For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude’s first draft had some ai-isms that annoyed me, so I asked for a redraft. I couldn’t get it to shorten its sentences much, but decided it worked with the Romance-language background that most of the characters come from. Its long rambling sentences seemed particularly apropos, in this scene set along the Mississippi.

Ride Along the River

The morning Alejandro Villarreal arrived at the cottage with three horses and an invitation to ride along the levee, Marianne was dressed and ready before Éléonore had finished reading the note he sent ahead.

This was, in itself, information.

Éléonore watched her sister settle her hat and smooth her gloves with the focused attention of someone who is pretending not to be focused at all, and said nothing beyond the practical. Their mother had raised an eyebrow at the invitation and then looked at Éléonore with the expression that meant she was delegating a judgment she had already formed. Éléonore had accepted the delegation with a small nod, and gone to find her own hat, and that was that.

Alejandro was waiting at the gate with his own horse and two others, a bay and a grey, both well-mannered and clearly well-kept. He handed the reins to the sisters with the ease of a man who has spent his life around horses and assumes others have done the same. The assumption was not wrong. Marianne mounted without assistance, which seemed to please him, and they set off toward the levee through the morning streets of the Faubourg, the horses’ hooves loud on the banquette stones.

The levee in the late morning was one of the finer things New Orleans had to offer, which was saying something in a city that took its pleasures seriously. The great curve of the river lay below them as they rode, brown and vast and moving with the unhurried authority of something that has been going about its business since before there were people to observe it. The far bank was green and low in the distance, and the smell of the water was everywhere, that green and mineral river smell that Éléonore had come to associate with the city itself. Above it rose the sharper scent of the horses and the crushed grass of the levee path beneath their hooves. Flatboats and keelboats moved on the current below, and further out the white sails of larger vessels, and the whole of it had a grandeur that made the concerns of three people on horseback feel, briefly, appropriately small.

Alejandro rode with the easy confidence of a man who has been on horseback since childhood and has never had cause to think twice about it. He kept his horse alongside Marianne’s with an attentiveness that managed to be both courteous and something more than courteous. It was the attentiveness of someone who wants to be near a person and is not troubled by the fact that this is evident.

Marianne was talking. This, too, was information, though of a different kind. She was talking with the unguarded animation she reserved for things that genuinely interested her, describing a passage from a novel she had been reading, gesturing with one hand in the way she did when she was making a point she considered important. Her horse moved placidly beneath her, indifferent to the literary argument being conducted above. She was, Éléonore thought, entirely herself. This was both the best thing about Marianne and, in the present circumstances, the thing that worried her most.

Alejandro listened with what appeared to be genuine interest, interjecting at the right moments, pushing back when he disagreed in the way that invited further argument rather than closing it down. He was very good at this, at making the person he was with feel that their mind was the most interesting landscape in the vicinity, considerably more interesting than the Mississippi River spread out below them or the wide Louisiana sky above.

They rode in this fashion for perhaps half an hour before something changed.

It was not a dramatic change. Alejandro did not become cold, or rude, or inattentive. He remained everything he had been. But there was a quality of presence that had been in him at the outset and was no longer quite there. It expressed itself in the fractional increase of distance he kept between his horse and Marianne’s, in the way his responses became a degree more considered and a degree less spontaneous, in the way his eyes, when Éléonore caught them, held something that was working through a private calculation.

Marianne did not appear to notice. Or she noticed and was not yet willing to acknowledge what she noticed. Éléonore, who had her own experience of the discipline of not acknowledging things, could not be certain which it was.

“You have been to Havana,” Marianne was saying. “Éléonore and I have talked of it. It seems to me that the culture there must be, in some ways, more free than here. More honest about what it is.”

“In some ways,” Alejandro said. “In others, considerably less so. Every city has its arrangements and its hypocrisies. Havana simply has different ones.”

“That is a rather weary way of looking at it.”

“Perhaps.” A pause, brief but perceptible. “Or perhaps it is simply an honest one.”

“You sound like a man who has been disappointed by something,” Marianne said, with the directness she could not help and would not have suppressed if she could. “In Havana, or here, or somewhere.”

Alejandro looked at her for a moment. Something moved in his expression that Éléonore could not quite read from her position a few yards behind them. “I sound,” he said at last, carefully, “like a man who is aware that some things which appear straightforward are, on closer examination, considerably more complicated.”

It was said gently. It was also said with intention, and the intention was not entirely kind. There was something in it that was preparing the ground for something else, some future statement or withdrawal. The care with which it was worded told her it was not spontaneous.

Marianne heard the gentleness and not, yet, the intention beneath it. “Most worthwhile things are complicated,” she said. “That is not an argument against them.”

“No,” Alejandro agreed. “It is not.”

He said nothing further, and the conversation moved to other things, and they rode on along the levee with the river below them and the sky above. Marianne talked and Alejandro listened and responded, and it was all perfectly pleasant and entirely correct. Éléonore watched the small careful distance he was maintaining between his horse and her sister’s and felt the shape of what was coming with a clarity that was no comfort at all.

They turned back toward the city as the noon heat began to build. Alejandro was describing a property his family owned east of the city. The description was detailed and affectionate and entirely impersonal in its implications, the account of a man speaking about his family’s holdings as fixed and settled and not subject to any kind of disruption or renegotiation. Marianne was listening with an expression that was still open, still interested, but with something beginning to form beneath it. Some question she had not yet quite allowed herself to ask.

When they reached the cottage gate and Alejandro had helped them both dismount with perfect courtesy and taken his leave with every appearance of warm regard, Marianne stood in the courtyard for a moment without speaking. Her hand rested on the warm iron of the gate.

“He spoke of family obligations,” she said, at last, to the middle distance. “Twice. He was very careful about how he said it.”

“Yes,” Éléonore said. “He was.”

Marianne turned and looked at her sister with the expression she wore when she was deciding whether to pursue a thing or set it down. It was a brief, fierce internal argument that was usually settled within a few seconds in favor of pursuit. This time it went on longer than usual.

“It means nothing,” she said finally. “All families have obligations. It does not mean anything in itself.”

“No,” Éléonore said, because this was technically true, and because there are moments when the most honest thing one can offer is the truth in its most limited form, and leave the rest to time.

Marianne nodded, once, as though this settled the matter, and went inside. Éléonore stood in the courtyard a moment longer, listening to the distant sound of the river that was always there beneath the sounds of the city if one knew how to hear it, vast and brown and moving with the unhurried authority of something that has been going about its business for a very long time, indifferent to the small human arrangements playing out on its banks.

She went inside too, and said nothing more about it, and waited for what she already knew was coming.