The Tale of the Rose Read Free Page B

countries at the drop of a hat. As the boat progressed, these daughters of the tropics began behaving more naturally and their distinctive character grew more conspicuous. Old and young alike, they twittered away in Portuguese and Spanish without giving the French women a chance to slip in even the briefest anecdote.
    Rita, a young Brazilian, had discovered a way of making her guitar sound like a church bell ringing for mass or a carillon chiming from a campanile. She said she had first been inspired to do this during a Brazilian carnival, one of those nights of Negro sorcerers and Indians when women abandon themselves to their desires, their truth, the whole vast life of the trackless, virgin jungle. Rita’s bells sometimes fooled the other passengers and brought them out onto the bridge. She claimed her guitar was a magical object and said she thought she would die if any harm ever came to it. Père Landhe, the priest she often confided in, was thoroughly disarmed by her and finally gave up lecturing her about her pagan desires and magical beliefs.
    I liked Père Landhe. We would take long strolls together, talking about life, God, the problems of the heart, and how to become a better person. When he asked why I never appeared in the dining room, I told him I was in mourning for my husband, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, * and that I was making this journey at the invitation of the Argentine government, which my poor late husband, a diplomat, had represented in Europe for a time. Père Landhe, who was well acquainted with several of my late husband’s books, did his best to console me; he listened while I told him, with all the sincerity of my youth, about the love a fifty-year-old man had awoken in me during the all-too-brief time of our marriage. I had inherited all his books, his name, his fortune, and several newspapers he had owned. A life, his life, had been entrusted to me, and I wanted to understand it, relive it, and go on with my own life in homage to his memory. I wanted to grow for him alone; that gift to him was my mission.
    Ricardo Viñes had been one of my husband’s close friends. Don Ricardo had paid special attention to me in Paris because, through my mother, I bore the same name as one of his friends, the Marquis de Sandoval, and for Viñes, Sandoval meant storms, the ocean, an unfettered life, and memories of the great conquistadors. Every woman in Paris adored him, but he was an ascetic—his greatest love affairs had never been anything more than musical. One day we heard Rita, the guitarist, say to him in a low, husky voice, “Is it true you belong to a very strict, secret order, even more severe than the Jesuits, a sect that requires you to devote yourself exclusively to art?”
    “Of course,” he replied. “Have you heard, as well, that we shave off half our mustaches on nights when the moon is full, and they grow back instantly?”
    My other chaperone on that ocean liner was Benjamin Crémieux, who was going to Buenos Aires to deliver a series of lectures. He had the face of a rabbi, and there was fire in his gaze and warmth in his voice. His words, I felt, were charged with a secret power that reassured me.
    “When you’re not laughing, your hair grows sad,” he told me. “Your hair tires out quicker than anything else about you. Your curls droop like sleepy children. It’s curious: when you light up and start telling stories about magic and circuses and the volcanoes in El Salvador, your hair comes alive again, too. If you want to be beautiful, you must always laugh. Promise me that tonight you won’t let your hair fall asleep.”
    He spoke to me as if I were a butterfly that he was asking to hold its wings open wide so he could have a better view of their colors. Despite the long, threadbare jacket he always wore and his beard, which made him look very serious, he was the youngest of my friends. His Jewish blood was pure and just. He seemed happy to be himself, to live his own life. He