A Game for the Living (15 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Velasquez house was not a large one, and it astounded Theodore that so many people had been able to cram themselves into it. People were dancing, even in the foyer, to the Cuban music played by a four-piece orchestra in the living-room. A few of the dancers waved at them gaily. The only light was candlelight, and there was a smell of incense, a trace of a gardenia fragrance, and the mingled perfume of many women. Ramón surveyed the crowd through his clown's face with an apparently simpleminded delight.

Theodore sought out Constancia, the only person he could recognize, and said: “Where's the Señora Velasquez?”

“Señor or Señora?” Constancia yelled.

“
Señora!
”

Constancia looked around, and then pointed. “The mouse!” she said, giggling.

Theodore took Ramón's arm and made his way towards the little grey mouse figure seated on the arm of a chair. “Olga? Good evening! It's Theodore!”

“Ah!” Olga spread her arms. “Señor Kangaroo!” She pulled out the sagging marsupial pouch of his costume. “And Ramón?”

“Not in there!” Theodore said happily. “Here he is! Your hostess, Ramón!”

Ramón took her mouse's paw and bowed politely.

“Your friends the Hidalgos are here, but I don't see them now. This is Señor and Señora Carvajal—Señor Schiebelhut,” Olga said, indicating the people standing near her. “Señora Guzman—”

“No-o!” protested the figure, in a falsetto. “
I
am Señora Jimenez!”

Everybody laughed.

“Well, it doesn't matter who we are tonight!” Olga said. “No more introductions. The drinks are in the garden, Teodoro. Go out and tell them what you want. Somebody stepped on my foot while I was dancing, and I can't move yet.”

“Oh, is it bad?” Theodore asked, bending over her foot.

“No! I am just being lazy. Get a drink and come back and dance with me!”

More people danced and cavorted in the garden behind the house. Unrecognisable figures kicked feet into the air, jumped for the
papier mâché
devils suspended from the trees, and pranced and whirled like dervishes. It seemed unbelievable that such madness could keep up all night, but it would, and all over the city. This was the third of the four nights of Carnaval, and people did not admit fatigue until the day after the last night. For the past several nights the street noises of horns and singing and hurrying feet had drifted up from the pavement into Theodore's windows. This was his first sight of a party of the season, and it was as if all the preliminary excitement he had heard on the streets, all the costumes in shop windows that startled the eyes in the daytime, had gathered in this house for one great explosion.

“A drink, Ramón,” Theodore said, handing Ramón a cup of punch with a straw in it.

Ramón felt for the space between the clown lips and put the straw in it.

“To Carnaval!” Theodore said.

“Carnaval!”

“Are you Eduardo?” a small figure asked, tapping Ramón on the shoulder.

“No,” Ramón said, shaking his head. He shrugged as the feminine little figure—some animal all green with a tail—went prancing away into the house.

Four girls were dancing in a ring, holding one another's hands. They began to do a graceful, complicated step that threw one foot into the centre of the ring, and which had nothing to do with the rumba that the orchestra was then playing. Ramón watched them, too. They were all in yellow, yellow rabbits with flopping ears, and their feet were shoeless, covered only by the yellow cloth feet of their costumes. They looked utterly charming to Theodore, like something come to life from an old story-book, fantastic and sexless and out of their minds. One really could not tell the sex of anyone except possibly by height and by the size of feet. And a couple of tall men were in women's dresses.

The green girl was back. “You
must
be Eduardo! You're joking with me!” she said in a young, tragic voice, staring up at Ramón. “
Say
something to me!”

“Who are
you
?” Ramón asked her.

“Nanetta,” she replied. “Who are you?”

“Pablo,” Ramón said.

“And you?” She looked up at Theodore out of a donkey face.

“Francisco,” Theodore said, bowing.

The girl continued to look at Ramón, though she must have known from his voice that he was not her Eduardo.

“Would you care to dance?” asked Theodore.

She spread her arms suddenly.

“Excuse me, Pablo,” Theodore said, and went off with the girl towards the living-room.

It was too noisy for talking, and at any rate the girl's head was several inches below Theodore's. He began to feel happier. Ramón would be all right this evening, he thought. Something had begun to happen to him when he put on the costume. It had to do with losing his identity, even to himself a little.

“Do you like dancing?” the girl asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you like parties?” She danced close to him, her energetic body bending and swaying to his steps. She kept up a giddy run of questions. What kind of accent was that? Was he really so tall, or was he on stilts? “There is a man on stilts here,” she said. “In the garden.”

Theodore looked and it was so, a man in the costume of Uncle Sam. “Are you watching out for Eduardo?”

“No,” she said, laughing.

“Did you come by yourself?”

“I came with a fri-iend,” she said, with mysterious intonation. “There. The African chief.” She nodded towards a group in which Theodore saw a fat man in chocolate-colored tights with a top hat, cigar and a ring through his nose. “My uncle,” she said, and laughed.

Theodore laughed, too, not believing her. “Are you pretty?”

“Oh,
sí-í,
” she said mockingly.

But Theodore did not want to know what her face looked like, even if it was pretty. He held her closer to him, looked around for Ramón, and realized that there were at least three clown costumes exactly like Ramón's. The girl's hand tightened on the back of his neck.

Midnight came and went. Theodore took several rum high-balls, losing most of them on the living-room mantel while he danced with Olga or some other female figure or the little girl called Nanetta, who stuck with him wherever he went. Somebody had pinned up his tail for him, so he no longer had to carry it draped over one arm or stumble on it dancing. And in a corner of the room, in full view of everybody who might have cared to see, Nanetta threw her arms around his neck, held him very close with her head against his and said: “I love you, Francisco.” They kissed, a bump of kangaroo and donkey muzzles. Then Theodore felt a sudden shame and embarrassment at seeing Ramón watching him with folded arms from a doorway across the room. At least he thought it was Ramón.

“Is that perhaps your friend Eduardo?” Theodore asked Nanetta, pointing to the clown in the doorway.

“Ah, no-o,” she said in her breathless, eager little voice. “Eduardo is taller.”

Theodore could never tell if the girl mocked him or not. He went over to the clown and said: “Is it you, Ramón?”

The figure did not answer at first; then there was a nod and a “
Sí
.”

“Have you danced with your hostess yet?”

“No.”

Ramón had always been fond of dancing, and he danced very well. “She's standing by the mantel now,” Theodore said.

The clown still leaned against the door-jamb. He uncrossed his arms and let them hang, and at that moment Theodore knew it was not Ramón. “Teo, it's Carlos!” the clown said in a tearful voice barely recognisable as Carlos Hidalgo's.

“Old fellow, what's the matter?” Theodore asked, patting his shoulder, but obviously nothing was the matter except that he had had too much to drink.

Carlos touched Theodore's shoulder, too, and lowered his clown's face. He gave a sob, a snuffle, and lifted his head.

“Would you feel better with some coffee, Carlos? I'm sure there's coffee somewhere. I'll ask Constancia.”

“No!” Carlos bleated, pushing himself off from the door and staggering.

Isabel—Theodore recognized her by her size and the way she moved—was suddenly by his side, with a firm grip on his arm. “Sorry, Teo. You see, he insists on starting out with a drink at home, and then—” She broke off with an embarrassed laugh.

“How about some coffee? Shall I ask the girl?”

“No, I'll get it, thanks, Teo.” She steered Carlos away with her.

As Theodore stood watching them he remembered that Carlos had never made good his promise to phone him when he had a free evening. He still wanted to talk with Carlos about the month he had been away before Lelia's murder. Obviously, their talk could not be this night. As he turned to walk back into the room, Olga came to him and said: “Teodoro, Constancia has been looking for you! You're wanted on the telephone!”

“Oh? Where? In this room?”

“Upstairs in my bedroom! The only place you can hear anything!”

Theodore went up to the first floor, looked into the wrong room first, and then found the bedroom with the telephone off the hook and lying on a blue-satin-covered bed. “
Bueno?
” he said. He heard a hum of many voices.

“
Bueno?
” said a woman's melodious voice.

“
Bueno.
This is Theodore.”

“Theodore! Elissa. How are you?”

“Very well. And you?”

“I am at the party I told you about. In Pedregal. Do you think you could come over? I could send a car for you.” Her slurring voice made a lazy, scalloping pattern in his ear.

“Well, I'm not sure, Elissa, because—”

Nanetta's little green figure appeared in the doorway as suddenly as a sprite's, poised on one foot, her hands on the door-jamb.

“I've already sent the car for you, so you don't
have
to decide, Theodore. If you don't want to come, just tell the car to go away again. The party here is just beginning! I do hope to see you.”

“How did you know I was here?” Theodore asked, nervous because Nanetta was clinging to him.

“Oh, I have my spies,” Elissa said with a soft laugh. “
A route a l'heure,
Theodore,” she said, pronouncing his name the French way, and hung up.

Nanetta's arms were around his neck again, her faintly perfumed donkey head against his. And she said not a word. They sat or fell down on the bed, and Theodore noticed at the same time that she had closed the door. It was ridiculous in the costumes—to lie embracing someone whose face you couldn't see, didn't know, and yet it was extraordinarily pleasant. Francisco and Nanetta. He kissed her green cloth neck, holding her tightly to feel some little warmth from her skin. Her hands caressed his back frantically.

Then the door opened with a sharp click.

“Nanetta! What the devil are you doing? Get up! Get out, you little—”

“I wasn't doing anything! “the girl protested shrilly, jumping to her feet.

“And
you,
señor!” It was the African chief. His pot belly was real, and perhaps he was her uncle, or her husband.

“Don't-blame-him-he-is-nice!” the girl said in a shrieking monotone.

“No, I don't blame him, I blame
you
!” roared the black man. “A
school
for you! You need a
convent
!”

They went off down the hall, and Theodore stood for a moment, confused, as a dialogue with himself raced through his head:

‘Well, they don't know who you are.' ‘That isn't the point. Why did you do it at all?' ‘Olga will understand. What did I do, anyway?' ‘They may not know who you are, but they'll recognize your costume when you go downstairs again.' ‘Oh, they'll ignore it. After all, it's Carnaval.' Ramón will hear about it. You've been an ass. A girl probably not more than eighteen! An ass!' Theodore stared at his reflection in Olga's narrow, full-length mirror. Then abruptly he turned and walked to the door.

They had not ignored it downstairs. Theodore's eye was drawn at once to the gesticulating knot of people in the corner of the living-room who stood out somehow in the general confusion. Olga's little mouse figure was among them, and when she saw him she detached herself and ran over to him. She pulled his shoulder down so that she could whisper, and said:

“Theodore, don't let him bother you. He's got a dreadful temper, and besides he's had something to drink. And that girl! She's his niece, and she's just been expelled from college somewhere. You can imagine why!”

Theodore told her that nothing had happened except the girl had tried to kiss him while he was on the telephone, and he couldn't imagine why there was any fuss, but he began to sound like Ramón, protesting too much, and stopped. The fat uncle was approaching him—Theodore thought—from far across the room, and, to Theodore's discomfort, he saw that several people were looking at him, and he imagined that he could hear them saying: “The kangaroo
.
.
.
It was the kangaroo!” But the African chief, who was holding his niece's hand, veered off to one side, heading for a hall, and the girl blew Theodore a kiss as she passed.

Theodore moved towards the garden, looking for Ramón. He was not in the garden. A dart game was going on with one of the
papier mâché
devils as a target, and it would have been perilous to cross to get to the patio. At last he saw Ramón dancing among the couples near the orchestra. He was talking to his partner, a rather tall and slender woman in a royal blue full skirt and a conventional black mask over her eyes. Then he noticed a group of three people turn their heads to look at him. Olga, of course, had a few stodgy people among her friends, but one would think that at Carnaval—Theodore watched Ramón for the first opportunity to speak to him, and at the end of a song he sidled through the crowd to reach him.