WITH THE NEW REGIME AT HOME, the era of cozy, chaotic, sometimes contentious, holidays en famille at La Migoua came to an end, and from 1973 onward my mother and Freddie decided that they would split the long hot summer between them. But who was going to look after little Nick and big Freddie—both equally helpless—when their mother/wife wasn’t there? (Apparently Vanessa had decided she couldn’t leave her husband and four children for a month to take on the nanny/cook/chauffeur/mistress role at this point—although later on she would.) I’m not sure exactly how my mother found Beatrice, a French student in her late twenties studying law in London, but Mademoiselle Tourot turned out to be remarkably accomplished at every aspect of her new job.
At home in her grandmother’s kitchen in the Gironde, Beatrice had been taught at a precocious age how to cook an impeccable poulet au gratin à la crème Landaise, she knew that a salade de L’Île Barbe required a dressing of lemon juice and never vinegar, and from her father she had learned which wines—a Château Pradeaux rouge 1998 and a Château Grenouilles Chablis, respectively—to serve with each of these sublime dishes. She was unfazed by the tortuous roads around La Migoua and equally fearless when it came to dealing with the murderous local drivers. Well brought up, well read, well adjusted, and well dressed, she was also witty and pretty, with curly reddish hair, just the right number of freckles, and had an engaging little gap between her two front teeth. Nick and Freddie were two lucky chaps, and I don’t imagine that either of them missed my mother for a single moment.
Nick remembers that Beatrice “made a huge effort to be liked, and succeeded. From the moment we met her, she was permanently in our lives. She could do all the things that Freddie loved—organize dinners, parties, and outings. She was fun and charming and great with children.” I suppose it was inevitable that they would become lovers. Freddie was incapable of meeting an attractive woman without wanting to sleep with her, and over the years their relationship—pace the other boyfriends Beatrice must surely have had—developed into what? I had no idea. But Beatrice once told me that Freddie had been “l’être le plus significatif de ma vie.” My stepfather had always been the ultimate juggler when it came to the ladies who inhabited his life, so for him this was a familiar pattern.
“Pourquoi pas?” was his attitude, although he did admit in a letter he wrote to Heather Kiernan (yet another of his lucky ladies) when he was seventy-three, “You might think that as I get older I would learn how to manage my affairs better but the reverse seems to be true.”
Never mind about managing his affairs. What was far more amazing, and I think admirable, was that he went on having them, pretty well up until the day he died. One particular conversation comes to mind, which must have taken place only a year or so before his death in 1989. Freddie had been staying with me in New York and was having a spot of bother with that perfidious male gland, the prostate. Clearly something was up, and—far more worried about his future chances of getting it up than by any fears about his mortality—he had decided to return to London for the dreaded operation. I was full of sympathy and said all the usual useless rubbish about how I was sure everything would be fine, and not to worry, and that I would call him soon to see how it had all gone. But he beat me to it.
Freddie’s relationship with the telephone was not an easy one—he preferred letters—and he was especially mistrustful of transatlantic calls, all those complicated codes, all that unnecessary expense. So I was stunned when he telephoned me a couple of weeks later, and even more surprised to hear him sounding so cheerful and chatty. Yes, the operation had been a huge success; all his friends had come to see him; the surgeon had been at Oxford and had asked Freddie to sign his copy of Language, Truth and Logic; Nick had brought him smoked salmon and Vouvray; the pretty young nurses had brought him The Times every morning—it all sounded more like a hotel than a hospital. And even more like a hotel when Freddie revealed the high point of his visit to this delightful establishment. The surgeon was not just an admirer of Freddie’s philosophy, he was clearly a genius with the scalpel, too, or maybe it was the patient whose own powers knew no bounds. Whichever way, the end result was the same—and more than satisfactory. In fact the reason for this amazing transatlantic call was so that I could be the first to know just how satisfactory. It was unclear which of his lady visitors had won the jackpot, but apparently almost as soon as she had arrived, with a couple of well-chosen books from Hatchards and a nice fruit basket from Fortnum’s next door, she had been bundled into the alluring hospital bathroom, where they had feasted, not upon nectarines or figs but upon each other. I could hear Freddie smiling down the telephone with pleasure as he told me the story, and I hoped he could hear me smiling back when I said how incredibly happy I was too.
NOW THAT MY MOTHER was going to La Migoua with Hylan, the house became a place they could escape to, sometimes alone in the spring, and in the summer with Nick and Alex. It was transformed from a crowded barracks ruled over by an unpredictable sergeant major into a charming love nest. Who knows what our neighbors Monsieur and Madame Tricon made of this abrupt shift in Monsieur and Madame Ayer’s arrangements, but I imagine they just poured themselves another glass of vin d’orange and sighed, concluding not for the first time that “Les Anglais sont complètement fous. Mais assez gentils, quand même.” And it wasn’t just the atmosphere of the house that was transformed.
Hylan soon found himself on the roof replacing tiles, on a ladder painting shutters, and most ambitious of all, putting up a new ceiling of slatted bamboo in the top-floor rooms. The bamboo looked pretty enough, but how was poor Hylan to know that in creating this bijou effect he was actually building a well-appointed apartment complex for several generations of loirs? It took a while for these creatures, which look like obese dormice with fluffy foxy tails, to discover their new home, but over the years they settled down very comfortably in the spacious gap between the bamboo and the roof. Without access to either birth control or toilets, they scuttled around up there, multiplying at an alarming Malthusian rate, and quite soon their shit started to stream down through the slats. The last time I went to the house, the first few days were spent scraping it off the bedcovers, scrubbing the walls, picking it out of the rush matting on the floor, and attempting, none too successfully, to winkle this semi-fossilized crap—I used a knife-teaspoon combo—out of the drain in the shower. But the bamboo still looks lovely.
In 1973 my mother’s holiday in France was cut short because the BBC had asked her
to go 15 rounds with that dreadful right-wing Catholic American pig, William Buckley. It is supposed to be recorded on August 22nd. I would imagine he’ll wipe the floor with me—he even ties Gore Vidal into furious little snarling knots, and I haven’t nearly the smooth patience of Gore. Also I don’t know anything—and he, alas, though nasty is extremely well informed.
Her misgivings seem to have been justified, and she wrote in a letter to Freddie:
I did my television thing yesterday, but I’m afraid I wasn’t very good. He filled me so full of paralyzed despair that I just couldn’t work up the energy to fight him. Even the one time I had him cornered, I couldn’t find the necessary oomph to deliver the coup de grace. Frightfully depressing it all was, not just being face to face with such a lunatic, but to discover I had lost the will to kill. “Why bother?” was all I felt, and that is, in such situations, the downhill road to nowhere. What an awful man. A loony. And though pretty, not nearly as pretty as John Lindsay.
The ill-fated debate between the pig and the sergeant major was also aired in the United States, and soon after, my mother received a postcard from an old friend: “We just finished watching you try to make conversation with William Buckley and I thought we should tell you how lovely you looked and how well you talked. You were extremely pretty on color TV and intelligent, and perhaps best of all, civil to Mr. Buckley.” She quoted this message in her letter to Freddie and added:
So I think it is v. kind of them but I much fear that when people start telling you (me, especially) how pretty you looked then it perhaps says all there is to say about the quality of the discussion. However I have stopped chewing my bottom lip over it as there is nothing I could do about it at the time, and even less now, so piss to it.
ONCE VANESSA had gotten up the courage to explain to her husband that she would be spending the summer at La Migoua with her lover from now on, there was an awkward day when the two couples overlapped at the house. My mother always called it Checkpoint Charlie. The first time Vanessa came it was Hylan’s job to teach her the driving situation (she was, after all, Freddie’s chauffeur), and they set off together in the car so he could show her how to get to the beach, the Bandol dump, and where to shop, leaving my parents sitting under the lime tree, chatting away as if nothing had changed. (One of the things that certainly hadn’t altered at all was my mother’s venom toward her rival, which despite Hylan remained as poisonous as ever. I remember being at the house when she discovered a particularly fetching apron—incredibly short with flirtatious girly ruffles, like something from a bad French farce—in the kitchen cupboard. Clearly bought by Vanessa, who was utterly, irredeemably feminine and had a tiny waist, the offensive piece of fabric was instantly converted into a rag for cleaning the floor, and as I recall, the lavatories too.)
With the summer divided up between his parents, Nick’s life at La Migoua took on a more serene aspect. His mother’s unpredictable moods had been tempered by love, and she and Hylan tended to leave him alone to do what he wanted. Which sometimes was drugs. “Neglect” is just another word for freedom in a fourteen-year-old’s mind, and Nick had plenty of both. One summer he had been lucky enough to find a stash of grass, hidden away in some secret place, so secret that Hylan had forgotten where he had put it, and ever the generous host, Nick was able to treat his friends to several satisfying joints up in his sweltering room under the shit-covered bamboo ceiling.
However, at this point I have to admit that firsthand knowledge of what my curious, fractured family got up to at La Migoua for the next few years is kind of sketchy. Reports would reach me from the various players in the drama—complaints from Nick about Vanessa: “Her arms are so skinny she can’t even carry the shopping bags, so I have to. I wish Beatrice was here.” Or from my mother, delirious descriptions of Hylan’s prowess behind the wheel/grouting tiles/making mint juleps for the Tricons with Jack Daniel’s they’d brought from London. All the things Freddie had never done: “Jesus, it’s like being on a real vacation.” Well, not so much for Nick and Alex. While Hylan was busy slaving away at his various domestic duties and my mother was lounging in the hammock, an ashtray and a stack of English newspapers by her side, they waited sullenly, and in vain, to be taken to the beach.
I was so happy not to be there.
ONE NIGHT during my last year at Oxford I met a man at a party and was surprised to wake up the next morning in an unfamiliar bedroom overlooking the High Street. I’ve heard it said, usually by people far better behaved than I am, that something that starts this way will never lead anywhere, but who knows how the mysterious affairs of the heart and body work—or don’t? All I know is that Tom—for that turned out to be my unfamiliar companion’s name—and I have been entwined, in some funny fashion or another, ever since.
Half Spanish and wholly Catholic, he felt doubly foreign to me. Having lived a sheltered life inside my family’s atheist anti-Franco cocoon, I’m not sure that I actually knew anybody who believed in God, and I had certainly never been anywhere near Spain—which only fueled my fascination with both these forbidden subjects. The day after my final exam I flew to Madrid.
Tom was staying at his grandmother’s apartment, an enormous, gloomy maze of a place on the Paseo de la Castellana, where an endless crusade against the sun was fought daily. Heavily armed with shutters, blinds, lace curtains, and swathes of thick brocade, the servants battled away at those twin scourges, heat and light, and despite the odd setback—I did once see a shaft of sunlight break through the defenses and illuminate a strip of dusty parquet—mostly won. Señora Marañón, who must have been about ninety at the time, inhabited an armchair in a corner of one of the smaller salons, and when I was introduced to her, she smiled and slowly turned her fragile tortoise head up toward me as I leaned down to kiss her withered cheeks. “Encantada,” she whispered and reached over to clutch my arm, hanging on tightly, as if she wanted to confide some secret, but then, thinking better of it, eventually allowed me to go. Above her on the faded green velvet wall hung a crucifix; its doll-like Christ, carved in ivory, slim and elongated as an El Greco, slumped against his mahogany cross.
At night Madrid was as dark as Señora Marañón’s apartment in the daytime. It felt almost Edwardian compared with the only other cities I knew—London, Paris, and New York—no dazzling neon, no lit-up shopwindows, no sodium yellow glare, just the cozy glow of bars and restaurants and old-fashioned streetlamps that emitted ineffectual pools of flickering light. The restaurant where we had dinner that first night lurked at the end of a cobbled cul-de-sac somewhere behind the Plaza Mayor. Not a single thing did I recognize on the menu, so after a few copitas of chilled manzanilla, and a couple of appetizers—fried blood sausage (morcilla) and some grotesque barnacles, long black appendages dangling obscenely from their shells (percebes)—Tom offered to order for me. Whether he chose the dishes to jolt me out of my effete Francophile ways, or whether they represented the ne plus ultra of Spanish cuisine, or whether he quite genuinely wanted to eat them I will never know. But here’s what we had after our rat’s penis and coagulated blood amuse-gueules at the bar.
Tom and the owner of the establishment were old friends—apparently he used to go there with his grandfather when he was a little boy—and greeted each other with hugs and cries of “Hombre!” After which there was naturally no need to consult a menu, because Tom would be having his usual, and I would be having the roast suckling pig. Suckling. It wouldn’t have been quite so awful if the entire newborn baby hadn’t arrived at the table on a silver tray with an apple shoved in her mouth—couldn’t she have been dismembered in the kitchen first? But no, we had to admire her, and then she was whisked away by her nurse/waiter and returned soon after to her parents, in the form of tender chunks of milk-fed meat beneath a deeply tanned layer of the crispiest and most irresistible skin I have ever tasted.
Tom’s usual turned out to be even more frightening. Take a lamb’s head, split it open, sprinkle with sea salt, grill, and serve. Simplicity itself. The sightless milky eyeballs gave his face a resigned, dispirited air, as if he had known all along that this would be his fate, and it was quite obvious that he’d never thought to visit an American dentist. Misshapen and stained, his teeth betrayed a lifetime’s addiction to unfiltered Ducados and way too many flagons of vino tonto. Tom dug into his brains, I took another bite of my roasted baby, and the beaming owner reappeared to check that everything was to our liking. “Perfecto. Delicioso,” we replied, quite truthfully.
After dinner we wandered back through the shadowy colonnades of the Plaza Mayor, and I listened as my tutor explained how, in 1589, Philip II had commissioned Juan de Herrera to design him a modern plaza in the fashionable Renaissance style for his brand-new capital. A multipurpose complex, it was perfect for all kinds of entertainments; everything from bullfights—you could still see faded bloodstains on some of the walls—to executions, and, during the Inquisition, autos-da-fé. So began my first tutorial in Spanish history. We would start on politics later that night at the Café Gijón.
Gregorio Marañón, Tom’s grandfather, had been one of the great Spanish intellectuals of the twentieth century. And the Café Gijón on the Paseo de la Castellana, a few blocks from the dark mazy apartment where his widow still lived, was where he used to hang out, and where we went for a drink later that night. A physician, scientist, historian, and philosopher, Doctor Marañón had been liberal in his politics and omnivorous in his interests, and I kept wishing that he and Freddie could have been sitting there with us on the red leather banquette, just so I could have listened to them talking together. But instead we were joined by some of Tom’s friends, whose conversation inevitably—because that was all anybody in Spain in the early seventies talked about—turned to Franco and what would happen after the old murderer was finally dumped in his Speer-like mausoleum in the Valle de los Caídos. Surely he couldn’t last much longer (he hung on another four years), but nobody knew what his heir, Prince Juan Carlos, would do when he came to the throne.
The Prince with the Pubic Hair on his Head, as he was affectionately known on account of his tightly coiled locks, had been educated in Spain (away from the influence of his exiled family in Rome) under Franco’s vigilant eye, and had sworn a public oath of loyalty to El Jefe. So maybe he had been brainwashed and would follow in his soi-disant godfather’s jackbooted footsteps. But then again he was rumored to be in touch with his far more liberal father, Don Juan, and with opposition politicians, so maybe he would lead Spain into the promised land of democracy. An enigma wrapped up in the rigid embrace of a dictator, the prince floated in regal ambiguity way beyond the grasp of Tom or any of his friends. And I floated off to unambiguously common sleep, curled up on the banquette, my head in my tutor’s lap.
Doctor Marañón’s house just outside Toledo had been a monastery in the sixteenth century—the chapel was still intact, and one of the monks’ cells had been turned into the doctor’s study, seemingly untouched since his death. If you stood by the sundial near the front door, and looked back across the valley, the view—the Alcázar, the cathedral, the steep hills, the bridge, and the swirling clouds—could have been, and was, painted by El Greco. Naively, ignorantly, absurdly, I gazed at Toledo and imagined I was seeing it through his eyes, failing to understand that nobody has ever been able to see what El Greco saw. Down some steps on the lower terrace our lunch—bread, wine, and a still-warm tortilla—had been set out on a stone table in the dusty shade of a grape-heavy pergola. Lizards bustled about in the ivy, cicadas thrummed away with no apparent sense of rhythm in the cypress trees, and way off in the distance I could hear the desolate clumsy clanging of church bells.
Later that afternoon Tom said he would take me to see a synagogue that looked like a mosque, improbably called Santa María la Blanca—its Jewish name obliterated during a series of savage pogroms in the fourteenth century. This would be my first lesson in the religious bouillabaisse that had existed in Spain before Ferdinand and Isabella, los Reyes Católicos, decided that on the whole they preferred their soup to be composed of a single Christian theme. Heat weakened and dizzy with wine, I listened as best I could to the story of an enterprising rabbi named Solomon ha-Levi, who had somehow or other transformed himself into the archbishop of Burgos, but my thoughts kept sliding back to the claw-footed tub I had glimpsed earlier on in a cool, grottolike bathroom upstairs. Maybe we should continue our discussion of la Reconquista up there?
A trickle of rust-tinged water dribbled into the enormous bath, pipes shuddering, as I lay back, eyes closed, and waited patiently for my body to be submerged. I could hear Tom talking to the cook and her husband in the kitchen downstairs, and after that total silence until he appeared at the door about half an hour later—“I’ve brought you some presents.” First he arranged a Leaning Tower of Books on the floor, then he balanced a couple of glasses and an ashtray on top of the laundry basket, and after that he settled into a rickety armchair and began to feed me warm figs, cold wine, and the occasional fiery drag of his cigarette while reading out loud from Gregorio Marañón’s book El Greco y Toledo.
“But do you know who wrote about El Greco better than anybody? Even better than my grandfather.”
I did not.
“He was a German art historian who came to Spain in 1908 to study Velázquez, but he fell in love with El Greco instead. His name was Julius Meier-Graefe.”
Who had been married to Busch, our friend in France with the filthy sex-crazed dog. Not much interested in hearing about Meier-Graefe’s widow or her revolting new consort, Tom found the book somewhere near the top of the listing tower: “This is what he says. ‘All the generations that follow after El Greco live in his realm. There is a greater difference between him and Titian, his master, than between him and Renoir or Cézanne.’ And that is the whole point! Which is why he only ever got two commissions out of Philip II, who could not begin to understand his vision. So, deprived of royal patronage, he moved to Toledo where he could paint what he wanted. You’ll understand what Meier-Graefe is talking about when we go see The Burial of Count of Orgaz.”
No doubt I would, but in the meantime, maybe he could pass me a towel? It was dusk when I woke up in an unfamiliar bedroom overlooking a garden in Spain.
“Too late for the synagogue and the count?”
“Oh yes,” he whispered. “Much too late.”
HERE WAS OUR PLAN: After Toledo we would drive south through Andalucía, staying in a series of monasteries and castles that had been converted into paradores, so I could continue my education in Spanish art and history, partly by osmosis and partly with the help of my traveling tutor. The Grand Tour à l’espagnol. I like to think that I made some progress along the way, and by the time we arrived at Tom’s family’s house on the coast, I was already familiar with the vague contours of Mudejar architecture, knew that when Philip II had the Escorial designed, he took his inspiration from the grisly grid on which Saint Laurence had been barbecued, and I’d learned that a glass of fino must always be held by the stem, never the bowl. I even made a bit of headway with the language, helped along by a publication called ¡Hola!, which Tom told me was read only by idiotic shopgirls and even more half-witted cleaning ladies.
Admittedly its editorial focus was narrow, but no less affecting for being so. How could one resist being swept up into the joys, tears, sorrows, and heartbreaks of the assorted royals (reigning and deposed), bullfighters, and soap opera stars who inhabited its colorful pages week after week? Even though I could just about stumble through a story about the tragic death of the Duchess of Ávila’s teenage son in a car crash, my spoken Spanish never progressed beyond six words—hola, adiós, gracias, por favor, and cama matrimonial. The last two being the most crucial. Every time we checked into a hotel, if I didn’t kick my tutor hard in the shins and hiss cama matrimonial into his ear, the sad, repressed, acne-stricken clerk behind the front desk would invariably show us into a room with two sad, repressed, and extremely narrow single beds.
Eager to please my new boyfriend’s parents, I was on my best behavior at their house, and flattered myself that things were going even better than I’d dared to hope. No more swearing—I was particularly careful to avoid any reference to Jesus H. Christ—I listened with genuine interest to his father’s musings on Saint John of the Cross, to his mother’s memories of life as an exile in Paris after the civil war, and appeared at breakfast, smiling and on time, each morning. Except that after three or four breakfasts we were asked, extremely politely, to leave. How could this be? Apparently the problem was related to the cama matrimonial business. When we arrived my suitcase had been firmly deposited in his father’s dressing room, conveniently located next door to the parental boudoir, while Tom was to share a room with his brother at the other end of the house. An odd arrangement, but ever the gracious guest, I was more than happy to follow the peculiar customs of these peculiar people in this peculiar country.
And yet, perhaps there was something to be said for their strange, antiquated ways. Forbidden pleasure. Illicit sex. Christianity clearly had its uses. Why had sex in our house never been associated with guilt? Why had there never been any rules to break? Well, I’d done my best and taken up with a Catholic and gone to fascist Spain, but my parents didn’t care and were actually extremely fond of Tom. His parents, on the other hand, cared a great deal about their son’s nocturnal ramblings, which is how we found ourselves waving adiós to them rather sooner than planned, and heading off to Extremadura.
Now, could it be a coincidence that in the very same year, 1492, that Ferdinand and Isabella had finally declared victory over the Jews and Moors, Columbus had sailed the ocean blue and discovered a whole new world full of infidels in need of persecution? Probably. But my kindly tutor at least pretended to take my facile aperçu seriously.
“Well, actually you’re quite right, there are some historians who see the Reconquista as a kind of dress rehearsal for the conquistadores, but I’ve always thought they got the hell out of Extremadura because it was—and is—the harshest, most miserable, and poverty-stricken region in the entire country.”
Not a great deal appeared to have changed in the five hundred years since Cortés, Pizarro, and their henchmen had abandoned their homeland in search of gold and glory. It was the emptiness that struck me first. We drove for hours and hours across a landscape drained of life—no people, no animals, hardly another car on the road, until we arrived at an equally desolate village. Its inhabitants had barricaded themselves away behind shutters to escape the heat; a sad, skeletal dog slept in a doorway; and in the dusty plaza only the church and a bar—the twin opiates—were open for business.
BEHIND THE PALACIO DE PIZARRO, at the top of a steep hill, Tom told me there was a convent where the nuns made the best yemas he had ever tasted, and since it was only about three in the afternoon, God knows we had plenty of time to kill before lunch. Yemas?
“You’ll love them. They’re incredibly sweet and sticky, just egg yolks and sugar.”
Unconvinced, I nevertheless trudged up the hill toward the convent’s stone facade, punctuated by windows barred with Saint Laurence–style grilles and two massive doors tattooed with metal studs. The nuns belonged to a closed order, and from the day they betrothed themselves to Jesus H. Christ to the day they died, they would never again have any contact with the world outside. Imagine. Quite apart from the horror of being buried alive in this prison, I wondered, on a more practical level, how they managed to conduct their yemas transactions without ever setting eyes on their eager customers.
“Like this,” and my tutor pulled a rusty chain beside a contraption with a small revolving door, waited until it creaked slowly around, put the money inside, waited for it to creak around again, and there was a box of yemas, neatly wrapped in brown paper and string.
“Until quite recently they used the same system for abandoned babies, except of course they traveled in the opposite direction.”
Oh no, poor little babies. Imagine being brought up by those faceless nuns in that fortress. If I hadn’t been quite so hungry I would have worked myself up into a tearful state about them, but instead I followed Tom down the hill and into a dimly lit restaurant hidden away behind Pizarro’s palace.
“Today we’re going to have an extremely simple lunch. Bread, ham, and wine. That’s it. The bread I don’t know about, but the ham and the wine will be más delicioso than anything you have ever tasted in your entire life. The pigs, who have pretty little black hooves—pata negra—snuffle around under the oak trees here in Extremadura eating acorns, until the happy day arrives when they are transformed into jamón ibérico.”
Tom picked up a slice of ham—rosy, almost translucent with a creamy flutter of fat along the edge—and handed it to me, with a glass of Vega Sicilia wine. With nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to meet, surely it made far more sense to linger a little longer at our table by the window, in which case we were in need of más vino y más jamón, por favor.
Only rarely, in my experience, and usually for only the briefest of moments, does life—quite capriciously—take it into its head to suddenly give you everything you could possibly desire all at once. And this was one of those mysterious ineffable moments. Which was why I couldn’t stop my thoughts from climbing back up that hill, slipping through the barred windows, and creeping along the shadowy flagstoned passages to spy on those ghostly nuns as they stirred their bubbling copper cauldrons full of egg yolks and sugar. Imagine.
“Tom, now we’re going to play a game that I made up as a little girl in France many years ago. It’s called ‘Which Would You Rather?’ Imagine we had a daughter”—he smiled, apparently happy with this idea—“and on her eighteenth birthday you have a very, very difficult choice.”
He took another sip of Vega Sicilia, and his face assumed an appropriately concerned expression.
“Would you rather she became a nun in a closed order making yemas for the rest of her life, or would you prefer her to be a lesbian?”
An impossible dilemma, exquisitely balanced, carefully calculated just to torture my poor tutor. I knew he’d go nuts agonizing over these two equally distressing choices and maybe it might even lead to an interesting discussion about the Catholic Church’s attitude toward homosexuality. But no, I had gotten it all wrong. Tom just looked at me as if I were completely mad, and without agonizing for a split momentito, replied, “A nun, of course.”
Of course.