The Tale of the Rose Read Free Page A

perched according to her whim on her huge stuffed bear, that huge flying stuffed bear that was Saint-Ex.” People speak of a couple as being happy or unhappy, as if it were ever that simple. In this case, at any rate, it was not. As a young girl, Consuelo told her classmates that when she grew up she wanted to be a princess, and she did become a countess, but her story is no fairy-tale romance. Yet through all the vicissitudes that beset them, the perils from without and from within, the spreading baobabs that threatened to strangle them and the domestic volcanoes whose eruptions brought disaster, across vast distances and amid war and tragedy, something kept bringing them back to each other, sometimes even to their own surprise. In the end, it was bigger than they were. “What moves me so deeply about this little prince,” muses that lost aviator, “is his loyalty to a flower—the image of a rose that shines through his whole being like a flame within a lamp.”
    —Esther Allen

Part One
Buenos Aires, 1930
1
    E VERY MORNING ON THE BRIDGE, Ricardo Viñes, the pianist with hands like a dove’s wings, would say in my ear, “Consuelo, you are not a woman.”
    I would laugh and kiss his cheeks, pushing back his long mustache that sometimes made me sneeze. He would then go through all the rituals of Spanish courtesy, wishing me a good morning, inquiring about my dreams, inviting me to enjoy this new day of our journey to Buenos Aires. And every day I wondered what Don Ricardo could possibly mean by his little morning greeting.
    “Am I an angel, then? An animal? Do I not exist?” I asked him fiercely at last.
    He fell serious and turned that El Greco face of his out toward the sea a few moments, then took my hands in his.
    “So, child, you know how to listen; that is good. . . . For as long as we have been on this ship, I have been wondering what you are. I know I like what is within you, but I also know that you are not a woman. I have spent whole nights thinking about it, and finally I set to work. I am more of a composer than a pianist, and only in music can I express the way I sense it, this thing that you are.”
    With the Castilian elegance for which he was so famous in Europe, he raised the lid of the piano in the ship’s lounge. I listened. The piece he played was very beautiful. The ocean rocked us gently, prolonging the music, and then, as usual, we started telling each other about our sleepless nights and latest sightings on the horizon, for every so often the sea would yield a glimpse of a lighthouse, an island, or another boat.
    I thought Viñes’s little greeting would never bother me again, now that it had been expressed in music, and I went to join the other passengers on board the
Massilia.
    There were Europeans on the ship, whose travel agents had persuaded them that the whole young American continent would reveal itself to them in the sound of a tango. And there were South American tourists, coming home from Paris with a sizable booty of dresses, perfumes, jewels, and
bons mots.
The older women talked freely and openly about all the pounds they’d taken off at their spas. Other women, even more brazen, showed me photographs in which the various surgical phases of their pretty little noses could be measured to the millimeter. A gentleman whispered to me about the success of a delicate operation: a dental transplant, using teeth bought on the cheap from people with no money.
    The younger women made a game of appearing in four or five different dresses every day. They had to get some wear out of those dresses, for the South American customs officers were very hard on the practice, common among society women, of smuggling luxury items back from Europe. Between each new outfit they would douse themselves in heady perfumes. The Argentine and Brazilian women far outstripped the Europeans in the luxury of their attire. And they were always ready to play the guitar or sing the traditional songs of their