Empress Bianca (4 page)

‘Thank you, Sarita, I love you too,’ Bernardo said, rather more good-naturedly, Bianca decided, than her friend deserved.

Bianca pulled back and thrusting out her pelvis slightly, placed an arm on her hip in a pose reminiscent of a Schiaparelli mannequin.

‘My God,’ Bernardo thought, his loins stirring at the sight of Bianca’s subtle display of sexuality, ‘this girl is provocative.’

‘Bianca’ he said, hoping his penis would not become embarrassingly engorged with blood, ‘how about a game of tennis tomorrow at the Town and Country Club?’

‘I’d love that, but I must warn you, I’m a very average player.’

‘Somehow I suspect we’ll enjoy the game, nevertheless. Shall I pick you up at eleven in the morning?’

Tennis the following day led to more games of tennis, which led to the holding of hands and much staring into one another’s eyes for the remaining five days of Bianca’s stay in Mexico City. On her last evening Alicia and Bernardo came round to Sarita’s house, and Bernardo drove the four of them to the American Ice Cream Parlour for sundaes. When he dropped them back home, Sarita and Alicia left them in the car and went to sit under the poinciana tree at the front of the house.

As soon as they were alone, Bernardo moved towards Bianca. She responded in full measure, and the next thing they knew, his lips were on hers, his tongue parting her mouth as their limbs intertwined, and he
urgently pressed his erect manhood against her thigh.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I love you too,’ Bianca replied.

‘Will you be my girl?’

‘I already am,’ Bianca said, never at a loss, even at that tender age, for an unexpected and endearing riposte.

The following morning the Barnett family went back to Panama to wind up their life there and organize their move to Mexico. For the six weeks that they were due to be apart, Bernardo and Bianca pledged to write each other every single day. For the first two weeks, their letters, though not particularly long, were filled with passion and desire, then Bernardo’s stopped. At first Bianca was perplexed but hopeful. By the end of the third day, however, hope was turning to humiliation and perplexity to rage. When, at the end of that week, she had still not received another letter, she accepted an invitation from Begonia Cantero Gonzalez to make up a foursome at the pictures. This proved to be a particularly fateful event, for that was how she met Hugo del Rio, the twenty year old son of a prosperous merchant who resided with his parents in some splendour a short drive but a world away from where the Barnetts lived in decidedly middle class style in Panama City.

No sooner did Hugo clap eyes upon Bianca than he fell utterly in love with her. By the end of the evening he was hinting that he would one day want to marry her and by the end of the week – a week in which the postman remained stubbornly emptyhanded as regarded letters from Bernardo - he was suggesting eloping with her. Never slow on the uptake, Bianca realized that Hugo’s attitude meant that his family would never approve of a girl of such unillustrious lineage as her. Intermingled with a feeling of resentment that anyone would have the gall to disapprove of her daddy’s little princess, was the realisation that here was an opportunity to salve the wound of Bernardo’s rejection while meeting her father’s target of moving up in the world, so when Hugo, patently caught up in the convulsions of a great passion, suggested that they marry in secret that Saturday, she hesitated only momentarily before agreeing to do so with the proviso that she continue living at home until she could she break the news to her parents – her father in particular – in her own time. It says a lot about Bianca that, even at that early age, she had no hesitation in reversing her decision as soon as she appreciated what a mistake she had
made. This came about as suddenly as Hugo’s presence in her life, for, upon returning from her midday marriage, she walked past the silver-plated tray in the vestibule where the maid customarily left the letters after clearing out the letter box, to see not one, but eight, letters from Bernardo. So there had been a problem with the postal services. Shaking with relief and anticipation, Bianca grabbed them off the tray and fled into the privacy of her bedroom, where she read them and discovered that Bernardo, her real love, was going out of his mind wondering why she had not replied to his letters. Not for a moment did Bianca hesitate about how best to get out of the fix she now found herelf in. She went straight to her father when he got back home later that evening and confessed tearfully that she did not love Hugo or want to live in Panama when her adored father would be in Mexico, and sat back confidently as he uttered the words she knew he would: ‘Don’t cry, Princess. Your Daddy will make it all good. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time. We can get the marrriage annulled.’ At that point, Harold’s ambition got the better of his reason and he allowed himself to hope momentarily. ‘Although the del Rios are a very classy lot and you can do a lot worse than being married to one of them. Maybe they’ll want to open up a branch of their shop in Mexico City. Is he a nice boy?’

Knowing what her father was angling for, and intent on averting him immediately, Bianca started to wail as if death would be preferrable to marriage to Hugo del Rio.

Feeling dreadful, Harold hugged his daughter protectively and said, ‘There, there. Don’t worry. Your old Daddy will take care of everything. I’ll go to the lawyers on Monday and have them begin proceedings to annul the marriage. I’m sure the del Rios will be willing to co-operate. One thing, though. You mustn’t see or speak to that young man again. Ever! Is that understood?’

‘Yes, Daddy,’ Bianca said, inwardly relieved that her father, and not she, would have to break the devastating news of her change of heart to the lovesick Hugo. ‘And one more thing, Bianca,’ Harold said. ‘Make sure you never breathe a word of this to anyone. No one – and when I say no one I mean no one – must ever know about any of this. Don’t even breathe a word of this to your mother. As far as you or I or the rest of the world is concerned, this marriage never took place. Understand?’

‘I understand,’ Bianca said meekly, glad that her father could so
painlessly – to her at any rate – erase this most inconvenient of marriages. When she returned to Mexico, Bianca and Bernardo took up where they had left off. This being Mexico in 1944, however, nice girls simply did not stray beyond certain boundaries, even though nice boys did everything in their power to entice those nice girls into allowing acts which would ruin their reputations and preclude them from taking their assigned places in middle-class circles as wives and mothers. The result was that there was a tremendous build-up of sexual energy which could only be relieved through necking, protestations of love and the phenomenon known in that circle as ‘scrubbing’, an act which involved the boy rubbing himself fully-clothed against the girl’s equally fully-clothed body, until she brought it to a halt with cries to desist or, as frequently happened with Bernardo and Bianca, the heat of the moment became so intense that the flames of passion expended themselves beneath the worsted of his trousers and his cotton underpants.

Harold and Leila Barnett were lenient parents, although Harold frankly had higher expectations for Bianca than a middle-class boy like Bernardo Calman. It is possible that the young couple’s relationship might not have flourished the way it did - he called to see her every afternoon after school for an hour, and they spent every waking moment of their weekends together - but the news from Europe was so momentous and alarming that it put the harmless antics of the youngsters into perspective; and even stricter parents than the Barnetts found themselves tolerating conduct in their children that would have been unthinkable even a year before.

Although the war news was welcome to those who supported the Allies, it came at a price for the Barnetts, as it did for many people in the New World with relations stuck behind the Axis lines or serving with the Allies. Harold’s only sibling was killed in action in France in September 1944. Palestine provided hope for Leila until the concentration camps gave up their secrets, and the influx of Jewish refugees from Europe turned that peaceful Middle Eastern haven into a powder keg, which would explode during the next three years, annihilating two of Leila’s brothers, along with many other Palestinians of all religious faiths. For the Piedraplata family, living a few miles across town from the Barnetts, but a eon away in terms of lifestyle, the news was equally bleak. Every Silverstein in Romania was annihilated. All of Hannah’s relatives were also
exterminated. None of Julius Finkelstein’s relations was ever heard from again. Manny and Anna Piedraplata, like her cousin by marriage Julius Finkelstein, now found themselves the rump of an extended family that no longer existed. It was a chilling and debilitating time for them all.

The first time Ferdie and Clara fully understood the enormity of what their parents were facing was over dinner one night in late 1945. That very afternoon, Julius had telephoned his late wife’s cousin to tell her that he had just opened a letter from Poland confirming that his sister-in-law and Anna’s cousin Bella, her husband and six children had all been gassed in Majdanek Concentration Camp in November 1943. The family were trying to absorb this latest tragedy when the normally urbane Manny burst out, his face contorted with pain: ‘It’s beyond comprehension that any human being can behave like that towards another human being.’

Clara stretched her hands across the dinner table and stroked her father’s compassionately. It was at moments like these that she was glad she had foregone her second year at Vassar College, the American university it had always been her dream to attend, where she was studying for a degree in philosophy. As the news from Europe had started coming in that April of 1945, when the British had liberated Belsen, and as her parents reeled under the shock of losing all their extended family, she had opted to transfer to Mexico City University so that she could be on hand should her parents need her. It was a decision she would never regret making. Her presence at home in Mexico became even more vital when, within a matter of months, Ferdie started to fall to pieces.

Ferdie, always so vital, so active, so full of ideas and enthusiasm, had become the mainstay of the business since their father had withdrawn into himself following the dreadful news from Europe. By August 1945, he was running the jewellery shop on the Reforma instead of Manny. While his father spent most of his time at home, Ferdie had stepped into the breach with all the capability the elder Piedraplata had ascribed to him. Where Ferdie found the time to run the other three projects he had developed on his own during the previous two years, no one knew or even questioned, for those were days when people were grateful to be alive and making money at a time when so many million others had either died or been rendered penniless. But Ferdie not only ran those businesses but also did so with outstanding success; he was even trying to dig his father out of his deep depression with ideas for other business projects that he
wanted to start up. It was therefore with a profound sense of shock that Clara witnessed the events of February 24 1947 as they unfurled.

She had got up, as was her habit, at seven o’clock in the morning. She bathed before going into the family dining room, where a full English breakfast of bacon, eggs, fried mushrooms and tomatoes, plus poached kippers, awaited her. As she ate, she noticed that Ferdie was not up before her. This was unusual for him, but she thought nothing of it, for Ferdie had not managed to rest much of late. Indeed, he was so frequently up late into the night and always awoke so early in the mornings that she used to tease him about his ability to go without sleep. This had proven to be especially true after he found himself a girlfriend in the shape of Fernanda Veira Fernandez, with whom he spent most evenings, paying her court in the Mexican manner at either his house or hers or occasionally, out on the town with friends. There had been talk in the family, albeit muted, that Ferdie might even propose to Fernanda, who was a nice girl from a nice family, even if she was neither outstandingly beautiful nor highly intelligent nor even particularly amusing. Had she been older, the Piedraplatas might even have been inclined to describe her as ‘somewhat dour’, but because of her youth they simply said that she didn’t have much personality, although they readily conceded that she had a lovely character and a pleasing disposition. As Clara left the breakfast table to dress for university, she supposed that Ferdie, who had returned home last night long after she had gone to bed, was merely sleeping in for once.

Early that evening, however, when Clara returned from university, she was met by her parents who were standing by the front door, awaiting her arrival. ‘We need to talk,’ Manny said, leading the way into the drawing room. Immediately, Clara knew that something was very wrong. The drawing room was only ever used for guests or emergencies, the less formal sitting room being the family room of choice.

‘What’s happened?’ Clara asked, by now so well used to earthshattering announcements that she thought there had been news of yet more terrible deaths of yet more relations.

‘It’s Ferdie,’ Manny said.

‘Ferdie?’ Clara repeated disbelievingly.

‘There’s something very wrong with him.’

‘What do you mean, Papa? What could be wrong with Ferdie?’

‘He’s been in his bedroom all day. He refuses to get up. He won’t talk
to us. He refuses to let us call the doctor. He’s still in the clothes he had on last night. He doesn’t even want your mother to pick up his jacket and tie, which he’s thrown down on the floor…’

‘Oh, Papa,’ Clara said, a wave of relief washing over her. ‘He’s most likely just tired. He’s been burning the candle at both ends, working very hard and then being up half the night with Fernanda and her friends. You mustn’t lose all sense of proportion. Maybe you ought to think about going to the office a bit more. It might do you good.’

‘Don’t patronize your father,’ Anna said. ‘Go. Take a look for yourself. You’ll see what he means.’