Sira by María Dueñas

Author:María Dueñas [Dueñas, María]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2023-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

43

The personal stylists arrived a few minutes later in a fluster. They had been alarmed by Don Julio’s urgent gesticulations from the window, a sign that something wasn’t as it should be.

Asunta Fernández, from the Henriette fashion house, was in her forties and wore her hair gathered in a silk headscarf. Juanita Palmou, of the Paula Naletoff house, was of a similar age and was holding a pair of sunglasses and a light-colored, wide-brimmed hat in her hands. The former was tall and slender; the latter, curvy with a flushed complexion. I’d assumed the women tasked with ironing garments and doing up fasteners would be two tender young assistants I could easily have eating out of my hand, so I was surprised to find myself facing a pair of seasoned professionals, like the one my mother had been when she was employed at Doña Manuela’s workshop. Except these women were from Buenos Aires, where there was a great deal more money and glamour than there had been in an impoverished prewar Madrid. As a dressmaker, I’d skipped this intermediate step and gone from young seamstress with potential to owner of my own businesses, first in Tétouan and then in Madrid’s Salamanca neighborhood. But they didn’t need to know any of that.

I greeted them without the flippant insolence I’d used to neutralize the hairdresser’s mistrust. However, I continued to pull the necessary strings to win them over.

“I’m here on Don Alberto Dodero’s say-so,” I insisted. “I’m very sorry that nobody informed you I was coming.”

I waited for a reaction but they both remained stonily silent and were clearly uncomfortable. It had been a busy, complicated day for them, as every day had been since their arrival. Or, more likely, as all the days since long before that. It had been a busy, complicated day as every day had surely been since their respective fashion houses received the request to designate an employee to take care of the first lady’s wardrobe on her tour of Europe. She hadn’t been a regular customer of either house before that and had used their services only occasionally, since General Perón secured the presidency the year before. And of course, those dealings were rarely welcomed. As reputable ateliers and boutiques, both Henriette and Paula Naletoff had been dressing the ladies of the Buenos Aires aristocracy for many years—women of tremendous taste, class, lineage, discernment, and wealth. The very ones against whom the president’s wife was waging a merciless war. Or vice versa. Either way, the result was the same.

The request had been a catastrophe for both businesses. Neither wanted to risk upsetting or perhaps losing their exclusive clientele by having their names openly associated with the president’s wife, but refusing would be reckless. Nobody refused Eva Perón anything. Anyone who dared would face the consequences. The houses had agreed, of course, and prepared several exclusive outfits. And they put forward Asunta Fernández and Juanita Palmou as assistants, two trusted, prudent, and highly regarded employees who would perform the task with complete professionalism.

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