The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

  “Is it very far from here?”

  Inder Singh shakes his head, in a gesture that is very typical of his countrymen, which confuses foreigners because it is not always the equivalent of a negative.

  “About two thousand kilometers.”

  Anita is left speechless. The Indian goes on, “India is very big, Memsahib. But don’t worry about a thing. The train for Jalandhar leaves the day after tomorrow at six o’clock. From Jalandhar to Kapurthala it’ll only be two hours by car. You have a suite reserved in the Taj Mahal Hotel, close to here …”

  The Victorian-style hotel was designed by a French architect who ended up committing suicide because he did not like the result. But even so it is grandiose.

  With verandas and huge corridors so that the air can always circulate, a stairway lit by the weak light entering through the stained-glass windows, Gothic ceilings, the finest wood on the walls, four brand-new “electric lifts,” a permanent orchestra, and shops full of multicolored silks, the hotel is a world apart within the city, the only public place open to Europeans and Indians of all castes. The other luxury hotels are for “whites” only.

  The first thing Anita does when she goes into the Imperial Suite is to open the windows to let the warm breeze from the Arabian Sea bring in the smells and sounds from the promenade. Down below is the Aurore. The heat is leaden.

  Although what she would really like to do is lie on her bed and cry, she does not want to make a fuss in front of her companions. They will say she is a silly little girl, and how can she expect the raja in person to travel two thousand kilometers to meet her, and of course, they are right, she thinks, but even so she feels disappointed. So the best thing will be to go out and discover her new country.

  Let’s see if at the same time I can get rid of this dizziness that makes me stumble as if I’d been drinking! She has spent weeks dreaming of that moment: “Come on, I want to see it all and explore everything …” she tells Mme Dijon. Then she turns to her maid. “Lola, it’ll be best if you stay here, in case the smell makes you sick, like in Alexandria.”

  3

  In the street it smells of rotten fruit, of mud and incense from the little altars. Cows wander around freely and no one seems to be surprised, except Anita, who cannot understand why they do not use them to pull the rickshaws, little carts with two wheels that carry passengers, instead of allowing it to be done by skeletal men who look more dead than alive. “We would willingly eat them,” says the driver of the horse-drawn carriage, a Moslem named Firoz who wears a little beard and a kurta so dirty that it is impossible to even guess at its original color. “… But for Hindus, the life of a cow is worth more than that of a man, so … who’s going to eat them!” The carriage crosses paths with shiny new double-decker trams; they have just been put into service, and they drive around the streets in the city center between wide esplanades of lawn and magnificent buildings, all of the same Victorian, neo-Gothic style. “These trams are better than the ones in Liverpool,” Firoz states, proud of his city. When they arrive at Crawford Market, Anita is amazed at the profusion of merchandise: it is a real Oriental bazaar. “This is where the English and Parsis come to shop,” explains the Moslem. “They are the ones who have the most money.” They sell everything, from poodles to Turkish tobacco or fruits they do not even recognize. The shopkeepers offer the two women some to try, from the top of pyramids of fruit and vegetables. The bas-reliefs that decorate the metallic structure and the interior fountain are the work of an artist called Lockwood Kipling, whose son, Rudyard, has just been honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature barely two months earlier.

  Anita spends her time exploring all the bazaars that come after Crawford Market, full of shops and stalls that sell cereals and sugar from Bengal, sweets from Kashmir, tobacco from Patna, or cheeses from Nepal; in the cloth bazaar she wants to touch all the different kinds of silks in India; in the thieves’ market she cannot keep her eyes off the jewels and other more curious objects. In two square kilometers there are a dozen big bazaars, more than a hundred temples and sanctuaries, and more merchandise on sale than Anita and Mme Dijon have ever seen in their whole lives.

  Away from the colonial center, with its opulent buildings and wide avenues, there is a labyrinth of alleys, an ants’ nest of people, a hodgepodge of races and religions, an explosion of life and chaos such as only the great metropolises of Asia can generate. Anita and Mme Dijon have to stop from time to time to wipe away the sweat and take a deep breath. “What a noisy city, full of all kinds of Indians dressed, or half-dressed, in strange ways or almost barefoot!” Anita would write in her diary.1 It seems to her that they are all talking in different languages at the same time. In a small fishing port, the koli are auctioning the morning’s catch. The shouts, the smell, and the atmosphere remind Anita of the fish market in the district of Málaga where she spent her childhood, a poor quarter known as El Perchel, because of the hooks where the fish was hung to dry. And the children with legs as skinny as toothpicks and eyes blackened with kohl look like the poor children of Andalusia, who also ran about naked in the slum districts. But here they are poorer. There are children so sick that they look like old men and others with their bellies swollen with worms; there are also beggars with terrible mutilations, which the skillful Firoz ensures are pushed away. “Here the poor are really poor,” says Anita, turning her eyes away from a leper covered in sores, who comes up to her holding out a bowl. She cannot hold back a grimace of disgust when she realizes that instead of hair, as she thought, the beggar’s head is covered in flies.

  Too rich, too poor: the contrasts in Bombay bewilder the girl from Málaga, but even so she wants to see it all, as though on her first day she wants to see and understand the complexity of her new country. Firoz takes them to the other side of the bay, and the carriage goes along a street that snakes up a hill. The horses pant as they go up. At the top there are five towers from where you can see the whole city. The view is magnificent, although the place looks as if it belongs in another world. The silence is constantly broken by the flapping of the vultures’ wings and the cawing of thousands of crows. These are the Towers of Silence, where the Parsis celebrate their funeral rites. Founded by a follower of Zarathustra, a priest from the east of Persia who composed hymns that re-created his conversations with God, the Parsi religion is one of humanity’s oldest. When they were expelled from Persia by the Moslems, the Parsis ended up in India. The English granted them a hill in Bombay so they could dispose of their dead. They do not bury or burn them; they place them naked on marble slabs on those five towers. The vultures and crows pounce on the corpses and devour them in seconds, so that death goes back to life. The only ones that have the right to handle the bodies are the “conductors of the dead.” Dressed in a simple cloth round their waists and carrying a stick, they throw the bones and any remains that have not been eaten into the sea. This is a place that attracts foreigners for its spectacular views and perhaps also out of a kind of morbid curiosity. But Anita cannot bear the spectacle. The air laden with smells, the heat, her nausea, and the sight of the predatory birds and some men who seem already to be in another world, are making her feel bad. “Get me out of here, please!” she begs Mme Dijon.

  On the way back, going round the bay, the funeral pyres that light up the dusk impress Anita almost as much as the Towers of Silence. She is not used to death being so close. For the young girl from Málaga, the day has held too many strong emotions. Dizzy from the colors, smells, and sounds, she feels faint. What she has seen is not a city, or even a country, but a whole world. A world too strange and too mysterious for an Andalusian girl who has hardly come out of adolescence. A world that makes her feel afraid. Suddenly she feels like sobbing, like emptying her body of tears, but she restrains herself. She has a great sense of honor; she is brave and she makes an effort to overcome her feelings. How far away Spain is! she says to herself, sighing.

  Later, as she goes down to t
he Sea Lounge, the hotel restaurant, stunningly beautiful in her evening gown, as etiquette requires, Anita Delgado stumbles. Perhaps it is because of the heat that the ventilators cannot dissipate or perhaps owing to the familiar melody played by the orchestra that reminds her so much of her previous life. This time, the effort she makes to regain control of herself does no good. She takes a few hesitant steps and ends up collapsing on the thick Persian carpet, causing a little stir among her companions, the other diners and waiters, who crowd around the young woman of pristine beauty, not knowing exactly what to do to make her come to.

  1 Excerpts of the sentences from her diary are from the book Anita Delgado (Planeta, 1997) by Elisa Vázquez de Gey.

  4

  Doctor Willoughby slowly runs his fingers through his thick graying sideburns and his mustache with its waxed tips. Settled in Bombay since he retired from the army, he is the doctor of the hotel clients. Generally his visits have to do with dysentery, colics, and abnormal diarrhea, which the newly arrived white people catch with amazing ease. And sometimes with a suicide, or injuries caused by a beating from some drunken, jealous lover. He has rarely attended any woman in the hotel with the diagnosis of Ana Delgado Briones.

  “It isn’t the heat, or nerves, or your supposed tiredness from the voyage that have worn you out, Miss …”

  Anita looks at him from the bed, where, recovered now, she lies in a satin dressing gown with her hair in a mess. Lola and Mme Dijon are standing next to her.

  “You are pregnant,” says Dr. Willoughby.

  Anita opens her eyes wide, half amazed, half unbelieving. The other two women exchange glances of surprise and look at Anita, wondering whether to express reproach or compassion.

  “Didn’t you know?” the doctor asks her, looking at her out of the corner of his eye, skeptically.

  “No. I swear by all I hold holy, I didn’t know.”

  “But didn’t you notice you missed your periods?”

  Anita shrugs. “Yes, but I thought it was due to nerves from the voyage. Besides, I haven’t missed many, only two … Are you sure about what you’re telling me, Doctor?”

  The doctor puts his stethoscope and gloves away in his case.

  “I hope to be able to confirm it for you tomorrow with the results of the tests,” he tells her before leaving the suite.

  Now Anita understands the constant seasickness, the inexplicable attacks of nausea that did not leave her even on the calmest days of the journey. She had not wanted to realize she was pregnant. It is likely that deep down she knew, but she preferred not to know. She had enough with what was ahead of her—the voyage, the wedding in India, a new life—without adding more fuel to the fire. Now she does not think about that night in Paris, when she made love for the first time with the raja. She does not remember her embarrassment or the fears she felt as he slowly undressed her; she does not remember the expert caresses, the exciting kisses, the words whispered in her ear, the pain and pleasure of love. Now she only feels she has betrayed the person she loves the most, her father. If Don Angel only knew his daughter was pregnant before the wedding in Paris, he, who had been so determined to preserve the honor of the Delgado family … !

  “If there’s no wedding, there’s no Anita,” her father had stated baldly to Captain Inder Singh, in the course of another flying visit to the little flat in Arco de Santa Maria Street, so that the man could transmit the message clearly and plainly to the raja. He had said it to please his wife, Doña Candelaria, but deep down he was convinced that this love story was nothing more than the whim of an Oriental despot and that it would never come to anything. Who in his sane mind could have thought it would all end up as it had? Don Angel Delgado de los Cobos, who honored his surname with his extreme thinness, did not believe in miracles, or in Cinderella. Bald, with a lean face and thick glasses with black frames, he had struggled all his life against an invisible enemy that always seemed to be winning: poverty. He had inherited substantial debts from his forbears and a small café called La Castaña in Siglo Square in Málaga. For a time he made money with the room at the back, which served as a small casino where the locals gambled their money playing cards. That allowed the Delgados to get to the end of the month with no luxuries but also with no great deprivation. The business yielded enough for them to send Anita to elocution classes to correct a small speech defect. Don Angel worked night and day; he wanted to make the little café into a more lucrative business, even if only to provide his daughters with a better education. What they received at the Esclavas school, where the nuns were more apt to teach them to embroider than to read or write, left much to be desired. Neither of his daughters read fluently and they could hardly write. In short, their life was hard but honorable, until bad luck struck Andalusia.

  First it was four consecutive droughts, which ruined the agriculture of the region. Then, in 1904, a plague of phylloxera gave the coup de grâce to the vineyards. This was followed by a dreadful epidemic of influenza, and, to crown it all, a huge flood devastated fields and homes. When the region was declared a disaster area, the young king, Alfonso XIII, was forced to visit Málaga in a gesture of solidarity. Because she was so pretty Anita was chosen from among the girls in the school to give him a bouquet of flowers when he arrived at the port. She was dressed in her Sunday best, with her plaits done very carefully. It was her first meeting with a king, and who could have told her then that her destiny would be intimately linked to that of this nice monarch who was famed for wanting to have a good time and who sent her a gift a few days later, a beautiful fan made of mother-of-pearl that Anita kept like a relic for the rest of her life.

  If the king’s visit brought a little consolation to the long-suffering inhabitants of Málaga, it did not stop them from being ruined. A few days later the gas company cut off the public supply because of the substantial debts owed them by the town hall. The electric trams, which had just substituted those pulled by animals, stopped giving public service owing to the power cuts. They had one mayor after another with a speed only comparable to the changeover of governments in the country. A faithful reflection of the state of the city and the country, the economic situation of the Delgado family deteriorated until it was untenable. The “casino” at the back of the café was deserted. No one had any money to gamble with and much less to drink away. So Don Angel had to sell the La Castaña café for fourteen thousand reales and move to Madrid with his wife and daughters.

  Lying on the bed in the hotel in Bombay, engrossed in the slow movement of the arms of the ventilator hanging from the ceiling, Anita remembers the early days in Madrid, the cold in the little flat in Arco de Santa Maria Street, near the Puerta del Sol, the sadness at seeing her father looking for work all the time and not finding any, the Spanish dancing classes that a friend of a neighbor’s got free for them at Maestro Angel Pericet’s academy, in Espiritu Santo Street, and that were their only activity. They went to rehearse heel-tapping and castanets every day, and they did so without their father knowing, because they knew the good man would not like to see his daughters in the world of dancing and the theater. He was still dreaming of one day earning enough to pay for serious studies for them. But the path to poverty seemed unavoidable, like a curse from above that was impossible to escape.

  “My daughters will never go on the stage!” he had shouted when he found out that some people who worked for the Central Kursaal, a new concert café about to be inaugurated, had visited the dancing school and had offered the girls a contract to work as curtain raisers. All the fury of the Spanish nobleman had come out in Don Angel. However, two days later, and following the wise, practical advice of his wife, Candelaria, who had to remind him that the fourteen thousand reales were about to vanish into thin air, he finally unwillingly signed the contract for his daughters “for a single show per night, and before midnight!” With the thirty reales a day from the contract, Anita and Victoria became the main support for the family. No one c
ould have imagined then that they would remain so for the rest of their lives.

  How would Don Angel react to the news of her pregnancy? Now that she was married, he would probably say nothing. But if he found out the pregnancy was the result of premarital relations …; she preferred not to imagine. The idea of making her father suffer seemed hateful to her. The man was very strict where his principles were concerned, and that had to be respected. However, she would have liked to be able to tell her mother. Doña Candelaria, a round, talkative, lively woman, with her feet firmly on the ground, would have screamed blue murder, but only for the sake of appearances. Then she would have backed her up. Doña Candelaria knew how to deal with things. She was a practical, obliging woman, tired of struggling against poverty.

  5

  The moon standing out against the starry tropical skies sheds its pale whiteness on the pictures, furniture, curtains, and sheets of the Imperial Suite through the cracks in the blinds. Anita cannot get to sleep. In her head the memories crowd in, as well as questions that are difficult to answer and images of the streets of Bombay, such as that of the mother of a newborn baby, frustrated because nothing was coming out of her dry breast, as withered as a fig. If the doctor confirms it and his calculations are correct, Anita will give birth in six months. She had never thought before about the idea of giving birth, but now it is looming ahead, and she is aware that it is going to take place in India, far away from her loved ones, from her mother, and above all from her sister; she falls prey to panic. Her heart starts beating faster and it takes her a while to calm down, and so it happens several times, like the waves of the sea during the voyage. She is still almost a child. And although she is sure of the raja’s feelings, in the depths of her heart there is always doubt lurking. What if he’s just used me? What if he leaves me to my fate? What if he doesn’t really love me anymore? What if he won’t ever let me leave India again? What if … ? What if … ? What she is really sure about is the unconditional love of her father, and yet she has betrayed him. That is why she cannot sleep.