In the early ’90s, one of my college students recounted his time living in Buenos Aires, where his father was posted for business. Every weekend, the family would wander through the local bazaar—a sweaty sprawl of hawkers, fortune tellers, and the pungent scent of grilled meats. But amidst the chaos strutted an apparition so grotesque she seemed plucked from a Dickens novel and dipped in perfume: an elderly slumlord in a full-length mink coat, parading her status like a war medal in 100-degree heat.
Her face was pinched into a permanent scowl, her thick lipstick applied like a dare, and her aura radiated pure disdain. She was, by all accounts, a miserly tyrant in pearls, known for gouging her tenants while she tottered through the market wrapped in dead animal fur, visibly wilting but too vain to admit defeat. It wasn’t just the cruelty or the heatstroke-defying couture that made her infamous—it was the sheer, pathological obliviousness.
She believed she was admired. She thought people stared in awe of her opulence. In reality, they watched in disbelief, hoping—perhaps unfairly—for a dramatic collapse on the cobblestones, a heat-induced pratfall to crown her legacy of greed.
Her story has no redemptive arc, no second-act revelation. She didn’t sell her coats or donate to charity or die in a puddle of repentance. Most likely, she keeled over in that same mink—roasted like a Christmas goose—and was buried without eulogy. No one attended her funeral, and certainly not her wedding, which I assume never occurred unless it was to money itself. Her legacy? Not fortune, not family. Just a place in folklore next to King Midas, Leona Helmsley, and every other tragic figure who mistook fear for respect.
Cinemorphosis 
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