Dry Your Smile by Morgan Robin;

Author:Morgan, Robin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Autumn, 1982

Emerging from her darkroom, Iliana de Costa blinked at the afternoon light slanting through her windows. Large, she supposed, bemused at the notion that windows of such size could be clucked over reverently in Manhattan, while they’d be considered average to small in Venice. There, her flat had cost one-quarter of the rent this one did, and had been almost three times the size. There, the incomparable light had lavished itself through floor-to-ceiling French doors that opened onto her terrace-balconies on the Riva degli Schiavoni overlooking the laguna. There … But what was the use of comparing? Venice was past. Like the Paris years. Like those in Barcelona, in Rome, and the abominable month in London, which she disliked almost as much as New York.

Yet here she was again, back in New York: this massive impersonal city where the light’s repertoire was usually limited to charcoal through slate, the textures on which it fell flattened to steel, concrete, granite. What New Yorkers called “the” park, she thought, would not be “central” but one of several in almost any major city in the world, nor did she find this lack ameliorated by the scrawny trees pathetically lining some (only the more affluent, she noticed) blocks. This time, however, Manhattan seemed more tolerable than it had in that first devastating encounter with the city almost thirty years earlier, when she had arrived from Buenos Aires with the equivalent of twenty-five U.S. dollars in her pocket and not a soul to contact. The cherished Hasselblad had to be pawned after three days. Later, when she returned to retrieve it with her first week’s salary from the factory job, the pawnbroker refused to honor her ticket. No use shouting at him in clear English; to him a Spanish accent meant a Puerto Rican and a drug addict. Nor would she assert that she was neither, feeling that would constitute a betrayal of the thirty-nine Puerto Rican women with whom she had shared that first week of hell, all of them hunched over sewing machines in one drafty room.

This time she had returned to New York in what they said was triumph. The reviews of her one-woman show at the Focus Gallery were uniform in their praise. Her work sold well. This time, all the cameras and lenses remained with her; no pawnbrokers need apply. This time, she could afford a high-ceilinged sunny flat in Greenwich Village, assemble her prized record collection from storage in three different cities around the world, purchase a fine set of components, and hear music again. This time, she was back as Iliana de Costa, and nobody dared ask why.

Nobody but Julian, of course—who had leaned across the table at their first lunch after her return last spring, inquiring earnestly just that: why had she returned, hating the city as she did? The answer had been easy enough, Iliana remembered, plumping down now onto her cocoa velvet couch, the still curling prints of her darkroom session in her lap for sorting: the Focus show, naturally.

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