A Game for the Living

  Mi corazón. The word corazón occurred over and over in Mexican popular songs. Theodore tried not to listen, but at the last line, each time Constancia came to it—and she was singing the same verse over and over—Theodore saw himself stumbling towards somebody with his own bleeding heart in his hands and a bleeding hole in his chest. He looked through the mail that Olga had saved for him. Bank statements. A telephone bill. Unsealed announcements of exhibitions and of a performance of Lysistrata at Ciudad Universidad under the direction of Carlos Hidalgo with sets by Lelia Ballesteros. It had come and gone. He got the mail he had received this morning out of his jacket pocket, saw a square blue envelope among it, and opened it frantically, letting the rest of the mail drop on the floor.

  It was dated simply ‘Friday’.

  Amor mio,

  I have a feeling you will be back in a day or so and did not want you to come home without a note from me. Welcome home! Did you paint well? We have missed you.

  Let me know as soon as you are back and visit me and bring your work or if you have so many excellent canvases, I’ll come to see you.

  I think I am about to sell a painting to the man of San Francisco—that is to a man he knows. Remember the dealer from S.F. who took photographs of my Veracruz paintings? Much to talk about.

  Ramón is fine. We both miss you.

  Todo mi amor,

  L.

  It had been mailed on 1st February. Today was the 5th. He searched it foolishly for a clue, and could see nothing but Lelia’s good spirits, energy in the crossed t’s that carried over and began the next word and suggested the easy legato of her speech. He carried the letter to his opened desk and laid it gently down. Over the desk hung a pen-and-ink and water-color sketch of a girl lolling in a hammock at Pie de la Cuesta, a bare foot and leg dangling, a string of green coconuts tumbled in her lap. “Just an Indian girl who was selling coconuts. Thank you, Señor, but it has no price. It is promised to a friend.” And Lelia had laughed. Theodore remembered the sound of her laugh, expressing pleasure at the man’s appreciation of her sketch, friendliness and apology all at once. Theodore frowned at the drawing until his tears obliterated the blue of the water, the sky, and finally all of it, and he sank into his chair and wept at his desk. He cried thoughtlessly, like a child over an unwarranted and undeserved disappointment.

  Theodore wondered how little José would take it. He was about nine years old now. Lelia had done four or five paintings of him, though behind her back he was apt to steal her jewelry or a handful of change that she left lying about. “Oh, he can’t help it, Teo. I was not so fond of that pin, anyway!” Lelia would say when Theodore offered to give the child a good scare and get the jewelry back. Lelia loved innocence, which was why she loved most children and only some adults. She always said the ideal thing would be to grow more innocent instead of more wise, and when Theodore had done some absent-minded thing or had got rooked by a shopkeeper, Lelia would tease him and tell him he was certainly growing more innocent every day. He could see Lelia swinging her door open for him with a smile, could see her in tears late at night and inconsolable because a day’s work had gone badly, could see her stooping to talk to a child on her block, buying candy for another, kissing another on the cheek as if it were her own, because the child had posed for her. It seemed to Theodore now that her equal love for Ramón and him, which he had often puzzled over, finding ever new and complex reasons for it, was simply in accord with her nature. To belong to one man would be to shut out all others.

  He walked to his bed and lay down slowly, as unrelaxed as a figure of stone on a tomb. No more conversations with Lelia, no more happiness shared with her when she sold a picture, or when a reviewer wrote a word of praise. As a painter, Lelia was going to be judged by what she had done up until yesterday at the age of thirty years and one month. Theodore’s blood began to stir with thoughts of revenge. Whoever had done it would pay with his life. He would see to that, even if there were no capital punishment in Mexico. This was no ordinary murder—with a bullet or even one or two knife stabs. He heard the scratch and tear of Leo’s claws in the ivy, and the cat arrived at the window-sill and seated himself with his tail curled around his forefeet, staring into the room while his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light. Theodore lowered his hand at the side of the bed, and the cat came noiselessly to him and rubbed his face against his fingers, then jumped on to Theodore’s chest. Leo purred loudly and gazed at Theodore as objectively as if he had been a picture on the wall.

  As he drowsed, Theodore’s thoughts about Ramón became ambiguous, as they had been for moments during the questioning. Ramón had a streak of cruelty, Theodore thought. He was not able to forget that, and not able to control his contempt and fear of Ramón because he had it. That parakeet he kept in his apartment! It drove Theodore insane when he was there. A dozen times Theodore had wanted to rush to the cage and free it and then open the window so it could fly out—but he never had. As far as Theodore knew, Ramón had never let the bird so much as fly around the room, and the little creature worked constantly to get the door of its cage open. Ramón had never even honored it with a name. There was much more Spanish than Indian in Ramón. Ramón accused him of looking down on the Spanish, but Theodore did not look down or up, he simply tried to understand them, and they fascinated him because he couldn’t. Ramón fascinated him with his mixture of Catholicism and cruelty and that extra enigma that was in him because of those four or five days of humiliation and beating in the Chihuahua prison. That beating had gone beyond mere mistakenness, the mere shame of being called a murderer: to Ramón the beating involved a concept of punishment for all his past ‘sins’ foisted upon him by the Catholic Church and created in his own mind. So that, in a curious way, Ramón had enjoyed the beating and the humiliation, though it had made him bitterly hostile to the police because they had inflicted it. Theodore did not want to think that Ramón had killed Lelia, but the facts and Ramón’s character made it possible that he had.

  The ambiguousness of it made Theodore sleepy—a phenomenon he was familiar with. Sometimes his drowsiness, his evasion, angered him when he was trying to think something out, and he paced around his room or drank coffee to combat it. And sometimes, thinking it best, he yielded to delicious little naps in mid-morning or mid-afternoon, induced by his chronic inability to decide anything. (Granted that he wanted to go on living, was his life worth his while or the world’s? Was he contributing anything other than his paintings, which few people looked at, and the money he gave to schools and hospitals and to families like Inocenza’s in Durango? Having found out that he was a good painter, would it avail him anything to try to be a better one? Should he try to take an active part in politics, even if the Mexicans made a laughing-stock of him? Shouldn’t he go to see the mummies at Guanajuato, as Ramón wanted him to do, instead of saying he knew what they would look like and what his reaction would be? How much unhappier would Mexico be if it were Protestant instead of Catholic? Sometimes he awoke with what seemed like brilliant answers to these and similar questions, but most of the time he did not.)

  He was awakened by a knocking on the door and Constancia bawling, as he had asked her not to do, that it was nearly four and that she had to leave. Theodore thanked her and let his head fall back on the pillow again. Then suddenly he got up and, before his head was quite clear, went to his telephone that stood on a low table beside his desk and dialed the number of his lawyer, Roberto Martinez. Theodore told him about Ramón and asked for the name of a reliable lawyer who might help him. Sr. Martinez gave him a name and offered to ring up the man himself.

  “Very well,” Theodore said, “if you’ll be sure to call him immediately.” Theodore made certain Sr. Martinez knew which jail Ramón was in, the large one near the Zócalo, and then he hung up. It was five past four. Theodore regretted that he had waited this long. Guilty or not, Ramón was entitled to the services of a good lawyer.

 
The telephone rang two or three times in the next hour. One call was from Antonio Cortés, a neighbor of Theodore’s in Cuernavaca, another from Mabel Van Blarcom in Coyoacán, a suburb of the city. The third was from Elissa Straeter, an unmarried American woman whom Theodore saw now and then at parties and whom he did not like. They all asked the same questions: was he all right; was there anything they could do; and would he like to visit them? Theodore was very fond of Mabel Van Blarcom and her Dutch husband, but he did not care to visit anybody now. Elissa, who was often drunk but did not sound drunk now, told him, in her invariably calm, polite tone, of a party scheduled for 4th March, during Carnival week, in Pedregal, an exclusive residential district just north of the city.

  “I can imagine you can’t think about a party now,” Elissa said in a sympathetic drone, “but maybe by the time a month rolls around—it’s Johnny Doolittle’s party, and he told me to ask anyone I wished, which doesn’t mean of course that you have to escort me, but we’d all love to see you there. I would.”

  Theodore thanked her and said he would remember and try to come.

  He went downstairs and mixed a strong whisky and water with an intention of drinking it and trying to sleep again, but he felt no nearer sleep after he had finished it, and he picked up the telephone and called the prison.

  “May I speak to Capitán Sauzas?” he asked.

  Much clicking and interference on the line. He could hear both ends of a conversation concerning the presence of bicycles in an area reserved for traffic officers’ motorcycles. One of the men was very angry with the other.

  “Capitán Sauzas is not here,” the voice said finally.

  He was probably sleeping, Theodore thought. “May I speak to Ramón Otero?”

  “Who?”

  “Ramón Otero. O-t-e-r-o. He is being held there for questioning in the Ballesteros—the Ballesteros murder,” Theodore stammered nervously, knowing already that it was hopeless.

  “Prisoners are not allowed the use of the telephone, señor,” said the man with a smile in his voice.

  “Can you tell me what is happening to him? I’ll be very glad to wait while you find out.”

  “No, señor, we cannot give out that information.”

  Theodore looked up his lawyer’s home telephone number—it was nearly seven now—and called it. Sr. Martinez assured him that the lawyer he had found had gone at once to the prison, but he had not heard from him since. Theodore got the office and home telephone numbers of the criminal lawyer, a Sr. Pablo Castilo Z., and called them both, but neither the office, which did not answer, nor his home, where a maid answered, gave him any information.

  Theodore opened a can of fish for Leo, fed him in the kitchen, then went to bed. He felt too tired to sleep, and there was something nightmarish about the light in the room with the blinds drawn against the slow dusk. His body felt too heavy to move, yet his brain spun lightly round and round, coming to grips with nothing.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sr. Castillo Z. telephoned at nine-fifteen the next morning and woke Theodore up.

  “Well,” he said on a note of triumph, “your friend is released. They questioned him all night. I haven’t even been to bed yet. But he is free.”

  “Then they think he’s innocent?”

  “Why, yes. So do I. The evidence is not enough—”

  “They proved what time he went to his own house after dinner?”

  “No—not exactly. But what they have is sufficient to show that Ramón Otero did not do it. Señor Otero thinks he was home by ten-thirty. Now the doctor does not think she was killed before eleven. Eleven is the earliest.”

  Or ten minutes to eleven, Theodore thought, remembering his watch had said one-fifty when the doctor gave his two-to-three-hour opinion. And Ramón only thought he was home by ten-thirty. “How is Señor Otero?” Theodore asked.

  “Ugh! Exhausted, señor! No sleep for two nights in a row. I can assure you, a guilty man would have broken down. But your friend protested his innocence to the last. You did not think he was guilty, señor!”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He will be allowed to go home this morning. They have sent for his partner, Señor—”

  “Baldin.”

  “Yes. He is going to see that he gets home. Ah—shall I send the bill to your address, señor, or to Señor Otero?”

  “You may send it to me,” Theodore said.

  After he had hung up, Theodore sat on the edge of his bed thinking. A criminal lawyer, no matter how clever, couldn’t have got a guilty man away from the police that fast, Theodore supposed. So he had to believe then that Ramón wasn’t guilty. Perhaps. Things were not always logical in Mexico. In America, they might have spent a week rounding up Ramón’s friends and acquaintances and trying to establish when and where he had made every move before and after the time of the murder. Only then would they have come to a decision. But in Mexico—

  Theodore made another attempt at unpacking, but his mind wandered back to Ramón. He could not feel positive that Ramón hadn’t done it. With policemen, Ramón could turn his heart and his face to stone, if he wanted to. Theodore began to think it was possible that he had fooled the police.

  At ten-thirty he tried again to reach Sauzas by telephone. This time, after a ten-minute wait, he got him.

  “Have you definite proof that he is not guilty?” Theodore asked.

  “Proof?” Sauzas hesitated. “No, except that he does not behave like a guilty man, señor. He behaves like a man who has lost his wife. We believe that the murderer got in by the ruse of delivering flowers or bringing flowers, and that he had a small boy buy them for him so the flower seller would not remember him. We are trying to find this boy in the neighborhood, but the flower seller does not remember enough about the boy.”

  “So—there are no new clues at all?”

  “No, señor. But now our work begins, eh? You will stay in your house, señor, until further notice, if you please.”

  “You mean I can’t go out anywhere in the city?”

  “Well—yes. But don’t attempt to leave the city. We shall be wanting to question you again.”

  “Very well. And, Señor Capitán—I should like to be informed of any new thing you find out. Will you do that?”

  “Very well, señor.”

  Theodore debated for a moment, then called Ramón’s number. The telephone rang about ten times, but Theodore waited patiently.

  Finally, he heard a confusion of two voices and then Ramón’s partner, Arturo Baldin, said: “Bueno?”

  “Bueno, Arturo. How are you? This is Theodore Schiebelhut.”

  “How are you, Don Teodoro? I hope well.”

  “Thank you. I wanted to ask about Ramón.”

  “Ah, he is very tired, señor. I am trying to get him to go to sleep,” said Arturo in his kindly, paternal voice.

  “Yes. I can understand. Is there anything I can—” Theodore hesitated, on an emotional fence as to putting himself out for Ramón.

  “I don’t think so, Don Teodoro. We have some sleeping-pills. They should have an effect soon.”

  In the background, Ramón murmured something.

  Theodore had wanted to talk to Ramón. Suddenly he did not. “I’m glad you’re there to look after him, Arturo.”

  “It’s hard to keep him quiet, because he wants to go out to see—Who is it, Ramón?—Josefina.”

  But he doesn’t want to see me, Theodore thought. “No, it’s best he stays quiet,” Theodore said.

  They hung up cordially.

  Inocenza arrived at three in the afternoon. She had seen the papers and was full of questions, sympathy, condolences from all her family in Durango, until Theodore finally said, gently: “Please, Inocenza—would you be quiet?”

  “But you do not think Don Ramón kille
d her, señor!” She was very fond of Ramón.

  “He was released this morning.”

  “Oh! “she said with relief. “Thanks be to God! He is not guilty!”

  “No,” said Theodore. “Let me help you with your things. What’s all this?”

  “My family sends a duck with their good wishes. And my Aunt Maria made a counterpane for you. That is this,” she said, slapping a string-tied bundle on the floor. “Inside the wrapping is very pretty, but I didn’t want it to get dirty on the plane. Ah, the plane, señor! The soup went this way, that way! I was afraid for my life, especially when I thought of the Señorita Lelia—la pobrecita. No, don’t carry anything, it is not fitting for you to carry my suitcase. Would you like tea or anything, señor?”

  “No, thank you, Inocenza. I am just very glad you are back.” He walked to the window that looked on to the patio and lighted a cigarette. It was good to have her in the house again, to hear her hurrying footsteps and her humming and singing in the kitchen, though she would probably be careful not to hum today. Inocenza had been very fond of Lelia, too, and not at all jealous, as Ramón had suggested a few times. Sometimes Ramón tried to pique him by telling him that Inocenza was his ‘real wife’. It was true she got her way most of the time, but what servant didn’t? Inocenza had been with him nearly four years. Ramón wanted a servant to be more servile than Inocenza, perhaps, yet neither Ramón nor anybody else could find one justifiable complaint about her. She stayed home at night, she ironed well and cooked well. She was also pleasant to look at, with her shining black hair always neatly done up in a great bun at the back of her neck. She wore shoes with a slight heel, which set her apart from the average flat-footed drudges one saw in the markets, and she wore a little lipstick. She was only thirty-two, and at the prime of her attractiveness, Theodore thought, though the only man she seemed to like at all was a quiet fellow called Ricardo who worked in Toluca and seldom got to the city. Eight or nine years ago she had borne an illegitimate son, Pepe, who lived with her family in Durango. Theodore sent him little gifts and toys now and then.