Picture the scene in a Parisian boudoir. A gentleman sits in an attitude of appraisal, hand resting on silver knob of ash plant, while a young lady takes off her dress. She rolls down her stockings and lies back against the sunburst headboard of the bed with her legs akimbo, like two pale chevrons…
“Now that would make a pretty picture!”
“Come on, Cristo, do you plan to join me or sit there painting me from your imagination?”
Laughing, Cristo stepped towards the bed.
The young lady swivelled round and took him by surprise.
“I’ve got you now,” she said, pulling him down into her arms.
When he had begun to woo Gelsomina, Cristo thought she was little more than a child, so gauche and without an opinion worth holding other than her charming sincerity until, in the throes of love-making here, she bit him on the cheek.
Taken aback, Cristo had a compulsion to confess. “Gelsomina,” he said, “I want you to know that I am not in love with you, just as you are not in love with me.”
Gelsomina lay silent beside him.
“Allow me to qualify that,” he said. “You will betray me just as I will betray you.”
“What are you saying?”
“I am saying simply that we will have our time and move on.”
“How can you be so cruel,” she said.
“One day,” he said, “you will see my cruelty as an act of kindness.”
Cristo was not wrong, but neither was he right. Several months later Gelsomina went off to live in Cap D’Antibes with a painter called Pablo. She didn’t want to live with laziness.
*
“No question. That girl has her eye on the big prize.”
“But she doesn’t leave him straight away.”
“She’s ambitious, and she is learning from him. Don’t forget he is only a stepping stone to greater things.”
“She is so manipulative.”
“What about him, George? He’s just as manipulative.”
“That may be so. Do you think she finds happiness with Pablo the painter?”
“Pablo is already higher up on the ladder than her.”