Untold Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

She sat without speaking until the tears dried on her face. “No,” she said, quietly and clearly, “I couldn’t go on. We both know that.” And indeed I had feared for her sanity the previous few months, when she had lost “the love of her life,” when her behavior had become so erratic it caused a tabloid furore, when she seemed to drift through too many of our conversations as if in a semifugue. Time after time, over the years, she had come out of the darkness (of her husband’s betrayal, of her bulimia, of numerous scandals) and dazzled the world. The deeper the darkness, the brighter she shone. Impossible to sustain indefinitely, and I had seen her teetering, finally, at the edge of the abyss.
    I said, and what about now? Now can you go on? And although moments before she had sobbed until she retched, choking on the impossibility of it all, she smiled that smile that she has, pure sex, and completely chaste, and said, “Oh, do give me a little credit, please.”
    But when I returned her mood was black. Two months of living in an unremarkable Brazilian suburb, working on her tan and roughing up her accent had perhaps already given her too much of the “normality” she thought she craved.
    That’s not a fair thing to say.
    She is not the first person on this planet to walk out of her life and “start over” as they say in her adopted homeland. She is not the first mother to leave her children behind. These things do happen, though they shock us when we hear of them.
    But her circumstances are extreme. What a dry formulation that is. Would that I could write of it, of her, with poetry and passion instead of my journeyman lettering. Were I able I would write not prose but an aria.
    So, yes, the circumstances are extreme and her depression, her bleakness, is natural and inevitable. We talked of it before as a stage that she would go through. Though, given the delicate state of her mind, she perhaps didn’t fully comprehend the finality of her actions, hadn’t accepted the loss of her boys as permanent. No, she couldn’t go on. But I didn’t doubt, I still don’t, that she will survive her losses. She is a survivor. She’s the toughest woman I ever met.
    “Real life,” though, must have come as something of a shock. She always wanted it, or so she imagined. She fantasized about riding on a double-decker bus the way others dream about riding in a horse-drawn coach. When we were making our little plan (that’s how she referred to it; she is often droll though princesses are seldom credited with a funny bone) she would remind me how many times she had walked down a London street “and got away with it.” There weren’t so many times, we could count them, because usually a photographer, or several, blew her cover. The cover being that it couldn’t be the Princess of Wales in jeans and a sweatshirt browsing at the magazine stand. Other times she’d go out in disguise, a wig, dark glasses, once a policewoman’s uniform, something she’d done once or twice in the early days, high jinks with her sister-in-law, and later, in desperation, to make pay phone calls to some undeserving object of her love. Disguise, she already knew, could work.
    But the unrelenting day-in-day-out of shopping and cooking and cleaning and washing, despite her retention through the years of a touch of the Cinderella complex, has definitely been a bore. She hadn’t hired a cleaner when I saw her. By the end of November she’d had over two months fending for herself. It’s a point of pride on which she will eventually give way.
    She’s wearing a wig and dyeing her hair as well; never one to do things by halves. Her tan is deeper than I’ve ever seen it. Her eyes are dark brown and she complains that the lenses are a pain to take in and out.
    Back in September, when we went to have the “filler” put in her lips, a local clinic in Belo Horizonte (the town where she was holed away), she could hardly breathe all the way there in