"Oh, honey, you're not," Claudia said, and kissed him. "You're a source of joy."
"Speak to her," el Coronel Frade said.
"You mean right now?" Claudia asked.
"Yes, I mean right now," el Coronel said. There was a tone of command in his voice, and Claudia reacted to it.
"Excuse me, please, Cletus," she said, and went in the house.
"Alicia," el Coronel Frade ordered, "would you have someone bring us some champagne?"
"Do I get any of it?"
"If you can drink it before your mother comes back," Frade said with a smile.
"Sounds fair enough," Alicia said, and went quickly into the house.
Now that was a father talking to his daughter, and vice versa. What the hell is their relationship?
"I'm sorry about this, Cletus," el Coronel said.
"No problem, Dad. I was raised with Uncle Jim's girls. They drove both of us crazy, too."
[THREE]
The Plaza Hotel Bar
Buenos Aires
1710 15 December 1942
Se?or Enrico Mallin, with Se?orita Maria-Teresa Alberghoni on his arm, entered the bar via the street entrance rather than through the lobby. They had just come from her apartment.
In her apartment earlier, watching her postcoital ablutions through the glass wall of her shower, and then watching her dress, he told himself she was not only an exquisitely lovely young woman, but a sweet and gentle one as well, worth every peso she cost him.
It was not impossible, he also told himself, that she was beginning to love him for himselfshe certainly acted like it in bed. Perhaps she was not submitting to his attentions solely because of the allowance he gave her, and the apartment, and his guarantee of her father's loan at the Anglo-Argentinean Bank. He was flattered by such thoughts, of course, but he was at the same time aware that they were not without a certain risk ... if she let her emotions get out of control, for example.
An arrangement was an arrangement. And its obligations and limitations had to be mutually understood between the parties. She would never become more than his Mi?a, and he would never be more than her good friend, her protector. She was expected to be absolutely faithful to her good friendthe very idea of another man touching Maria-Teresa, those exquisite breasts, those soft, splendid thighs, was distasteful. And he was expected to be faithful to her. Excepting of course, vis-a-vis his wife.
The relationship was an oldhe hesitated to use the word "sacred"Buenos Aires custom. His father had a Mi?a; his grandfather had a Mi?a; and most of the gentlemen of his professional and social acquaintance had Mi?as. When he was a young man, his father explained to him the roots of the custom: It first developed in the olden days, when marriages were arranged with land and property, not love, as the deciding factor, and a man could not be expected to find sexual satisfaction with a woman who might have brought 50,000 hectares as her dowry but was as ugly as a horse.
In the olden days, a gentleman was expected to provide for the fruit of any such arrangement. And he was ostracized from polite society if he failed to do so. Some of the affluent Buenos Aires families (those who were perhaps a little vague about their lineage) could often trace their good fortune back to a great-grandmother or a great-great-grandmother who had an arrangement with a gentleman of wealth and position.
Just before the turn of the century, when Queen Victoria was on the British throne, the custom was buttressed by Queen Victoria's notionshamelessly aped by Argentine society, as were other things British in those daysthat ladies could have no interest in the sexual act save reproduction. A man, a real man, needed more than a woman who offered him her body only infrequently and with absurd limitations on what he might do "with it.
In exchange for certain considerations, a Mi?a well understood her sexual role.
In more recent times, the necessity for permanence in the relationship between a Mi?a and her good friend died out. This was because the efficacy of modern birth-control methods obviated the problem of children. On more than one occasion, however, Enrico Mallin considered giving Maria-Teresa a child. He loved his own children, of course, but they had inherited their mother's English paleness. He thought it might be nice to have a child or two with Maria-Teresaa child who would have his olive skin and dark eyes, his Spanish blood.
Of course, on reflection, he realized the foolishness of this notion, and ascribed it to his fascination with her olive skin and dark eyes.
Because a Mi?a was not a whore or a prostitute, it would be ungentlemanly to conclude an arrangement with her in such fashion that she was forced into one of those professions afterward. Hence the allowance, at least a part of which the girl was expected to save for a dowrywhich she could use after the arrangement came to an end. And hence the note at the Anglo-Argentinean Bank which Enrico had guaranteed for her father's business. When a Mi?a had enough money to wish to begin her married future, it was usually time for her good friend to wonder whether the grass might be greener elsewhere.
Maria-Teresa Alberghoni was Enrico Mallin's third Mi?a, and she had been with him for four years. While he couldn't imagine replacing her, in the back of his mind it seemed to him that their arrangement would doubtless come to an end in another two or three years ... though in truth, he didn't really want to do without Maria-Teresa. The grass is rarely greener than where you are standing.
Although one of the best in Buenos Aires, the Plaza Hotel is, after all, nothing more than a hotel. A hotel accommodates travelers ... or sometimes a man and a woman not married to each other who require a bed behind a locked door.
Appearances are important. Unless it is for some specific functionsuch as a ball, or a wedding reception that their husbands are unable to attendladies should not risk gossip by being seen in a hotel without their husbands. Specifically, a lady would not think of entering the bar at the Plaza Hotel without her husband; and gentlemen of Enrico Mallin's social and professional circle had an unspoken agreement never to take their wives to the bar at the Plaza under any circumstances.
This left the gentlemen free to take their Mi?as there in the almost certain knowledge that they were safe from their wives.
The girls liked the system too. They could move from table to table chatting happily with their friends, while the gentlemen were afforded the opportunity to show off their Mi?as to their peers, and to have private conversations about business, or whatever else needed to be discussed in confidence, in a place where the walls do not have ears.
As a matter of fact, in Enrico Mallin's judgment, the showing-off aspects of the custom had recently started to get a little out of hand. For one thing, certain gentlemen were beginning to bedeck their Mi?as in jewelry and furs. There was nothing wrong, certainly, with giving your Mi?a a couple of small gold trinkets, or even a silver-fox cape, especially if she had done something to make you extraordinarily happy, or as a farewell gift, if the relationship was drawing to an end.
But these weren't trinkets, these were diamonds and other precious jewels, and heavy gold bracelets, and quite expensive fur coats. Once one or two gentlemen started this practice, all the Mi?as would begin to expect it.
And worse than that, certain gentlemen started to appear in the Plaza bar with a Mi?a on each arm. And there was one old fool, Hector Forestierohe was as bald as a cucumber and must be in his seventieswho was showing up with three. Enrico had no idea what exactly he thought he was proving by thisto suggest that he had enough money for three Mi?as, or that he was still virile enough to handle a menage a quatre in bed.