The Two Deaths Of Senora Puccini

There is a particular sort of dinner party at which one realises, around the second course, that the host is not merely serving food but quietly laying out the moral corpse of his entire life between the wine glasses.

The Two Deaths of Señora Puccini is exactly that sort of evening: polished, expensive, faintly damp with danger, and almost certainly the kind of invitation one should have declined by pretending to be ill, dead, or already in another country. Outside, a Latin American city is busy coming apart in the traditional manner — gunfire, civil war, authority losing its buttons — while inside, three old friends arrive at the grand house of Dr Daniel Pacheco, surgeon, charmer, collector of admiration, and the sort of man who has clearly never mistaken humility for a useful accessory.

They have come for one of those ritual reunions men arrange when they wish to prove that time has not altered them, except for the money, the cowardice, the betrayals, the failed ideals, the receding hairlines, and the general smell of compromise. There is dinner. There is talk. There is a photograph of a beautiful young woman. And there is Antonia Puccini, now older, serving the meal with the air of someone who has long ago learned that silence can be sharper than cutlery.

The photograph becomes the evening’s fatal little trapdoor. Who was she? What was she? Why does Pacheco speak of her as though remembering a great love, a possession, a crime, and an opera he wrote entirely in his own honour? The room tightens. Stories begin to spill out. Each man, encouraged by wine, vanity and the surrounding collapse of civilisation, starts dragging his private shame into the lamplight. Outside, the country is tearing itself to pieces; inside, the respectable classes are doing the same thing with better tableware.

Stephen Dobyns makes the whole thing feel like a thriller, a confession, a fever dream and a very bad evening among educated people who have mistaken eloquence for absolution. It is lush, nasty, elegant and theatrical: the sort of novel where desire does not merely go wrong but puts on a dinner jacket first, then ruins everyone’s life with excellent manners. Power lounges about the place pretending to be romance. Memory tidies itself up and calls the result truth. Men explain themselves at great length, which is generally how one knows something unforgivable has happened.

And Señora Puccini? She is not simply a tragic object in someone else’s melodrama, however much certain gentlemen might prefer her that way. She waits in the story like a blade in a napkin: present, controlled, underestimated, and not nearly as finished as the men around her imagine.

This Penguin paperback is in Near Fine condition, which is almost indecently respectable for a book so full of moral mildew, erotic obsession and dinner-party doom. Crappy Old Books recommends it for anyone who likes their literary thrillers served with civil unrest outside, bad conscience inside, and the growing suspicion that the housekeeper may be the only person in the room who properly understands the evening’s menu.

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