What We Become Read online

  “It requires great intelligence to pass off your true feelings as artifice,” said Max.

  He had read or heard that somewhere. Lacking any real education himself, he was adept at taking other people’s words and making them his own. At choosing the appropriate moment to use them. She looked at him, slightly taken aback.

  “Goodness. Perhaps we underestimated you, Mr. Costa.”

  He grinned. By now they were strolling toward the rail on the poop deck, past the last of the three smokestacks.

  “It’s Max, remember.”

  “Of course . . . Max.”

  They reached the rail and leaned over to peer at the bustle below: caps, trilbies, white panamas, wide-brimmed sun hats, and cloche hats, all the rage, made of felt or straw with colored bands. Where the first-class promenade decks on port and starboard converged on the terrace of the smoking room, whose windows were flung open, the tables were crowded with passengers enjoying the calm sea and mild weather. It was the hour of the lunchtime aperitif, and a dozen waiters in scarlet jackets were swerving in and out of tables, holding aloft trays of drinks and snacks, while a uniformed headwaiter made sure everything ran as smoothly as expected.

  “The waiters look friendly,” she remarked. “Contented . . . Perhaps it’s the sea air.”

  “Well, I can assure you they aren’t. They live in fear of the chief steward and the ship’s officers. Looking friendly is part of the job: they are paid to smile.”

  She looked at him with renewed curiosity. Differently.

  “You seem to know a lot about it,” she ventured.

  “I do. But we were talking about your husband. About his music.”

  “Oh, yes . . . I was going to tell you that Armando likes delving into the apocryphal, inventing anachronisms. He enjoys working with a copy more than with the original. With nods to other composers, whether they be Schumann, Satie, Ravel . . . To dissimulate by pretending he’s making a pastiche. Parodying above all the parodists.”

  “An ironic plagiarist?”

  She studied him again in silence. Intensely. Sizing him up him both inside and out.

  “Some call that modernism,” he backtracked, afraid he had gone too far.

  His had a well-rehearsed smile, that of an honest fellow—or a perfect dancer as she had called him earlier. After an instant, he saw her turn away, shaking her head.

  “Don’t be mistaken, Max. He is an extraordinary composer, who deserves his success. He pretends to explore what he has already discovered, or to disregard details he has already inserted with precision. He knows how to be vulgar, yet even his vulgarity is sophisticated. In the way elegant people sometimes dress deliberately nonchalantly. . . . Do you know the introduction to his ‘Pasodoble for Don Quixote’?”

  “I’m afraid not. My musical knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond ballroom dancing.”

  “What a pity. You would understand better what I just said. The introduction to the ‘Pasodoble’ doesn’t lead anywhere. It’s a brilliant joke.”

  “Too complicated for me,” he said candidly.

  “Yes.” The woman studied him carefully again. “I daresay it is.”

  Max was still leaning over the white rail. His left hand was six inches away from her right hand, which was clasping her book. He looked down at the passengers in first class. His long years of training allowed him to feel only a twinge of rancor. Nothing he couldn’t live with.

  “Will the tango your husband composes also be a joke?” he asked.

  In a sense, she replied. But not only that. Tango had become vulgar. It was all the rage, as much in fancy ballrooms as in popular theaters, the movies, and local dance halls. Armando’s idea was to play with that vulgarity, to give people back its original meaning, filtered through the irony they had just been talking about.

  “Dissimulating in his usual way,” she concluded. “With his enormous talent. A tango that will be a pastiche of pastiches.”

  “A chivalry novel to end all chivalry novels?”

  For a moment she looked astonished.

  “Have you read Don Quixote, Max?”

  He quickly weighed his chances. Best not to take the risk, he decided. Out of senseless pride. It is easier to catch a clever impostor than an honest fool.

  “No.” The same irreproachable smile, spontaneously rehearsed. “But I have read things about it in newspapers and magazines.”

  “Perhaps end is the wrong word. But certainly one that goes beyond them. Something that can’t be surpassed, because it has everything. A perfect tango.”

  They moved away from the rail. Over the water, gradually turning from gray to blue, the sun was dissolving the last traces of surface mist. The eight starboard lifeboats, painted white and resting on their chocks, were so dazzling that Max had to lower his cap a little more to shield his eyes. Mecha Inzunza took a pair of dark glasses out of the pocket of her sweater and put them on.

  “What you told him about the origins of tango fascinated him,” she said, after a few more steps. “He can’t stop mulling it over. . . . He is expecting you to keep your word and take him there.”

  “What about you?”

  She gave him a sidelong glance, turning her head twice, as though not fully grasping the implications of his question. Inzunza bottled spring water, Max remembered. He had flicked through the illustrated magazines in the reading room in search of advertisements, and had questioned one of the stewards. At the turn of the century, her grandfather, a pharmacist, had made a fortune bottling water in Spain’s Sierra Nevada. Later on, her father had built two hotels there, and a new health spa, recommended for people with liver and kidney ailments, which had become fashionable among the Andalusian upper classes in the summer season.

  “What are you expecting, Mrs. de Troeye?” Max persisted.

  By this stage of their conversation, he was hoping she might ask him to call her Mecha, or Mercedes. But she did not.

  “I’ve been married to Armando for five years. And I admire him deeply.”

  “Is that why you want me to take you there? To take you both there?” He allowed himself a skeptical expression. “You aren’t a composer.”

  She did not reply at once, but continued to stroll, her eyes hidden behind her dark glasses.

  “What about you, Max? Will you travel back to Europe on the Cap Polonio or stay in Argentina?”

  “I may stay for a while. I’ve been offered a three-month contract at the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires.”

  “As a dancer?”

  “For now, yes.”

  A brief silence.

  “That doesn’t seem to hold much of a future. Unless . . .”

  She fell silent again, yet Max had no difficulty completing the sentence: unless with your good looks, honest-John smile, and tangos you manage to seduce a millionairess perfumed with Roger & Gallet, who will take you on, all expenses paid, as a chevalier servant. Or, as the Italians put it more crudely, a gigolo.

  “I don’t intend to devote my entire life to that.”

  Now the dark glasses were turned toward him. He saw himself reflected in them.

  “The other day you said something interesting. You spoke of tangos to cry for and tangos to die for.”

  Max made a dismissive gesture, as if to minimize its importance. His instinct told him to be honest this time, too.

  “It was a friend who said that, not me.”

  “Another dancer?”

  “No . . . He was a soldier.”

  “Was?”

  “He isn’t any longer. He died.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “There is no need to be.” Max smiled wistfully to himself. “His name was Dolgoruki-Bragation.”

  “No ordinary soldier’s name. More like that of an officer, wouldn’t you say? . . . A Russian aristocrat.”

  “That is
exactly what he was: Russian and an aristocrat. Or so he claimed.”

  “And was he really . . . an aristocrat?”

  “Possibly.”

  Now, perhaps for the first time, Mecha Inzunza seemed unsettled. They had come to a halt beside the outer rail, at the foot of one of the lifeboats. The name of the boat was painted in black letters on its prow. She removed her hat (Max managed to read Talbot on the inside label) and shook her hair, loosening it in the breeze.

  “Were you a soldier, too?”

  “For a time. Not for long.”

  “In the world war?”

  “In Africa.”

  She tilted her head slightly to one side, fascinated, as though seeing Max for the first time. For years, the war in North Africa had been grabbing the headlines in the Spanish press, filling the illustrated magazines with photographs of young officers—Captain So-and-so of the Army, Lieutenant Such-and-such of the Spanish Foreign Legion, or of the Cavalry—who died heroically (they all died heroically in the society pages of La Esfera or Blanco y Negro) in Sidi Hazem, Ketama, Bab el Karim, and Igueriben.

  “Do you mean in Morocco? . . . Melilla, Annual, and all those dreadful places?”

  “Yes. All those places.”

  He was leaning back against the rail enjoying the cool breeze on his face, squinting in the bright sunlight reflecting off the sea and the white lifeboat. As he slipped his hand inside his blazer and retrieved the cigarette case engraved with a stranger’s initials, he noticed Mecha Inzunza watching him intently. She continued to stare at him as he offered her a cigarette from the open case, and shook her head. Max took out an Abdul Pasha, snapped the case shut, and tapped one end of the cigarette on the lid before placing it between his lips.

  “Where did you learn those manners?”

  He had taken out a book of matches embossed with the Hamburg Südamerikanische crest, and was trying to light his cigarette in the lee of the lifeboat. This time, too, his reply was sincere.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She had taken off her dark glasses. Her eyes seemed much paler, more translucent in that light.

  “Don’t be offended, Max, but something about you puzzles me. You have flawless manners, and you are blessed with good looks, of course. You are a wonderful dancer and more dapper than many gentlemen I know. And yet you don’t seem . . .”

  He smiled to disguise his awkwardness, and struck a match. Despite cupping his hands around the flame, the wind blew it out before he could light his cigarette.

  “Educated?”

  “That isn’t what I meant. You don’t display the clumsy exhibitionism of a social climber, or the crude affectation of those pretending to be what they are not. You don’t even possess the natural arrogance of a handsome young man. You seem to please everyone, without even trying. And I am not only referring to the ladies. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

  “More or less.”

  “And yet the other day you told us about your childhood in Buenos Aires and your return to Spain. Life doesn’t seem to have been very kind to you then. . . . Did things improve after that?”

  Max struck another match, successfully this time, and looked at her through the first puff of smoke from his cigarette. All of a sudden, he no longer felt threatened by her. He remembered the red-light district in Barcelona, La Canebière in Marseille, the sweat and fear in the Legion. The bodies of three thousand men, baking in the sun, scattered along the road between Annual and Monte Arruit. And the Hungarian woman, Boske, in Paris, her sublime body, naked in the moonlight that poured in through the only window in the attic on Rue de Furstenberg, onto the crumpled sheets amid silvery shadows.

  “Somewhat,” he replied at last, looking at the sea. “Or rather, I improved somewhat.”

  The sun has hidden behind the Punta del Capo, and the Bay of Naples is growing slowly darker with a last shimmering glow upon the water. In the distance, beneath the dark folds of Vesuvius, the first lights are being turned on along the coast stretching from Castellammare to Pozzuoli. It is dinnertime, and the terrace at the Hotel Vittoria is gradually emptying. From his chair, Max Costa sees the woman rise and walk toward the glass door. Their eyes meet again momentarily, but her gaze, casual and distracted, passes over his face with indifference. This is the first time in Sorrento that Max sees her from close up, and he notices that although she still shows traces of her former beauty (especially her eyes and the delicate shape of her lips), time has left its mark on her: her cropped hair is almost like Max’s; her skin is duller, less taut, and crisscrossed with countless tiny wrinkles around the mouth and eyes; and her hands, although still slender and graceful, are flecked with the unmistakable blemishes of age. Yet her gestures are the same as he remembers: calm and self-assured. Those of a woman who all her life has strolled through a world created especially for her to stroll through. Fifteen minutes earlier, Jorge Keller and the young woman with the braid joined the group around the table, and now they are accompanying her as she crosses the terrace, past Max, and disappears out of view. A thickset, bald fellow with a grizzled beard is with them. Scarcely have they gone by, when Max rises and follows them through the door, pausing for a moment next to the Liberty armchairs and the potted palms decorating the conservatory. From there he can see the glass door leading into the hotel lobby and the stairs to the restaurant. When Max gets there, they have already continued up the outside steps and are walking along the path through the hotel gardens toward Piazza Tasso. Max goes back to the lobby and approaches the concierge.

  “Was that Keller, the chess champion?”

  The man’s feigned surprise is magnificent. He nods, discreetly. He is a tall, willowy youth, who wears two miniature gold crosskeys on each lapel of his black jacket.

  “Indeed, sir.”

  If Max Costa has learned anything in the fifty years he has spent drifting in and out of such places, it is that employees are more useful than those in charge. Which is why he has always tried to form closer relationships with the actual problem solvers: concierges, porters, waiters, secretaries, taxi drivers, or receptionists. Those through whose hands the resources of a wealthy society pass. Such connections are not merely improvised, but take time, common sense, and something money can’t buy, an ease of manner that can be understood to mean, today you scratch my back, tomorrow I scratch yours; or at least, I owe you one, my friend. In Max’s case, a generous tip or a shameless bribe (his perfect manners invariably blurred the indistinct line between the two) were never more than precursors to the devastating smile he gave both victim and accomplice—willing or unwilling—before the final twist. In this painstaking way, all his life, he has accumulated a wide range of acquaintances bound to him by unique, discreet ties. And that also included men and women of dubious character, objectively undesirable, capable of unscrupulously stealing from him a gold watch but also of pawning it in order to lend him money if he was in need or to repay a debt with him.

  “Keller will be dining out, I imagine.”

  The concierge nods once more, without fully committing himself, this time with a polite, mechanical expression: aware that the old, distinguished-looking gentleman on the other side of the counter, who has casually taken a fine leather wallet out of his inside jacket pocket, is paying for four nights at the Hotel Vittoria what he earns in a month.

  “I’m mad about chess. . . . I’d love to know where Mr. Keller dines. I’m quite a fan, you know.”

  The five-thousand-lira note, discreetly folded into four, changes hands and disappears into the pocket of the jacket with the miniature gold keys on the lapels. The concierge’s smile is more natural now.

  “Ristorante ’o Parrucchiano, on the Corso Italia,” he says after checking the reservations list. “A good place to eat cannelloni or fish.”

  “I’ll go there one of these days. Thank you.”

  “My pleasure, sir.” />
  There is plenty of time, thinks Max. And so he climbs the broad staircase adorned with vaguely Pompeian figures, until, running his fingers along the banister, he reaches the second floor. Before his shift ended, Tiziano Spadaro gave him the room numbers of Jorge Keller and his entourage. The woman’s is 429, and Max makes his way down the corridor toward it, along the carpet that muffles his footfall. The door is standard, with the classic lock that allows you to look through the keyhole, and it presents no problems. He tries his own key (it wouldn’t be the first time luck triumphs over technical problems). Then, after glancing quickly left and right, he slips a simple picklock out of his pocket, as perfect in its own right as a Stradivarius: a metal rod, half the length of his palm, flat and narrow with a hook on one end, which half an hour before he tested on the lock of his own door. In less than half a minute, three quiet clicks indicate that he can enter freely. Max turns the handle and opens the door with the calm air of the professional who has spent the best part of his life opening other people’s doors with an absolutely clear conscience. After a final precautionary glance down the corridor, he hangs up the Non disturbare sign and walks in, softly whistling to himself “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”

  3

  Boys from the Old Days

  THE ROOM HAS an attractive covered balcony with an arch overlooking the bay. The last light of day is seeping in through the windows. Cautiously, Max draws the curtains, goes into the bathroom, and returns with a towel, which he arranges on the floor to block the gap under the door. Then he puts on a pair of thin rubber gloves and turns on the lights. The room is simply decorated, with damask armchairs and prints of Neapolitan vistas on the walls. There is a vase of fresh flowers on the chest of drawers, and everything looks clean and neat. In the bathroom, a monogrammed canvas vanity case contains a bottle of Chanel perfume and Elizabeth Arden moisturizers and cleansers. Max looks without touching, then searches the room trying not to disturb anything. In the drawers and on top of the chest and bedside tables are a few personal belongings, a notebook, and a purse containing a few thousand lira in notes and small change. Putting on his spectacles, Max has a look at the books—two thrillers by Eric Ambler in English and one by an Italian author called Soldati: Le lettere da Capri. At the bottom is a biography of Jorge Keller, an envelope bearing the hotel crest marking the page. On the cover, beneath the title, A Young Chessboard Life, is a photograph of him, and inside several paragraphs are underlined in pencil. Max reads one at random: “He remembers being so upset when he lost a game that he would cry inconsolably and refuse to eat for days. But then his mother would say to him: There is no victory without defeat.”