The Ornaments of Love

Chapter Eleven

The moonlight over Barcelona was now at its strongest, and the Marquesa stood staring through the glass doors at its reflection on the finely cut and polished stonework that made up the walls of her balcony. She had not realized she had stopped speaking as her story had played out in her mind, or that Veronica was now so aggressively fixed upon her memories.

"What happened?" she asked her aunt again.

The woman turned back and smiled at her niece's funny little face, so full of anticipation, the wide-eyed insistence over something she now found to be so distant. It was ridiculous, really, that she remembered so much of it.

"It was a very simple decision that my father made, and the only real thing he could do, though the idea had never crossed my mind the entire time. My father was no murderer, and though I believed this at the time, I truly did not come to understand this truth until after he was forced to deal with Antonio.

"Very quietly, and with an abundance of skill in his timing, my father sent Antonio off to Paris as the nephew of a distant but wealthy Spanish aristocrat. He became a boy of status delivered into the City of Light by his only living relative and sole benefactor. He was sent there in a private carriage, no less, to an apartment located in a respectable building near the Latin quarter, purchased outright for him, where he would stay indefinitely as he continued his education. Antonio was enrolled at the Sorbonne and went on to pursue the field of his choice, all of this under the agreement that he could never return to Spain again. I promised Papá that I would never pursue him, even if just to know anything about his life after me. He would only communicate with his mother privately by letter through my father, a courtesy that she kept secret to her grave. As far as his father, our family, and his associates would ever know, Antonio had been privately executed by men who were, of course, paid handsomely for their cooperation in the charade. My father constructed the whole enterprise in one day and saw to its accomplishment without arousing the suspicions of anyone, aside from his secretary, whose name he used as Antonio's pseudonym in the affair.

"There is a great deal about the memory of my father which I cherish, but nothing so much as what he did for Antonio, for all of us during that time. He proved to me that a man could be greater than his society would allow, and he taught me the worth of standing for one's principles even if it must become the strictest of secrets. As for me, he made it understood to all that, after examination by a doctor, my virtue had not been stolen by the boy, but only attempted. There was, of course, a tremendous scandal in Madrid over the sordidness of this entire affair. But a year later, when my father had found a Barcelonan suitor to accept a seventeen-year-old virgin from a wealthy Madrilenian house, who could give him sons, what threads of scandal remained unraveled forever. Don Augustí simply presumed I was a virgin on our wedding night, and, I presume he wouldn't have truly known if I weren't.

"But you see how you have let me ramble on about my father when his tale is not the one that I intended to tell you tonight? The real story behind all of this was my first experiences with Antonio. Forgive me for traveling so far in my narrative only to come to a simple story that needed only a few sentences to be told properly.

"What was important to me was that I gave myself to Antonio because I loved him and I wanted him to be happy at any price. At the time, I thought that giving my body to him was the ultimate expression of this love. I surrendered to this conviction completely. In time, I would come to understand that there was a great deal more I could have done for him, had I taken a moment to truly think out his situation. I came to learn that sex, for all its taboo and acclaim, particularly its heralding by men, is not as important a gift as it is a possession. One could choose to use it as a momentary prize or as part of a dowry, and by this manner, one could take advantage of the tremendous value of sex to use it as a tool or a weapon. I have found that any one of several uses can prove to be invaluable under both the most common or unusual of circumstances. Understand, what makes sex such a powerful commodity for women is that only women can use it in any of these ways.