What We Become (36 page)

“I never imagined Mecha looking after her son in this way, among the chess-playing world,” Max said, testing the ground. “My memory of her is very different. From before all this.”

Irina appears interested. She leans forward, resting her elbows on the table, next to a glass of Coca-Cola with ice cubes floating in it.

“Is it a long time since you two last met?”

“Many years,” he says. “And our friendship goes back even ­further.”

“What a lucky coincidence, both of you being here in Sorrento.”

“Yes. Very lucky.”

The waiter brings his drink. The young woman gazes at Max, intrigued, while he raises his glass to his lips.

“Did you ever meet Jorge's father?”

“Briefly. Just before the war.” He sets the glass down gently on the table. “Actually, I knew her first husband better.”

“De Troeye? The musician?”

“That's right. The one who composed the famous tango.”

“Ah, of course. The tango.”

She gazes at the horse-drawn carriages stationed in the square, awaiting prospective customers. The drivers idling in the shade beneath the palm trees.

“That world must have been fascinating. Those clothes, that music. Mecha said you were an exceptional dancer.”

Max waves his arm in a gesture that is midway between a polite protest and dismissive modesty. He learned it thirty years back, from one of Alessandro Blasetti's films.

“I wasn't bad.”

“And what was she like then?”

“Elegant. Very beautiful. One of the most attractive women I ever met.”

“It feels strange to think of her like that. She's Jorge's mother.”

“And how is she as a mother?”

A silence. Irina touches the ice in her glass with her finger, but doesn't drink.

“I'm not the best judge of that.”

“Too possessive?”

“She shaped him, in a way,” Irina says, after remaining silent for a moment. “Without her sacrifices, Jorge wouldn't be what he is. Or what he could become.”

“Do you mean he would be happier?”

“Oh, no, please. Nothing of the sort. Jorge is a happy man.”

Max nods, politely, while he takes another sip of his drink. He needn't dig far to remember happy husbands whose wives, in another life, deceived them with him.

“She didn't want to create a freak, the way some mothers do,” Irina adds after a while. “She always did her best to bring him up
like a normal boy. Or at least to make that compatible with chess. And she succeeded, to some extent.”

She says these last words hurriedly, glancing around the square, as though afraid Mecha Inzunza might appear at any moment.

“Was he really a gifted child?”

“Just imagine. He learned to write at the age of four from watching his mother, and by the time he was five he knew all the countries and capital cities in the world by heart. She realized his potential very early on, but also the potential dangers. And she worked hard to avoid them.”

Her face seems to tense for a moment when she says the word
hard
.

“She still does,” Irina adds. “Constantly . . . as if she is afraid he will fall into the abyss.”

She doesn't say
an
abyss, but rather
the
abyss, Max notices. The noise of a Lambretta backfiring as it passes close by appears to make her jump.

“And she is right,” she adds, gloomily, almost in a whisper. “I have seen many people fall into it.”

“Surely you exaggerate. You're young.”

She gives a brisk, almost savage smile that seems to age her by ten years. Then her face relaxes again.

“I've been playing chess since I was six,” she says. “I have seen many players end badly. They become caricatures of themselves, away from the chessboard. Being the best requires an inhuman effort. Especially if you never make it.”

“Did you once dream of being the best?”

“Why do you speak in the past tense? I still play chess.”

“I'm sorry. I had no idea. I assumed that an analyst was similar to the team of bullfighters in Spain whose job it is to assist the matador. I didn't mean to offend you.”

She gazes down at Max's hands. The age spots. His clipped, manicured nails.

“You don't know what it is to lose.”

“Excuse me?” Max stifles a chuckle. “I don't know what?”

“It's obvious from your appearance.”

“Ah.”

“Sitting in front of the chessboard and seeing the consequences of a tactical error. How easily your talent and your chances go up in smoke.”

“I understand . . . but appearances can be deceptive. Failure isn't exclusive to chess players.”

She seems not to have heard him.

“I also knew all the countries and capital cities in the world by heart,” she says. “Or the equivalent. But things don't always turn out the way they should.”

She is smiling now, almost valiantly. For her respectable audience. Only a young girl can smile like that, Max reflects. Sure of the effect it will have.

“It's difficult, being a woman,” she adds, her smile fading. “Even now.”

The sun, whose rays have been moving from table to table across the terrace, lights up her face. Squinting, she puts on her dark glasses.

“Meeting Jorge gave me a fresh opportunity. To experience all this at close hand.”

“Do you love him?”

“Do you think your age gives you the right to ask impertinent questions?”

“Of course. There have to be some advantages.”

Silence. The noise of the traffic. A distant horn blast.

“Mecha says you were a very handsome man.”

“I'm sure it's true. If she says so.”

The sun is touching Max now, and he can see his reflection in the girl's big dark glasses.

“Oh, yes,” she says impassively. “Of course I love Jorge.”

She crosses her legs, and Max looks for a moment at her bare knees. Her flat leather sandals reveal the arch of her foot and her toenails painted dark red, almost purple.

“Sometimes I watch him playing,” she goes on, “moving a piece, taking risks the way he does, and I think I love him madly. . . . Other times I see him make a mistake, something we have prepared together, which he decides to change at the last moment, or hesitates over. . . . And at that moment I detest him.”

She falls silent for a moment, as though pondering the truth of what she has just said.

“I think I love him more when he isn't playing chess.”

“That's normal. You're young.”

“No. Youth has nothing to do with it.”

The silence that follows is so long that Max assumes their conversation is over. He calls the waiter's attention, asking for the bill with a snap of his fingers.

“Do you know something?” Irina suddenly blurts out. “Every morning, when Jorge is playing in a tournament, his mother comes down to breakfast ten minutes early, to make sure everything is ready for when he arrives.”

Max thinks he notices a tone of displeasure. A tinge of resentment. He has an ear for such things.

“So what?” he murmurs.

“So, nothing.” Irina moves her head and Max's reflection bobs up and down in her dark glasses. “He goes down, and there she is with everything ready: orange juice, fruit, coffee, toast. Waiting for him.”

The red and green lights on a boat sailing out of Nice harbor advanced slowly between the dark stains of the sea and sky, against the flashes from the lighthouse beyond. Separated from the port by the dark hill of the castle, the city encircled the Bay of Angels
like a luminous strip, curving slightly southward, from which a few specks of light have detached themselves, to drift up toward the nearby hills.

“I'm cold,” Mecha Inzunza said with a shiver.

She was sitting behind the wheel of a car she herself had driven there, in her shimmering gown, her embroidered silk shawl with long tassels wrapped around her shoulders. From the passenger seat, Max leaned toward the dashboard, slipped off his jacket, and draped it over her. In his shirtsleeves and skimpy vest, he, too, could feel the dawn chill seeping through the closed roof of the convertible.

Mecha rummaged in her bag in the dark. He heard her crumple an empty pack of cigarettes. She had finished them after dinner, and then smoking with him there in the car. It felt like an eternity ago, Max reflected, since he had taken his place at the dining table, next to an extremely thin, middle-aged Frenchwoman who designed jewelry for Van Cleef & Arpels, and the young blonde with the cheap perfume: a singer and actress named Elvira Popescu, who turned out to be an amusing tablemate. During dinner, Max gave his attention to both women, although he ended up chatting more with the actress, who was delighted that the attractive, elegant gentleman on her left was from Argentina (I'm crazy about tango, she declared). The younger woman giggled a lot, especially when Max gave a discreet imitation of the different ways screen actors like Leslie Howard or Laurence Olivier lit a cigarette or held a glass. A good raconteur, he told a funny story that made the older lady smile, and even lean toward them with interest. Each time the young actress laughed, Max disguised his unease as he felt Mecha Inzunza observing him from the other end of the table, where she was sitting next to the fair-haired, mustachioed Chilean gentleman. Over dessert, he saw her drink two cups of coffee and smoke four cigarettes.

After that, everything happened as it should have. Without
forcing the issue, she and Max avoided each other when all the guests left the dining room. Later, while he was chatting to the Colls, the young actress, and the Chilean diplomat, their hostess approached the group, informing the baroness that a dear friend of hers, who had come there unaccompanied, was feeling unwell and was preparing to return to her house in Antibes, and would she mind awfully if Max accompanied her, for they had just discovered they were old acquaintances. Max confirmed that this was true and agreed to the request. After first hesitating, almost imperceptibly, for an instant, Asia gave her consent. Of course she didn't mind, she declared, charmingly cooperative, before observing wittily that Max was the perfect companion for any woman feeling under the weather, or even in perfect health. There were sympathetic smiles, apologies, and thanks all around. The baroness gave Max a long, knowing look (how do you do these things, she seemed to be saying, admiringly) while Susana Ferriol glanced at him out of the corner of her eye with fresh and barely concealed curiosity as she shepherded him toward the entrance where Mecha Inzunza was waiting, enveloped in her shawl.

After formally taking their leave, they walked outside, where, instead of a large, chauffeur-driven limousine, Max was surprised to find a small Citroën 7C two-seater with its engine running, which an attendant had just parked at the front of the house. Mecha paused beside the open car door, and began to touch up her makeup with the lipstick and mirror she had fished out of her bag, in the light of the lanterns illuminating the steps and the circular driveway. Afterward, they climbed into the car and she drove in silence for five minutes, Max gazing at her profile in the glare of the headlights reflecting off the walls of the villas. The car stopped near the sea, at an overlook close to Le Lazaret, amid pines and agaves. From there they could make out the flashing lighthouse, the harbor entrance, the dark mass of the hill beneath the castle, and the lights of Nice in the distance. Then she switched off the engine and they
talked. They continued to do so, between lengthy silences, as they smoked in the dark, scarcely able to see in the dimness of distant lights or the glow of cigarettes. Without looking at each other.

“Give me one of your Turkish ones, please.”

She hadn't lost the ease of tone and manner he had so admired on board the
Cap Polonio
, typical of young women of her generation, brought up on movies, novels, and illustrated women's magazines. But nine years later she was no longer a girl. She must have been thirty-two or thirty-three, Max calculated, looking back. A couple of years younger than him.

“Of course. Forgive me.”

He took his cigarette case from his inside jacket pocket, felt for a cigarette, and lit it with his Dunhill. Then, without extinguishing the flame, he exhaled the first puff of smoke and placed the cigarette directly between her lips. Before snapping the lighter shut, he was able once again to make out her silent profile facing the sea, just as it had been earlier when it was lit up by the intermittent beams from the lighthouse.

“You haven't told me where your husband is.”

He had been turning the question over in his mind all evening. Despite the passage of time, a slew of memories was washing over him. Far too many intense images. Armando de Troeye's absence somehow distorted the situation. Made everything feel incomplete. Still more unreal. The tip of Mecha's cigarette glowed twice before she spoke again.

“He's in prison in Madrid. They arrested him a few days after the military uprising.”