A Game for the Living

  “Then I don’t believe you.”

  “What do I care what you believe or not!”

  “All right, don’t care!” Theodore said hotly.

  Ramón suddenly gripped the Bible. “There! You see? I swear it! I killed her!” He looked defiantly at Theodore, then thrust the Bible from him.

  Theodore replaced the Bible on the little table. What had he learned now? That Ramón had really killed her or that Ramón was insane?

  A stubborn, angry silence filled the room.

  Then Ramón said: “I can’t understand you, Teo. But that’s a small matter, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not vindictive. Maybe that will help you to understand. I don’t want to think you killed her, Ramón—but even if you had, I don’t think I’d be vindictive. You think that’s foolish, I know. You’ve often thought I was foolish.”

  “Yes. And emotionless—comparatively speaking.”

  “That doesn’t matter much, what you think of me. I offer you my friendship, in spite of the fact you may have killed her. I just don’t know, Ramón. I want to believe that you didn’t—”

  “Therefore you believe I didn’t. That’s the way you believe in God and Christ, or anything else, just what you want to believe and nothing more!” His voice rose in nervous anger.

  “I would be the same, Ramón, if I thought you’d killed her. That’s what I wanted to say.” Theodore was trembling. He felt he had committed himself to a pledge he could never take back. “You’ve always made fun of my philosophy of life—called it no philosophy at all. It has some elements of Christianity—”

  “The few you choose to have!”

  “I try to practice what I believe in.”

  “So you would forgive everybody? Every murderer, every thief?”

  “No. No, I would not,” Theodore said, feeling suddenly defeated and resentful because he did not deserve the defeat, and did not know how to turn it his way. “It’s because I don’t believe you’re an evil man, Ramón. Some men are evil.”

  “Who is and who is not? Whoever you decide?” Ramón asked, flinging his hands out. “You must remember my threats to Lelia. I made no secret of how I felt, did I, Teo? She was a torture to me, and yet I loved her. We have had some fine, friendly talks about that, haven’t we, Teo?” he asked, his voice on a strange note of remorse and hysteria.

  “Yes,” Theodore said.

  “You remember I said once I could kill her, Teo?”

  Theodore did remember, but he was silent.

  “You see? You don’t choose to remember!” Ramón cried triumphantly. “But it’s true, Teo!”

  And did it matter? Did a threat prove anything? Theodore walked a couple of steps in the room and turned again. “I think there are worse crimes than murders—especially murders of passion. There the emotions are involved. It’s a momentary thing—and usually the murderer feels remorseful. He’s a human being at least! But take the men who exploit their fellow men, crooked landlords, crooked politicians—who exploit thousands of people and know what they’re doing and do it all their lives, with calculation, too. They’re the real criminals, the men who should be ashamed before their wives and their children and their God. You’re not one of those, Ramón. Not at all.”

  Ramón was walking about restlessly, smoking. “The answer to that one is simple, Teo. Such men have no consciences. Else they couldn’t sleep. And then they’d die. And the world would be better off, I’ll grant you.”

  Theodore also lighted a cigarette. What more could he say? Ramón might reject his friendship in his words, Theodore thought, but the friendship would remain. Theirs was that kind of friendship. Even if they did not see each other for weeks now, each would miss the other’s dissonance in his life. Theodore went to Ramón, clapped him on the shoulder and smiled. “Ramón, I have an idea. If you’d like a change of scene for a few days, why don’t you come and stay at my house? There’s an extra bedroom and bath, and you could be completely alone if you wished—read, play the gramophone, take walks, even eat your meals alone. Or with me.” He waited. “We might take a trip together a little later—to Lake Pátzcuaro or somewhere.”

  “No, Teo. Many thanks.”

  “I would like to go somewhere out of this town myself, but I feel we should be around to help Sauzas. Something new may turn up.”

  “Oh, nothing new will turn up,” Ramón said with a sigh. He laughed suddenly, like a boy. “How could anything new turn up?”

  Theodore laughed, too, with a sense of relief. “Well, Ramón, think it over. You may change your mind. I’ll be going.” He walked to the door. When he turned, Ramón was standing where he had been, looking at him. “Adios, Ramón.”

  “Adiós.”

  Theodore went quickly down the stairs. An elderly woman in black was struggling up with a bolsa of groceries, holding to the banister. Theodore took the centre of the stairs to let her pass. At the next landing, he almost collided with a priest in a black robe and hat. The priest looked at him quizzically, and on an impulse Theodore stopped.

  “I am looking for the apartment of Ramón Otero,” said the priest. “I am Padre Bernardo.”

  “He is two flights up. The first door on the left as you leave the stairs. Did he send for you?”

  “No,” said the priest, who had a weak, drooping mouth, which the sadly drooping lines of his eyebrows followed above his small brown eyes. “I am coming to pay him a visit.”

  “Because I am his friend—is the reason I asked,” Theodore said. “Are you his priest? Does he confess to you?”

  “Sometimes to me, sometimes to another.”

  “Did he confess the murder?”

  “Sí,” said the priest without emotion.

  “And do you believe him?”

  The priest gave a slow, worldly shrug and said: “Sí. I must believe. He tells me so.”

  The man had the languid, slow-witted manner that Theodore often noticed in priests. He looked as limp as his black robes. “Well—what are you going to do with him?”

  “You are not a Catholic?” the priest asked, jerking his shovel-capped head back a little.

  “No, I happen not to be. I ask because I’m a friend of—”

  “Well—I shall comfort him. I shall do the duty of a priest,” he said matter-of-factly, and even smiled a little.

  “You know he has been exonerated by the police. He is not guilty.”

  The priest smiled with a superior air now. “That is no concern of mine, señor.”

  “You should try to convince him that he is not guilty,” Theodore said quickly, but the priest looked uninterested.

  “We are all guilty in the eyes of the Lord.”

  Theodore’s anger surged suddenly into his face.

  The priest was climbing the stairs.

  Theodore fumed inwardly, without being able to think of a single thing to call after him. In fact, only the ludicrous phrase l’esprit d’escalier crossed his indignant mind. He hurried on down the stairs. A worthless lot! What comfort would he be to Ramón? To reassure him that the fires of hell would be hotter than any he had known on earth? What Ramón needed was a psychiatrist! Dashing out of the door, Theodore overturned a pyramid of oranges on the sidewalk, sending half of them into the gutter.

  “Ah, look at that! Why don’t you watch where you’re going with your big feet!” screamed the fat old woman, who was not stirring from her pillow seat on the sidewalk.

  “I am sorry. I am very sorry.” It seemed to Theodore that the pyramid of oranges had been put there purposely for him to upset in order to make himself feel more asinine, but he repressed his anger and patiently collected the oranges and brought them back to the woman, though the average Mexican might not have bothered, Theodore thought. Theodore knew that he was obviously a forastero in Mexico, and for this reason he fe
lt that his conduct had to be above reproach. He smiled and gave the old woman a five-peso note, for which he got quite a friendly smile in return and a “May God reward you in Heaven!” which lingered in his ears.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  2 March 1957

  Today painted well for the first time since Lelia’s death. A composition in yellows of the view from my studio window. For the first time, a pleasant tiredness after a day’s work—which lasts no longer than I can keep thinking about my day’s work. There is no word from Ramón, and Sauzas says no one intends to make an attempt to treat him. The police are finished with him. They have left him to the priests—who believe everything he says.

  Have the feeling people on the street are watching my house, and when I look at them for a moment, realize I must be wrong. Yet Inocenza says she has never had the telephone ring and there be no voice. Gives me the feeling someone watches to know when I am home and even when I am going to answer the telephone, since I. answers it at least half the time.

  A few American friends in town (Ernest & Judy Riemer, Paul Shipley) & Riemers asked me to dinner, but I have no heart to see them and got out of it. Have seen in the last week only R. once, Josefina once and Olga. Josefina wants to believe R. is guilty just as I want to believe him innocent. “If he is innocent, he is wicked to have put us through all this,” says J. with passion. My efforts to persuade her not to judge R. she laughs off, says I judge him, too, and I cannot convince her that I bear R. not the slightest ill will.

  Night before last: a dream Lelia was decorating her apartment with colored streamers for a Carnaval party. Nothing happened in the dream. It left me oddly cheerful. J. with Sanchez-Schmidt (very decent man) is arranging a sale of Lelia’s paintings & drawings along with the dissolution of her apartment. I am relieved that J. does not expect or need me to help her. I offered. J. gave me the silver box that L. never polished and which I adore, in which she used to keep her jewelry and trinkets—though I was given little of the last, and not my choice: gold pin with figure 8 knot and seed pearls and one odd ear-ring. This is what comes of modestly saying I did not want anything!

  Theodore kept his fingers in the place and turned back. The diary was two and a half years old. He did not write in it every day. Here and there he had made a sketch, and he had made more than he realized of Ramón, who had never agreed to sit for him. It amused Theodore to draw him in front view as a Roman with a wreath on his head, and in profile as a sharp-featured Spanish torero, and to find one sketch as much like him as the other. There was a pen-and-ink drawing of himself hectically feeding Leo in the kitchen, setting a broiled and split lobster before the cat with one hand and with the other pouring melted butter from a pitcher, and below it their dialogue:

  LEO: Where have you been, damn you! Don’t you know it’s after midnight?

  T: I told you I’d be late coming home, and I’m sure Inocenza gave you a little something at five o’clock.

  LEO: She did not.

  T: Don’t lie, Leo. And here’s a fine broiled lobster. Smell it!

  LEO: R-row! If you think this makes up for waiting six hours!

  T: I promise not to do it again.

  LEO: You will. You’re lucky I stay around at all, because you don’t deserve me.

  Theodore turned back to what he had just written and added:

  Kurt Zwingli (now in Zurs) wants me to illustrate in pen and ink a new short book of his. The MS came yesterday. ‘The Straightforward Lie’. A satire of modern life. A young man of the kind who never existed—like those in the exercises of old-fashioned grammar books who stay at pensions in London in order to learn the language, attend concerts and visit museums and exhibit Schwärmerei for every vital statistic—travels around the world today and finds everybody dubious about the good and value of everything, cynical and pessimistic. Our hero refuses to be dampened and misses all the cynicism. Summary cannot do it justice. I adore it.

  I see rather dense but fine penwork which would combine the static stiffness one sees in grammar-book illustrations (ill-fitting clothes, sexless bodies, everyone with two left feet) plus nightmarish darkness, the darkness of pessimism and resignation. If I get myself into the proper frame of mind, I’ll attempt it. Must be done by Sept. To get in proper state of mind, something must happen. Sauzas is apparently making no progress.

  Looked at Rouault. The solace of looking at other people’s paintings.

  About midnight, when Theodore was in the living-room reading, his telephone rang. He felt suddenly sure that it would be his silent caller, and the things he had thought of before to say went through his mind in a frightened flash. His hand was already perspiring as he rested it on the telephone. He yanked the telephone up.

  “Bueno?”

  He heard a confusion of voices at some distance from the telephone, then: “Bueno? Don Teodoro?”

  Theodore relaxed a little. “Si, Arturo.”

  “If you will pardon the hour, Don Teodoro, Ramón would like to see his bird,” Arturo said distractedly.

  “Oh. Does he want me to bring it?”

  “No, he will come. Or is it too late?”

  “Not at all.”

  “In a few minutes, then. Is that all right, Don Teodoro?”

  “Seguro que sí!”

  Arturo hung up.

  Theodore turned on another light in the living-room, then climbed the stairs to the second floor, saw that Inocenza’s light was out, and knocked gently at her door.

  “Sí!” Inocenza said in a frightened voice as if she had awakened from sleep at the same instant.

  “Inocenza, it’s I. I would like to get Ramón’s bird. I’m very sorry to disturb you.”

  “Sí, señor.” He heard a bustling about, then Inocenza opened the door in her robe, barefoot, and turned and took the bird cage down from the hook.

  “He telephoned. Ramón’s dropping over for a moment, but there’s no need for you to disturb yourself.”

  Inocenza smiled. Her glossy hair hung loose, and it was very beautiful falling behind her shoulders. “I would be glad to come down, if you need me, señor.”

  “No, no, I don’t think we will. Thank you, Inocenza.” The bird was silent as he carried it down the stairs, and he wondered if it was still asleep under its cloth, or if it was awake and waiting in a state of terrified suspense for what might be going to happen to it.

  Theodore put a jacket on over his shirt and sweater. The house was chilly. There was kindling and some heavier wood in a leather hod beside the fireplace, and Theodore wadded some newspaper between the fire-dogs, laid kindling on it, and struck a match. A fire would be cheerful for Ramón, he thought. He put on wood as fast as the fire could take it. Then he undraped the bird cage. The bird looked at him intelligently with its head on one side, then hopped closer to the cage door and studied it as if it were contemplating a new means of attack.

  Leonidas jumped silently down from a chair and approached the cage with the stealthy swagger of a lion sure of victory.

  “Oh, no you don’t, Leo,” Theodore said, picking the cat up. He carried him to his study off the living-room, turned on a small light, and set the cat down on a couch. “Stay here and be quiet.”

  Theodore heard a car stop in front of the door and went immediately out to open the iron gates. Arturo was paying the libre driver.

  “I won’t be staying long, Don Teodoro,” Arturo said after greeting Theodore courteously. “I just wanted to be sure that Ramón got here safely.”

  They crossed the patio and entered the house.

  Ramón sat down on the rug beside the bird’s cage. In the better light, Theodore saw that Ramón’s eyes were swollen as if he had been weeping. Arturo wore his anxious smile, and looked at Theodore and shook his head as if to say he had done his best and without much success.

  “Inocenza has taken g
ood care of the bird, I think,” Theodore said to Ramón. “She keeps him in her room because it gets sun and the cat never goes up there to annoy him.”

  Ramón might not have heard him.

  Theodore looked with embarrassment at Arturo, then beckoned to him, and they walked to a corner of the room. “Did anything happen tonight?” Theodore whispered.

  “No, señor. Nothing unusual. He went to church—”

  Ramón was half-reclining beside the cage, opening the door. The bird looked at the open space for a moment, then hopped out and fluttered from the rug to the seat of the sofa. Ramón smiled at it and wiped his eyes. He looked at Theodore. “Forgive me, Teo. Forgive me.”

  “Of course I forgive you!” Theodore said, not knowing exactly what he meant. Theodore felt a reassuring or warning pat on the arm from Arturo.

  Ramón sat up on his heels. “Forgive me,” he said wearily, and held his head in both hands.

  Theodore came closer to him. “Come and sit down.” But Ramón did not respond to his tug at his shoulder. “Is there anything you’d like, Ramón?”

  “No.” Ramón took his hands down from his head and looked at his bird again.

  “You’ve never let him out of the cage before, have you?”

  “No.”

  Ramón had always said, the times that Theodore or Lelia had asked him to let the bird out in his apartment, that he was afraid the bird would fly up to the light fixture on the ceiling and not come down again. Theodore thought Ramón did not want to be bothered getting the bird back in the cage and, perhaps more important, did not want to give the bird that bit of pleasure. There was a curious cruelty in Ramón’s attitude towards the little prisoner whom he gave no joy to and took none from, and it combined both sadism and masochism, Theodore thought, because he felt that in the bird Ramón saw himself.

  Now Ramón was crawling on his knees towards the sofa, holding out his finger with a look of pathetic affection. The bird hopped along the back of the sofa, a tiny, exquisite, sky-blue thing against the terra-cotta-colored sofa. Theodore felt that Ramón was trying to prove something by the fact that the bird would or would not come to him.