Empress Bianca (9 page)

‘I’m going to ask Ferdie for a divorce,’ she said.

Vittorio held her tightly. He kissed the back of her neck, stroking her back sensually. ‘I’ve been praying to the Virgin for this day for the last two years,’ he said intensely.

‘Vittorio,’ Gloria laughed. ‘That is outrageous. Who else but you would think it acceptable to pray to the Virgin for another man’s wife - and when
you’re another woman’s husband too?’

‘No,
Bella
. You have been my true wife for ten of these past twelve years, and I have been your true husband. Your husband and my wife have been social arrangements. The Virgin knows where my heart lies.’

With that, Gloria turned over to face Vittorio and kissed him. ‘Thanks for taking me back, Vittorio,’ she said, silently thanking Ferdie for removing the one impediment from her relationship with the man she had always truly loved.

A
s she dressed for her old school friend Sara Finkelstein de Cohen’s party, Bianca had no more idea that she would one day marry Ferdie Piedraplata than she did that all her social ambitions would be realized beyond her wildest dreams. As far as she was concerned, this May evening in 1963 was nothing more than an opportunity to climb another rung up the ladder of Mexico City Society.

For Bianca, all that was important in life remained focussed upon the social circles in which she moved in the Federal District and to which she aspired. Society was the platform upon which she could assert herself. Upon which she could strive and attain, allowing her to earn an achievement that would add grit to her life and make getting out of bed more of a challenge than the seamlessly pleasurable - and pointless existence - of the Mexican matron ever could.

As Bianca looked into the mirror and peered at the image reflected back at her, she saw a woman already approaching middle age, with blonde hair blunt-cut to the shoulders and backcombed to within an inch of its life. It was a very young look. Very trendy. With her large green eyes outlined in heavy black eyeliner - top and bottom - and further accentuated with long, thick, black false eyelashes; green and white eye shadow highlighting the distance between the eyes and eyebrows; a hint of blusher and a pale pink lipstick, Bianca projected an image of perfect but youthful grooming.

‘I don’t look a day over twenty-eight,’ she said to herself, consoling herself with the thought. ‘Not bad for a woman approaching her mid-thirties.’

In Bianca’s circle, half her contemporaries looked at least ten years older than she did; the other half, fifteen years older. To Bianca, her looks were of overriding importance, because she functioned in a world where a woman’s achievements were made possible by beauty and charm while at the same being circumscribed by the wealth, position and accomplishments of her husband. Although Bernardo Calman was a successful man, and she had been moving inexorably up the social ladder with him, Bianca’s ambition was now to become one of the leaders of Mexico City society. To that extent, therefore, her ambition was outstripping Bernardo’s position, but she was intelligent enough to see that it was realizable, as long as she poured the unique gifts of beauty, charm and energy, with which she had been endowed by nature, into her quest.

Bianca got up from her dressing table and peered at herself in the full-length mirror. She was as slender as if she dieted and exercised constantly, her ample bosom sexily filling out the line of her low-cut dress. She nodded approvingly at what she saw, for reflected back at her was an undeniably beautiful woman radiating sex appeal, who, unlike many another beautiful woman, had no anxieties about her looks. Indeed, one of her rarer characteristics was how completely for granted she took her beauty while at the same time relishing all the attention it brought her.

Bianca delighted in a compliment the way few other women did; and the look of lust that so frequently overcame men when they were talking to her never failed to generate a genuine thrill within her. Nor did she mask that delight. She gave expression to it in a way that thrilled men right back. Whether it was with a low chuckle, the batting of her long eyelashes or a finger fleetingly placed on the arm of the man with whom she was flirting, Bianca always, but always, conveyed her appreciation of the man who appreciated her, for she had learned one of the secrets of being a successful woman, which was that few men could resist being appreciated and in as obvious and direct a manner as social mores allowed.

Unusually for a woman who was so attractive to men, Bianca also got along well with other women. They never found her a threat, not even when she had their husbands drooling over her. Partly, this was because Bianca was careful to reserve her most pungently sexual conduct for the moments when no woman could overhear her, but partly it was also because she courted women as much as she courted men. Flattery - or, as
she would put it, ‘displaying appreciation’ - laid on with a trowel was the secret of her success and always had been. She had learned the art as a little girl sitting on her father’s lap and had used it lavishly thereafter, safe in the knowledge that the one thing no one wants to rectify is another’s splendid opinion of oneself.

Lavishness had actually become an increasingly pronounced feature of Bianca’s personality in recent years. In the social world as in so many other areas of her life, once she hit upon a mode of behaviour that elicited the responses she required of it, she repeated and refined it. In the case of her lavish demeanour, this worked so well socially that she had already begun to acquire quite a reputation in Mexico City for being a hostess. This, she knew, was her passport, visa and residency papers for the upper reaches of Mexican society, where nothing, save money and lineage, counted more than entertaining. In the absence of a great fortune, the Calmans were providing the only other means for acquiring an enviable social position: superb hospitality. Twice a year, therefore, at the end of April and the beginning of September, the Calmans hosted a large cocktail party for two hundred, during which they served every drink known to humanity and food that was always a combination of Lebanese and Mexican. The mix was both exotic and unusual, and the hospitality truly Middle Eastern in its splendour.

To establish herself further, Bianca had started two years previously to throw a dinner dance that she hoped would become one of the fixtures of the Mexico City social calendar. She had already originated the format she intended to perpetuate - the latest ‘in’ band until six o’clock in the morning, at which time Kedgeree, scrambled eggs and bacon, fried sliced mushrooms, fried sausages and kippers - a full English breakfast - were served. Bianca had started to play up her Britishness in a way her father never did, wisely using it to provide her with a distinction and a distinctiveness that she would otherwise have difficulty laying claim to.

She therefore made it known to all her friends that she invariably sent out engraved invitations that she had printed in London by Smythson of Bond Street, who, she claimed, were the English Royal Family’s stationers. Lest anyone miss where their invitations came from, each envelope had that firm’s name embossed on the flap, and Bianca was assiduous in letting everyone know that her family had always used the Queen’s stationers, thereby reinforcing the Barnett family’s reputation for aristocratic
connections - a reputation she was cultivating - while at the same time standing out from the crowd of Mexico City socialites by sending out invitations unlike anyone else’s.

For all her efforts, Bianca was only too aware that she had not yet reached the pinnacle of society to which she aspired. For all her achievements, she was not yet even properly on the periphery of the upper reaches of Mexican society, dominated as it was by no other female than Amanda Piedraplata, for Mr and Ferdie Piedraplata were the couple to know. Theirs was indisputably the most eminent social position in Mexico, before even the President and his family, who were viewed as transients while the Piedraplatas were regarded as holders of positions whose permanence transcended the changes in political climate.

Ferdie and Amanda lived like a latter-day imperial couple in a recently completed Frank Lloyd Wright palace in Lomas not far from the Chapultapec Palace where the Mexican Emperor Maximilien and his Belgian Empress Carlotta had briefly lived while he reigned in the nineteenth century.

For sheer, up to the minute splendour, their maze of concrete, glass and flat roofs was unsurpassable.
Architectural Digest
said so.
House and Garden
said so.
Harper’s Bazaar
said so. Everyone said so. Their country house, situated on a man-made island in Cuernavaca, a two-hour drive from Casa Piedraplata in Mexico City, was a nineteenth-century palace built by Emperor Maximilien during his reign. Rumour had it in Federal District drawing rooms that Ferdie Piedraplata had instructed I.M. Pei, the celebrated architect who practised in the United States, to design another modern palace on the site and to tear down the ill-fated Emperor’s palace to make room for it.

Whenever Bianca thought of Ferdie and Amanda Piedraplata, life’s injustices bore down upon her slender shoulders. Why did they have to clutter up their circle with presidents, government ministers and foreigners? Why couldn’t Ferdie be more patriotic? More Mexican? Why couldn’t he and Amanda choose their friends from the same circles that she and her friends did? Nice, well-off, social Mexicans. Every time the Piedraplata parties were covered in the society pages of the newspapers, the only Mexicans present were the boring old president, his boring old wife, his boring old ministers and their boring old wives as well as a sprinkling of Oligarchs who featured in the red-velvet bound Families of
Mexico. Or the wretched International Set. Super-rich and super-beautiful people like the Fiat king Gianni Agnelli, the Queen of England’s cousin David, Marquess of Milford Haven, Chase Manhattan Bank’s David Rockefeller, or Aristotle Onassis with Maria Callas.

One of the more charming features of Bianca’s personality was the complete lack of envy she possessed. She was not upset because they had what she wanted. She merely wanted an invitation to the party. She was therefore perfectly sincere when she asked herself why they couldn’t give fellow Mexicans like herself and her peer group a chance to meet them, when all she wanted to do was bask in the glorious light that their luminous presence cast. Life was just too unfair: Bianca was convinced of it, still puzzling over how best to engineer a meeting with Ferdie Piedraplata and his wife Amanda.

‘You would think,’ Bianca said to herself for what must have been the thousandth time, ‘that it would be easy enough to meet people who live in the same city. It’s not as if I want to become friends with them. I don’t. I merely want them to attend one of my parties each year, and for Bernardo and myself to be asked to one of theirs in return. That’s hardly a lot to ask.’

With the gift of clarity that would hold her in good stead throughout her life, Bianca knew precisely what she wanted from the Piedraplatas. She was equally clear about what she did not want. She did not want a close friendship, for Bianca knew from the newspapers and gossip on the social scene, that Amanda was the niece of an English lord, and while Bianca never let on to anyone - not even to Bernardo or her children - that she was fully aware of her father’s humble antecedents, over the years she had come to realize that there was a good reason why her father avoided speaking English or being with the British. She was not about to blow his cover - and incidentally her own - by befriending an Englishwoman who would be ideally placed to unmask her father for being the commoner he was. No, her ambition, so far as the Piedraplatas were concerned, had nothing to do with friendship. She simply wanted the kudos of being recognized by her peers as a member of the Piedraplata social set. Nothing more, nothing less.

Since Sara had told her that Ferdie and Amanda were attending the party, Bianca had resolved that, even if she had to move heaven or earth to create the opportunity, tonight was the night she was going to set her
foot on the first rung of the Piedraplata ladder. Intent on looking her best as well as her richest, Bianca put on the emerald and diamond parure that Bernardo had given her for her thirtieth birthday. ‘Proper grownup jewels,’ her father had called them. They were dazzling. And they had dazzled her friends. But, she had no doubt, they would be very secondrate compared to Amanda Piedraplata’s fabled jewels. ‘Still,’ she consoled herself, ‘at least they show I’m not penniless.’

Sure enough, when Bianca walked onto the Cohen veranda in Lomas, there was Amanda Piedraplata ‘holding court’ with two other women dressed in midnight-blue taffeta, in what looked suspiciously like a Balenciaga cocktail dress. On her bodice she was wearing the most obscene amount of sapphires Bianca had ever seen in her life. Rather than being envious, however, she was bedazzled. One of those stones alone was worth twice the whole of her parure, and she knew it. Amanda Pedraprata would also know it. ‘What a display,’ Bianca said to Bernardo. ‘If you owned jewellery shops like the Piedraplatas, I would also drape myself in every jewel I could. Have you ever seen a more fantastic sight in your life?’

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she heard someone behind her call her name. ‘Bianca? Long time no see. How are you, you fabulous thing, you?’

‘Begonia?’ Bianca asked, almost disbelievingly. ‘Can it really be you?

After all these years?’ Begonia was the Panamanian girl who had sat behind her at the Academy in Panama City and who was responsible for introducing her to her unrecognised first husband Hugo del Rio, whom not even Bernardo knew about. Although they had never been close friends, they had been friendly enough: on the periphery of one another’s circles. Bianca hoped that Begonia was equally ignorant of that secret from her youth. ‘Can you believe it?’ Begonia replied, providing her with the welcome clue. ‘Nineteen years! The last time I saw you, you were barely a teenager. Now you’re a knockout.’

‘It’s sweet of you to say so. You’re looking great yourself. So soignée. As if you had just stepped off a plane from Paris.’

‘In a manner of speaking, I did. I married someone called Raymond Mahfud. Although his family are originally from Baghdad we’ve been living in Beirut, which is called the Paris of the Middle East, and in its own way it’s very Parisian. I don’t mind telling you, though, it’s great to be back in Latin America.’

‘Will you be staying, or are you just visiting?’

‘No. We’re here to stay. Raymond is opening a branch of the Banque Mahfud here.’

‘So you married a banker?’

‘I sure did,’ Begonia said with the merest hint of resignation.

‘But how exciting! It is exciting, isn’t it?’

‘Not if you don’t like parties eight nights a week and dinners with all sorts of people about whom you really couldn’t care less but have to be nice to. I believe they call it being a Corporate Wife.’