*
The guests were gathering downstairs already. My hands trembled as I put my sapphire earrings on. Silvia had been right. Blue suited me. My mother had agreed blindly with all of Silvia’s suggestions, not caring much for terrestrial affairs herself.
My mother came from humble origins. She was one of eight siblings, and all of them considered her the luckiest girl in El Milagro, her hometown, to have found a rich foreigner to marry her—that was the lie they told everybody. The truth was my father already had a wife in Europe, but both of my parents acted as if his real wife was nothing but a long-lost relative.
I couldn’t understand what my father saw in my mother. She was plain looking and not too bright, but she treated him like a god. She never argued, but simply joined her hands in prayer when he said something offensive. Such servitude, such blind loyalty was not easy to find. My father liked that she forgave easily, that she wasn’t demanding. There had been only one instance that I knew of, one offense in their lukewarm life that my mother didn’t tolerate. And he’d suffered for his extramarital indiscretion with one month of silence from my mother. Eventually, they’d reached a truce.
A few months after that, my father had gotten drunk and mentioned his Spanish wife for the first time. He said it was her birthday and he was drinking in her honor. He said her name was Maribel and she could dance flamenco like a goddess. He also said she had gorgeous hair, all the way to her waist, and skin as soft as the petal of a flower, but she had a rotten temper and held grudges for years. She was like a matchstick, he’d said, quickly incensed.
“What a foul mouth she had,” he told me after finishing a bottle of wine, “but she sure knew how to love a man.”
To say I was uncomfortable to hear my father speak like that about a woman was an understatement. The fact that it wasn’t my mother made it even worse. I stood up and left him alone in his study with his bottles and his memories.
I’d always suspected that my mother’s attempts to be the perfect wife had to do with that fiery woman my father could never forget.
I looked at my reflection one last time before joining the guests downstairs. Hopefully, my father had invited Juan. I hadn’t seen him since the incident with Silvia and I was hoping for an opportunity to apologize for my rudeness. If he liked the way I looked tonight, I might be able to earn his forgiveness more easily.
There were about a hundred guests scattered throughout the foyer and the inside patio of the house. My father took my hand at the bottom of the stairs. He looked jubilant. I hadn’t seen that proud look in his eyes before and having his attention was intoxicating.
“Ma chère, there’s someone I want you to meet,” Papá said into my ear as I waved to Silvia at a distance and searched for Juan among the faces. “Laurent, je présente ma fille, Angélique.”
“Enchanté,” the man said.
Good thing I was holding on to my father’s forearm. In front of me stood a monument of a man and a true aristocrat. He kissed my hand, making my stomach float.
“Laurent has just arrived from France. He’s a novelist.”
A novelist? How sophisticated!
“I’ve never met an author before,” I said in my botched French. I didn’t speak it as fluently as I should have, considering my father was French. But it was his fault because he spoke in Spanish most of the time. “What is your novel about?”
“Oh, many things,” he said, “love, lust, starvation, war.”
I’d always had a gift with people. I knew exactly how to engage them in conversation. All I had to do was ask them about themselves. It hadn’t failed once. I used my gift with Laurent.
It only took a few questions before the Frenchman told me all about himself. He was an artist, he explained, and the medium was irrelevant as long as he could express himself. He was a big fan of an innovative (fancy word!) new painter named Henri émile Beno?t Matisse. According to Laurent, there were exciting artistic movements emerging all over Europe.
I’d always wanted to go to Europe, particularly to my father’s homeland, but I doubted I would ever go. Not unless I married a native. Where had my father gone anyway? I spotted him sitting in his favorite chair, his throne, with a glass of jerez, surrounded by friends. But he was staring at me. Excluding his botched attempt to marry me to Don Fernando del Río and form some kind of medieval alliance with that arrogant rancher, my father had never been interested in my social life. He certainly hadn’t introduced me to a man before, nor had he looked so pleased with me or attentive to my every move.
And now he was smiling at me. The evening couldn’t be more perfect.
Someone greeted him. Someone wearing an old brown jacket.
Juan.
Self-consciously, I shifted in my seat. Laurent and I shared the same settee as we waited for dinner to be served. He’d been discussing modern art for at least twenty minutes and I could barely get a word in. Not that I would even know what to say, I’d only studied until the sixth grade and then concentrated on my harp studies with a private tutor.