Categories > Original > Romance > Fruta de la pasión
Ch 21 - The sign of the X
0 reviewsThe pleasant business banter between Araceli and Alejandro goes on and he learns something about her recent actions
0Unrated
"Two hundred for a barrel of Rioja is a good offer, and you know it," Araceli told Alejandro to rekindle their business talk. "And as you could see it tonight, or rather taste it, it's a very good wine. In all modesty, I think it's one of the best Rioja you'll find in all Alta California... I have found an excellent producer in Spain, and I'm his only purchaser here in the New World."
"I don't doubt the quality of your goods, Señora, but I'll have a more reasonable offer from–"
"Oh really, Don Alejandro," she said with the amused tone Alejandro used to use on Diego when his son was still a child and had just said an obvious lie, "what kind of businesswoman would I be if I didn't know the prices practised by my competition?"
She said all this with a crooked smile and a sparkle in her eyes.
That's the precise moment Villegas chose to seek her out and to check the garden.
"Ah, here you are my dear," he told Señora Ximénez de Valdès. "Your brother was wondering where you had been."
Alejandro suppressed a sigh of frustrated annoyance at the interruption.
"Oh," she said, "I hadn't noticed we had walked away from the rest of the party, sorry. We were talking business and got a bit carried away."
"Away indeed, even spatially speaking, as I see," Don Cesar noted with a teasing smile.
"Then let's go back to the patio if you please, Don Alejandro. I owe myself to my guests."
"Of course, Señora," he agreed, inwardly cursing the younger man for interrupting his tête-à-tête with Doña Araceli.
But before they made their way to the house, Señor Villegas gently held her back by putting his hand on her arm.
"By the way," he told his mistress, "and before we're again in the middle of everyone..."
"Yes?" she asked.
He shot her a bright smile. Alejandro wanted to wipe it from his face: couldn't the man see that he and the lady were having a serious business negotiation, here?
"Why don't you want the whole of San Diego to know...?" Villegas asked her.
"I don't know what you mean..." she answered in a slightly too firm tone which made Alejandro think that, on the contrary, she knew exactly what he was talking about. The older man, for his part, was totally in the dark.
The young man's smile grew wider.
"Whatever..." he stated. "Don Alejandro, did you hear what Don Carlos said over dinner? According to him, the payment for Ortega's taxes just showed up on the alcalde's doorstep after siesta, along with an anonymous note explaining that the money was intended to cover Pablo's debt. Can you believe that, Araceli?"
"Well," she retorted, "whoever did this must be very stupid or have a great faith in people's honesty! Leaving money on a doorstep, in broad daylight, on display and for all to see it!"
"Oh," Don Cesar replied, still smiling and raising an eyebrow at her, "there is never much people outside during siesta! And indeed the money was still there when the alcalde opened his door! In fact no one saw whoever dropped off the money and the letter, as far as I know."
"Really?" she asked.
"Really," he confirmed. "And, still according to Don Carlos, the letter wasn't signed; or rather, there was only a mere cross at the bottom of it."
"Ah?" she said, sounding barely interested.
"Yes, a cross. And you know what...? I couldn't help but think that this cross as only signature could as well have been... a capital X..."
"An X?" she repeated in a neutral tone of voice.
Don Cesar shot her a crooked smile, while the hidden meaning of his words began to make its way through Don Alejandro's mind.
"That's a fine thing you did..." Villegas told her quietly and approvingly.
Surprisingly, she pouted a bit.
"Oww," she said, "just don't go shouting it from the rooftops!"
"Why that?" both Don Cesar and Don Alejandro asked.
"People might begin to think that I have a heart..."
"But I know that you do have a heart, mi Corazón, and what's more, a good one!" Villegas protested.
"Perhaps," she conceded, "but I'd prefer that this piece of information remains unadvertised, or else everyone will try to take advantage of it! You know... ask for delays in payment, for me to loan them money and so on; and I'm running an import-export company, for God's sake, not a darn bank! If they think I have a heart somewhere inside my chest and not just an account book, they'll start making puppy eyes at me during business talks..."
"Really, Señora," Alejandro told her, "there's nothing inglorious with having a good heart!"
"Pooh!" she dismissively commented. "Generally speaking, of course there's nothing wrong with that, but obviously none of you two know what it is to make business and be a woman. People expect me to be kind and sweet and sympathetic, they think I won't stand up for my interests, so I have to be twice as tough as anyone else for them to respect me."
"I assure you Señora, I certainly won't think less of you for being kind-hearted," Alejandro told her. "And I've learned the hard way never to underestimate you in any kind of negotiation!" he added with a chuckle. "In fact, have I ever tried to make puppy eyes at you?"
"Not that I can remember, Don Alejandro," she answered. "But now that the idea is in the air..." she couldn't resist teasing him, "perhaps I regret it?"
Then she became serious again and turned to Villegas to ask him:
"Anyway, what makes you think I did it out of sheer selflessness and kind-heartedness? As a matter of fact, it was all in my own interest to do so: Pablo Ortega is one of my tenants, you know that. And if he didn't have enough money to pay his taxes, in fact he didn't either have the money to pay me what he owes me. And as long as he would have stayed in jail, he certainly wouldn't have worked in his farm, which means that he wouldn't have earned anything in the meantime, which in turn means that he was never going to pay me his rent, you see?"
"So" Villegas said, "what you're trying to tell me is that you acted purely out of self-interest?"
"Precisely," she said, "that's it. Now Pablo can work again and in a few weeks he'll pay me the rent he owes me."
"So that's to remain your official version?" Don Alejandro asked her. "That you paid his debts and freed the poor man only out of personal financial interest?"
"No," Doña Araceli patiently reminded him with a twinkling eye, "the official version is that Pablo Ortega has been freed thanks to an anonymous benefactor."
"And talking about that, what about these taxes you paid for him?" Don Cesar prompted her. "Won't you get this money back too?"
"But I didn't pay anything, my dear! ' X' paid these!"
"Won't you even tell the man that you're his Fairy Godmother?" Alejandro asked.
She frowned a bit, wriggling her nose pensively in a comical manner which Don Alejandro found strangely endearing. Then she finally answered his question:
"Oh, I will. But only him, no one else. Just so that he knows it's not a gift but a loan. A zero-rate loan, but a loan. And that in the future I intend him to pay his rent and his taxes before he buys foolish things for his sweetheart!"
"You're not a romantic at heart, are you?" her beau rhetorically asked.
"As you already very well know," she replied. "I'm a pragmatic, but this certainly doesn't mean I can't have feelings; I just refuse to let these make me do ridiculous things or act like a foolish teenager. Lord knows I did this enough when I was indeed a teenager!"
Again, Alejandro wondered what kind of young girl Doña Araceli had been ten years earlier: whatever it was, she certainly didn't seem to have a very high opinion of the girl she was then!
"Well, about Pablo's girlfriend..." Villegas started to suggest, "if you think he got into this situation because of his infatuation for her, then perhaps you should tell her too that you're the one who had to pay for his release!"
"Certainly not," she retorted heatedly. "She and her mother are so... so... self-righteous! They don't want anything to do with 'a woman like me', don't you remember? The fact that he works a land owned by my company is already hard to swallow for them..."
"Precisely, you might do him a service by... I don't know, prompting an unpleasant reaction from her which would finally open his eyes to the sort of person she is? I just don't understand what Ortega sees in her..." Don Cesar commented.
"Well," Doña Araceli provided, "she's absolutely gorgeous..."
"And...?" Villegas asked as an answer, "is that really all there has to be to arouse interest as far as love is concerned?"
"For some people it's sometimes enough to cloud all the rest and make them make poor choices or meet poor decisions..." she replied with a sad look, her eyes staring again into space.
Don Alejandro was witnessing this strange conversation and beginning to feel awkward at hearing them talk about people he didn't even know. Not to mention that again the subject seemed to have prompted some unpleasant memories in his hostess... Why that? Granted, she wasn't the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen, but still... No, in all objectivity she wasn't exactly beautiful, but there was something about her... a certain je-ne-sais-quoi... some inexplicable charm in her stance and gestures, in the imperfections of her face and the unevenness of her features...
"But in fact," Villegas went on, startling Alejandro from his reverie, "I heard that things were being less idyllic for them lately... Perhaps they have broken up?"
"I can only hope so..." Doña Araceli answered. "For him!" she clarified. "Anyway, back to business. But now that you have betrayed my little secret before Don Alejandro, now that he knows that I do have a heart, it will be easy for him to try to move me to pity and to obtain indecently low prices for the wine he intends to buy from me!"
"I very much doubt you'd allow yourself to be moved by any trick I could try, Señora," Alejandro said, "but still... I can make an offer of one hundred and fifty for a barrel of your Rioja."
"Well tried, Don Alejandro, but no. Yet I can make an effort for you: one hundred and eighty. As you can see, I'm growing soft with age."
"With age! Really! You!" Alejandro exclaimed playfully. "If you are aging, Señora, what should I say, then?"
"You should say yes to my offer, Don Alejandro," she answered tit for tat, "because I won't lower it."
He hesitated, or at least made a show of doing so.
"All right," he finally agreed. "You can rest assured, Doña Araceli," he added with a smile, "you're not growing soft in business. At all."
She smiled back at him, an amused sparkle in her eyes.
"Still," she told him playfully as she finally made her way back to her other guests, "I'm curious to know what your 'puppy eyes' look like... Perhaps you will try these out on me next time...?"
"I don't doubt the quality of your goods, Señora, but I'll have a more reasonable offer from–"
"Oh really, Don Alejandro," she said with the amused tone Alejandro used to use on Diego when his son was still a child and had just said an obvious lie, "what kind of businesswoman would I be if I didn't know the prices practised by my competition?"
She said all this with a crooked smile and a sparkle in her eyes.
That's the precise moment Villegas chose to seek her out and to check the garden.
"Ah, here you are my dear," he told Señora Ximénez de Valdès. "Your brother was wondering where you had been."
Alejandro suppressed a sigh of frustrated annoyance at the interruption.
"Oh," she said, "I hadn't noticed we had walked away from the rest of the party, sorry. We were talking business and got a bit carried away."
"Away indeed, even spatially speaking, as I see," Don Cesar noted with a teasing smile.
"Then let's go back to the patio if you please, Don Alejandro. I owe myself to my guests."
"Of course, Señora," he agreed, inwardly cursing the younger man for interrupting his tête-à-tête with Doña Araceli.
But before they made their way to the house, Señor Villegas gently held her back by putting his hand on her arm.
"By the way," he told his mistress, "and before we're again in the middle of everyone..."
"Yes?" she asked.
He shot her a bright smile. Alejandro wanted to wipe it from his face: couldn't the man see that he and the lady were having a serious business negotiation, here?
"Why don't you want the whole of San Diego to know...?" Villegas asked her.
"I don't know what you mean..." she answered in a slightly too firm tone which made Alejandro think that, on the contrary, she knew exactly what he was talking about. The older man, for his part, was totally in the dark.
The young man's smile grew wider.
"Whatever..." he stated. "Don Alejandro, did you hear what Don Carlos said over dinner? According to him, the payment for Ortega's taxes just showed up on the alcalde's doorstep after siesta, along with an anonymous note explaining that the money was intended to cover Pablo's debt. Can you believe that, Araceli?"
"Well," she retorted, "whoever did this must be very stupid or have a great faith in people's honesty! Leaving money on a doorstep, in broad daylight, on display and for all to see it!"
"Oh," Don Cesar replied, still smiling and raising an eyebrow at her, "there is never much people outside during siesta! And indeed the money was still there when the alcalde opened his door! In fact no one saw whoever dropped off the money and the letter, as far as I know."
"Really?" she asked.
"Really," he confirmed. "And, still according to Don Carlos, the letter wasn't signed; or rather, there was only a mere cross at the bottom of it."
"Ah?" she said, sounding barely interested.
"Yes, a cross. And you know what...? I couldn't help but think that this cross as only signature could as well have been... a capital X..."
"An X?" she repeated in a neutral tone of voice.
Don Cesar shot her a crooked smile, while the hidden meaning of his words began to make its way through Don Alejandro's mind.
"That's a fine thing you did..." Villegas told her quietly and approvingly.
Surprisingly, she pouted a bit.
"Oww," she said, "just don't go shouting it from the rooftops!"
"Why that?" both Don Cesar and Don Alejandro asked.
"People might begin to think that I have a heart..."
"But I know that you do have a heart, mi Corazón, and what's more, a good one!" Villegas protested.
"Perhaps," she conceded, "but I'd prefer that this piece of information remains unadvertised, or else everyone will try to take advantage of it! You know... ask for delays in payment, for me to loan them money and so on; and I'm running an import-export company, for God's sake, not a darn bank! If they think I have a heart somewhere inside my chest and not just an account book, they'll start making puppy eyes at me during business talks..."
"Really, Señora," Alejandro told her, "there's nothing inglorious with having a good heart!"
"Pooh!" she dismissively commented. "Generally speaking, of course there's nothing wrong with that, but obviously none of you two know what it is to make business and be a woman. People expect me to be kind and sweet and sympathetic, they think I won't stand up for my interests, so I have to be twice as tough as anyone else for them to respect me."
"I assure you Señora, I certainly won't think less of you for being kind-hearted," Alejandro told her. "And I've learned the hard way never to underestimate you in any kind of negotiation!" he added with a chuckle. "In fact, have I ever tried to make puppy eyes at you?"
"Not that I can remember, Don Alejandro," she answered. "But now that the idea is in the air..." she couldn't resist teasing him, "perhaps I regret it?"
Then she became serious again and turned to Villegas to ask him:
"Anyway, what makes you think I did it out of sheer selflessness and kind-heartedness? As a matter of fact, it was all in my own interest to do so: Pablo Ortega is one of my tenants, you know that. And if he didn't have enough money to pay his taxes, in fact he didn't either have the money to pay me what he owes me. And as long as he would have stayed in jail, he certainly wouldn't have worked in his farm, which means that he wouldn't have earned anything in the meantime, which in turn means that he was never going to pay me his rent, you see?"
"So" Villegas said, "what you're trying to tell me is that you acted purely out of self-interest?"
"Precisely," she said, "that's it. Now Pablo can work again and in a few weeks he'll pay me the rent he owes me."
"So that's to remain your official version?" Don Alejandro asked her. "That you paid his debts and freed the poor man only out of personal financial interest?"
"No," Doña Araceli patiently reminded him with a twinkling eye, "the official version is that Pablo Ortega has been freed thanks to an anonymous benefactor."
"And talking about that, what about these taxes you paid for him?" Don Cesar prompted her. "Won't you get this money back too?"
"But I didn't pay anything, my dear! ' X' paid these!"
"Won't you even tell the man that you're his Fairy Godmother?" Alejandro asked.
She frowned a bit, wriggling her nose pensively in a comical manner which Don Alejandro found strangely endearing. Then she finally answered his question:
"Oh, I will. But only him, no one else. Just so that he knows it's not a gift but a loan. A zero-rate loan, but a loan. And that in the future I intend him to pay his rent and his taxes before he buys foolish things for his sweetheart!"
"You're not a romantic at heart, are you?" her beau rhetorically asked.
"As you already very well know," she replied. "I'm a pragmatic, but this certainly doesn't mean I can't have feelings; I just refuse to let these make me do ridiculous things or act like a foolish teenager. Lord knows I did this enough when I was indeed a teenager!"
Again, Alejandro wondered what kind of young girl Doña Araceli had been ten years earlier: whatever it was, she certainly didn't seem to have a very high opinion of the girl she was then!
"Well, about Pablo's girlfriend..." Villegas started to suggest, "if you think he got into this situation because of his infatuation for her, then perhaps you should tell her too that you're the one who had to pay for his release!"
"Certainly not," she retorted heatedly. "She and her mother are so... so... self-righteous! They don't want anything to do with 'a woman like me', don't you remember? The fact that he works a land owned by my company is already hard to swallow for them..."
"Precisely, you might do him a service by... I don't know, prompting an unpleasant reaction from her which would finally open his eyes to the sort of person she is? I just don't understand what Ortega sees in her..." Don Cesar commented.
"Well," Doña Araceli provided, "she's absolutely gorgeous..."
"And...?" Villegas asked as an answer, "is that really all there has to be to arouse interest as far as love is concerned?"
"For some people it's sometimes enough to cloud all the rest and make them make poor choices or meet poor decisions..." she replied with a sad look, her eyes staring again into space.
Don Alejandro was witnessing this strange conversation and beginning to feel awkward at hearing them talk about people he didn't even know. Not to mention that again the subject seemed to have prompted some unpleasant memories in his hostess... Why that? Granted, she wasn't the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen, but still... No, in all objectivity she wasn't exactly beautiful, but there was something about her... a certain je-ne-sais-quoi... some inexplicable charm in her stance and gestures, in the imperfections of her face and the unevenness of her features...
"But in fact," Villegas went on, startling Alejandro from his reverie, "I heard that things were being less idyllic for them lately... Perhaps they have broken up?"
"I can only hope so..." Doña Araceli answered. "For him!" she clarified. "Anyway, back to business. But now that you have betrayed my little secret before Don Alejandro, now that he knows that I do have a heart, it will be easy for him to try to move me to pity and to obtain indecently low prices for the wine he intends to buy from me!"
"I very much doubt you'd allow yourself to be moved by any trick I could try, Señora," Alejandro said, "but still... I can make an offer of one hundred and fifty for a barrel of your Rioja."
"Well tried, Don Alejandro, but no. Yet I can make an effort for you: one hundred and eighty. As you can see, I'm growing soft with age."
"With age! Really! You!" Alejandro exclaimed playfully. "If you are aging, Señora, what should I say, then?"
"You should say yes to my offer, Don Alejandro," she answered tit for tat, "because I won't lower it."
He hesitated, or at least made a show of doing so.
"All right," he finally agreed. "You can rest assured, Doña Araceli," he added with a smile, "you're not growing soft in business. At all."
She smiled back at him, an amused sparkle in her eyes.
"Still," she told him playfully as she finally made her way back to her other guests, "I'm curious to know what your 'puppy eyes' look like... Perhaps you will try these out on me next time...?"
Sign up to rate and review this story