| 3. What's "mysterious" about a woman's independence: not putting down roots wherever she happens to be, never forming any deep attachments--living the life of her choice, rather than somebody else's? I wasn't ever Daddy's little girl and, at age forty-two-and-a-half, it's way too late to start. I'm not a feminist for the reason I have no patience with any kind of "ist," certainly not because I don't see the mess men have made of the world--the suave, paternal, patronizing Daddy Warbucks types most of all. Father and I were close. My best memory of him is the trip we made to France together, without my mother, in the spring of '57, sailing First Class on the Liberté from New York. Everyone on board raved about the food, but what I loved was just being at sea for six days: the slow roll of the ship, the bow plunging into the next roller as the stern comes up; the creak of the woodwork and the vibration of the engines; the salt deposit on the outside of the portholes and the portholes themselves, thick glass encased in rounds of brass; the smell of waxed linoleum below decks and the tarry smell above; the wind blowing the ship's smoke backward along the decks, the displacement washing out along the flank of the ship and the churning wake turning over in glassy-green boils astern; the seabirds, whalespout, and porpoises knifing through the water. Father, who was always making up stories to amuse me, had a running one throughout the voyage about Miranda in her rhinestone bathing suit swimming on to Cherbourg ahead of the ship. My father disappeared in Rosario, Sinaloa State, Federal Republic of Mexico, on a business trip in February 1992, almost ten years ago now. The story my mother had was the police arrested him and took him to the local jail following an automobile accident. Though he had Mexican car insurance, all the necessary papers, and no one was really hurt, blood was spilled--and spilling blood is serious business in Mexico. Finally, the other driver put up a TAXI sign behind the windshield before the police--paid off by the cab company--arrived. Apparently, Father found a lawyer but there was never any sort of a trial. Six months later they transferred him to a federal prison somewhere between Hermosillo and Guadalajara, a thousand miles apart. After that we had no word at all, in spite of high-level contacts between the State Department and Mexico City and a formal protest made to the Mexican ambassador in Washington. Against the advice of State, Mother and I made a trip south, but while the Mexican authorities were polite and both the Governor of Sinaloa and the Federal Secretary of State gave us audiences, instead of information we got sympathetic nods and noises. The trip ended with our hotel room in Mexico City being burgled, though nothing of value was taken. I don't think Mother ever gave up but within five years she was dead of a rare form of cancer and I was working for the World Health Organization in Turkey. After Turkey I was posted to Colombia with the WHO for a while before hieing me home to the States to spend another year near Langley, Virginia before coming south to El Paso, where I missed the excitement of being overseas but enjoyed the hundred-degree-plus weather, running ten miles at a stretch and biking twenty or thirty in the heat of the day--the way I like it. The hospital I worked for left something to be desired professionally (they almost killed one old man brought in in the dead of the night with a broken hip) but, if only for that reason, I felt useful there. My community work in Juárez was more of a challenge, though for a long time it seemed to me like a sideshow to what was really going on across the river. Despite my best efforts, I'd become just another bland, boring person leading a dull, uneventful life treading out the proverbial mill. Even Miguel Belmonte Rostov, while not exactly a bore, was in reality something short of the fascinating personage he fancied himself to be. In his early sixties, medium height and stocky, with a head of thick black hair graying at the temples and beyond, smooth, slightly florid face, and soft brown eyes, he was the son of a Russian émigré count and a haute-bourgeoise Spanish beauty raised in Mexico City. We met at the bar in Café Central, a rather intimate art deco sort of place done in pastel shades, sconce lighting, and carefully created shadow, and a favorite with the sort of wealthy Old El Pasoans who still wear pearly-gray Stetsons and polished black cowboy boots with their dark business suits, as well as with rich Mexicans from Chihuahau--among them Miguel Rostov, who was said to appreciate especially that the head barman was a bullfight aficionado. I was drinking Perrier while pretending to study the evening news when a man wearing a beautifully-tailored, navy-blue doublebreasted suit with a white silk shirt and purple tie hurried through the plate-glass doors of the restaurant. Fumbling a Turkish cigarette from a gold case, he approached the bar and rested one thigh on the stool beside me--alone this time, unaccompanied by a woman as he'd been on previous occasions. He looked more youthful than his pictures but I knew it was Miguel and not his younger brother Raoul from the small scar immediately to the right of the cleft in his freshly-shaven chin. I gave him a cool up-and-down look over my shoulder before turning round again, pouring Perrier from the fresh bottle the barman had just set down, pulling my mane back over my shoulders with one hand and shaking it out until I felt its weight fall below my waist, and propping my chin on my fist to watch the sportscaster spout a string of baseball statistics. For most men life isn't just a game, it's less than one. Having been briefed on Rostov's reputation as a lady killer I wasn't expecting to have to wait long, and I didn't. "Most American women today are too busy, as they call it, for the luxury of long hair." The voice from behind me spoke impeccable English, only slightly accented. "It is always a pleasure to meet a lady of leisure who can afford it." Without looking round, "Is there anything more in life beyond beautiful hair?" I asked. "For a woman nothing--except a beautiful face, of course. Ordinarily, it is easier to converse with than the back of the head. Would you care to show me yours?" "Perhaps, if you'll buy me a drink." "Desde luego. What do you care for, my dear?" "Champagne, of course." In the glass behind the arrayed bottles I watched him signal the barman who stood at the server's station discussing the Easter bullfight at the Plaza Monumental in Juárez with a pair of aficionados. The man brought a bottle of Dom Perignon in a bucket and two crystal flutes. He poured the glasses full and I took a drink from mine before turning to face Miguel Rostov directly. "Lovely champagne," I said. "Thank you so very much." "De nada, Seńora." I gave him my hand. "I'm Miranda," I said. "I am called Miguel Belmonte Rostov," he replied, raising the hand to his lips. "And do you have a last name, my dear?" "I do," I told him, "but you don't need to know it, yet." Rostov stubbed his cigarette, slipped the gold case from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, snapped the case open, and held it out to me. "You must try one of this Turkish brand. Really they are very good." "I'm sorry but I don't smoke." "If only you would take one and just puff on it then, as a favor to me. Women who don't smoke make me nervous, I admit it to you." Rostov lit the cigarette for me and I cocked it at a jaunty angle and blew on it, once, to please him. He'd paid for the champagne and it was all in a night's work, anyway. "Perfecto!" he cried, admiring the effect. "And may I invite you to have supper with me, as a second favor, here in this restaurant? After meetings all day in El Paso I find I have an appetite for discriminating conversation this evening, as well as for food." "Con gusto," I agreed, "so long as we share rack of lamb together." I hate red meat, lamb and veal most of all: It distresses me to think of anything so young having to die simply to in order to gratify my baser appetites. But Thin Man had emphasized Rostov's partiality for lamb in particular. We finished the champagne and Rostov called for a table at the far end of the restaurant, away from the plate-glass windows looking onto the mews and the trees strung with white electric lights. It was a round table for four, allowing us to sit together with our backs to the wall, facing outward. The waitress was a Mexican girl, very pretty; obviously she had waited on Miguel Rostov many times before. He was gallant with her, but too much the man about town to flirt with her in the presence of his latest acquisition. We ordered the rack of lamb and Rostov called for a bottle of Chateau Neuf du Pape 1912 that by itself would have guaranteed the girl a tip of two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars. The wine steward brought the bottle, displayed the label for Rostov to see, gave him the cork to sniff, and poured a little into his glass. Rostov tasted the wine. "Bueno," he pronounced, "muy bueno." The waiter filled the glasses and left. When he had gone, Rostov raised his for a toast. "To Miranda," he proposed. "An oldfashioned beauty in an age that no longer understands the meaning of the word." The service was superb, the lamb edible, and I even enjoyed the escargots (which I'd never liked before), so long as I was able to forget what it was I was eating. But the conversation, having mainly to do with the corrida, was barbaric. Over and over I heard myself professing to adore the bullfight, having acquired a passion for it while living in Spain. Rostov was delighted--he'd never met a woman, let alone an American one, so enthusiastic about the crowning adornment of Spanish culture--and promised to escort me to the next butchering at Plaza Monumental, Sunday after next. Afterward he wanted to drop me off at home in his chauffered limousine but I demurred, telling him I'd phoned already for a taxi on my way from the ladies' room. He seemed so pleased by his success with me that I wondered later, on my way to bed, whether it had occurred to him yet that he still didn't know, in addition to where I lived, what my last name was. |
