Buenos Aires
1745 30 November 1942
Cletus Howell Frade, First Lieutenant, USMCR, and Laird of the Manor, in T-shirt and khaki trousers, was sitting on a heavy wooden chair—so heavy it absolutely could not be tipped back on its rear legs, and he had really tried—on the balcony outside his bedroom. A liter bottle of Quilmes Cerveza (beer) rested on his abdomen. His feet, in battered boots he’d owned since before he went to College Station to join the corps of cadets at Texas A&M, rested on the masonry railing. And he was watching an exercise boy let a magnificent Arabian run at a full gallop at the racetrack across the street.
“I wish I was up there with you, you lucky sonofabitch, whoever you are,” he announced to the world in general.
And immediately regretted it. Every time he opened his mouth and a sound came out, even a cough, either Señora Pellano or one of the maids appeared with a warm smile on her face and inquired, “¿Sí, Señor?”
He glanced over his shoulder to see if one of them was headed his way. No one was coming through the bedroom—or Granduncle Guillermo’s playroom, as he had come to think of it.
He looked back toward the river and the racetrack. Thirty or forty sailboats were on the river, and there was activity at the racetrack, as if they were preparing for a race. He took another pull at the neck of the bottle of cerveza.
Damned good beer. They really know how to eat and drink down here.
He was not looking forward to the evening. He was going to dinner, where he would meet his aunt Beatrice and his uncle Humberto for the first time. Until three days before, he had been blissfully unaware that he had an Uncle Humberto or an Aunt Beatrice or a Cousin Jorge who got himself killed at Stalingrad. And whose death, his father said, left Aunt Beatrice shattered enough to need a psychiatrist’s attention.
There was of course no way to get out of going.
“Beatrice will inevitably find out that you are in Buenos Aires,” his father told him on the telephone, “and would be deeply hurt if you do not pay your respects.”
“I understand.”
“Beatrice and your mother were close, Cletus. They were brides together, and young first mothers. She held you as a baby.”
And now she’ll want to know how come her baby is dead, and I’m alive.
Shit.
“I will try to make it an early evening. May I send a car for you at nine forty-five? They usually sit down to dinner at ten-thirty or eleven.”
An early dinner?
“Thank you.”
He was also having troubling feelings about the events of the previous evening.
After their first coupling—which took place no more than ninety seconds after they stepped off the elevator and walked into the playroom, and lasted about half that long—Monica confided to him that a combination of Pablo’s diminishing sexual drive and the attention h
e was spending on his Mina had combined to almost entirely deny her the satisfactions of the connubial couch.
Their initial coupling was followed by three others. The last two shattered the hope that his near-terminal chastity was solely responsible for his carnal thoughts about the Virgin Princess, and that once that condition was cured, his shameful thoughts about her would disappear.
That didn’t happen. He managed to perform—although he wasn’t too sure he could the last time Monica reached for it—in a manner that did not bring shame on the reputation of the commissioned officer corps of the United States Marines. But clear images of the pert, yet ample virgin breasts of Señorita Dorotea Mallín kept flashing into his mind, even as he was somewhat feverishly attending to the business at hand.
Which is what you get, you pre-vert, for looking down the front of her dress whenever you have the chance.
At least I got out of her house before I made an ass of myself. I think Mallín was looking at me funny toward the end, which means that he caught me looking at her.
On the other hand, there’s no denying that I miss her something awful. Just seeing her, hearing her talk and laugh. Just having her look at me. The funny thing is that when I think about her—except when I’m banging a thirty-two-year-old mother of three—it’s not her breasts, or even that absolutely perfect ass, but her eyes. Christ, she has beautiful eyes!
Thank God, I got out of there before I made any kind of a pass at her.
Or am I going to be a fool and call her up when the Buick comes and ask her if she’d like to go for a ride?
In his mind he heard her voice: “I have never been in a Buick droptop, Cletus. Will you take me for a ride when it arrives?”
“Convertible, Princess. Convertible. Sure. Be happy to.”