by Maria Duenas
“That’s right, but that’s not the worst of it. Juan Luis doesn’t know the whole story. I’ll tell him tonight; I didn’t want to trouble him on the last day of Serrano’s visit.
“So what’s the worst of it?”
“This,” she said, furious, taking up what looked like a telegram and holding it in her fingers as though with pincers. “This is what has made me ill, not the preparations for the visit. This is the worst part of all.”
I looked at her, confused, and then she summarized its contents.
“I received it yesterday. Peter arrives in six weeks.”
“Who’s Peter?” I didn’t remember anyone by that name among her friends.
She looked at me as though she’d just heard the most preposterous of questions.
“Who else would it be, Sira, for God’s sake? Peter is my husband.” Peter Fox was scheduled to arrive in Tangiers on a P&O ship, keen to spend a long period with his wife and son after nearly five years of barely hearing anything from them. He was still living in Calcutta but had decided to make a temporary visit to the West, perhaps weighing his options for leaving imperial India once and for all, since the place was becoming more unsettled with the locals’ movements toward independence, according to what Rosalinda had told me. And what better perspective for considering the possibilities for a potential move than a family reunion in his wife’s new world?
“And will he be staying here in your house?” I asked in disbelief.
She lit a cigarette, and as she sucked the smoke in she nodded emphatically.
“Claro que si—he’s my husband, he has every right.”
“But I thought you were separated . . .”
“In practice, yes, but not legally.”
“And you’ve never planned to get a divorce?”
She gave the cigarette another deep drag.
“A million times. But he refuses.”
Then she told me all the twists and turns of that troubled relationship, and through it I discovered a Rosalinda who was more vulnerable, more fragile. Less unreal and closer to the earthly troubles of the residents of the human world.
“I married at sixteen; he was thirty-four at the time. I’d spent five years in a boarding school in England; I left India when I was still a girl and returned a young woman almost of marrying age, absolutely determined not to miss out on a single one of the parties in colonial Calcutta. At the first one, I was introduced to Peter, who was a friend of my father’s. I thought him the most attractive man I’d ever met in my life; I hadn’t met all that many—almost none, in fact. He was fun, capable of undertaking the most unimaginable adventures, and the life and soul of any meeting. At the same time he was mature, experienced, a member of an aristocratic English family that had settled in India three generations earlier. I fell in love like a fool, or at least that’s what I thought then. Five months later we were married. We set ourselves up in a magnificent house with stables, tennis courts, and fourteen rooms for the servants; we even had four Indian boys permanently in uniform to be ball boys in case one day we happened to decide to play a game—just imagine! Our life was filled with activity: I loved dancing and horse riding, and I was as skilled with a rifle as I was with my golf clubs. Our life was an unstoppable merry-go-round of parties and receptions. And what was more, we then had Johnny. We built an idyllic world within another world that was equally lavish, but I realized too late how fragile were the foundations upon which it was all supported.”
She stopped talking, and her eyes were fixed on emptiness, as though taking a few moments for reflection. Then she put her cigarette out in the ashtray and went on.
“A few months after giving birth, I started noticing something wrong with my stomach. I was examined, and to begin with they told me there was nothing for me to worry about, that my troubles were merely related to the natural health problems that we nonnatives were exposed to in that tropical climate. But I got worse and worse. The pain increased, my fever began to rise daily. They decided to operate and they didn’t find anything unusual, but I didn’t get any better. Four months later, faced with my relentlessly worsening condition, they gave me another close examination and were finally able to put a name to my illness: aggressive bovine tuberculosis, contracted from the milk of an infected cow that we’d bought after Johnny was born so I’d have fresh milk for my recovery. The animal had fallen sick and died long ago, but the vet hadn’t found anything abnormal when he examined it, just as the doctors had been unable to find anything in me; bovine tuberculosis is extremely difficult to diagnose. But what happens is that you start developing tubercles, sort of nodules, like lumps in the intestine that keep constricting it.”
“And then?”
“And then you end up chronically ill.”
“And then?”
“And then each morning when you open your eyes you thank heaven for allowing you another day to live.”
I tried to hide my unease with another question.
“How did your husband react?”
“Ah, marvelously!” she said sarcastically. “The doctors who saw me advised me to return to England; they thought—albeit not all that optimistically—that perhaps an English hospital would be able to do something for me. And Peter could not have agreed more.”
“Thinking of what was best for you, no doubt . . .”
A bitter laugh prevented me from finishing my sentence.
“Peter never thinks about what’s best for anyone, querida, but himself. Sending me far away was the best possible solution, but rather than it being for my own health it was for his own well-being. He had lost all interest in me, Sira. He stopped finding me fun, I was no longer a precious trophy to take around with him to clubs, to parties, and on hunts; the pretty, fun young wife had transformed into a burdensome invalid whom he had to get rid of as quickly as possible. So the moment I was able to stand on my own two feet again, he arranged tickets for me and Johnny for England. He didn’t even deign to come with us. With the excuse that he wanted his wife to receive the best medical treatment possible, he dispatched a grievously sick woman who hadn’t yet turned twenty and a little boy barely old enough to walk. As though we were just another couple of pieces of luggage. Adiós, and good riddance, my dears.”
A couple of thick tears rolled down her cheeks. She brushed them away with the back of her hand.
“He pushed us away from him, Sira. He spurned me. He sent me to England, purely and simply to be rid of me.”
A sad silence settled between us, until she recovered her strength and went on.
“During the journey, Johnny began to have high fevers and convulsions. It turned out to be a virulent form of malaria; he would need to spend two months in the hospital to recover. My family took me in, in the meantime; my parents had also lived in India for a long time but had returned the previous year. I spent the first few months relatively peacefully, and the change of climate seemed to do me good. But then I got worse, so much so that the medical tests showed that my intestine had shrunk till it was almost totally constricted. They ruled out surgery and decided that only with absolute rest might I manage to get even a tiny bit better. That way, they thought, the organisms that were invading me wouldn’t continue advancing through the rest of my body. Do you know what that first period of rest was like?”
I didn’t know, and I couldn’t guess.
“Six months tied to a board, with leather straps holding me still, over my shoulders and my thighs. Six whole months, with its days, its nights.”
“And did you get better?”
“Very little. Then my doctors decided to send me to Leysin, in Switzerland, to a sanatorium for tuberculosis. Like Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.”
I guessed that she was talking about some book, so before she could ask me if I’d read it I encouraged her to continue with her story.
“And Peter, meanwhile?”
“He paid the hospital bills and established a routine of sending us thirty pounds a
month to support us. No more than that. Absolutely nothing else. Not a letter, not a telegram, not a message via some acquaintance, or, needless to say, any intention of visiting us. Nothing, Sira, nothing at all. I never heard anything personally from him again. Until yesterday.”
“And what did you do with Johnny during that time? It must have been hard on him.”
“He was with me in the sanatorium the whole time. My parents insisted that he should stay with them, but I didn’t accept. I hired a German nanny to entertain him and take him out, but every day he ate and slept in my room. It was a rather sad experience for such a small boy, but I didn’t want him away from me for anything in the world. He’d already lost his father, in a way; it would have been too cruel to punish him further with the absence of his mother.”
“And did the treatment work?”
A little laugh lit up her face for a moment.
“They advised me to spend eight years in the sanatorium, but I was only able to bear eight months. Then I asked to be voluntarily discharged. They told me it was foolish, that it would kill me; I had to sign a million pieces of paper releasing the sanatorium from any responsibility. My mother offered to come to collect me in Paris for us to make the journey home together. And then, on that return journey, I made two decisions. The first, I wouldn’t speak of my illness anymore. The truth is, in recent years only you and Juan Luis have heard about it from me. I decided that perhaps tuberculosis might grind down my body, but it wouldn’t crush my spirit, so I chose to keep the idea that I was an invalid out of my thoughts.”
“And the second?”
“To begin a new life as though I were a hundred percent healthy. A life outside of England, away from my family and the friends and acquaintances who automatically associated me with Peter and with my chronic illness. A different life that to begin with would include only me and my son.”
“And it was then that you decided to go to Portugal . . .”
“The doctors recommended that I settle somewhere temperate—the south of France, Spain, Portugal, perhaps northern Morocco; somewhere between the excessive tropical heat of India and the miserable English climate. They designed a diet for me, recommended that I eat a lot of fish and little meat, relax in the sun as much as possible, not do physical exercise, and avoid emotional upsets. Then someone told me about the British colony in Estoril, and I decided that that might be as good as anywhere else. And that’s where I went.”
Now everything fitted much better into the mental map that I’d built up to understand Rosalinda. The pieces began to link to one another; they were no longer fragments of a life that were independent and hard to connect. Everything now began to make sense. I wished with all my strength that things would turn out well for her: now that I finally knew her life hadn’t all been a bed of roses, I thought her more deserving of a happy fate.
Chapter Thirty-Two
___________
The following day I accompanied Marcus Logan to visit Rosalinda. As on the night of the Serrano reception, he came to fetch me at my house, and together we walked the streets. Something had changed between us, however. The hasty flight from the reception at the High Commission, that impulsive run through the gardens, and the leisurely walk through the shadows of the city in the small hours had somehow managed to break through my feelings of reticence toward him. Perhaps he was trustworthy, perhaps not; maybe I’d never know. But in a way, that didn’t matter to me. I knew he was making an effort to evacuate my mother; I also knew he was attentive and polite toward me, that he felt at ease in Tetouan. And that was more than enough: I didn’t need to know any more about him or try to go in any different direction, because the day of his departure wouldn’t be long in arriving.
We found her still in bed, but with a bit more color in her cheeks. She’d had the room tidied, she’d bathed, the shutters were open, and the light was gushing in from the garden. On the day after our visit she moved from the bed to a sofa. On the next she changed her silk nightgown for a flowery dress, went to the hairdresser’s, and took up the reins of her life again.
Although her health was still unsettled, she decided to make as much as she possibly could of the time she had left before her husband arrived, as though those weeks were the last she had left to live. She resumed the role of the great hostess, creating the perfect setting so that Beigbeder could devote himself to public relations in an atmosphere that was relaxed and discreet, trusting implicitly in his beloved’s efficiency. However, I never learned what many of their guests made of the fact that those gatherings were hosted by the young English lover, and that the high commissioner of the pro-German faction felt so at home at them. But Rosalinda was still active in her plans to bring Beigbeder closer to the British, and many of those less formal receptions were planned with that end in mind.
Over the course of that month, as she had done before and would do again, she invited her compatriots from Tangiers on several occasions, members of the diplomatic corps, military attachés well outside the Italo-German orbit, and representatives of important and wealthy multinational institutions. She also organized a party for the Gibraltarian authorities and for the officers of a British warship docked on “the Rock,” as they called it. And among all those guests Juan Luis Beigbeder and Rosalinda Fox circulated, a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other, comfortable, relaxed, hospitable, and affectionate. As though there were nothing going on—as though in Spain brothers weren’t killing one another and Europe wasn’t heating up for the worst possible nightmare.
I got to be close to Beigbeder again several times, and again was able to witness his very unusual manner. He frequently put on Moorish dress, sometimes the slippers, sometimes a djellaba. He was friendly, uninhibited, a touch eccentric; above all he utterly adored Rosalinda and said as much to anyone without the slightest blush. Meanwhile, Marcus Logan and I continued to see each other regularly, increasing in friendship and building an affectionate closeness that I struggled daily to contain. If I hadn’t, that initial friendship probably wouldn’t have taken long to develop into something much more passionate and profound. But I fought not to let that happen and to remain firm, so that the thing that was beginning to draw us together wouldn’t go any further. The hurt I’d suffered from Ramiro still hadn’t completely healed, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before Marcus would leave, and I didn’t want to suffer again. All the same, the two of us became regular presences at the parties in the villa on the Paseo de las Palmeras, sometimes even joined by Félix, who was delighted to enter into that alien world that so fascinated him. From time to time we would go out of Tetouan as a little gang: Beigbeder invited us to Tangiers for the launch of the España de Tánger newspaper, created on his own initiative to tell the world what those from his cause wanted to say. Another time we went off, the four of us—Marcus, Félix, Rosalinda, and I—in my friend’s Dodge, for the sheer plaisir of doing so: to go to Saccone & Speed in search of provisions of Irish beef, bacon, and gin; to dance at Villa Harris; to watch an American movie at the Capitol or order the most stunning hats from the studio of Mariquita the milliner.
During that time we also wandered Tetouan’s white medina, ate couscous, jarira, and chuparquías, climbed the Dersa and the Ghorgiz, and visited Río Martín beach and the Ketama inn, surrounded by pines. Until time ran out, and the unwelcome visitor appeared. It was only then that we discovered that reality can exceed even the bleakest expectations. That was what I heard from Rosalinda just a week after her husband’s arrival.
“It’s much worse than I’d imagined,” she said, collapsing into an armchair the moment she arrived at my atelier.
This time, however, she didn’t seem bewildered. She wasn’t angry in the way she had been when she first heard the news. This time she simply radiated sadness, exhaustion, profound disappointment: at Peter, at the situation they found themselves trapped in, at herself. After half a dozen years of roaming the world alone, she thought she’d be ready for anything; she thought that
the experience she’d accumulated would have brought her the resources to face any kind of adversity. But Peter was much tougher than she’d anticipated. He once again took on the simultaneous role of father and husband, as though they hadn’t spent all those years living apart, as though nothing had happened in Rosalinda’s life since she married him when she was still a girl. He reproached her for the casual manner in which she was educating Johnny; it appalled him that his son wasn’t attending a good school, that he would go out to play with the neighborhood children without a nanny close by, that his entire sporting prowess consisted of his ability to throw stones with the same excellent aim as all the Moorish boys in Tetouan. He complained, too, about the lack of radio programs to his taste, the absence of a club where he could meet up with his fellow countrymen, the fact that no one around him spoke English, and how hard it was to get a British paper in this city that was so cut off from the world.
Not everything appalled the demanding Peter, however. He turned out to be absolutely satisfied with the Tanqueray gin and the Johnnie Walker Black Label that in those days you could get hold of in Tangiers at ludicrous prices. He used to drink at least a bottle of whiskey a day, nicely punctuated by a couple of gin cocktails before every meal. His tolerance for alcohol was astonishing, almost as astonishing as the degree of cruelty he meted out to the domestic staff. He spoke to them reluctantly, in English, without bothering to take account of the fact that they didn’t understand a word of his language, and when it finally became clear that they didn’t understand what he was saying he shouted at them in Hindustani, the language of his former Indian servants, as though the condition of serving a master had a universal language. To his great surprise, one by one they stopped showing up at the house. And all of us, from his wife’s friends to the most humble of their servants, took no more than a few days to work out what sort of creature Peter Fox was. Egotistical, irrational, capricious, alcoholic, arrogant, and tyrannical: it was impossible to find fewer positive attributes in a single person.