Beyond the Ties of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

had often seen Sergio, several years older than she, during summer vacations. He wore his blond hair a bit long and was constantly brushing it out of his eyes. He paraded around with a pack of boys his age that came with him for the summer. They spent their days hunting, fishing, and riding horseback through the valley, and she’d see them ride past her family’s house in the afternoons when they returned from the day’s excursion. On weekends they rode their horses into town and got drunk at the local tavern. The girl who came in on weekends to help in the kitchen told Eugenia that they spent their time putting the moves on the local girls, and that Sergio always scored with one of them. “It’s his green eyes,” she insisted. Eugenia knew that Sergio’s blond hair and green eyes marked him as upper-class. The younger local girls, brought up on pulp novels and soap operas, always dreamed about falling in love with and marrying a rich young landowner. And the fact that he wore his hair long, almost hippie-like, only made him more attractive in a vaguely exotic sort of way.
    â€œOh, come on, Mamita,” Eugenia answered uneasily. “He’s at least three years older than I am. Besides, why would he be interested in me? He has friends his own age.”
    â€œThat may be, hijita , but he’s come alone this vacation. I just invited them to dinner for tonight. They’ll be over in an hour, so why don’t you take a bath and put on something nice.”
    They were there at eight, and for the first time in a long time her mother made her signature pisco sours. There was something about Sergio, Eugenia thought, and it didn’t only affect the local girls. She, too, found his long blond hair and green eyes quite arousing. He’d obviously been brought up to speed on their mothers’ plotting, because he spent the cocktail hour looking her over even as the conversation was mainly between the older adults. When they sat at the table her mother put the two of them next to each other. By the time dessert came Sergio had placed his leg up against hers and was rubbing back and forth very lightly. She had found it hard to concentrate on the conversation, but maybe it was the three glasses of wine she had drunk on top of the pisco sour.
    They didn’t become a couple, not really. They lived too far away from each other in the city and Sergio was already in college. But whenever they were at the farm at the same time, he came over and took her out horseback riding. They always ended up in the forest. After they kissed for a while among the eucalyptus trees, the crushed leaves under their bodies filling the air with their pungent sharpness, she would suddenly sit up and call an end to the session. Sergio seemed willing to accept this, perhaps because their families knew each other. She wasn’t like the little country girls he could have behind the bushes any Saturday night. In fact, Eugenia grew convinced that he found her especially interesting precisely because she would not accept his advances. She began to look forward to their outings.
    When she got to the university, things changed. They were all hippies in those days, no matter what their social class, confronting the system, going to demonstrations, smoking marijuana. She was pretty sure he’d told all his friends they were having sex, and he started pressuring her to finally prove her love for him, as he put it. It was after one particularly ugly scene at a party, when he’d been drunk and had tried to force her upstairs, that he began arriving hours late for their dates. Her refusal had been public that time, she now realized, and that had been unforgivable because it made a fool out of him in front of his friends. But when she went to the demonstration that morning, she thought she still wanted to reconcile.
    As she wrote in her journal on a daily basis in the peace and quiet of the summer break, Eugenia thought