Empress Bianca (5 page)

Clara, sympathizing with her parents as she did and appreciating the strain they had been living under since the end of the war, got up, confident that she would walk into her brother’s bedroom and see Ferdie resting. After all, what could have happened in the thirty-six hours since she had last seen him to bring about the reaction - indeed, the drama - which her parents seemed intent on creating out of a simple lie-in? Clara was therefore utterly unprepared for the sight greeting her when she opened the bedroom door, saying, ‘Ferdie, it’s Clara. May I come in?’

Ferdie’s response was a soft groan. She pushed open the bedroom door and entered the room. There, lying on the bed, was her brother: still in the trousers of his Prussian-blue pinstriped suit, the jacket and tie now neatly hanging in the armoire, thanks to his mother, but with the starched white shirt unbuttoned to reveal his hairy chest and his socks still on. Worse, however, than the state of the normally fastidious Ferdie’s clothing was his expression. He looked wretched, haunted even: his eyes sunken in a way that was wholly unnatural and betokened real illness. Yet he did not look sad. Rather, he looked as if the life had been wrung out of him, as if he had been crushed beneath a boulder. As soon as she saw her brother’s expression, Clara understood why her parents were so worried.

‘Ferdie,’ Clara said, making her way over to sit by the side of the bed. ‘What in God’s name has happened?’

Ferdie shook his head on the pillow.

Clara took his hand. ‘Ferdie, something must have happened. Is it Fernanda? Did she break up with you?’

Once more Ferdie responded by shaking his head.

‘Is one of the businesses in trouble?’

Again, only the shake of the head.

‘Are any of the businesses in trouble?’

That elicited the beginnings of a smile before he shook his head again.

‘What is it, then? Are you just tired?’

‘I must be. I’ve never felt like this before,’ he said.

‘Don’t you think you should let Papa and Mama call the doctor?’

Ferdie shook his head again, this time vigorously.

‘You’ve been driving yourself too hard. You’re suffering from exhaustion. The doctor can give you something to make you feel better.’

‘Rest, that’s all I need. Rest. And peace and quiet. Sorry, Clara,’ Ferdie said, allowing his sister to hold his hand, ‘but I don’t have the energy to talk. Maybe tomorrow, OK?’

Clara kissed him on the forehead. ‘Have you eaten anything at all?’

‘Soup. That’s all I want. But not now…later.’

‘I’ll get Cook to bring some.’

With that, Clara kissed her brother again and left his bedroom.

Standing in the passage to greet her were their parents. ‘Well?’ Anna said. ‘See what I mean?’

‘I do see what you mean, Mama,’ Clara said as they walked back into the drawing room. ‘I’ve never seen anyone look like that before. It’s hard to put it into words, but he just looks so odd. Still, I don’t think there can be anything very wrong. I mean he was lucid. If his thought processes had been disturbed, I’d say we do have something to be worried about. But they aren’t. He’s just wrung out.’

‘It’s more than that,’ Manny said. ‘I can tell. A father’s instinct, if you prefer. I do wish he’d let us call the doctor.’

‘Your father’s right. I’ve seen many people exhausted in my life, and none of them has been quite like Ferdie is.’

‘Maybe you should call the doctor if you’re so worried, even though Ferdie doesn’t want you to,’ said Clara, who actually agreed with her parents.

‘That’s not a good idea,’ Manny said. ‘He’d take it as a mark of disrespect if we went over his head. He’s a man now. He’s not a little boy. We have to respect his wishes, even if we don’t agree with them.’

‘Then maybe you ought to go into his bedroom right now, Papa, and tell Ferdie that, while you will respect his wishes not to call the doctor, you insist, as his father and employer, that he take a break for a few days.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ Anna said.

For the next five days, Ferdie stayed in his bedroom. In that time, he left his bed only to relieve himself. He did not change his clothes for the first two days. Only on the third morning, when Anna insisted that he change into pyjamas, did he finally strip off the trousers, his socks and his white shirt. Not once, however, did he brush his hair, wash his face, brush his teeth or take a bath. Exhaustion was on thing, both his parents and sister agreed, but this was something else. What none of them realized, because none of them had ever seen it before, was that they were witnessing the first severe manifestation of the downside of hypermania. The manic phase, which they had also failed to recognize, they had been observing for some considerable length of time prior to his collapse. His tremendous energy, his plethora of ideas (all good, but nevertheless, an extraordinary amount of them), his boundless enthusiasm – all the things the family believed were what made the adult Ferdie Piedraplata so extraordinary – were also the indications of a hypermanic personality at work. It would take several more cycles of exuberance and collapse before any of them, Ferdie included, realized what the problem was. Thereafter, hypermania, with its peaks and troughs, would cast a pall over the rest of Ferdie’s life.

T
hat first manifestation of the down phase in Ferdie’s illness lasted only a few weeks, after which he gradually bounced back with all the energy, and flair that were characteristics of his personality. Never one for idleness, as soon as he was fit, he once again applied himself to his true vocation: the creation and expansion of a great fortune. Meanwhile, across town on the outskirts of Chapultapec, in a far more ordinary part of the Federal District, as Mexico City was sometimes known, than San Angel, where the Piedraplatas lived, Bianca Barnett was preparing to marry the man of her dreams - or, at any rate, the man of her dreams of the moment.

It was in mid-October 1948 that Bianca’s wedding day dawned warm, bright and sunny. The weather was neither too humid nor too hot. A perfect day for a wedding, in fact. The marriage ceremony was due to take place that afternoon at the Chapultapec Synagogue, followed by a reception at the Barnett house, which was two streets away from Julius Finkelstein’s, in that modest but good area. In the four years since his arrival in Mexico, Harold Barnett had enjoyed a measure of success that allowed him to live well. The one-storey house he had built the year before was spacious, with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, as well as a living room, dining room, a family room and servants’ quarters with laundry room, bedroom, lavatory and shower. It sat on half an acre of land, which Leila had had their full-time garden-boy landscape with attractive flowerbeds and bushes. To the poor, the Barnetts seemed rich, even though to the rich, they were poor.

To the beggar woman from the shantytown a mile and a half down the
road who pushed her face between the closed wrought-iron gates of the Barnett residence, as Harold rather grandly referred to his house, the scene unfurling before her eyes was one of unimaginable wealth. She stood outside that October afternoon and watched the wedding preparations as the houseboy, the gardener, three waiters on secondment from the Jewish Club and three housemaids beavered away, opening up trestle tables which they then draped with white damask table cloths before setting them with what looked, to the beggar woman, like fabulous silver tableware but was actually only nickel-plate. She feasted her eyes as small but beautiful floral arrangements were set down at regular intervals upon the five longer trestle tables or put in the centre of the eleven smaller tables seating four apiece. She was entranced when chairs which looked as if they were made of gold were placed before each place setting, little realizing that they were merely ordinary metal chairs coated with goldcoloured paint: a solecism which would have been regarded as the ultimate in vulgarity by the very people Harold Barnett was trying to ape, had he known any well enough to invite them.

When the rows of electric lights were draped from pole to pole, and the nickel-plated candelabra brought out and placed upon each table, the beggar woman closed her eyes and imagined the glow they would provide later that evening, when the reception was in full swing, with the band playing and the guests being wined and dined. She hoped that no one would shoo her away, and indeed, no one did until a beautiful blonde lady, followed by two men carrying buckets of flowers, came outside. As the lady was walking towards a wooden arch, a tall man in pinstriped trousers, a crisp white shirt and a black bowtie came up to the woman and said, in a harsh tone of voice: ‘What do you want? Go on! Off with you!’

The woman stepped back and would have run off had she not noticed the beautiful blonde lady turning around and gesticulating towards the starched and pinstriped man. ‘Come and see me,’ the vision of loveliness appeared to be saying. ‘Let her stay.’ The beggar woman edged towards the roadside and waited until he had walked across to his mistress. Sure enough, within moments he confirmed by gesture that her interpretation of the beautiful blonde lady’s actions had been accurate, so the beggar woman stepped back towards the gate and once more pushed her face between the black iron bars. Having done so, she watched, again entranced, as the beautiful blonde lady directed the dressing of the arch
with a quantity of pentas, lilies and other flowers whose names she did not know but which, she had no doubt, cost more than she and her whole family had to live upon for a year. The rich, she decided, really do live in another world, one free of the cares and concerns which daily oppress those who are less fortunate. How she would love to make the leap, if only for an hour, from her life to the one unfolding before her eyes, but she knew the futility of such hopes.

After the arch had been dressed to the beautiful blonde lady’s satisfaction, she retreated back into the house. By the time she reemerged, dressed in a long, pale-green chiffon tea gown and a matching hat, the beggar woman had gone.

The beggar woman therefore did not see Leila take up her position in the backseat of the new green Mercury coupe with which Harold had replaced the Packard for the ride to the synagogue, nor did she see Bianca step out of the house a few minutes later and wait, patiently, while her bridesmaids - all in long apricot dresses - unravelled her long tulle train before helping help her into the Austin Princess limousine which the British Consul had lent Harold for the journey from the house to the synagogue and back.

‘You’ve made your Daddy very proud, Bianca,’ Harold said as the Consul’s chauffeur started up the engine. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful bride than you.’

‘Not even Mummy?’ Bianca said teasingly.

To Harold, the height of feminine beauty had always been his wife, followed by his daughter, who closely resembled her mother; he knew that Bianca was mischievously prodding him to find out which one of his two loves was the more beautiful in his eyes.

‘Oh, your mother made a magnificent bride, but if I have to judge, I’d say you’ve aced her.’

Satisfied, Bianca leaned over and kissed her father on his cheek.

Harold suddenly looked as if he was about to cry. ‘It’s unbelievable to think that my little Bianca is getting married,’ he said as the tears slid down his cheeks. ‘I don’t know what your mother and I are going to do without you.’

‘Daddy, it’s not as if I’m going far. We’ll be living only five minutes away in Lomas, and Bernardo is already working with his father twenty minutes from home. Nothing’s going to change except where I lay my
head at night. Promise.’

‘Promise?’ Harold said, a plaintive expression in his eyes.

Bianca thrilled at the look. She basked, as she had always done, in her father’s adoration. Although she would never admit it to Bernardo, she needed her father’s love almost as much as she needed Bernardo’s, for Harold Barnett had been the mainspring of her self-esteem: the person in whose eyes she had always been perfect and for whom she had never been able to do any wrong. ‘Don’t be an old silly, Daddy. Of course nothing’s going to change. You surely don’t think I’d ever let a little thing like a husband come between us, do you? Now, come on, don’t blubber. You did enough of that last night, and I can’t have you setting me off again. I have to walk up the aisle a well groomed bride, and I fear a tear-stained face will be incompatible with that.’

‘Quite right,’ Harold said, putting on a brave smile and trying to banish his tears.

Ever since Bianca had become engaged to Bernardo Calman three months beforehand, Harold had been dreading the day when his baby would leave home. Try as he might to reason with himself that he was lucky to have such a nice and obliging young man as a prospective son-in-law, he had never been able to shake the feeling of doom, loss and horror at what would happen once Bianca adjusted to married life and found that she did not need her father the way she once had. In an attempt to let go, Harold had been telling himself these last three months that it was inevitable that Bianca would grow up and marry, and he must count himself lucky that she was marrying someone of Bernardo Calman’s calibre.

Bernardo Calman, although not rich, was unusually easygoing. He was good-natured almost to a fault. He was simple and direct. He made no pretence of the fact that he worshipped Bianca. From the very outset of their relationship, he had met the Barnett family on their terms and had fitted in so well that Harold would have thought he was obliging to the point of weakness, had it not been for the fact that Harold himself was obliging of his daughter to that same ineffable point. Moreover, while Bernardo had no money of his own, and did not appear to have a glittering future in front of him the way Ferdie Piedraplata did, he was from a prosperous family of builders and had joined the family firm, not as an employee, but as a junior partner. He was therefore a man with
prospects, as Harold would put it, and while he would never provide Bianca with the life Ferdie Piedraplata could, he would nevertheless provide her with a good and comfortable lifestyle, and ultimately, Harold comforted himself, it was the fact of comfort, more than its degree, that really mattered.

Leila Barnett also approved of Bernardo Calman, not only for the same reasons that Harold did but also for one very private reason of her own. Bernardo Calman was Jewish. Leila and Bianca were Jewish. Although Leila loved Harold and had never regretted marrying him, the world had changed in a way that would now make it impossible for her to marry a Christian, or for her father to approve of her doing such a thing. After all that had happened to her people since the days of her own marriage, Leila was delighted that Bianca was reaffirming her Jewish identity instead of stripping her descendants of it. Moreover, this marriage precluded her from having to tell her Christian husband that she didn’t want her Jewish daughter to marry out of the faith, out of her own people. Of one thing Leila was sure. After all the suffering her people had endured in Europe throughout the last decade, the last thing she would have wanted was a Christian son-in-law, inevitably bringing yet more Christian blood into her family and diluting for all posterity the strength and heritage of the Seed of Abraham.

Although Leila had helped her daughter to get dressed, even she was startled by the radiance of the bride when Bianca took up her position at the entrance of the synagogue. She was absolutely ravishing in a longsleeved, jewel-necked white organdie and lace bodice with a heavily gathered floor-length skirt and a long train over which flowed, like the fizz upon a glass of champagne, an even longer tulle veil. This was attached to her hair by a tiara of faux pearls, partially obscured by a heavily gathered layer of tulle that had been pulled down over her face for the walk down the aisle. Even that single layer of tulle covering her face, however, did not did not detract from her beauty or her radiance. Rather, it enhanced it, giving Bianca a mysterious air that was at once romantic and glamorous.

To the wedding guests, none of whom had known the Barnetts before their arrival in Mexico, this was one of the weddings of the year. The Barnetts were already accepted as members of bourgeois society, in part because Harold had never disabused anyone of the notion that he was a wellborn British gentleman. In fact, Harold Barnett fostered that notion,
despite the fact that he had been born anything but a gentleman. His father was a railway worker from Llangoglen who moved to Gwent before he was born, his mother being a domestic servant with a local solicitor’s family.

What saved Harold from a life of unfulfilled potential was saving Leila Milade’s life. But for that fortunate occurrence, he might well have been condemned to a life of class limitations, of unredeemed and unremitting boredom. Of knowing his place and taking it for granted for the remainder of his life. It was ironic, as Harold knew only too well, that the Milades had accurately judged his measure because he was a foreigner in a foreign land.

Had they been English, they would have dismissed him as soon as he opened his mouth and betrayed the remnants of his humble Welsh origins. Instead they heard what they thought was the sound of a middleclass British gentleman: someone who might not be rich or grand but who, judging by his manners and his deportment, must be well bred.

As a foreigner, Harold had made the leap from the working to the middle class. Thereafter, there was never any question of his ever returning to Britain to live. He liked being a British gentleman, and he could only be taken for one so long as he lived outside of Britain and the English-speaking world. And as long as he spoke a foreign language. The result was that Harold seldom spoke English, except to Bianca, Leila and the staff at the British consulate, who invariably made allowances for the British abroad. Harold was easily able to adhere to the habit of a lifetime when he stood up to make his speech as father of the bride, if only because none of the guests spoke English. Flanked by the flowered arch, a microphone in his hand, he welcomed his guests in Spanish and proceeded to sing the praises of his daughter in the tongue of the land.

Bernardo, whose only language was Spanish, did the same in his speech, while Bianca sat back and enjoyed the high point of her life.

To Bianca, it seemed unlikely that life would ever get better than this. Here she was, marrying the man she craved and embarking on a life that would doubtless provide her with a Latin version of the American dream: handsome husband, three or four children, an active social life, increasing prosperity. Ultimately, there would also be a big house with four bedrooms and en suite bathrooms designed by Mexico’s leading architect - whoever that happened to be by the time she and Bernardo could afford that
realization of the dream. She was going to have a perfect life, with love, money, kids, happiness, servants and a place in bourgeois society so that she could keep herself gainfully amused while Bernardo did a man’s work and brought home a man’s wages.

At the end of Bernardo’s speech, Bianca rose to cut the cake with him. This was the end of the speeches, she knew, and she felt a sense of rising expectation as soon as she and Bernardo cut the cake and he fed her a slice, which she sexily took from his fingers, her teeth brushing provocatively against the skin of his fingers as she did so. Then the cake was whisked away by the houseboy to be cut up in the kitchen before being distributed amongst the guests who rose and toasted the health and happiness of the bride and groom in champagne.