Meet Me Under The Ombu Tree (35 page)

A month later, when finally a letter arrived at their home in Buenos Aires, it was not addressed to Maria, but to Santi. He had paced the hall every morning with the misery of a caged bear, hoping for a thin blue envelope to release him from his desolation. Miguel had instructed Chiquita to go through the pile and take out any letters that might be from Sofia before Santi had a chance to find them. But Chiquita’s heart had softened, watching her son decline further and further into his unhappy, solitary world and so she had deliberately begun to let them sit on the table just long enough for Santi to see them before she descended the stairs to do what her husband had instructed.

Santi was grateful to his mother but they never spoke about it. Both pretended they had not noticed. Every morning he flicked through the letters, mostly addressed to his father, and watched his hope fade away with each letter that he rejected. What Santi and Chiquita didn’t know was that Maria went through the post in the entrance hall every morning on her way to the university, before the porter took it up to their apartment.

When Maria saw the letter she picked it up and studied the handwriting. It

wasn’t Sofia’s writing and it had been posted in France, but it was definitely from Sofia. Who else did he know in France? It was obviously a love-letter and it was obviously written and posted in such a way as to prevent anyone from discovering it. They were once again excluding her. She felt she had been slapped in the face. The hurt grabbed her by the throat and she gasped for air. She was too angry to cry. Jealousy overpowered her and consumed her until she ached to scream out at the unfairness of it all. Hadn’t she been a good friend to Sofia? How could she so callously turn her back on her like that? Wasn’t she her best friend, after all? Didn’t that count for anything?

Maria crept into her bedroom with the letter and locked the door. She took off her shoes and lay on the bed tucking her feet in behind her. She spent a long while looking at it, wondering what to do. She knew she should give it to Santi, but she was so angry that her fury blinded her. She wasn’t going to let them get away with it. She wanted them to suffer like she was suffering. Ripping open the envelope she pulled out the letter within, and immediately recognized the messy scrawl of her cousin. She read the first line.
To my love,
it said. Without reading the rest she turned over the page to confirm that Sofia had signed it. She had.
My heart beats with the anticipation that you will soon be here with me. Without that promise, I don't think it would beat at all.
Then she had signed it simply,
Chofi.

So, Maria thought bitterly, Santi is going to go and join her. He can’t leave, she raged silently, he can’t leave too. Not both of them. That means that they are planning to run off together and never come back. What will Mama and Papa think? They’ll die of grief. I can’t let this happen. Santi will regret it for the rest of his life. He’ll never be able to return to Argentina - neither of them will. Her heart quickened as she devised a plan. If she burnt the letter, Sofia would believe he had changed his mind. She would endure her three years in Europe; by then she would have grown out of the infatuation anyway, and then come back as planned. Whereas, if Santi followed her there now, neither would come back, ever. She couldn’t bear to lose them both.

Maria wrote Sofia’s address in her diary, writing backwards in case Santi were to come snooping, and put the letter back into the envelope. She didn’t read the rest. She couldn’t put herself through the torture of reading the details of their affair, not even to satisfy her curiosity. She walked solemnly out onto the balcony with a box of matches. Lighting the envelope she let it burn into a flowerpot, until there was nothing left besides a small mound of featherlight

ashes that she pressed into the earth with her fingers. Then she slumped onto the tiled floor, dropping her head into her hands and finally allowed the tears to break and fall freely. She knew she shouldn’t have burned the letter but they would all thank her in the end. She wasn’t just doing it for herself, or for them, but for her parents whose hearts would break if Santi left them for ever.

She hated Sofia, she missed her, she longed for her. She missed her moods, her petulance, her sharp wit and irreverent humour. She felt so hurt and betrayed. They had grown up together and shared everything. Sofia had always been selfish, but she had never shut her friend out before. Not like this. She couldn’t understand why Sofia hadn’t written to her. She felt she didn’t matter: she wasn’t important. It sickened her to think that she had been nothing more than a loyal puppy, following Sofia around, never really appreciated. Well, she’d done it now. Sofia would hurt just as much as she was hurting. Now she would know what it felt like to be treated as if she didn’t matter. When she later reflected on what she had done, she felt a terrible guilt and vowed never to tell anybody. When she looked at her reflection in the mirror she didn’t recognize herself any more.

When another letter arrived, not long after the first, Maria felt her stomach lurch with guilt. She hadn’t expected Sofia to write again. Hastily she hid it at the bottom of her bag and later condemned it to death by fire like the last one. After that she stalked the post every morning with the cunning of a professional thief. Trapped by her previous deceptions she would have been unable to stop even if she had wanted to.

Weekends weren’t the same once Sofia left. All that remained after her parting was a bitter residue and an animosity between the families that threatened to destroy their much-cherished unity. The summer faded as the winter set in. The air smelt thickly of burning leaves and damp earth. The atmosphere on the farm was one of melancholy. Each family retreated into itself. The Saturday
asa-do
was washed away with the rain and soon the burnt ground where the barbecue had been became nothing more than a puddle of muddy water symbolizing the end of an era.

As the weeks dragged on into months Santi became more and more desperate for some sort of communication from Sofia. He wondered whether she was being prevented from writing to him. All part of the strategy to get over him, no doubt. His mother was sympathetic but realistic. He must get on with his life, she said, and forget about Sofia. There were plenty of other girls about.

His father told him to stop ‘moping around’. He had got himself into a mess: ‘It happens to us all at some stage in our lives; the trick is to push through it. Bury yourself in your studies, you’ll be glad later on that you did.’ It was obvious that they were both deeply disappointed in him, but there was no point in making the boy suffer more than he was already suffering. ‘We’ve punished him enough,’ they said.

Sofia filled his every moment, whether he was lying in tormented sleep or out galloping angrily across the plain. He spent every weekend on the farm, retracing their steps, running his hand nostalgically over their symbol in the trunk of the ombu tree. He would torture himself remembering her until he would crumble like a child and cry until he had no more strength left in him to sob.

In July of that year Juan Domingo Peron, President of the Republic of Argentina, died after only eight months in office, following his return from exile the previous October. Whether loved or hated Peron had been in the public eye for thirty years. His body was not embalmed and the funeral was simple according to his own instructions. His second wife, Isabel, became President and the country spiralled into decline. Intellectually challenged, she relied on her Machiavellian adviser, former policeman and astrologer, Jose Lopez Rega, nicknamed ‘El Mago’ (the Wizard), who claimed he could raise the dead and speak to the Archangel Gabriel. He even mouthed Isabel’s speeches as she gave them, claiming that the words came directly from the spirit of Peron. But the blood was gushing out of the country and neither Isabel nor Lopez Rega could stop it. The guerrillas broke into revolt only to be met with the death squads of El Mago. Paco predicted that it wouldn’t be long before their President was overthrown.

‘She’s a nightclub dancer, I don’t know what she’s doing in politics. She should stick to what she’s good at,’ he grumbled.

He was right. In March 1976 the military deposed Isabel in a coup and put her under house-arrest. With General Videla at their head they proceeded to launch a bloody war on anyone who opposed them. People suspected of subversion or antigovernment activity were rounded up, tortured and killed. The Great Terror had begun.

Geneva, 1974

Sofia sat on the bench overlooking the deep blue lake of Geneva. Her eyes, fixed somewhere amid the faraway mountains, were red and sore from crying. It was quite cold although the sky was the most magnificent cornflower blue. She sat huddled in her cousin’s sheepskin coat and wool hat and shivered. Dominique had told her to eat. What would Santi think if she returned to Argentina a poor version of the woman he had said goodbye to? But she didn’t feel like eating. She would eat once he replied to her letter.

Sofia had arrived in Geneva at the beginning of March. It was the first time she had been to Europe. She was immediately stunned by the differences between her own country and Switzerland. Geneva was meticulously tidy. The streets were clean and smooth, the shop windows framed with gleaming brass, their interiors luxuriously decorated and scented. The cars were glossy and modern and the houses free from the kind of blemishes that a turbulent history had bestowed on the buildings of Buenos Aires. Yet in spite of all its order and polish Sofia missed the mad exuberance of her home city. In Geneva the restaurants closed at eleven whereas Buenos Aires only awoke at that time and continued to buzz until well into the small hours. She missed the froth of activity, the noisy cafes, the street parties and entertainers, the smell of diesel and burnt caramel and the sound of barking dogs and screaming children that were all part of the ambience of the streets of Buenos Aires. She found Geneva quiet. Polite, cosmopolitan, cultured but quiet.

Sofia had never met her father’s cousin Antoine and his wife Dominique before, although she had heard her parents speak of them. Antoine was her father’s second cousin; she knew all about him from her father’s stories of his ‘London days’, when they had enjoyed the city together like two hounds on a hunt, and Anna had told her that she had lived with the couple in Kensington during their engagement. Sofia seemed to recall that Anna hadn’t taken to Dominique - she found her too ‘over the top’, whatever that meant. Dominique had never liked Anna, she recognized an opportunist when she saw one, but she warmed to Sofia the minute she laid eyes on her. So like Paco, she thought happily.

To Sofia’s relief, Antoine and Dominique turned out to be the most delightful couple she had ever met. Antoine was large and humorous and spoke

English with a very heavy French accent. At first she thought he was putting it on to make her laugh. She certainly needed a laugh when she arrived. But it was genuine and he enjoyed her amusement.

Dominique was a woman in her forties. She was curvaceous with a candid, generous face and large blue eyes that opened very wide when she wanted to show interest in something. She tied her long blonde hair (which she was happy to point out wasn’t at all natural) into a ponytail with spotted hankies. Always spotted hankies. Dominique told Sofia that she had met Antoine thanks to a spotted hanky, which he had handed to her from the row behind at the Opera in Paris. Antoine had noticed her wiping her tears on the sleeve of her silk dress. From that moment on she always wore a spotted hanky in commemoration of that important day.

Dominique was loud and flamboyant, not only in the way that she laughed, for she sounded like a big exotic bird, but also in the way that she dressed. She always wore brightly coloured flowing trousers and long shirts she bought from an exotic shop called Arabesque in London’s Motcomb Street. Every finger had a ring on it that sparkled. ‘A good knuckleduster in times of need,’ she had said, before telling Sofia of the time she knocked the false teeth out of the leering mouth of a grubby flasher at Knightsbridge tube station. ‘If he had been well-endowed I would have shaken his hand,’ she joked. ‘London is a strange place, the only place I’ve ever been flashed at or threatened. Always on the tube, too.’ She added wryly: ‘I remember a man, another grubby little man, who barely reached up to my navel. He looked up at me with these livid eyes and said “I’m going to fuck you”. So I looked down my nose at him and told him, very firmly, that if he did and I found out about it, I’d be very, very, cross. He was so startled he jumped off at the next station like a scalded cat.’ Dominique enjoyed being outrageous.

Sofia was dazzled by the violet and shimmering blue eyeshadows she used to enhance the colour of her eyes. ‘What’s the point of using natural colours? Nature can do that by itself,’ she had laughed when Sofia asked her why she chose such vivid colours. She smoked through a long black cigarette-holder like Princess Margaret, and painted her fingernails blood-red. She was confident and opinionated and sassy. Sofia understood exactly why her mother hadn’t liked her, for they were the very qualities that Sofia immediately admired. Sofia and Anna had rarely agreed on anything.

Antoine and Dominique lived in opulent splendour in a large white house on

the Quai de Cologny, overlooking the lake. While Antoine spent long hours working in finance, his wife wrote books. ‘Lots of sex and murders,’ she replied with a grin when Sofia had asked her what she wrote about. She had given her one to cheer her up. It was called
Naked Suspect
and was appallingly bad; even Sofia with her inexperience of good literature could see that. But it sold well and she was always running off to sign copies and give interviews. The couple had two children in their teens - Delfine and Louis.