The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [42]
“See, look at what Miguel has.” Leonarda pointed at the stuck ham. “He’s the height of sophistication.” She giggled. He looked pleased despite himself, despite even the evident mockery of the comment. “Oh, could we please each have a piece?” she asked, child-like, begging, entirely unnecessarily.
He looked at her with tolerance mixed with delight.
He took a large knife with a wooden handle, too large a knife really for the task at hand, and sawed some pieces off. He handed them to us on little napkins.
“Come,” Leonarda said to me, turning, chewing on the meat, “look at the wines.”
He had a shelf of wines. Above the cooking stove, high on the wall, was a painted portrait someone had done of him, the great man, gazing out.
They began talking now, just the two of them, sparring, while I looked on.
He turned to me. He had an apron on. “I apologize for speaking in Spanish,” he said. “My English is imprecise.”
But it wasn’t that. They spoke the same language in another sense. That was what he held forth, that they spoke the same language, made the same allusions, literary, historical. In each was perfected the Argentine will toward superiority.
Here, when they were talking, he still had a footing. I could tell, even now, he was gaining on her. He knew more, if only because he’d spent more time alive. Despite Leonarda’s bravado, he could still make her nervous. She still admired, respected him, much as she hated herself for it. Yet it was also for that that she was here. She would ask him questions without looking at him, as if he wasn’t even worthy of her glance. The more important the question, the more she’d look away or at least feign to look away. You could see that, in fact, it really was a charade; she was looking near enough to catch the movements of his form if not the focused picture.
It seemed that once again the tables had turned. Again, she was mocking him. She had read his books, though she pretended not to have. She knew all the information in them. It was important that, to the degree possible, she knew everything he knew. That he couldn’t make an allusion that she wouldn’t pick up on. Of course, this wasn’t my territory, what they were discussing, Argentine history. So what was my territory here? In short, what the hell was I doing here? The way he looked at me sometimes, it seemed he had the same question.
I suddenly felt confused, as if I’d woken up out of a dream. Why did she want me here at all? For protection? Maybe there was an element of that, but after all, she saw him often enough on her own. I suddenly felt that there was no purpose to my presence at all. I looked around, saw the open window, venue for escape. I could step right out into the garden.
Leonarda saw me looking out at the garden.
“Hey, Daddy,” she asked, “can I show Daisy the garden?”
“You aren’t allowed to at night,” he said, then seeing her exasperated teenage face, “but yes, yes, go.”
Leonarda passed by him, brushing her breasts against him, then turned. “Oops,” she laughed. One of the buttons of her shirt was open, exposing half a luminous breast.
He smiled but he was too stricken to find it actually funny.
Leonarda and I stepped out through the window, climbing up and over the sill right into the garden. There was a jasmine bush nearby that gave off a dizzying smell—we picked sprigs of it—then a round stretch of grass. We walked across the stretch of grass.
“You were perfect,” Leonarda said. “Your behavior was perfect.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, gratified to have done well on the one hand.
She shrugged. “I told him all about you. And you were just the way I described.”
“What way?” Now I was annoyed. “And why should I be acting any way for him?”
“Not for him. For me, silly.” She suddenly looked solemn. “I told him I was in love with you and that would never change.” Then, changing the subject, pulling