Charles and Augustine were landowners, as had been their parents, their grandparents and their great-grandparents before them. They grew beets: red beetroot that stained the hands and clothes, and sugar beets, the crop that was the pride of France. Augustine had been married off to Charles, ten years her senior, when she was just sixteen. In those days, marriages were not made for love but for money and family alliances. After all, what could make more sense than to unite two of the biggest beet farms in the region? Charles was a handsome fellow, known around the countryside for his many conquests. She was the best behaved of her three sisters; the youngest and the hardest-working. She was the first to be married off, which was unusual since she had older sisters. She hadn’t had a say in the matter and had married Charles without a thought.
They’d now been married for sixty years and had celebrated their diamond anniversary the previous week. The whole village had come out to congratulate “Mr and Mrs Beetroot”, as they were known. It was a wonderful party, even though their two sons had not been able to attend, as they were very busy down in Paris. Such was to be expected: they had their own families, their work, their own preoccupations. But Augustine sometimes felt lonely up there in Picardy, and she asked Charles to travel to the capital and leave the beets in the hands of their young employees. “They’ll be fine without us! What use are we at our age?” Charles wasn’t a fan of big cities. He preferred to stay on the farm, where he felt at ease. The grandchildren should come to them, where they’d have room to run around and play in the fields; it would do them good to learn how to harvest beets. Augustine did not always agree with her husband, but she acquiesced to him as she had always done. After all these years, there was hardly much sense deciding to rebel now.
A diamond anniversary was a fine thing. Augustine had barely noticed their life go by. She’d raised their children and grown beets, and what else was there to add? Still, something extraordinary had happened to her, once. At their anniversary dinner, she’d told the story of how she’d fallen madly in love with her husband. One fine day she suddenly realised it, and just like that her heart had pounded and filled with joy. On that day, as she well remembered, Charles was sitting down to dinner and talking to her about pesticides and account management, and she was barely listening. In the warm glow of the porcelain light, leaning over the wooden table, he was handsome. More handsome than usual, his white hair sparkling, his expression deep, his beard perfectly trimmed. He was beautiful like an old sage, like the great writers and philosophers she’d once admired when she took the time to read. He was handsome like Victor Hugo, her husband Charles. So she leaned into him, gently, as she’d never done before, and she whispered to him, for the first time: “I love you.”
Alan Alfredo Geday