If Teresa was aware that she was being watched by one of her best customers, she didn’t show it. ‘If you don’t let these workers join the strike, the men will come and smash your windows,’ she warned senyor Montella and the foreman.
Senyor Montella moved onto the factory floor, guiding his wife behind him. ‘Quickly, Rosita,’ he said, nodding towards the waiting carriage. ‘Take Xavier and go straight home. It is not a day to be out visiting.’
‘But la senyora de Sagarra is expecting us,’ his wife protested. ‘And she’s been so sick.’
‘She has her nurse and her maids. She will understand,’ senyor Montella assured her.
His wife took her son’s hand and slid past us like a person trying to avoid a herd of predators. The boy, Xavier, wasn’t afraid, however. He didn’t take his eyes off me, as if he were puzzled by something. What fascinated him so?
‘I don’t know what you are hoping to achieve,’ senyor Montella said to the women of Damas Rojas once his wife’s carriage had departed. ‘Without the iron mines in Spanish Morocco, our economy will collapse. There won’t be jobs for anyone. Then what will you do?’
‘If that is true,’ said Juana, facing him squarely, ‘then why aren’t the twenty-year-old rich boys going to war instead of poor young fathers and husbands?’
Senyor Montella lifted his chin. ‘That,’ he said, tugging at his shirt cuffs, ‘is simply the workings of the economic system in which we live. Those who can pay reap the benefits.’
The women of Damas Rojas scoffed and catcalled at such outrageous arrogance.
‘You see,’ said Teresa, turning to her supporters. ‘These are the words of a devout Catholic!’
One of the older machinists who had been listening rose from her seat. The movement was so regal, so calm and dignified, that everyone in the room fell quiet. All eyes were on the grey-haired woman, who said nothing as she packed away her fabric and wrapped her shawl over her shoulders. She then walked slowly across the factory floor to join the women of Damas Rojas. The rest of the workers followed her. It was only when the factory was cleared that the woman lifted her eyes to her employer.
‘If that’s the economy we exist in, senyor Montella, then it must be changed. I can accept that the rich can buy better shoes and clothes and live in nice homes. But I cannot accept that one human’s life is worth more than another’s simply because he has money.’
By nine o’clock that morning, the strike had closed factories all over the suburbs of Barcelona. Two hundred and fifty workers at the Hispano-Suiza automobile works had walked out on their jobs and had persuaded the workers in more than a dozen other plants to join them. The movement now headed towards the centre of the city.
Ramón and I marched with the women of Damas Rojas and their supporters towards the passeig de Gràcia, where many of the shops were still open. The wide, tree-lined boulevard was a striking contrast to the place where we lived. Even the air smelled different, free of the disease that plagued the atmosphere of the barri Xinès. Everywhere we saw boys on bicycles, women being chauffeured in motor cars, men with bowler hats and walking canes, as if it were any normal day.
Our group ran to the shops and banged on the doors. ‘Close now for our brothers in Morocco!’ we shouted. The shopkeepers hurriedly locked their doors and pulled down their grilles as if they had been only awaiting our command.
I had never seen such luxury. Apart from the bookshops, chocolatiers, delicatessens and shops selling porcelain and silverware, there was a shop devoted entirely to silver spice and tobacco boxes. The store next to it was full of strange stick-like devices with numbered dials on them. ‘They are telephones,’ Paquita explained to me. ‘So people in one part of the city can speak to those in another.’ I was amazed.
The protest might have remained a peaceful one-day strike if not for the trams, which were still running. Mariano de Foronda, the director of Barcelona’s tram system and a close friend of King Alfonso, was a known opponent of the labour movement. The rumour was that he was driving around the city in his motor car, threatening the tram drivers if they stopped work.
Teresa and the women hurled abuse at the drivers when the trams passed us. ‘You are traitors to the cause!’ they shouted.
‘We are just obeying orders!’ the drivers replied.
We met some more women from Damas Rojas and Damas Radicales. They were carrying a banner that read ‘Down With the War!’
‘The workers from Poble Nou are here,’ Pilar, the fishmonger, told Teresa. ‘They say trams have been attacked by workers in that district and now Governor Ossorio has put armed security guards on them. But that won’t stop us!’
‘Be careful,’ warned Juana. ‘The authorities might be deliberately trying to provoke violence. That way they can declare martial law and bring in the army.’
Pilar shrugged. ‘We’ve been asked to walk in front of the workers with our sign so the guards and police won’t shoot.’
I looked around the crowd and wondered where my father was right now. Things were beginning to sound dangerous.
The women and workers started to organise themselves into a formation, but before they had a chance to finish, a tram appeared around the corner. People picked up stones to throw at it. A side window shattered. The security guard on board, a young man not much older than Anastasio, aimed his gun at the workers, who were ripping up the track ahead of the tram. He fired. Luckily for them, he was a poor shot. But his action enraged the crowd, which included onlookers and their children. Before we knew what was happening, Ramón and I were caught in a crush of people pressing towards the tram, which had come to a stop before the ruined track. The driver, guard and passengers alighted in a panic as the crowd threw its weight against the side of the vehicle, heaving against it until it toppled on its side. The workers and women cheered. A young man ran out of a nearby building with a lit torch in his hand. He threw it into the tram and the wooden seats quickly caught fire, eliciting more whoops and cheers from the onlookers.
Later in the day, Teresa took me and Ramón to the Casa del Pueblo, which was abuzz with activity.
‘What’s the latest?’ Teresa asked Núria, who was handing out food packages.
‘A short while ago some workers attacked a tram, with guns they had stolen from a police station. They forced the driver and passengers to get off, then released the brakes and sent the tram careening down the street. The Civil Guard arrived and fired on the workers, who opened fire in return. Now, two tram drivers and three of our own are dead. Many others were wounded. A little girl was killed in the crossfire.’
The news about the child who had been killed upset Teresa. ‘That’s it for the day,’ she said, urging Ramón and me back out onto the street. ‘We are heading home. I promised your father I’d look after you, and that I will.’
We stayed inside Teresa’s stifling apartment that afternoon, while women from Damas Rojas came and went with messages regarding the progress of the day. Teresa jumped from her chair and raised both her fists in the air when Carme arrived with the news that the trams had been brought to a standstill.
‘I hope that arrogant de Foronda is satisfied now,’ she said. ‘What did he achieve? Burned-out trams and ripped-up tracks!’
A young boy brought us a note from Papá to let us know that he was unharmed. Teresa, we’ve been told that workers in Madrid are impressed by how quickly we’ve crippled the city’s industry and commerce, and that they are now planning to strike themselves, he wrote.
His message brought light to Teresa’s eyes. ‘If the whole country unites against the war, they will have to stop it,’ she said. ‘If we act as one, we can change things.’
Although there had been a bloody exchange of fire between police and protesters outside the army headquarters on passeig de Colom the previous evening, Tuesday morning started quietly. Women hung out the washing and children played in the streets. There was no wheeled traffic and no newspapers. There weren’t even communiqués posted on public
buildings by the Captain General ordering workers to report to their factories and places of employment.
Teresa opened her flower stall at the markets until nine o’clock, joking with the other vendors that the Montella servants had wisely not shown their faces. Laieta brought the news that Governor Ossorio had resigned.
‘What?’ exclaimed Teresa, keeling over with laughter. ‘Is he that great a coward? What governor leaves his post when his city is in the midst of a battle? Who have they got to replace him?’
‘General Santiago has stepped in.’
‘No!’ Teresa laughed again. ‘I’ve heard he is incompetent.’
‘He is as long as he has men from Barcelona in his command. Did you hear what happened at the docks yesterday evening?’
Teresa shook her head.
‘That bastard General Brandeis ordered his dragoons to fire on the dock workers and their wives. But the people hoisted themselves onto crates and trolleys and shouted, “Don’t shoot, our brothers, we are fighting for you! We are fighting for your lives!”’
Teresa’s jaw dropped. ‘What happened?’
‘The soldiers refused to fire. How could they do otherwise? They may as well be shooting their own families.’
Teresa put her hands to her mouth in delighted amazement.
Laieta smiled. ‘Now the workers all over the town are doing the same thing. They cheer and applaud the soldiers who are sent to attack them and the men won’t fire.’
Despite our elated mood after Laieta’s news, the streets around Teresa’s apartment looked different on our way home from the market. The residents were ripping up the cobblestones to build barricades, and adding sewer covers, bed frames, lampposts and anything else they could get their hands to reinforce them. Where there were electrical lines, they were being cut. It looked as though people were preparing for a full-scale battle.
‘What’s going on?’ Teresa asked one of the women.
‘We’ve been told something big is going to happen this afternoon, and to ready ourselves against mounted charges.’
Teresa glanced at the men wielding weapons and practising their aim. I could see she was torn between her promise to protect us and her longing to be part of the action. We were about to move on when a boy on a bicycle came to a halt in front of us.
‘Are you Teresa Flores García?’ he asked. Teresa nodded and the boy handed her a slip of paper. ‘It’s instructions from your friends at the Casa del Pueblo.’
The boy rode off and Teresa opened the paper. Ramón and I stared over her shoulder, anxious to know what information it contained. I couldn’t read the words; all I could see was that it was a list along with a map. Ramón, who was more advanced in reading than I was, muttered the names: ‘Sant Antoni, Sant Pau del Camp …’
Teresa looked at us, then turned to the workers at the barricade. ‘It has begun!’ she cried. ‘The Revolution!’
The people stopped what they were doing and stared at her. She waved the paper in the air so they could see it.
‘They are burning the churches!’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘This afternoon!’
TEN
Paloma
The day after my first flamenco lesson, I returned to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, intending to continue my research on the supernatural. It was coming up to examination time at the Paris universities, and the library was even more crowded than it had been on my previous visit. The atmosphere had transformed from scholarly zeal to exhaustion and edginess. I noticed one student leaning against the staircase, who appeared to have fallen asleep standing up. I was glad to see that he shook himself awake after a few seconds and picked up his books before his knees relaxed and he toppled to the floor. If I had gone to a regular school, I could have been one of the students swotting here now. What would I have studied? Art, or the history of music, perhaps? I couldn’t even imagine it. It seemed to me that from the moment I had opened my eyes and taken my first gasp of air, I had lived and breathed ballet. Hadn’t my mother been dancing the part of Giselle when she first realised she was pregnant? Hadn’t she been listening to the waltz from Sleeping Beauty when she went into labour?
While I waited for the librarian to retrieve the books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, I found myself thinking about Jaime. I wondered whether he had been born in Spain or France. I guessed Spain because of his slight Spanish accent. Which region was he from? Then I wondered why I was wondering about him, and stopped myself. I thought about what he’d told me about la Rusa instead. What had she done during the Civil War that had made her so hated that somebody might have killed her all those years later? It occurred to me that Mamie might know, but I had to stick to my promise of not asking her questions about the past.
I collected my books, but before sitting down with them, I searched the card catalogue to see if the library’s collection included anything on flamenco dancers. I found a book titled The Encyclopaedia of Flamenco that I thought could be a good start. The wait for the book, however, was longer than it had been for the other materials. When the librarian finally placed the encyclopaedia on the pick-up shelf, I couldn’t find a free seat at one of the desks to read it. So I balanced it on the edge of a desk and leafed through the pages on the great flamenco guitarists and singers until I reached the section on dancers. Carmen had been right about the stage names. La Joselito had taken her name from a bullfighter who had been trampled to death in 1920; Antonia Mercé was la Argentina because she was born in Buenos Aires; la Mejorana was named after a herb. Flamenco aficionados, it seemed, were not averse to designating names in reference to dancers’ physical disabilities, or those of their parents: La Sordita was deaf; and la Niña del Ciego was ‘the daughter of the blind one’. The gypsies had a particularly warped humour, or maybe it was superstition, because the contemporary dancer la Chunga’s name meant ‘the unattractive one’, even though from the photograph the encyclopaedia showed of her she was bewitchingly beautiful.
Then I found what I was looking for:
La Rusa was born in the slum area of Barcelona known as the barri Xinès to Andalusian parents in 1901. Out of her poverty she rose to become one of the most famous flamenco dancers of her time. Despite her newly gained wealth and prestige, she sided with the Republicans in Barcelona during the Civil War (1936–1939), perhaps in memory of her father, who had been a member of the Radical Party during the strikes of 1909. Her loyalty to the masses turned out to be a decision for which she paid dearly when she was forced to live in exile. She died in 1952 in Paris.
That was all. There was nothing about la Rusa’s real name, or why she had taken her unusual stage name. There was nothing about where she had lived in Paris. But one thing puzzled me above all else: if she had fought on the side of the Republicans against Franco during the Civil War, why would anyone in the Spanish émigré community have wanted to kill her? Most of them had been Republican supporters too. Then I remembered Mamie once telling me that Franco was supposed to have arranged the assassinations of several high-profile exiles, especially if they had continued to speak out against his regime. Was that what had happened to la Rusa?
The snippets of incomplete information made my curiosity grow. I returned the book along with those on the supernatural, and went back to the catalogue to see if I could find another book that might have more information about la Rusa. The clock on the wall caught my attention. It was already half past twelve. I was cutting it fine to get back in time for Mamie’s afternoon class. If there was anything my grandmother hated, it was a lack of punctuality — especially in front of her students.
I found two other books on the history of flamenco and filled in the request slips quickly. The notice at the desk said there was a waiting time of thirty minutes for books, but those I had requested didn’t arrive until three-quarters of an hour later. I had fifteen minutes to get to the Métro station if I wanted to make Mamie’s class on time.
I didn’t even bother taking the books into the reading roo
m, but crouched down against a wall and balanced them on my lap. I browsed through the first book, which explained flamenco in general terms. It is an art that has been taken over by show business, but it wasn’t always the gaudy tourist spectacle that it has become today. Interesting, but I would have to save reading that for later. I swapped the book for the next one. It had a long chapter at the front about the history and origins of flamenco, but at the back there was a section on the artists of the past and present. It didn’t list the dancers in any logical order, however, and I had to scan the copy to see if it contained anything about la Rusa.
‘Mademoiselle, you cannot stay here.’ I looked up to see the security guard frowning at me. ‘You must place yourself at a reading desk to use the library’s books.’
I only had five minutes left to skim through the book, but I could see from the guard’s expression that pressing the point was not going to get me anywhere. One of the students in the reading room stood up and left his seat. I quickly took it, cringing inwardly when I found it so warm.
I checked the page titled ‘The Women of Flamenco’. Zapateado — the drumming sound made with the feet — was originally performed only by male dancers. The women used mostly their hands, arms and shoulders. That was changed by dancers such as la Rusa … I flipped over to the next page and my heart skipped a beat when I saw the woman in the black and white photograph: the mane of jet black hair; the arched brows framing panther-like eyes; the broad nose and the full lips. The lips were black in the photograph, but I knew they were blood-red in real life. I swallowed and tried to breathe. My pulse was hammering in my head. I read the caption: La Rusa — Celestina Sánchez, 1932.
The room around me turned white as my blood drained to my feet. I was staring at the face of my ghost. It was la Rusa who had given me the golden earrings. It was la Rusa who had come to see me.
Golden Earrings Page 8
