The Four Ages of a Woman:
Post-adolescence, Prime Time, Maturity and Museum Piece.
(Featuring Miss K. Kuznetsova, Ms. E. Green and Mrs. A. Bancroft)
So many dinners are full of inconsequential chatting, loaded with meaningless charming words that when a serious issue, bang!, explodes on the white tablecloth, we all stare in disbelief. Surely, she will not go that far, we say to ourselves... WoodyAllen-Manhattanite dialogues in a warm windy night, on top of the chocolate-diving sherries? It can happen, the Honourable Reader can rest assured. Thanks to the courage of Taurina, a fully blooded espanola like don't do them anymore. Thanks perhaps also to the "albarino" White and to the post-dinner Bombay sapphire..
A small perfect-sized dinner, two host and four guests. Outside, in a corner of a peaceful courtyard, with rhododendrons around and as the centerpiece of the circular-shaped table, there we were. Rupert, the host, very early forties, was managing with soft efficiency the delivery of "caipiroshka". His wife, Girissima, (near to forties?) was wearing a turquoise blue Ibiza-acquired top with matching beautiful smiling eyes. The Porteño-Salamancan glamorous couple, Taurina (fortysomething) and Thelaw (early fiftysomething) with Candidata (early forties). Plus this blogger of yours (undefined age, glamorous 40's perhaps?).
Why did the conversation took that particular turn? Why that irruption of female nostalgia for the hips, culo and breasts of their respective Youth Self? Why dit it became the leitmotiv of the tertulia? Because they could not accept the Moscow story of a love affair between their contemporary bull T-bone and a tender young veal medallion? Perhaps. But, as I say incurring the risk of repeating myself, Taurina had guts.
She recalled the last time she tried on a new bikini, under the unforgiving surgical operating room crude lights of a Zara dressing booth, with excruciating detail. We were laughing like mad to her cold cynical auto-critique, inch by a inch, of a no longer post-adolescent body. She stopped, looked at us, in a comic-tragical way, and described, with abundant southerner waving of arms and hands, how a bunch of young insistent guys used to follow her on the beach whenever, in those golden years, she wore her daring bikini. When, as she put it, she was monissima and the chance of touching her culo was to die for. Nowadays, things changed. Taurina could have kill the fucking taxidriver who, the other day, dared to say to her: "It's thirty euros, Señora". She would have been prepared to pay one hundred fifty euros, for Goodness sake, to be driven to that very same spot in Calle Serrano if only the taxista would have used "Señorita" and made her day. Instead, she paid the taxi and left with a hesitant unbalanced walk, feeling like crawling close to the burning asphalt, like an escaping salamander. Was that really her, that dinosaur crossing Serrano in that instant bound to the Zara shop? What business for a Dyplodocus to go and try to find a suitable bikini? Why not a full-length tunic, she felt like asking the shop assistant? When did outlook became so crucial? Surely, at least, the inner beauty can remain young? Candidata interrupts and says with near-desperate anger: "I'll give you all my youngish inner beauty, I don't F%$#$$ care to be ugly or old inside, as long as I can get back my turnonian attractive body of my twenties!" Now, was not that a pure Faustian Challenge, if I have ever seen one? Are we that ready to quickly get rid of our immortal soul, in some Mephystophelian rebajas, in order to regain the slender curves, the pecak-like skin?
So, it went on like that, whisky after whisky, gin after gin, until in the end the dinner turned into supper. A very friendly session, very comical most of the time, tragical now and then, of social group-analysis.
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