The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [31]
“When did you arrive?” Leonarda asked.
“A few months ago.”
“Like Daisy. Are you having fun?”
“Of course,” Isolde said. “There’s wonderful culture here.” This seemed to be her line. What was less predictable was its effect on Leonarda.
“Really?” Leonarda’s eyes were shining. It seemed that, despite her cynicism, she was very susceptible to foreigners admiring her country. “What have you been seeing?”
“Opera, dance. There’s wonderful dance.”
“Oh, you’re Isolde! Did you see Tristan and Iseult? It was just playing at the Colón.”
“Of course. Did you go?”
“No, I couldn’t.” Leonarda looked horribly disappointed, then enraptured again. “But I have the music. I’ve been singing it.” She sang a line from an aria, really quite loudly. “But you should sing. Your voice is amazing. You must be a mezzo. Have people told you that?” I could see her dreaming up the scene, Isolde, internationally celebrated mezzo-soprano, quivering in the footlights. These infatuations of hers always made me nervous.
“I have been told that, yes.”
“And are you going to stay here? You must stay. We can study singing together,” Leonarda went on, as if nothing else had ever mattered to her in the world.
Isolde laughed, touched and surprised. I, on the other hand, felt annoyed. For one thing, I couldn’t sing.
“What else have you been doing?” Leonarda asked.
Misinterpreting the question as “What do you do?” Isolde adopted her upright posture, forceful, as if exerting her will. Were it not such a sensitive issue for her, Isolde would have undoubtedly understood by now that most Argentines would never pose a question like that, considering it bad manners, and would be perfectly content to learn weeks later, for example, that a newfound friend was responsible for assuring the security systems of the U.S. government or worked in a Turkish restaurant as a cook.
“I’m developing a project related to art and charity for children,” Isolde said.
“Sounds fantastic,” Leonarda answered, her enthusiasm taking an abrupt nosedive. Neither “charity” nor “children” were at all her thing.
“Good, good,” Isolde said, relieved not to have to elaborate.
In the end, things never worked out between Leonarda and Isolde. The three of us attempted to meet a few times, but something always went wrong. For starters, Leonarda was always afraid that people would find her weird.
“She’s sort of weird, right?” Isolde asked me right away.
I shrugged, as befitted my role as the cipher, the malleable, mediating one.
Unsurprisingly, in Leonarda’s case, it was more complicated. She would go into raptures, dreaming up her image of Isolde, the innocent Austrian woman in distress. “She’s adorable, her accent. She’s so alone. I can picture her so well wearing a dirndl.” But when face-to-face with Isolde, something always jarred. Isolde did not cooperate with the dream. She kept getting in the way, asserting her will. “No, let’s meet at this restaurant instead.” “Let’s only speak in Spanish.” “I’m not going to be ordered around by some poorly instructed Austrian” was Leonarda’s conclusion.
On seeing Leonarda at the party, a slim man with dirty-blond hair got down on one knee.
Isolde, on my right, appeared agitated. “Do you know that guy, Alfonso?” she whispered in my ear.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
She put her hand on my arm, a bit flushed. “Here,” she said. “Can we talk over here?”
“Sure.”
We moved backward toward the bookshelves. “I’ve made out with him a few times at parties, always drunk, of course,” Isolde said, her eyes half on me, half on Alfonso. “And then he asked me on a date. I knew about his family. You know, he’s from a very old Argentine family.” It seemed that Isolde had memorized this whole new set of nomenclature, so different from the European one. “He plays the role of the upper-class eccentric. But what I hadn’t realized was that the family was poor.”
“They are?”
“Can you believe it?”
“How did you find out?”
“Because I got all wet. There was