Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

way men rarely are past adolescence, with a litheness like a deer’s, and this lends her physique an angularity and creates hollows under her high cheekbones that make her face look gaunt, severe, and sculptural. Her skin is not as Addie has imagined—not amber, cinnamon, gold, or any shade of brown—but a rare and striking black, like melted Jew’s-pitch in a Charleston roadbed on a day as hot as this. Her complexion is unlined, so wholly fresh she might be forty, even thirty-five, but her hair is grizzled, and there’s thirty years’ too much experience in her face to pass for that. She’s wearing a black silk dress, good but plain, with gathered skirts and waist attached, and on her feet, which are narrow, large, and flat as planks, a pair of silver satin slippers.

Clarisse—whose back is turned—is, like her mother, tall, but more delicate and willowy of frame, and her dress, though also black, is of a different order from Paloma’s, the brocade like heavy web on brightblack satin silk. It’s as chic and elegant as Addie’s own, but in a different way, not that of a Charlestonian, but of a habanera. She is holding a closed fan, and her hair—which is lustrous and wavy, as black as a crow’s wing—is pinned up in the manner of the day, à la giraffe, held in place by an ornate tortoiseshell-and-sterling comb. A few wisps, as fine as eider, have broken free and curl against her neck, which is the color of parchment or old bone.

“Ahí están,” Paloma says, her eyes fixed on Addie’s in deep, lugubrious appraisal that is without enmity of any sort.

“Anjá!” Clarisse wheels toward them now, her fan pressed dramatically between her breasts. “You startled me. But, Harlan, is this she? ¡Guapa muchacha! ¡Sí, guapa, muy guapa! You are here at last!”

“Clarisse, Paloma,” Harlan says, “this is our new mistress.”

Clarisse takes Addie’s hand and presses it. “We were so worried when the Nina miss the tide.”

There’s an intensity in her address that makes Addie reflexively draw back. At close view, the strong planes in Clarisse’s face recall Paloma’s, but they have a European cast inherited, no doubt, from her father. She looks Spanish or Sicilian, and Addie, who has been called beautiful in her day and tried—with small encouragement from her aunt and their milieu—to mortify her pride in it, has the rare experience of feeling, in this woman’s presence, plain. Clarisse is a great and striking beauty, with a widow’s peak on her clear, high brow and full, expressive lips. But her cheeks and throat have a mottled flush and, in her eyes—which are a strange, pale brown, almost yellow—there is a glassy, febrile shine.

“We got to see the river in full sun,” she says. “I hope the delay hasn’t put you out.”

“The delay?” Widening her eyes, Clarisse now laughs a loose, lax laugh. “¿Entiende, Mamá? The delay has put us out!”

“Silencio, muchacha,” says Paloma, with a grieved expression.

“Pero, es divertido, ¿no?”

Paloma puts her hand on Clarisse’s arm in a calming or restraining way. “You are welcome, niña. He aquí su casa…. Consider this your home. We wish you every joy.”

“How is Father?” Harlan asks.

“Very weak. The doctor is bleeding him again.”

And now Addie notices that on the plate—what she took, before, for food—are leeches, four of them, glistening and plump, somnolent with being fed, amidst scattered drops of watery, pink blood.

“We have been so curious,” Clarisse says to Addie, like a child with a new pet she can’t let go. “We have heard so much. Harlan tells us poems. Your hair of gold. Your eyes. Su sangre azul.”

Paloma spits in her left hand and swift as thought—too swift to be opposed—thumbs a cross on Addie’s brow. “Forgive me, niña,” she says, her stare so grave and forthright that Addie merely blinks, astonished, and cannot take offense.

Clarisse laughs and laughs at this. “¿Qué, Mamá?” she says. “¿Piensa mal y acertarás?”

“You’re drunk,” says Harlan with disgust, at the very moment the thought occurs to Addie.

Opening her fan the slightest bit, Clarisse touches Addie’s arm with it, a gesture as precise as a scientist adding reagent to a titer. “He is severe with me,” she says, smiling the disciplined smile of a coquette. “This is how we know him, like un viejo, an old man, gruff and tired of life, and then, one day this winter, he come back from the race a boy reciting verse again. You are so good for him, I think. We are so glad you are here.”

“Thank you,” Addie says. “That is a lovely comb.”

“This?” She touches it. “My father gave it me.”

“Count Villa…Urrutia.”

“Urrutia,” Clarisse corrects, rolling her rs. “Harlan has told you something of my history. I am flattered. Would you…? Allow me….” When she removes the comb, a tress falls across her shoulder like a soft, black lash. “As a wedding gift.” As she offers it to Addie, Paloma stops her daughter’s hand.

“¿Por qué no, Mami?”

“Porque lo digo yo. Go attend the guests.”

“Thank you, but your mother’s right,” says Addie. “It’s far too much. The party is your gift to us.”

“It is to your liking?”

“Everything is lovely.”

“Except the cake,” says Harlan. “I thought I asked for Sumter.”

Clarisse now frowns for the first time. “I tried—all day yesterday—but I could not remember. I saw it just that one time from the boat. My hands made what they knew.”

“It is the opera in Havana, I believe?”

Looking back at Addie, Clarisse smiles and her eyes narrow a degree. “Yes, Tacón’s.”

“Why did you choose that?”

Addie’s question seems to take her by surprise. Clarisse considers with a quizzical expression as a silent beat elapses. Having no ready answer, she turns to Harlan, as though maybe he might know.

Atop his head, not just seed pearls, but mature ones whose cost would be impossible to estimate, have formed. They are rolling down his temples now, together with the brine of all the oysters and the water of the seas where they were bred. His eyes, his hazy, ginger