  Pacheco took hold of my elbow and slowly walked me toward the bed. “You have nothing to be anxious about, Nicky.”

  Despite my reluctance, I moved forward. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “It’s a gift. Calm yourself.”

  I had never seen a naked woman except in art books and here was one lying a few feet away. What’s more, I was supposed to make love to her. Obviously, love wouldn’t enter into it, but at fourteen that was how it seemed. I felt on the verge of panic.

  “But who is she?” I whispered, hoping she wouldn’t hear.

  “A friend. Go to her. I’m telling you to do it.”

  How do I describe the woman? First of all, there was nothing romantic or beautiful about her, but neither was she entirely repulsive. At the time I thought her old, but she was probably about thirty. She must have been part Indian, because she had those high cheekbones and slanted eyes and her skin was a light tawny color. She lay on her back, propped up on her elbows. She was a very large woman, not so much fat as swollen, with a great round belly. Her breasts were huge but also rather flabby so they lay on her chest and stomach like two pigskin purses. The room was hot and her skin was shiny with sweat. Even now I recall the tiny rivulets of perspiration that ran off her belly. Around her neck was a thin silver chain from which was suspended a small letter M. Her nipples in the dim light looked black. Her pubic hair had been shaved.

  She looked at me with a sleepy grin and motioned me over with one finger. Pacheco gave me a little push and I approached the bed, so terrified that I could barely stand. Slowly, the woman reached out and took hold of my belt; then, with her eyes still on mine, she unfastened the buckle and the snap. She had short black hair that surrounded her head like a bowl and very round cheeks, like a chipmunk with its mouth full of seeds.

  Giving my pants a yank, she pulled them down so they fell about my ankles. Then she took my cock in her hand. I was in such a daze that I didn’t seem to be doing something so much as watching from outside my body. Slowly, she pulled me to her, forcing me gently onto the bed as if my cock were a little leash. Had I been older and more experienced, I’m sure my anxiety would have kept me from having an erection, but at that age I knew no better. I was too confused to think and my body did the only thinking necessary.

  As I lay on top of her, she slipped my cock inside her, then wrapped her legs around mine, pinning me to her. I’ve said she was big but she was also very tall, because my head barely reached her shoulder. She smelled of oil, the warm olive oil that my mother sometimes used to clean the wax out of my ears when I was a child. I lay with my head pressed against her breast. She felt very soft and her skin was wet and rubbery. It was like lying on top of a warm and greasy inflatable mattress. I tried not to touch her flesh with my hands, partly for fear of offending her nakedness; but, given my anxiety about falling to the floor, I was afraid not to hold on and my fingers fluttered nervously about her ribs. But then she wrapped her arms around me and I lay pinned to her breast like a little brooch as she manipulated her hips. I came right away, a small explosion of light. Afterward she let me lie a little longer so I could catch my breath and get over my surprise. Then she gave me a slight shove and I slid off her body and onto the floor.

  “You boys,” she said in a rather masculine voice, “it’s like eating too much white cake.” She patted my hand, then turned over on her side and appeared to go to sleep. Although the sheet was white, she was lying with her hips on a bright red towel. I stood for a moment, not knowing what to do. Pacheco put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Well done, Nicky. There’s a bathroom over there if you want. Then go down through the door on the other side and you’ll find the others.”

  I washed myself carefully, not that I felt she was dirty but to wash from my skin the strong smell of her oil, which I was afraid my mother would notice and even recognize. Then I went through the second door and down a flight of stairs. Certainly I was too astonished to think much about what was happening. At the bottom, through another door, I found ten of my schoolmates in a long room like the dining room at school. There were even tables. They sat and studied me seriously as I walked slowly across the bare wooden floor.

  “Did you do it?” asked Eric Schwab.

  I felt immediately guilty, as if I was the only one who had given in to the woman, while they had abstained. I nodded my head.

  With that they all leapt up, clapped, hammered on my back, and filled the room with their laughter. Some were still in their school uniforms from that morning—white shirt, blue pants and jacket with the school shield over the heart. “We too,” said Schwab. “We all had a turn. Pacheco’s letting the whole class fuck her. Of course, I’ve had women before.”

  He said this and the other boys laughed or groaned or called him a liar. One boy had found a broken chair leg and let it dangle from the button fly of his pants in mockery of Schwab’s sexual prowess. We were all extremely excited, even hysterical. The hugeness of Pacheco’s prank made our hearts race.

  “I could have another go at her,” said Schwab. “I like those big ones.”

  Of all of us, Schwab probably looked the most mature. Even then, he must have been six feet tall and had hair on his upper lip. He was muscular and blue-eyed and something of a bully. He pretended to be afraid of nothing but once we had seen him taunt Pacheco and be so badly beaten that he had missed several days of school. Now, if Pacheco had told him to jump through a flaming hoop, Schwab would have jumped.

  I doubt that any of us had been with a woman before, not even Schwab, and our talk, which in memory strikes me as silly, was full of nervous hilarity as we compared our different yet similar experiences. Schwab swore he had made her moan with pleasure and that he had held himself back for thirty minutes. Some said it was great, some weren’t sure. Two boys wept. Another was angry, another full of guilt. Throughout the afternoon, more boys came clown the stairs and were astonished to find us. Some laughed, some felt embarrassed, most did both. Of the twenty-five Boris had found out of a class of thirty, only two had refused to climb into the whore’s bed. One was Carl Dalakis. Another two admitted they hadn’t been able to have erections. I expect there were others who had been unable to perform, but they kept their mouths shut. Those who admitted failure were badly teased. Schwab said that he would bring them back and show them how to do it.

  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 astonis
hment. 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.