The Chain

She was one of those appealing and charismatic girls born, as if by a mistake of destiny, into a kinship of clerks. She had no gift, no prospects, no means of becoming recognized, tacit, loved or much less wedded by a man of prosperity and merit; and so, she let herself be wed to a unimportant bureaucrat at the Ministry of Education. She donned herself quite plainly since she had never been able to afford anything better, but she was as displeased as if she had once been so called well-to-do. Females do not belong to a status or grade; their attractiveness, beauty, and usual fascination take over the place of birth and family. Usual grace, inherent classiness and a rapid wittiness decide their place in the social order of things and make the daughters of commoners the equals of the most upheld ladies. She suffered unendingly, sensing that she was eligible to all the elegances and extravagances of life. She suffered because of the destitution of her living quarters as she glanced at the filthy walls, the fraying chairs, and the hideous shades. All these things that another woman of her sort would not even have perceived, tortured her, and made her feel horribly indignant. The spectacle of the little Allard girl who performed her housecleaning sealed her whole self with awful doubts and desperate dreams. She fantasized of still anterooms draped with Asian wall-hangings, ignited from above by blowtorches in figurine pouches, while two giant footmen in knee-length haunches catnapped in massive wingchairs, heavy-eyed from the cooker’s stifling heat. She daydreamed of massive living rooms supplied in erratic aged satins, sophisticated tables weighed down with irreplaceable decorations, and alluring smaller rooms, scented, made for afternoon conversations with near and dear friends - prominent, attractive men, who all women covet and yearn for. When she found her place at the round table for dinner, covered with a three-day-old cloth opposite her spouse who, lifting the lid off the broth, exclaimed loudly, "Ah! Beef! Whatever could be better," she fantasized of satisfactory suppers, of brilliantly gleaming silverware, of all-ornaments which filled the walls with outlines from another time (different from her own) and astonishing fowl in fanatical timberlands; she fantasized of mouthwatering dishes given out on magnificent tableware, of murmured courtesies listened to with an enigmatic smile as one ate the pink flesh some recently caught, brazen, and boiled fish or the wings of aviation of a quail. And yet, even with these fascinating dreams, she was never endlessly chained to the unmistakable trial of reality.