A Game for the Living

  Alejandro Nuñez, baker, wishes his beloved friend LELIA BALLESTEROS a serene voyage into eternity.

  They were all colophoned with black crosses or rows of black crosses. There was a small square representing the regret of Xavier Sanchez-Schmidt, the art dealer. And one from a club of some sort in Veracruz.

  The doorbell rang, and Theodore jumped up from his chair. “It’s probably Ramón, and if so you can set another place, Inocenza.”

  A young man stood in front of the iron gates. Theodore hesitated, then continued across the patio.

  “Yes?” Theodore said.

  “Buenas tardes. Señor Schiebelhut?” the young man said with a faint smile. “I have something I think belongs to you.” He indicated a flattened paper bag that he was holding securely under one arm.

  “What is it?”

  “A muffler.” His eyebrows rose expectantly. “Didn’t you lose one?”

  “No.” Theodore shook his head.

  “I think you did. Try to remember. A few days ago?”

  “I haven’t lost a muffler. Where did you find it?”

  The young man’s face looked disappointed. “Here.” He moistened his lips. “On the sidewalk here. A good muffler. I thought it might be yours. Adiós, señor.” He turned quickly and walked away.

  Another pedlar’s trick, Theodore thought. If he’d looked at the muffler, the boy might have said: ‘Well, I’ll let you have it anyway for ten pesos. You can see it’s worth twice that.’ Theodore opened his gates and looked in both directions for Ramón. Ramón was not in sight but the young man with the paper bag was crossing the street near the corner, and he looked back over his shoulder at Theodore. His cheap, baggy black trousers hung on his bony hips like trousers on a scarecrow, and for an instant Theodore was reminded of the stick figures he often drew with his fountain-pen at the bottom of postcards and letters to Lelia.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ramón did not want a drink, and he refused to take off his overcoat. He sat on the edge of the sofa, his hands gripping his knees, trembling. It was nearly midnight. “I’ve been to see Eduado Parral and Carlos. I said I was innocent, but I don’t know if they believe me. How can you tell if someone believes you?” He spoke with the tremulous rush of hysteria. “And you, Teo? Do you believe I am innocent?”

  “I believe you, Ramón.” Theodore did not know what Ramón might have done if he had told the truth, that he did not know what to believe. He wondered what Eduardo had made of it. Eduardo was a young hard-working painter, a good-natured fellow who perhaps had been infatuated with Lelia himself, though he had always got on well enough with Ramón and him. Theodore could not imagine Eduardo losing his temper, but what would Eduardo have made of all this protesting? Theodore went to his bar trolley, poured two whiskies, and carried one to Ramón. “This will do you good. You haven’t had anything to drink, have you?”

  “No. No, thank you, Teo. No whisky.”

  “Tea?”

  “No.” Ramón rubbed his hands on his thighs.

  “What did Carlos say to you?” Theodore asked.

  “He was very quiet. I don’t know what he said. Then he had a couple of strong whiskies, and he told me to shut up. He said it was a disgrace to the memory of Lelia. Imagine! Then Isabel tried to calm him down and apologize for him, because he must have been drinking before I came and he was certainly out of his head when I left.”

  “Well—Carlos liked her, too.”

  Ramón laughed. “Her? Carlos likes any pretty face. But he has no right to tell me to shut up. I went to see him as a friend. I think I’ll cross him off my list of friends. Teaching at the Universidad has made him an adolescent again. He’s not a man, he’s a little boy who depends on his wife to wipe his nose! And he tells me to shut up!”

  Theodore was silent a moment. “I find Carlos annoying sometimes myself. It’s too bad you went to see him, Ramón. You didn’t have to. I realise—we all realise—the police questioning was very disturbing to you. They accused you, insulted you, so you think you have to make sure nobody thinks you’re guilty.” Theodore smiled a little.

  Ramón looked at him angrily. “You seem to think it’s a laughing matter. Look at you. Not a bit upset, are you? I’ll bet you didn’t shed a tear about Lelia!”

  “All I meant to say was that I understand how you feel, Ramón. Arturo said you weren’t sleeping well. If you need some more sleeping-pills, I have some.”

  “I don’t want any sleeping-pills.”

  What did he want, Theodore wondered. Did he expect them to fall on each other’s shoulders and weep about Lelia and what she had meant to them? He extended his packet of American cigarettes, but Ramón shook his head. “Are you staying at your house or with Arturo?”

  “At mine. Arturo spent the night last night.”

  Theodore winced at the thought of Ramón’s apartment in his present state of mind. The apartment consisted of one high-ceilinged room with a kitchenette in the corner. The toilet was down the hall. The room had a few bright pictures of Lelia’s in it, and if Ramón was in good spirits it was not gloomy, but the gloom set in as soon as Ramón was gloomy, and one saw the grey wall out the window, the horrible light at the top of the ceiling, and the shabby, second-hand furniture.

  “You’re not disturbed at all, are you?” Ramón asked, blowing smoke from his tiny Carmencita cigarette out of his nose.

  “Some things one doesn’t show in front of people, Ramón,” Theodore replied, putting himself on guard.

  “Am I people? Your best friend, you used to say?”

  “I still consider you my friend. I hope the lawyer was of some help to you.”

  “Oh, yes. The lawyer. He stood around and listened until they were through with me.”

  “You weren’t there very long, anyway, Ramón.”

  Ramón looked at him through his pink lids, a bitter smile on his lips.

  Theodore wondered what he might say that would erase the hostility from Ramón’s face. Ramón was afraid, Theodore thought. That was why he went around protesting to everybody that he hadn’t killed Lelia. He was afraid, because many times, in his anger at Lelia, he must have imagined doing just what the murderer had done—or perhaps Ramón himself had done. Theodore wanted to ask Ramón quietly, now while he could look at him, whether he had done it, but he was afraid to ask him. Theodore glanced at the stairs. Inocenza had waited up for a while to see Ramón, but finally she had gone up to her room, and perhaps now she was asleep.

  “I am so glad to see that nothing bothers you, Don Teodoro. You never wanted to marry her, did you?”

  “I never wanted to marry anybody. That doesn’t mean I loved Lelia any less,” Theodore replied.

  “Lelia was just a charming girl you met on your travels. A beautiful Latin girl with a talent for painting.”

  “Lelia was more to me than that. You don’t know what you’re saying now.”

  Ramón’s trembling had subsided, though he had not touched his drink. “Maybe you can imagine her even closer to you now that she’s gone. Everything’s in one’s own mind, you always say. You’re not like the rest of us, are you, Teo.”

  Theodore did not want to get into a discussion of the Catholic versus the Protestant conscience or, what was worse, the Catholic conscience versus Ramón’s idea of ‘Existentialist’s conscience’, which was no conscience at all to Ramón. Just because he did not torture himself, as Ramón did, for having an affair out of wedlock!

  “Always taking trips away from her,” Ramón continued, as if to himself.

  “Often with you both. I was in love with her, too, Ramón.”

  “I believe you, Teo. It was just a funny kind of love. You used to urge me to marry her and her to marry me. Remember?”

  “But that was when I’d just met you both, Ramón. Before I realized Lelia didn’t want t
o marry. I considered myself something of an intruder then. I didn’t realize. And I’m sorry I intruded on your privacy by suggesting that you marry each other. It wasn’t any of my business.”

  “No, it was not. But you wanted us to get married, didn’t you?” Ramón asked, pointing a finger at him.

  “I thought you were enough suited and that you were in love with each other.” Theodore looked at his little glass of whisky, which he was holding in his hand as if he were frozen. He felt that he was blushing. It was as if Ramón had looked in on a private fantasy, a foolish, romantic one. By feeling well disposed towards their marrying, Theodore had used to imagine that he would ‘win’ in the situation, and that by absenting himself from Lelia he could keep her memories of him without the blemishes that married life would put on them. He had used to imagine that if Lelia chose Ramón, she would end by not liking Ramón as much as she would have liked him, as a husband. And there had been the Christian “to give is more blessed than to receive” working its effect, too, no doubt. In all these senses, Theodore had used to imagine ‘winning’. He would have been desolate if Ramón had married Lelia, yet in a perverse way would probably have enjoyed his desolation.

  Theodore’s French clock on the mantel struck twelve in little ‘tings’.

  “Why didn’t you ever ask her to marry you, Teo? She might have accepted.”

  “I had two reasons. The first is, it would have hurt you. The second is that I doubt my loyalty—I would doubt it for a wife. I used to fall in love every month when I was younger, depending on what I was working on. A new picture, a new style, and there was another girl to go with it. Something like that might have happened if I’d married Lelia. As it was, I—I went on being in love with her for three years. It was pleasant for both of us, I think.” He frowned and tossed his whisky down in one gulp. “I don’t want to talk about that now. I’m tired, Ramón, and so are you.”

  Ramón stood up suddenly. “Then I won’t keep you up. We are all tired. So we’ll tuck ourselves in our little beds.” Ramón looked at him from his full height, and there was still the contempt in his face which both annoyed Theodore and hurt him.

  “Ramón, let’s say you loved her more, loved her a longer time—that you would have made her a good husband—but I loved her, too, Ramón.” He put his hand on Ramón’s shoulder, expecting Ramón to jerk away, but when Ramón was motionless, Theodore’s fingers tightened. “My friend, I’m sorry it couldn’t be.”

  “What?” Ramón asked impatiently.

  Theodore took his hand away. “Shall I come out with you? Do you want to get a libre?”

  “Thank you, I’ll walk a way.”

  Theodore went out and opened the gate for him. He started to say that Inocenza sent her regards, then decided not to. “Try to rest, Ramón.”

  “Oh yes,” Ramón said mockingly, and then he disappeared into the darkness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A week passed. Sauzas telephoned Theodore one afternoon and asked him to come to the prison to look at six ‘suspects’ he had gathered. Theodore had not seen any of the men before, to his knowledge, though one, a wretched, scrofulous fellow of thirty-five, had been guilty of another brutal rape and murder.

  Theodore tried to paint, but did so badly he stopped. As was usual with him, he was having a delayed reaction, and he felt more depressed in the third week after the murder than he had in the first. He slept badly, and got up often in the night to write something in his diary and to read what he had written in the past. He looked also for names of people that Lelia might have dropped in talking to him, and found not a single one, because he did not usually enter that kind of detail in his diary.

  He phoned the Hidalgos one evening with an idea of going to see them. Carlos answered and said he had to work all evening.

  “What about tomorrow?” Theodore asked. “Could you both come for dinner?”

  “All this week is bad, Teo,” Carlos said. “I’ll give you a ring next—”

  “One thing I wanted to ask, Carlos. Nothing else has occurred to you? About Lelia? Some name she mentioned, some fear—anything?”

  “Teo, I’m as much in the dark as you.”

  “You were at least here in January, and I wasn’t.”

  “But I didn’t see her.”

  “Not even when she did the Lysistrata sets for you?”

  “One set. It was nothing at all. She came out to the Universidad one afternoon—” Carlos broke off.

  “All right,” Theodore said, with a sigh.

  They agreed to get in touch the following week.

  To add to Theodore’s nervousness, two or three times when he answered the telephone he got no response from the other end of the line. Theodore mentioned this to Sauzas, who showed a mild but persistent interest in it. Had Theodore heard any noises in the background? Who had put the telephone down first? Theodore had, though the second time it happened he thought he had waited about three minutes. Why hadn’t he waited longer? Well, there hadn’t seemed to be any purpose in waiting longer! The telephone calls might not have anything to do with the murder, after all. Could it be Ramón? Ramón was acting very strangely, not going to work, just sitting in his apartment or else dashing across town to call on someone he or Theodore knew, or Lelia had known, and assure them of his innocence. Sauzas was keeping a close watch on Ramón.

  Theodore had an idea that the telephone caller might be Elissa Straeter, because she had played this telephone trick a few times before, calling again a moment later and speaking to him. This happened only when she had been drinking. Now and then, when he saw her at a party, she flirted with him, told him he was the only man she was attracted to in Mexico, but Theodore was repelled by her, and always had been. Since he had been a little abrupt with her when she had called to express sympathy after Lelia’s death and to invite him to a party, he thought she might be retaliating in this way. Or she might have been too drunk to say a word. Theodore had said: “Elissa? . . . Elissa?” once into the telephone, but, feeling very silly, he had stopped. It would have been difficult to explain to Sauzas, perhaps, but Theodore knew as surely as he existed that Elissa Straeter had neither killed Lelia nor hired anyone else to kill her. She was from one of the ‘good’ families of America, and politeness and gentleness were so deeply instilled in her they were really part of her blood, along with the alcohol. “Oh, of cou-rse” and “Thank you” were her most frequent phrases. He had once seen a drink spilled down her dress by someone, accidentally, and Elissa had said in her drunken, gentle voice: “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Theodore could not have borne Sauzas dashing off on the tangent that Elissa had a motive if she was in love with him, so he said nothing about her. She was one of those women, not the first in Theodore’s life, whose attentions were too embarrassing to acknowledge. Every man, even the ugliest, must have them, Theodore thought, such was the variety of sexual conditioning.

  One morning, when Theodore was in his studio trying to work, Inocenza came in with the first mail. There was a bill from the lawyer Castilo, a bulletin from the Art Institute at San Miguel de Allende, and a postcard which showed a colored picture of an airport with a hangar flying an American flag. Theodore turned it over and read:

  Monday

  Amados mios,

  I am doing a little painting and having a good time with Inés, who is driving me all around Florida. Beautiful country and wonderful climate. Returning in two weeks. Love to you both,

  Your Lelia

  It was postmarked February 18 from Tampa, Florida. Inés was a cousin of Lelia’s, who was married to an American and lived in Orlando.

  “What is it?” asked Inocenza, who was watching him.

  Theodore shook his head, too dazed to say anything for a moment. “A joke—somebody’s joke.” He handed her the card. Inocenza could not read very fluently, but the card was typewritten and in Spanish. And,
curiously, it was just what Lelia might have written, but Lelia would have signed it ‘L.’ with a pen and put in a couple of X’s, probably.

  “From Señorita Lelia?”

  “It was written only a week ago, Inocenza! And mailed from North America!”

  “Name of God! It is from her spirit!” Inocenza exclaimed, and clapped her hand over her mouth while her brain struggled to convince her that this was not true.

  “No, it is somebody’s joke,” Theodore said angrily, starting for the telephone in his bedroom.

  He could not reach Sauzas, but he said firmly that it was “muy, muy importante”, and he was told that Sauzas would be radioed at once, as he was somewhere in a police car. Theodore walked around his bedroom, staring at the postcard and wondering if the typewriter could be traced, and if it were a Spanish typewriter, because a tilde was missing over one of the n’s. Or the writer might have been clever enough to leave off the accents to make it appear to be written on an American typewriter. But Theodore had a feeling that the person who had written the postcard was in Mexico, D.F. It was the joke of someone who wanted to watch the reaction.

  Carlos Hidalgo? One of his wild practical jokes had been to invite people to a party at a wrong address—later, laughing hilariously, he had picked them up and taken them to the right address, his new apartment—but Theodore could not believe Carlos would stoop to such a thing as this.

  Sauzas telephoned within a quarter of an hour, and Theodore read him the postcard.

  “Do you have any idea who sent it?”

  “Absolutemente no!”

  “Ah-hah,” Sauzas said thoughtfully. “Señor Schiebelhut, I am now very near the house of Ramón Otero. I wonder if you could meet me there in a few minutes?”

  “Well—yes. In the house?”

  “On the street. On the corner to the right of the entrance as you face it. In about ten minutes. Can you do that?”

  “It may take me fifteen. I’ll come as quickly as I can.”