Free Empress Bianca by Lady Colin Campbell Page A

ideas, it is simplicity itself. I wonder why we didn’t think of it before.’
    On the principle that everyone needs to eat, and that food degenerates in a warm climate, Ferdie, who had already successfully opened electrical shops near two of the poor districts in Mexico City, decided to open twenty small refrigerator shops all over Mexico. For all his adventurousness, Ferdie was an innately cautious person who never took an unnecessary risk and always sought to create safety nets in case of unforeseen eventualities. This quality was one that he brought to bear not only in his business life but in his personal life too. It was also what propelled him to open up the refrigerator shops in working-class districts, shrewdly realizing that the poor needed credit and would not want to shop in affluent areas, where they would be led to feel that their presencewas at best tolerated and at worst an intrusion.
    It was this careful quality that had also led Ferdie to call off his engagement with Fernanda. With hindsight, he could see that he had treated her unfairly, but breaking up with her had seemed the only sensible thing to do at the time. This was at the time of his third bout of depression, eighteen months after the first and nine after the second. After the first one, he had ascribed his condition to overtiredness and had actually been so touched by the way Fernanda reacted that he had proposed marriage, even though he did not feel ready to settle down; but after the second bout, he began to question whether his personal life might not be having a hidden effect on his frame of mind. He therefore resolved to sever relations with Fernanda if he had a third bout, which he did two months before their wedding. This cancellation caused a furore in the smart Mexican social circles in which they moved. Fernanda was perceived as being blameless. Fiancés did not break off engagements with nice girls from nice families on a whim, after all. They only did so if the girl was found to be lacking, which Fernanda was patently not. The reaction of both his friends and his parents’ friends so jolted Ferdie that he shied away from forming an attachment with another girl from a good family. In truth, it was just as well that he did, because most parents of such girls would not have allowed their daughters out with Ferdie Piedraplata after what he did to Fernanda.
    In the nine years between ending his engagement to Fernanda, Ferdie developed a reputation in Mexico for being a playboy, even though he felt himself to be merely a man whom circumstances had cast into the twilight world where the living was fast and the women faster.
    He travelled extensively on business. Always, he went first class, crossing the Atlantic on such liners as the SS United States , the Queen Elizabeth and the Andrea Doria . It was on one of those crossings that he met the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Thereafter, whenever he was in Paris, he called in upon them at their Bois de Boulogne residence, unless, of course, they were all in New York, in which case he merely went up a floor to their apartment at the Waldorf Towers, where Ferdie customarily stayed. He was well on his way to earning a reputation as a sybarite when he first encountered Gloria Gilberto, Mexico’s leading soprano, a tall, slender, statuesque brunette who resembled the movie star Delores del Rio and had been rated as a potential challenger to Maria Callas,although, it has to be said, more in the Mexican than the Greek or American press.
    The whole course of Ferdie’s life altered when he went backstage at La Scala in Milan to congratulate her on the fine performance she had given in the title role in Bellini’s Norma . Upon meeting her, Ferdie felt something he had not experienced since first dating Fernanda. There was an immediate sympathy. A desire. A feeling of possibilities above and beyond the ordinary. Gloria, moreover, was no girl. She was a woman. An experienced woman of the world. A woman