Meet Me Under The Ombu Tree

by Santa Montefiore

  Taking an apple from the fridge she dipped her finger in the pot of dulce de leche. Nothing tasted as good as Soledad’s dulce de leche. She made it from milk and sugar that she boiled on the stove. As much as Sofia had tried to make it in England for her children, it had never tasted the same. She put a spoonful on her apple and ambled out through the sitting room onto the terrace. It lay still and ghostly in the shadow of the tall trees, awaiting the sun to rise up and discover it. She bit into her apple and savoured the sweet toffee taste. Gazing out at the early morning mist that lingered above the distant plains she suddenly felt a strong desire to take a pony out and gallop through it. She marched across the park towards the puesto, the little cluster of shacks where Jose had always tended the ponies.

  Pablo greeted her as she approached, wiping his hands on a dirty rag. He smiled, baring his crooked, black teeth. She shook his hand and told him how

  sorry she was that his father had died. He nodded gravely and thanked her shyly. ‘My father was very fond of you, Señora Sofia,’ he said and grinned bashfully. She noticed that he now called her ‘Señora’ instead of ‘Señorita’. The name placed a distance between them that hadn’t existed all those years ago when they had practised polo together.

  ‘I was enormously fond of him. It’s just not the same here without him,’ she replied truthfully, looking around at the strange brown faces that stared at her through the windows.

  ‘You want to ride, Señora Sofia?’ Pablo asked.

  ‘I won’t play, I’ll just gallop around a bit. Get the wind in my hair. It’s been a long time.’

  ‘Javier!’ he shouted. A younger man ran out of the house in a pair of bombachas, the coins on his belt glistening in the pale light. ‘Una yegua para Señora Sofia, ya’ When Javier made towards a dark mare Pablo shouted at him, ‘Not Azteca, Javier. La Pura! For Señora Sofia the best. La Pura is the best,’ he said, grinning at her again.

  Javier brought round a pale chestnut pony and Sofia stroked her velvet nose while he silently saddled her up. Once mounted she thanked him before cantering off into the field. It felt good. She could breathe again. The pressure that had been gathering in her chest and throat slowly receded and she felt her body relax with the gentle motion of the gallop. She looked over to Chiquita’s house and thought of Santi asleep with his wife. She didn’t know it at the time, he told her later, but he was there at the window, watching her as she rode across the plain, wondering how he was going to get through the day. With her arrival everything had changed.

  Sofia didn’t see Santi all day. When she arrived at his house to visit Maria, he had gone into town with his children only to return after she had left. Every car that drove down the track she hoped would be him. She tried not to care, but she couldn’t help worrying that the time would crumble in her grasp and soon she’d be back in England again. She was desperate to see him on her own. She wanted to talk about the past - their past. She wanted to bury the ghosts for good.

  Chapter 40

  Chiquita had asked Sofia to stay for dinner. Although Maria was unable to eat with them, she wanted Sofia to be close. ‘I don’t want to miss out on a second of your stay. Soon you’ll be gone and who knows when I’ll see you again,’ Chiquita had said. As Sofia had dined with her parents the night before, she didn’t think they’d mind.

  Dinner was outside among the crickets and predatory dogs. Eduardo looked pale in the eerie glow of the candle lamps. He spoke very little and hid behind his fine round glasses. His grief was etched into the lines around his eyes, grief that even his glasses failed to disguise. Santi and Sofia reminisced with Chiquita and Miguel - once again Claudia listened with a small smile that ill-fitted her solemn face. She obviously didn’t want to look too interested but neither did she want to be accused of being rude. So she sat demurely, eating the pasta with a fork, occasionally dabbing the corners of her mouth with a white napkin.

  Sofia rarely used a napkin. Anna had always tried to encourage her daughter to ‘behave more like a lady’. But Grandpa O’Dwyer had always defended her.

  ‘What’s in a napkin, Anna Melody? Personally I find my sleeve more reliable -at least I always know where it is,’ he’d say. He complained that napkins spent most of their lives falling off knees onto floors. Sofia looked down at her lap -Grandpa O’Dwyer was right once again. Her napkin had disappeared under the table. She bent down to retrieve it. Panchito, who was sitting on her right, grinned at her before flicking it up with his foot.

  Chiquita and Miguel were deeply proud of Panchito. He was tall and handsome with Santi’s charm. His smile was very much like his brother’s, in the way the lines creased around his mouth. It was easy to see how his brothers’ turbulent lives had affected his. He had grown up the perfect child to compensate for his brothers. Having watched his mother literally shrink in the wake of Santi’s scandalous affair and Fernando’s hasty departure to Uruguay he had made every effort to make her happy. He was very close to Chiquita - they all were. She doted on them and they could count on her to put them above everything else. She allowed her children’s lives to quite literally shape hers. They were her life and she lived for them.

  Panchito played a nine-goal handicap on the polo field, and as much as it wasn’t considered the proper thing to do professionally, his parents had

  allowed him to pursue it. They could hardly deny him a career in polo when his talent cried out for him to play. His mother was way too involved in his life. It was clear from their conversations that Chiquita didn’t want her ‘Panchito’ to grow up. Most of the family now called him Pancho instead of Panchito (‘little Pancho’). But to his mother he would always remain Panchito. He was the baby and she was still clinging onto his childhood; if she had opened her grasp she would have found that she had been clinging on to nothing but air. Her Panchito had flown her nest years ago.

  Soledad had told Sofia that he was quietly conducting an affair with Encarnacion’s daughter, Maria (named after Maria Solanas) who was not only married but had a daughter, the father of whom could have been almost anyone in the pueblo. ‘A nice young man like Pancho doesn’t want to go to a brothel. He’s just learning the ways of women,’ she had said in his defence. When Sofia looked at ‘young Pancho’ she imagined he’d been ‘learning the ways of women’ from the moment he’d discovered what his penis had been made for.

  During dinner Santi and Sofia talked with restraint. On the surface no one would have guessed the tension they both felt in their chests, the effort it was to act as if they felt nothing more than the warmth of an old friendship. They laughed when they wanted to cry and spoke calmly when they wanted nothing more than to shout, ‘How do you feel?’

  Finally Sofia kissed her cousins goodnight. Claudia stood rigidly in front of the French windows, eager to leave the terrace and retreat into the house with her husband. ‘See you tomorrow, Sofia,’ she said smilingly, but her eyes remained distant.

  It was at that moment that Santi thrust a piece of paper into Sofia’s hand. He looked at her with an expression of longing and kissed her on her cheek. Claudia didn’t notice because his back was facing her. She just stood there expectantly.

  Sofia stepped out into the night, clutching the piece of paper to her chest. She was impatient to open the note but the minute she saw it crumpled and distressed she recognized it as the very note she had sent Soledad to give him twenty-three years before. She struggled with her emotions as she opened it and read the words again: Meet me under the ombu tree at midnight. Conquered once more by that now-familiar sense of regret, she clutched it to her bosom and walked on. She couldn’t sit as she would normally have done in order to regain her composure - she was too agitated. She kept walking.

  Santi’s feeling hadn’t changed. He had kept her note, cherished it. And now he delivered it to her with the same urgency and secrecy as she had sent it to him that terrible night. He wanted her. She had never stopped wanting him. She couldn’t help herself. She knew it was wrong but she was unable to pull h
erself back. Her heart ached with the thought of what might have been.

  She felt like a child again, breaking the rules. As she brushed and plaited her hair at her old dressing table Sofia could have been eighteen again. She was thousands of miles away and swept back into a life so removed from the one she shared with her husband and girls that it was almost as if she were living a fantasy in which they had no place. At that moment nothing mattered but San-ti. It felt so right. Santi was part of her. He belonged to her. She had waited twenty-three years for him.

  She was about to leave the room when there was a hesitant knock at the door. She looked at the clock. Quarter to midnight.

  ‘Come in,’ she said irritably. The door opened slowly. ‘Papa.’

  Paco stood hesitantly in the doorway. She didn’t want to invite him in, she was anxious to get to the ombu. She couldn’t bear to be late for Santi, not after

  having waited so long.

  ‘I just wanted to make sure that you are all right.' he said gruffly, and his eyes flicked around the room as if he was nervous of looking into hers.

  ‘I’m fine, Papa, thank you.7

  ‘You know, your mother and I are happy you are home. You belong here,’ he said clumsily. He looked frail as he stood there, uncertain of what to say. He had always known exactly what to say.

  ‘A part of me will always belong here,’ Sofia replied. Then she felt sorry that this gulf existed between them. That it was so easy for people’s lives to change them. She walked up to him and embraced him. While she held him in her arms she glanced at her watch. There was a time when nothing would have distracted her from his love.

  ‘Now, go to bed and get some sleep. We’ve got all the time in the world to talk. I’m tired, it’s been a long day. We’ll talk tomorrow,’ she said, gently but firmly showing him to the door.

  'Bueno, Sofia, I will say goodnight then,’ he whispered, disappointed. He had come to tell her something, something that had cast a shadow over his conscience for many years. But it would have to wait. He would tell her another

  time. Reluctantly he left the room. Once he had shuffled down the corridor she was aware of a tear that he had left on her cheek when he kissed her.

  Sofia didn’t need a torch that night; the moon was so phosphorescent it cast silver shadows over the grass and fields. It felt oddly surreal as she ran over them. She remembered the night she took the same route for her last meeting with Santi. It had been dark and ominous then. She could hear a few dogs barking in the distance and a child crying. It wasn’t until she could see the silhouette of the ombu tree against the glittering navy sky that she began to feel afraid.

  As she approached she slowed down to a hasty walk. She searched the tree for him but couldn’t see him anywhere. She had imagined she would see the glow of his torch jumping around like the last time. That moment would be for ever engraved on her memory. But tonight he needed no torch and it was light enough for her to see the hands on her watch. She was late. Had he not waited? She went cold. She felt her throat constrict with impatience. Then suddenly from behind the tree he appeared like a black shadow. They stared at one another. She tried to work out his expression, but she couldn’t see it clearly in spite of the moonlight. He must have been doing the same. And then instinct overcame them, releasing them from all rational thought. They fell upon each other, touching, smelling, breathing, crying. Their actions spoke where words could never have done justice to the years of longing and regret. She felt then that she had truly come home.

  She didn’t know what time it was when they finally lay fulfilled and delirious on the sweet grass, and she didn’t really care. She was aware only of his hand playing with the strands of hair that had worked free from her plait. She breathed in the spicy scent of him and buried her face in his chest. She could feel his warm breath on her forehead and the roughness of his chin against her skin. She wallowed in the sensual pleasure of the moment. Nothing else mattered or existed for her but him.

  Talk to me, Chofi. What happened when you left?’ he asked finally.

  ‘D/os, I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘I have asked myself so many times, what could I have done?’

  ‘Don’t Santi, don’t torture yourself. I went crazy asking myself those same questions and I still don’t know the answers,’ she replied, raising herself onto

  her elbow and placing her finger across his lips. He took her hand and kissed it, blinking up at her.

  ‘Why did they have to send you away? I mean, they could have sent you to boarding school - anything, but sending you to Switzerland was a bit drastic, and then not knowing where to find you ...’

  Sofia watched his anguished face, those tormented green eyes searching hers for an answer. He looked as vulnerable as a child and her heart lurched for him.

  They sent me away, Santi, because I was expecting your child,’ she said quietly, and her voice quivered. He stared at her in disbelief. ‘Do you remember when I was ill? Well, Dr Higgins was sent for. Mama went crazy. Papa was more understanding but furious. There was only one thing to do as, of course,

  I couldn’t keep the child. Our affair was improper; they could never have accepted it. Mama, naturally, was only worried that I would bring shame upon the family and that was more important than anything else. I think at that moment she saw the devil in me. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.’

  ‘Slow down, Chofi-you’re babbling. What did you just say?’

  ‘Darling Santi, I was pregnant.’

  ‘You were pregnant with my child?’ he stammered slowly, unable to take it all in. He then sat up abruptly and rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied sadly, sitting up and letting him draw her into his arms.

  ‘Oh Chofi, why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Mama and Papa had made me promise not to tell anyone. They sent me to Geneva to have a termination. They didn't want anyone to know. I was afraid that if I told you, you’d demand to come with me, demand your rights as the father, confront my parents. I don’t know - I was afraid. I was frightened to go against their wishes. You should have seen them. They were different people that night. I decided to write to you once I was far away, when my parents would be unable to do anything about it.’

  She couldn’t tell him that she had had the child and then given him away. She was too ashamed. How could she tell him that she had regretted giving him up from the moment she had come to her senses that bleak winter morning in London. Would he believe her if she told him that not a day went by when she didn’t think about Santiguito, wonder where he was and what he was doing? How could she tell him without sounding callous or flippant? That

  wasn’t the way he remembered her. So she left him to assume that she had terminated the pregnancy, and suppressing the pain, she carried it alone.

  ‘Maria,’ he said flatly.

  ‘It’s a long time ago,’ Sofia said quietly feeling it was wrong to criticise her cousin now that she was dying. He held her close and she knew that the fact that she had carried his child brought them irreversibly closer together. He was thinking of what might have been. She could feel his regret because it reflected her own.

  ‘Is that why you never came back? Because you lost our child?’ he asked into her hair.

  ‘No. I never came back because I believed that you didn’t want me, that you had moved on and found someone else. I didn’t want Argentina without you. I reached a point where my pride prevented me from coming home. I suppose I left it too long.’

  ‘Surely you trusted me?’

  ‘I wanted to, but after a while I lost hope. You were so far away - I didn’t know what you were thinking. And I waited. I waited for years!’

  ‘Oh Chofi, you should have come back. If only you had come back, you would have seen how I was pining for you. I was lost without you. Nothing was the same. I felt utterly useless. I didn’t know where to find you. I didn’t know where you were, otherwise I would have written.’
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  ‘I know that now. I didn’t think for one minute that Maria might have destroyed my letters.’

  ‘I know. As I didn’t receive them, I couldn’t write back. I didn’t know where you were. Maria confessed to me years ago, but by then it was too late. I know at the time she thought she was doing the right thing. She has been torturing herself with remorse for years, that’s why she stopped writing to you. She couldn’t bring herself to tell you, or to face you.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘I can’t believe we were beaten so easily,’ he said hoarsely, shaking his head. ‘I gave up in the end. I had to, or I would have been driven insane. I thought you had found someone else. Why else would you not have come home? Then Claudia came along and I faced the decision of making a life with her or waiting for you. I chose a life with her.’

  ‘Are you happy?’ asked Sofia slowly.

  ‘Happiness is relative. I thought I was happy until yesterday when you appeared at the hospital.’

  ‘Santi, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I’m happy now.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m very sure,’ he replied, taking her face in his hands and kissing her forehead. ‘It hurts me to think of you suffering alone in Switzerland. I want to know what happened. We have years to catch up on. I want to share every minute of them with you. I want to feel that I know your life so well I could almost have been there with you.’

  ‘I will tell you about Switzerland, I’ll fill you in on everything.’

  ‘You should get some rest.’

  ‘I wish we could spend the whole night together.’

  ‘I know. But you’re back. I’ve dreamed of you coming back a hundred times.’ ‘Did you dream it would be like this?’