Free Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop by Kirstan Hawkins Page B

a party with some new friends. I’m sure you would love to meet them, they talk about these things all the time. Your trusted friend, as ever, Claudia. Arturo read the letter over again looking for a hint of the tenderness and passion that he had poured into his own to her, and found none.
    Devastated by Claudia’s response to his decision to be a poet, and unable to defy his father’s wishes any longer, Arturo resigned himself to entering medical school and trying to please the two people he loved and admired the most. He was not very good at his studies, easily distracted by irrelevancies, and he took longer than most to graduate. His contact with Claudia started to diminish over theyears, with longer and longer gaps appearing between his letters to her and the replies he received.
    Then, in the last year of his course, Claudia suddenly reappeared back home and Arturo’s passion was reignited under her guiding hand. Claudia had taken a job teaching politics and sociology and was beginning to be associated in the newspapers with the frequent student demonstrations and teachers’ strikes that were plaguing the university. Arturo’s desire for her, fuelled by guilt, was stronger than it had ever been. She terrified him, but she taught him to enjoy a pleasure beyond anything he had ever known. Secretly, sometimes playfully, sometimes tauntingly, in the darkness of the bushes of their teenage meeting place, she showed him how to be a man.
    â€˜Promise me we’ll get married when I’ve finished my studies,’ he begged, after each liaison.
    â€˜Take care,’ she whispered back seductively, ‘I believe I have the power to make you do anything.’ Then, as they were getting dressed, she would chastise him. ‘Remember, Arturo, there is more to life than personal satisfaction. You shouldn’t get too attached.’
    He would leave their assignation confused, intoxicated with the softness of her touch and the harshness of her words. He knew that any knowledge of his continuing contact with her was likely to kill his father, and yet when he was in her company he was possessed by a passion that was beyond his control.
    Arturo’s father had his contacts and eventually got wind of his son’s renewed relationship with the young political agitator. Fortuitously, Arturo was coming up for his year after qualifying, in which he was required by the authorities to do twelve months’ medical service in the rural provinces. His father started to ask around among his acquaintances for a suitably isolated location towhich to arrange for his son to be sent, in the hope that this would break the affair with Claudia. Through a close friend of Loretta’s he heard of a little-known and inaccessible town in need of a doctor. Within a month he had made all the necessary arrangements for his son’s posting. Arturo’s spirits were lifted only by Claudia’s admiration for his dedication to serving the poor.
    â€˜I’m proud of you at last,’ she told him. ‘Arturo, promise me you’ll never become a pampered professional like your father, taking care of the privileged classes and performing unnecessary operations for imaginary diseases resulting from their idle life.’
    â€˜But I’m only going for a year,’ Arturo objected, never having really contemplated what Claudia’s ambitions for him meant. He could not conceive of a life away from the comforts of his cherished home.
    â€˜Will you visit me?’ he asked, quietly defying his father’s wishes.
    â€˜I’ll try to join you in your work, once I’ve finished mine here,’ was all she said. ‘Don’t let me down.’
    His father, on the day of his leaving, sent him off with a similar warning: ‘I have pulled important strings to get you this job, son. Don’t ever forget it. If you fail in your duties, I will never forgive you.’
    With these parting words