Free Swedish Tango / the Rhythm of Memory by Alyson Richman Page A

almond eyes, the dark brown irises, and thick black lashes. When she gazed upon him, she looked quite simply like an Egyptian princess. The night before their marriage, she had given him a book of poems by the Roman poet Catullus and promised to perfect her Latin so that she could translate the poems for him when they lay in each other’s arms.
    He swore they would live a life of love, the child in her belly there to remind them of their eternal vows. They would live simply and poetically. Their union never to be broken, their eternal bond forever sealed.
    He had not wanted his job to change what they already had. He did not want to change himself. But somehow he feared that the wheels of his destiny were already in motion and there was little he could do to slow it down.
    The studio had signed him to a three-movie contract, and all of his roles would be the same—that of the romantic hero, driven to capture the heart of the woman he was cast to love.
    With the money from his first film,
Buenos Dias Soledad
, Octavio purchased a huge house for his pregnant wife on the outskirts of Santiago that the previous owners, two spinster sisters named Maria and Magda, had painted red. On the day they finalized the sale, the elder sister, Maria, approached the young couple and begged them never to repaint the house, for the sisters had painted it vermilion as a symbol of their unrequited loves. Octavio agreed, hoping to give the two now wizened women some peace in their old age. And even though the house had faded in color over the years, so that it was more a faded pink than a vibrant red, Octavio upheld his promise and even affectionately renamed the house La Casa Rosa.
    Uninterested in taming things that were meant to grow wild, Salomé was far less diligent in maintaining the sisters’ garden. The lush and intricately planned yard that the spinsters had cultivated over the years had fallen upon two owners who had no patience for weeding or planting new bulbs. While it had once bloomed different flowers each season, peonies in the summer, dahlias in the fall, the garden soon grew like an enchanted forest with untamed vines wrapping over the fence and fruit trees overloaded with unpicked bounties.
    Living in such bohemian and lush surroundings, Salomé found her creative energies heightened during the last months of her pregnancy. She painted one of the upstairs bedrooms yellow, using the saffron threads she used to tint her paella as her inspiration. She crocheted white curtains with outlines of elephants and giraffes into the intricately woven pattern.
    Doña Olivia brought the cradle in which she had rocked herown daughter, and Salomé painted it with lemon leaves and lemon fruit, inspired by her own garden, which was now fragrant with the scent of verbena and rose.
    At night, when Octavio returned home exhausted from the studio, his eyes dark with fatigue and his jaw tired from rehearsing his lines, he still had time to hold Salomé in his arms and stroke her full belly underneath her long, white nightgown.
    He would bring her head between his two brown hands and kiss her delicately on the mouth.
    “My precious Fayum,” he would whisper to her. “Tell me our love will be forever.”
    “Our love will be forever, my darling,” she would whisper back to him. She would turn her brown eyes up to his, her delicate lashes fluttering in the moonlit room.
    And then he would sigh. His naked chest rising and falling in small undulations. “One day this house will be filled with children and you and I will grow old together.”
    “Yes,” she would say. Salomé knew these were her husband’s nightly musings. The affirmations he needed to maintain his hectic schedule of filming and rehearsing.
    Octavio hated talking about his daily activities. His hours were spent meeting various publicists, managers, and impatient producers. It embarrassed him. And Salomé sensed his tension. She herself was dreading the completion of his first