Member-only story
Rosa’s Colors 5
Paris, 1977
“Rosa. Fleur. Call yourself whatever you want, Little One. You will always be my Little One,” sighed Don Diego as he stroked the satin-smooth almond-hued thigh of his mistress and secretary.
Rosa Guardia-Garcia had taken the opportunity when filing her passport application to rename herself Fleur La Guardia. She thought it sounded more sophisticated, more like the person she planned to become. It also subsidized the dividing line between her present and her past, adding to the oceans that would soon separate her from the impoverished village of her childhood.
France!
Rosa/Fleur was initially flabbergasted by the sky of Paris, so different from the blue one in Costa Rica. This sky was constantly moving, always changing color, varying shades of grey from whitish grey to pinkish grey to an almost midnight blue grey. And this city was enormous, as overpowering to one accustomed to San Jose, as San Jose had been to one accustomed to the little village outside Puntarenas.
In Paris, Ambassador Menendez and his wife lived, she knew, in an airy three-bedroom apartment in the seventeenth arrondissement on rue des Renaudes near place des Ternes. Don Diego had found Fleur a minute efficiency two blocks from his offices at avenue Emile Zola in the fifteenth.
