Monday, July 14, 2003

Symposiast Fiction – Period Romance Serial

…continued from With all the rage that her limp heart could muster, she looked the Count in the eye and slowly whispered the words that were to seal her fate. “I hate you, father, I hate you!”

An intense silence followed, alleviated only by Alejandro’s sharp inhalation of breath. But Fermina’s eyes remained defiantly fixed on her father, in the hope of catching some approximately human reaction in his face before it fled to make way for the steely impassivity that usually resided there. She was seeking some sign that her declaration had at least momentarily revealed a chink in the supremely indifferent façade that he had presented to her all the days of her life. With some horror, though little surprise, she was made to finally realise that it was no façade at all. He was indifferent, and quite genuinely so. He was no actor. He had been indifferent to her love when she had loved him - a childish folly, you must concede, but one to which all children are prone – and he had been indifferent to the disappearance of that love once he had killed it. So it stood to reason that her hatred - long felt but only newly performed - would be insufficient to register some acknowledgment in him. In the face of her anger, however forceful or implacable it might have been, he would feel no compulsion to alter his position. Her changes meant nothing to him. She meant nothing to him.

Flames of humiliation licked her face, and yet, his mind had moved to other matters. His attention switched back to the papers before him, as if the interlude that had scorched her with such vehemence had not even occurred. Time passed. The blood roared in her ears. Her eyes prickled. Her mind was filled with shouting, as she attacked the situation from as many angles as her rage was propelling her to find. Perhaps it was pure futility that she lamented his carelessness in regard to her. She knew his faults, and she knew them to be rabid and numerous. She even knew that, had she lived her life in the knowledge that he adored her, she would have scorned his love. Had such a love existed at all, she would have seen that it was tainted by its source. But still, she was cut to the quick by his matter-of-fact dismissal of her self in its entirety. When the value of one’s existence is rejected or denied, it is a potent slap. It wallops you, irrespective of whether it has been delivered by a wholly detestable figure. And such wounds can only inflame further when you know that all you have to offer in life is your existence, when you are a woman of mean education and without the consolations of work or a public life, and when there is no other hook on which to hang your identity besides your presence in a household. And now Fermina was to be banished even from that meagre position. She had thought it impossible that she could exist in a more pronounced state of invisibility, or that she could ever be made to feel more keenly that she was worth little in the eyes of others. But she was now to be removed even from those around her who, in a practical sense, at least had to think of her on a daily basis, even if such thoughts were tinged with irritation. So, she was consigned to further degradation.

And yet, though her reeling mind had fixed upon no source of consolation, she began to regain her composure. It was a measure of how much of it she had clawed back that, a few minutes later, she had regained enough to be darkly amused when, having emerged from his papers, her father’s face contorted into a startled gape when he found, to his astonishment, that she was still there. It was laughable that he should have been so astounded, and yet, it was characteristic of his thinking. She knew that, to his mind, she should have ceased to exist as a presence in his life after he had made final and binding arrangements to be rid of her. It would seem to him a galling miscalculation to find that she remained, and that his decision would not acquit itself in actuality until the morning. But the fault would rest with Time, not him. And it would pass. It was a pittance, but Fermina felt that that look on her father’s face, when enlivened by an instant of unpreparedness, was the only victory she would ever win. Now that she would be leaving his house, consigned to some distant hole, she had the feeling that it would be the only memory she had amassed over her lifetime with him to show that she had once had an effect on his selfish composure. Her presence had been felt. But it was a paltry memento to account for the only life she had yet known….

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