The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [20]
The one surprising thing she’d done was to suddenly one day quit her job at the bank.
Her parents were dismayed but, for the first time in her life, Isolde didn’t care. She had saved some money and set out to travel. Her first stop, as she’d told me, had been Uruguay, a destination for a certain category of Europeans at that time of year, the southern summer, and then Argentina a month or so later where, seduced by the reception she received, she stayed on. “It’s different, isn’t it?” she said. “The way you’re treated here is different.” She laughed. “Like royalty or something.” In Austria, she’d been nothing particular, an Austrian among Austrians, blonde among blondes. She’d even dyed her hair darker in school in the hopes of distinguishing herself. But here she felt revered. Why? Simply for being European, already she was placed in a higher echelon.
Her first encounters in Argentina were lucky ones, or so she thought at the time. The initial connection was made through her landlady to a guy, now in his fifties, whom the woman’s daughter used to date. The guy had a right-wing TV talk show, one of the most popular in the country. Isolde didn’t entirely grasp the heavily right-wing connotations of his commentary, nor would she have particularly cared, but the guy was famous. He invited her to barbecues at his country house. She was let in on the secret of that crowd. The famous right-wing talk-show host, always seen publicly in the company of a famous actress, and not least known for his misogynist jokes, was actually gay. He had a young beautiful lover the age of his own son. The two boys lived in his house, shared meals with him, each had a room with a DVD player and powerful speakers. Isolde felt one of the elect to be privy to this secret. She tried to relish in her rapid, unpredictable insider status. But the truth was that, when she was among these people, in this walled-in property outside the city, eating the famous Argentine barbecue, nothing touched her soul. She soon realized that it was a false piste. Where she wanted to be was with the cocktail crowd.
She backtracked, refused some of the country invitations. Though she’d started a flirt with the talk-show host’s son, she dropped this too. There was a whole cocktail circuit. Isolde spent many lonely nights, knowing there was a cocktail party somewhere and not having anyone to go with or not being sure that she could get in. Sometimes she got dressed up and went anyway. She could almost always get in with her face and clothes alone. All the same, she would feel terribly exposed as she stepped out of the cab and up to the door. When no cocktail event was materializing, she went to modern dance performances or concerts. Everything, as she’d mentioned, was so cheap.
She soon met a French girl her age who was secretive and would sometimes tell her where an event was and sometimes not. The French girl had her own agenda, to be the most sought-after foreigner in Buenos Aires. Though the French card among Argentines could never really fail—the model for the upper-class Argentine woman is French, for the Argentine man, British—Isolde, with her goldenness, was competition.
In the cocktail set, circulating is key. On the other hand, given this very fact, the eloquence of absence cannot be overlooked. Isolde was not so good with the eloquence of absence. She had no patience with being alone. She was savvy enough to know it should be tried. She would try it and couldn’t bear it, would dress