“Who’s Chico?”
“Uncle Cristóbal’s dog. He doesn’t like Gunesh—I think he’s jealous.”
Rose wondered what Juanita had thought of Gunesh, the interloper, covering her newborn son in slobber.
“Rafaelito’s asleep now,” Nieve said. “Come and see.” She took Rose by the hand and led her toward a blue-painted wooden door in the whitewashed facade of a cave house. Rose could see Juanita, her head bent over a wicker cradle placed on the ground. She was singing to her baby, tucking the blankets in around his tiny body. It was a picture of innocence that sent an arrow of guilt through Rose’s heart.
“Esta es mi amiga—la Tia Rose.” This is my friend—Auntie Rose. Nieve whispered the words over the top of the cradle.
Juanita looked up. Rose was horrified to see that her eyes were red and puffy, as if she’d been crying.
“What’s the matter?” Nieve asked.
“Nothing,” Juanita replied. “The wind is full of dust today, that’s all. Fetch a glass of lemonade for our guest, will you, Nieve?” There was a blanket spread on the ground beside her, and she gestured to Rose to sit down. “Bienvenida.” Welcome.
Gunesh spread himself out between them, and Juanita put out her hand to stroke him. “You have a beautiful dog.”
“And you have a beautiful baby.” Rose’s voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. High pitched and tremulous. She handed over the flowers and the ribbon of silver bells.
“Thank you—you’re very kind.”
Rose felt even more wretched. She reached out to touch the tiny fingers. “How old is he?”
“Almost four weeks. He came early—the day after my husband left for France.” Juanita gave Rose a wry look. “Typical of a man, eh? To disappear when you need him most?”
Rose felt her insides shrivel. She forced her mouth to turn up at the edges. But she didn’t trust herself to say anything in reply. Had Cristóbal confessed to what had happened while he was away? Was that why his wife looked as if she’d been sobbing her heart out? And if he had, did she know that Rose was the one he’d been with?
Juanita reached for something on the other side of the cradle. It was a bunch of garlic heads strung together. Juanita took a knife from her pocket and split one open. The cloves fell into her lap, and she peeled them deftly, exposing the creamy white flesh beneath the papery skin. Lifting the edges of the yellow blanket that covered the baby, she tucked the garlic beneath the mattress so that Rafaelito was encircled by it.
“Why are you doing that?” Rose’s curiosity got the better of her. This time her voice was a little steadier.
Juanita glanced at the sky. “The heat of the sun will bring out the smell,” she said. “It drives away any snakes that might come near.”
Rose nodded. Bill Lee’s sisters had talked about using garlic to keep away vampires. And it reminded her of something her aunt Ruth—a cousin of her mother—had told her when she was a little girl. Aunt Ruth’s brother, who had been a pearl trader, said the pearl fishers of Aden, in the Persian Gulf, strewed garlic in front of their shacks to keep away the great water serpents. Strange, Rose thought, that this Spanish Gypsy mother was using it in the same way.
Nieve appeared with the lemonade. Following in her wake were Juanita’s older children, Juan and Belén. Juan was heartbreakingly like his father. He had the same blue-green eyes. When he smiled Rose had to look away. Belén settled down on the rug next to Gunesh. Rose’s skirt was in the way, and as the child lifted the folds of cotton aside, she remarked on how pretty the fabric was.
It was a relief when Lola came out of the house to join them. There was nothing in the way she greeted Rose that suggested she had found out about Cristóbal’s dalliance.
A few minutes later the baby woke up and let out a lusty wail. Juanita scooped him up and headed toward the house.
“He’s hungry, I expect.” Lola watched Juanita disappear through the door. Turning to the children, she said, “Why don’t you take Gunesh for a walk?”
When they had gone she said, “Poor Juanita’s in a terrible state. We had some awful news this morning. Yesterday a baby girl was taken to be baptized—the daughter of a friend of ours—and she never returned.”
Rose shook her head, mystified. “You mean she died? In the church?”
“No, she didn’t die—she was taken.”
“Taken?” Rose echoed. “By whom?”
“By the authorities, we think. The parents don’t know. They weren’t there. But that’s what people are saying.”
“But . . .” Rose trailed off, trying to make sense of it. “How could the parents not have been there—at their child’s christening?”
Now it was Lola’s turn to look puzzled. “Is that what happens in your country? The mother and father take the baby to church? Well, it’s different here. The parents stay at home. The godparents come and collect the baby and bring it back when the ceremony is over. That’s what’s supposed to happen. But not yesterday. They never brought her back. Juanita says her friends were told they’ll never see their daughter again.”
“Why would the authorities do that?” Rose wondered if the parents had been accused of some crime. She knew from her time with the English Gypsies that they were always afraid of being accused of any bad thing that might happen in a neighborhood—whether they were responsible or not.
“Because she’s a little gitana.” Lola sucked in a breath. “A rojo child.”
“A red? Her father fought in the Civil War?”
“No—he was too young. His elder brother was a partisan, I think. But it’s not that. Not really. It’s about the government taking charge of children they consider to be born into the wrong kind of family. We come into that category. People are saying that General Franco has spies in every city. The church is sending people to call at homes like ours. They pretend to be interested in our religious beliefs, but really they’re nosing around. And the next thing you know, the baby disappears.”
Lola gazed into the distance, her eyes narrowing as she took in the honey-colored ramparts of the Alhambra. “The tourists have no idea. They only see the beauty. But Granada is a wicked, sinister place. It was bad enough during the war—but it’s getting worse. Much worse.”
“Where do they take the babies?” Rose pulled her shawl tight around her. It wasn’t cold. But what Lola had described chilled her to the core. She pictured Juanita, tucking cloves of garlic under the mattress of Rafaelito’s cradle. Clearly there was something much worse than snakes lurking out there.
“They send them to families the government approves of so they’ll grow up as payos, not Gypsies. To save the race. That’s what General Franco says.”
It was horribly familiar. Like Hitler all over again. Rose was only too aware of Franco’s Nazi sympathies. But she had never imagined that the evil doctrine of racial purity would outlive Hitler; that in a time of supposed peace, babies would be snatched from their mothers because of their kawlo rat. Their dark blood.
“It’s not only the babies they’re taking.” Lola turned to Rose, her eyes full of foreboding. “I heard they took nine-year-old twins while we were in France. They said they were too old to be adopted, so they sent the boy to a monastery and the girl to a convent.”
Rose stared back, stunned into silence. So it was not just Rafaelito who was in danger. Juan and Belén could be taken, too. And Nieve. Darling Nieve.
“The sooner we can move away, the better,” Lola said. “No one knows us in Madrid. We’ll get a place far away from the Gypsy quarter. Nieve will go to school while I look for work.”
Rose nodded. No wonder Lola was so keen to swap the taverns of Granada for the film studios of the capital. No wonder she had embraced the idea of learning to read and write with such unbounded enthusiasm. Education was a passport to anonymity, a way of shaking off the tags that marked her out to the authorities.
“What about Cristóbal and Juanita? What will they do?”
Lola shook her he
ad slowly. “Juanita has family in the countryside. She’ll take the children if she has to. But Cristóbal will never leave Granada. It’s in his soul.”
Rose passed through a huge stone gate carved with the same fruit that had hung from the vardos of the Granada Gypsies. The Gate of the Pomegranates was the entrance to the hilltop fortress of the Alhambra. She climbed the winding tree-lined path, seeking refuge from the afternoon heat among the pools and fountains of the Jannat al-ʿArīf—the palace gardens she’d read about.
Granada was beguiling but suffocating. Wandering the streets of the city was like being trapped in an enormous oven. She had arranged to meet Lola and Nieve in the gardens after the siesta, but sleep had eluded her in the stuffy room at the posada. And so she had gone for a walk, hoping to find a shady, secluded bench to doze on.
She made her way slowly up the slope, past man-made streams that ran along either side of the path. It was like walking through a forest on the side of a mountain. Towering cedars, sycamores, and cork oaks formed a canopy with their branches, blocking out the burning rays of the sun. Her old life in London seemed terribly unreal and far away. And soon she would be traveling even farther south—beyond the snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevada to find the village Nathan had described in his letter. The thought of boarding the bus the day after tomorrow stirred up a feverish sense of anticipation—a mixture of excitement and foreboding.
At the top of the hill, the trees gave way to a carpet of orange, blue, and yellow. Irises, marigolds, and roses were framed in low-trimmed hedges of box and myrtle. Passing through another great gate, she made her way through the old walled city created by the Moorish rulers over a thousand years ago.
Every few yards there were glimpses of the outside world between gaps in the architecture. She saw swifts performing astonishing aerobatics, diving and wheeling across the river valley. And in the distance, the cave houses of Sacromonte, with people the size of ants climbing up the road from the Albaicin.
She walked on, through horseshoe arches decorated with blue-and-white mosaic tiles, past stone walls honeycombed with arabesque carvings, along cobbled paths studded with black and white pebbles in intricate geometric designs. Then she went up a flight of stairs whose handrails were channels of running water. It took her into an avenue of fruit trees growing against terracotta walls—their boughs heavy with ripening peaches and apricots.
A profusion of scent filled her nostrils as she entered the first of a series of gardens. Rambling roses, honeysuckle, and oleander climbed up pillars and pergolas. Lavender, rosemary, candytuft, and agapanthus filled ornamental beds and terracotta pots. And between the beds was an abundance of other trees and bushes: oranges, plums, medlars, and magnolia.
Pools of water, long and narrow, formed the shape of a cross at the center of the garden. At the far end a fountain sent shimmering beads arcing through the air. Rose found a bench beneath a cascade of pale-blue wisteria. Hewn from rock, it looked hard and uncomfortable—but the sun had warmed it. She sat back and closed her eyes, breathing in the fragrance of the flowers, hearing nothing but the birds and the gentle splash of the fountain.
The guidebook said Jannat al-ʿArīf was an old Arabic phrase. Scholars argued as to the meaning. It could be translated as “Orchard of the Architect” or “the Gardens of Knowing.” It seemed impossible that such a haven of tranquility could have continued to exist through the horrors of what had gone on in the city below just a handful of years ago. And that it would continue to exist, like some parallel universe, while people like Lola and Juanita and Cristóbal lived in fear of what the monster who now ruled Spain might do next.
The Gardens of Knowing.
The words seemed to mock Rose’s naïveté. She had allowed herself to believe that she could live the Gypsy life. That she could throw off convention and be free, passionate, alive. But in falling for Cristóbal, she had succumbed to nothing more than a romanticized image. He behaved as if he were free—but he was not free in any real sense of the word.
As she opened her eyes, she saw a swift swoop over one of the pools for a sip of water, skimming the surface so fast it barely caused a ripple, the droplets sliding away as if the feathers were coated in wax. As she watched the bird soar into the sky, it occurred to her that what had happened in France had released something inside her. The impermeable membrane spun around her heart by grief for the loss of her family had been breached. What Cristóbal had done felt like a wound, and it had hurt her—still hurt her—but somehow this new pain had freed her. It had forced her out of the cocoon of numbness. Now she knew she could be something more than she was when she left England. A different person. A better person.
She wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed when she got up to leave the garden. She wandered into the harem courtyard—the place where the many wives of the Moorish rulers had lived, only able to glimpse the outside world through the fretwork of stone that enclosed the section of the palace they occupied. Rose wondered what that would have been like. It must have felt like living in a gilded cage. They would have been able to see the river, the streets and houses along its banks, and the distant snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevada. But they could never set foot outside the palace walls.
The confined world of women at the Alhambra was echoed in the name of the place she entered next. The Tower of the Captive was stunningly beautiful inside. Intricate mosaics of cobalt blue, emerald, and magenta covered the walls. Rose wondered who had been imprisoned here. The guidebook didn’t say. A group of tourists was clicking away with cameras. When they left she was all alone in the cavernous space. The silence was unnerving.
It was a relief to get back into the sunlight. She found herself in another courtyard, walking through a forest of elegant pillars with overhanging wooden eaves, delicately carved, like fringes of lace hanging from the sky. At the center of the courtyard was a fountain of twelve stone lions standing in a circle and facing outward, supporting the bowl of the fountain on their backs. The guidebook said that to the Moors, water was a symbol of hospitality. An inscription carved into the walls said “Whoever should come to me thirsty, I shall lead him to a place where he will find clean, fresh water of the sweetest purity.” It might have been a quote from the New Testament.
She glanced again at the book in her hand. Apparently, this part of the Alhambra had been built during a period of tolerance and an exchange of cultural ideas between Christians and Muslims. Rose blew out a breath. That was six hundred years ago. Why couldn’t people be more tolerant now? Had human beings learned nothing in more than half a millennium?
“I thought I might find you here.”
The voice made her jump. It was Cristóbal, so close behind her that when she whipped around, her hair brushed his face.
“I went to the posada, but they said you’d gone for a walk.”
“How did you know I’d come here?” Her heart was thudding treacherously against her ribs. Why did he still have this effect on her?
“The landlady said you’d borrowed the guidebook. And Nieve told me she was meeting you up here later for a picnic. I’ll be there, too, of course. It would look odd if I wasn’t, with the performance being here tonight. So I thought I’d better get you alone while I had the chance.”
“There’s nothing else to say, is there?” She made herself look right into the blue-green blaze of his eyes, willing herself not to weaken.
“Isn’t there?”
“Please don’t say you’ve told Juanita.” The thought of her bending over the baby, her face swollen with tears, piled on fresh agony.
Cristóbal shook his head. “I’m not that stupid. I came to say sorry. To make things right.”
“It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?”
His face clouded. “You . . . you’re not . . . ?”
“No, Cristóbal, I’m not. No thanks to you. What if I had been? What then?”
“You would have managed, I’m sure.” He shrugged. “You came all that way to France on your
own. You don’t need people, really, do you?”
She glared back at him, floored by his casual disregard, this knack he had of always turning the spotlight away from his own shortcomings.
“What were you expecting?” he went on. “Did you think we had any kind of future, you and me? A woman with a university degree and a Gypsy who can’t even read music, let alone books?”
“The only thing I was expecting was the truth,” she hissed. “If you’d been honest with me at the start, it would never have happened.”
“Are you telling me you didn’t enjoy it?” His eyes narrowed. “Do you know how long I was in prison? Four miserable, stinking years—four years of my life that I’ll never get back. Do you have any idea what that does to a man? It changes you forever, Rose—makes you grab whatever you can, whenever you can.”
Her lips parted, ready to launch a biting rebuke. But the words stuck in her throat. What he had said was a garbled echo of the very sentiment Nathan had expressed in his last letter.
We might not have a lifetime to live together, might not have what people are always supposed to have. Living as I do now, I must concentrate it all into the short time that I can have it.
The memory of Nathan’s words made her understand Cristóbal a little bit better—but she still wanted nothing to do with his lies.
“You’re right,” she said coolly. “I have no idea what you went through in prison. I thought I knew you—but I didn’t. I won’t make that mistake again.” Without a backward glance, she swept out of the courtyard, past the unseeing eyes of the stone lions. She didn’t stop until she reached the wisteria bower in the Jannat al-ʿArīf. She curled herself up on the bench, hiding like a child behind the fronds of blossom.
Chapter 15
Lola stood barefoot on a patch of grass in front of the harem courtyard. She raised her arms above her head, and Rose, who was facing her, mirrored her posture.
“You have to make flowers with your hands. Show her, Nieve.”
The Snow Gypsy Page 13
