Chapter 1: I will be his wife

Tatiana Mattew

Part One

I look at myself in front of the mirror. Even though I feel beautiful with my wedding dress on, I can’t help feeling sad about the decision someone else made for me, the one my father has made to wed me to a man I’ve only met once. I will become the mother of a little boy who lost his birth mother at birth. I am not ready for that kind of thing. Although I grieve for a poor widower situation, I can’t help but feel distressed and melancholy about my position.

“Get that look off your face, Tati. You’ll see that everything will be all right,” I hear my mother say to me as she tries to adjust my veil. 

She decided to dress me in everything to see how I’ll look tomorrow. 

“I just don’t understand why this is the only solution,” I grumble, even though I know it’s no use anymore.

In less than twenty-four hours, I’m getting married.

I still haven’t talked to Lucian. I made plans to meet him tonight.

I look at my mother again. I know it seems like I’m begging, but it’s not what I want.

I don’t want to be pitied.

I don’t want to get married!

“You know it’s the only way to keep our house. Do you want us to be homeless? Because that’s what will happen if you don’t marry that poor widower.”

“He’s not a poor widower. He’s shit out of money.”

“Tatiana! Don’t express yourself like that. You sound like a tramp.” With mom, I have never been able to be or express myself the way I wanted to.

To her, both Teresa and I will always be the girls she gave birth to and changed diapers for years. We will never be old enough to decide what to do and what not to do.

“You are cutting off my wings. You’re ruining my one true love relationship. Doesn’t it hurt that I’ll break Lucian’s heart? Have you thought about that, Mom?”

She pulls away a little and ducks her gaze. I can feel her embarrassed.

And it’s no wonder.

“We’re not trying to hurt you. We’re sure that... that this gentleman will be good to you.”

“You don’t know him! You don’t know what he’s like! What if he’s a bloodthirsty man? A depraved man who rents me out by the hour to his friends?”

“But what things you say, Tati. Magghio is not depraved. You don’t know him either. While we should not....”

I approach her and interrupt her by grabbing her shoulders, shaking her as if she were a doormat.

“You nothing!” I yell. “Nothing! You don’t know him either. How is it that you could sell me out like this? Do I have anything to say? Is it up to me to just accept it? Does that depend on whether or not I’m a good daughter?”

My mother doesn’t know what to answer me, so she just looks at me with her embarrassed almond eyes. She knows it’s wrong, I know it, even my father, with all the assurance he wanted to show me the day before, knows it too: this is all a nuisance, a stupidity and, most of all, an abuse. An abuse on his part against my trust, abuse on the part of that man who intends to marry me to pay off my father’s debts and get a mother for his orphaned son. A woman who I am sure will only want me to be in the extreme care of her little boy, like a servant, like a nanny. I have not been able to object to this situation. My heart is pounding, knowing that I will not be able to refute anything in the future. I will be his. I will be nothing more than a commodity for Darío the Shady One.

I’m wearing the dress, trying it on to be perfect tomorrow, my mother has had it made. When she handed it to me, I immediately suspected that this wedding was not planned overnight. It wasn’t planned out of the blue. They knew that something like this would happen with me and that they would make that decision long before they consulted me, as they did not have the delicacy to consider my feelings at any time. 

I cannot swear that I am in love with Lucian. But, still, he does not deserve this. After all these years together, I leave him for another man, for one I have not seen. One with whom I have not spoken, with whom I only crossed a glance that sent shivers down my spine and that every time I remembered his eyes fixed on me. I felt as if my spine was run down by a tiny centipede, one that I could not touch and that I felt deep inside me in every vertebra.

That’s what the glimpse of the Shady One felt like that day.

And for many days to come.

That’s why I knew there was no doubt: I would never be happy with that man.

Was there no other contestant for the position of substitute wife?

I am horrified by the cruelty of my thoughts.

But I just don’t feel like myself.

I can no longer think delicately and kindly.

“How long have you known I was going to marry this man?” I question my mother. I see her blink, surprised and scared. “I knew it,” I mumble. “This isn’t a twenty-four-hour thing. You guys already had it figured out!”

“We didn’t want to do it. We gave the whole thing so much thought, but it’s just that he came up to us a few months ago and proposed this... I said no right away. I had no idea your father had entered this world!”

“What world?! I deserve to know, Mom. Because of you, I’m about to marry someone I don’t love.”

“Love is relative that is built over time.”

“Don’t philosophize on me, Mom. Don’t give me that therapy. Two hundred years ago, your words would have convinced any foolish woman with few brain cells. We’re not in that era where people married to favor both families.”

“You are wrong, Tatiana. Those times, as you call it, will never go out of fashion.”

My mother is wearing a gray cotton dress, half-sheer, that reaches below her knees. The sleeves are short but not demonstrative. Josefyn has always dressed in this demure and conservative. The only extrovert is my sister Teresa.

Thinking about her, I worry. I don’t want them to do the same to her.

I express this to my mother, who freaks out.

“Of course not! What do you think we’re doing? That we’re raising you to sell you? To make a profit with you? Can’t you see this is hard for us? Be less oblivious, Tatiana!”

Every word of hers makes me angrier. All I feel like is digging a hole and sticking my head in until it all passes.

“What will I do when he wants to sleep with me? What will I tell him if he wants to have another child?” I inquire so that my mother will finally understand the gravity of this situation I’ve been put in.

However, her response does not reassure me. Quite the contrary, it only defeats me.

“You will be his wife, and you wil l do your duty in every sense of the word wife.”