Something sinister in even the traffic, some stalled, oppressive sense of refugee, of the bridge down and the last flight out of wherever (Dear God, couldn’t he go faster? Didn’t he know shortcuts?), and Mrs. Bliss, as much out of distraction and a need to make the time pass, tried to get Camerando to pitch in. She started to ask him questions. (Though, truthfully, were she back in Toibb’s office now, she would have opened her pocketbook, removed the homework she’d been at such pains to prepare, and torn it into a dozen pieces. This was no country for baleboostehs. Her husband was dead, her family scattered. She had no interests!)
“Do you know Susan and Oliver Gutterman?” she said.
Camerando shook his head.
“Enrique Frache? Ricardo Llossas?”
Mrs. Bliss noted the absence of recognition on his face and went on as though she were reading from a prepared list both of them knew was just a formality, so much red tape.
“Vittorio Cervantes? No? What about his wife, Ermalina?”
He shook his head again and again and Mrs. Bliss wondered how much longer he could answer her questions without actually speaking. She would make this the point of the game.
“Carlos and Rita Olvero? They live in your building.”
“I know Carlos,” Hector Camerando said. “We’re not close.”
So much for the point of the game, she thought. And then, remembering what they said on TV, she laughed and said, “Wait, I have a follow-up. Carmen and Tommy Auveristas?”
She hit the jackpot with that one, she broke the bank at Monte Carlo, and suddenly didn’t know whether to be pleased or terrified that they had made contact. It was tiresome to have to acknowledge that one no longer had any interests, yet there was something reassuring and comfortable about it, too. To live by second nature, the seat of your pants.
“Listen,” Camerando exploded, “put up or shut up! What do you know about it anyway? What do you know about anythin’? An old Jew lady cooking soup, making fish! You want some advice? These are your golden years. You should shuffleboard the livelong day. You should tan in the sun till the cows come home! Join the discussion groups. What’s wrong with you, lady? These are your golden years. You shouldn’t leave the game room!”
He’d scared her shitless. And the odd thing, the odd thing was he liked the old woman. When he came out of Rita de Janeiro’s and saw her waiting for her bus he’d been happy to see her, first on her account and then on his. It was already the middle of the afternoon and he hadn’t found an opportunity to make reparation, do his good deed. Well, he thought as he’d seen her waving at him, it’s Mrs. Ted in the nick of time.
Though that part was superstition, the little self-imposed ritual upping the degree of difficulty. Logically, of course, if the time of day made no difference to God it certainly shouldn’t make a difference to Camerando. And if it did (and it did), then maybe none of it made any difference to God. And maybe, too, he could have saved himself the trouble and stopped the whole thing altogether. On the other hand, he thought (though this had occurred more times than he could remember), perhaps God not only wasn’t in it but wasn’t even in on it! Boy, he thought, wouldn’t that be a kick in the nuts?
So he took God out of the equation (Hector Camerando, he scolded, Hector Camerando, you are one good-looking, well-dressed fuck; you can’t lose, can you, Fuck?) and decided for more times than he could remember that he’d been doing it for himself all along.
And that degree of difficulty was the whole point.
Hey, if it wasn’t, shit, if it wasn’t he could have tossed ten, twenty, thirty bucks to the first bum he saw on the street, said, “Starlight, Starbright,” and made a wish on the damn creep.
But nah, nah. He played by the rules even if they were only his rules. It had to be all done by at least an hour before sunset, Fall back, Spring forward inclusive. And it was having to wait until the last minute that made it exciting. Well, it was in the blood, wasn’t it? Flowing free all up and down his proud red hidalgo.
Still, he hoped the royal reaming he’d just given Mrs. Ted’s old ass hadn’t spooked her to the point where it canceled his reparation. It probably had, though, and now he’d either have to look out for an accident he could stop for, or pull up to some kid selling newspapers at a stoplight, slip him a ten, and then not take the paper.
Sometimes, compulsive superstition could be a pain in the ass. He wondered whether Jaime Guttierez had similar tics. The guy was one of his best pals, but they had never talked about it. Sure, Camerando thought, he must have them. They were compadres — the both of them dashing macho gentlemen spirit sports with a word and code of honor big and wide as a barn door.
He hated his temper, his temperament. It had cost him a wife, a couple of relatives, and not a few friends. Though he personally doubted that was what had gotten him into the loopy tit-for-tat of his life. And, frankly, he didn’t think being Catholic had all that much to do with the endless appeasement that made up at least a part of his days. Even when he’d been a strict observer, confession and penance were things he could do with his soul tied behind his back. In spite of — maybe even because of — the fact that he never really understood those mysteries. To him, God had always seemed something of a pushover. Surely, he thought, reciting all the Our Fathers and Hail Marys in the world didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to the human heart, and he’d long ago wearied of such pale, puny recompense. What’s more, making restitution to the injured party made as little sense. Why go to the bother of injuring a party if all you had to do to wipe the slate clean was give back his money or restore his health? It slipped all the punches and didn’t do a thing for your character. It was hypocritical, if you want to know.
Yet he’d stung and frightened her, rammed words down her ears that, at that close a range, she couldn’t help but hear even if she was deaf. (And to judge by the size of the hearing aid that hung out of the side of her head like a fucking Walkman, she was plenty deaf!) So what he decided to do, he decided, was make her the beneficiary of a second reparation. She’d been poking her nose, sniffing around his business, trying to get him to spill the goods on his life. All right then, he’d pass up the accidents and paperboys, go straight ahead and rat on himself.
“I know Frache,” he told the old woman, “I know Llossas. I know them all. I’m in with Aspiration de Lopardoso.”
“Aspiration de Lopardoso?”
“You don’t know him?”
She shook her head.
“You didn’t just ask me about de Lopardoso?”
“I never heard of him,” Mrs. Bliss said.
Ay ay ay, Camerando thought. Macho gentleman spirit sport or no macho gentleman spirit sport, he was frankly astonished that he should be sitting beside this particular woman in this particular place. True, she was only one more familiar absolute type of woman. Throw a mantilla around her shoulders or a dark shawl over her head and she could be a stand-in for any widow in the world, any lachrymose madre, ma, or mama who ever was. Any old, enfeebled pietà of a dame crying over the spilled milk of a lost child. Though it was beyond imagining (as it was with so many of that order) how she could have set aside the housework and tatting and nursing of babes ever to have lain still long enough to conceive one, impossible to drum up in her — not love, she was a pillar of love — but the juices of anything like enjoyment or passion. It was for her that the long distance was created, floral remembrances on birthdays and holidays, all the merely token requitals of pure blind will in the service of sacrifice. She was such a dope! So stupid! Running only on instinct without the intelligence or fury to refuse anything to anybody, so simply and purely biological as to once have tumbled out of her silly-ass womb. Up to her eyes in forgiveness and long-suffering and incapable of cutting, or even of recognizing, a loss. Who knew nothing of odds, and believed that, by God, so long as it were her blood, she didn’t care a damn what damage it did! Selfishness like hers — mother selfishness — made guys like him and Auveristas and Chitral and Guttierez pikers. So dumb! Now there was someone who knew how to work the reparations!