The Baroness de Aynant, Paquita Figueroa, was a queer woman. Her father, a wealthy Cuban gentleman, sent her at the age of eighteen, accompanied by an aunt, on a trip to Europe. On the steamer a young Flemish gentleman, fair and blond, as elegant as a Van Dyck portrait, had paid her much attention; the girl had responded with all the ardent enthusiasm of the tropics, and within a month after their arrival in Spain, the Cuban miss was named the Baroness de Aynant, and left with her husband to take up their residence in Antwerp.
The honeymoon waned, and both the Flemish gentleman and the Cuban wife, once they had settled down again to a tranquil existence, agreed that they were not a congenial, well-matched couple. He was devoted to the simple, methodical life, to the music of Beethoven and to meals prepared with cows’ butter; she, on the other hand, was fond of a wild time, of gadding about the fashionable promenades; she loved a dry, hot climate, the music of Chueca, light meals and dishes made with oil.
These divergencies of taste in small matters, piling up, thickening, in time clouded completely the love of the baron and his wife. She could not let pass calmly the cold, tranquilly ironic remarks that her husband made concerning the sweet-potatoes, the oil and the accent of the southern peoples. The baron, in turn, was piqued to hear his wife speak scornfully of the greasy women who devote themselves to cramming down butter. The rivalry between oil and butter, embroiling itself, interweaving itself with their other affairs of greater importance, assumed such proportions that the couple reached the point of excitement and hatred leading to a separation. The baron remained in Antwerp dedicating himself to his artistic predilections and to his buttered toast, while the baroness came to Madrid, where she could give free rein to her fondness for fruit and oily food.
In Madrid the baroness committed a thousand follies. She tried to procure a divorce, that she might marry a ruined aristocrat. But when her bill of divorcement was all prepared for filing, she learned that her husband was seriously ill, and no sooner did she get the news than she left Madrid, hurried to Antwerp, nursed the baron, saved his life, fell in love all over again and presented him with a baby girl.
During this second epoch of their love the couple threw a dense veil over the great question that had formerly divided them. The baroness and the baron made mutual concessions, and the baroness was well on the way to becoming an excellent Flemish dame when she was left a widow.
She returned to Madrid with her daughter, and soon her Levantine instincts reawakened. Her brother-in-law, uncle and guardian of the child, helped her out with a monthly stipend, but this was not enough. A friend of her father’s,—a certain Don Sergio Redondo, a very wealthy merchant,—offered her his hand; but the baroness did not accept, and preferred his patronage to being his wife. Soon she deceived him with another, and for twelve years she continued this duplicity.
In the midst of this squandering, this madness and surrender to caprice, the baroness preserved a moral background, and withdrew her daughter completely from the world in which the mother dwelt. She placed her child in a convent school and every month, the first money that she laid hands upon was used to pay for the girl’s tuition. When she had completed her education, the baroness intended to take her off to Antwerp and live there with her, resigning herself to the career of a respectable woman.
Niña Chucha would grumble and protest at her good friend’s whims, but she always ended by obeying them.
Manuel found the house a paradise; he had nothing to do and would spend his idle hours smoking, if there were anything to smoke, or walking along the Moncloa, accompanied by the baroness’s three dogs.
In the meantime Mingote was hard at work. His plan was to exploit Don Sergio Redondo, friend of the baroness’s father and former protector of the lady. The latter, with the instincts of an intriguing, deceitful wench, had informed her former protector that their relations had produced a boy; then she had told him that the boy had died, and afterward, that the boy was still alive.