‘I don’t like bullfights,’ I said.
‘That’s because you don’t understand them. Come with me tomorrow and I shall explain everything to you: the nobility of surrendering oneself to death.’
I shivered. The demon around him was strong. I tried again to move away from him — and it. ‘There is nothing to understand. They are just cruel.’
Salazar bit the side of his thumb. ‘What sort of gypsy are you?’ he asked, an annoyed expression on his face. ‘Have you become a soft Catalan? Or should I say, has a certain Catalan softened you?’
I had no doubt that he meant Xavier. How did he know about us? His spying must have involved more than keeping track of where I was performing. The murderous look in his eyes chilled me and a terrible thought came to my mind. I saw Xavier arriving at my dressing room and Salazar shooting him. No sooner had I thought it than there was a knock at the door. Salazar and I both turned towards it.
I remained silent, terrified it might be Xavier.
‘Senyoreta, I have some flowers for you,’ came a female voice. ‘Shall I put them in your room?’ It was the club’s maid, Consuelo.
Salazar shook his head, but I ignored him. ‘Yes,’ I answered.
Consuelo walked in with a bouquet of long-stemmed calla lilies that was taller than she was. She settled them in a vase on an end table before she realised that Salazar was with me. She glanced at my face and must have seen the fear there. Bless you, I thought, as she began moving noisily around the room, dusting everything in sight and violently fluffing the cushions.
Her frenetic activity made Salazar uncomfortable. He moved towards the door, where he grabbed my arm and forced me to look into his bloodshot eyes. ‘So you think bullfighting is barbaric, do you?’ he asked. ‘What you don’t understand is that some beasts … and some people … are born doomed.’
Salazar let me go with such force that I stumbled backwards.
He strode out the door and his demon scuttled after him. I realised now what the demon was. It was death.
Xavier arrived a quarter of an hour later with a bouquet of white roses. Salazar had so unnerved me that I collapsed in his arms.
‘You’ve exhausted yourself again, haven’t you?’ Xavier laughed. ‘You didn’t give yourself much of a break after Portugal.’
I feigned a smile. I didn’t want to tell Xavier the real reason for my alarm. To whom had Salazar been referring when he had said that some people were born doomed? I held Xavier to me as a chill prickled my skin. Dear God, I prayed, if one of us is doomed, let it be me.
Xavier was right when he said that I needed to rest after Portugal. But I found it impossible to settle my thoughts while Salazar’s words rang in my head like a threat. I didn’t go anywhere for a few days. I stayed in my hotel suite and read the newspapers to occupy my mind. I made Xavier call me every day even if I was seeing him that night. Salazar had disappeared from my life for months and years at a time before. I prayed he might disappear from it forever.
The articles in the newspapers were depressing: unemployment was rising and unrest among the workers and peasants was increasing. The brutality with which their protests were put down was causing many commentators to suggest that the only way forwards for the poor was through revolution, not reform.
One day, Evelina Montella arrived to visit me. I was touched that both Xavier’s sisters frequently called on me; I had expected to be snubbed by them. Xavier had told me that, unlike Margarida, who openly despised her sister-in-law, Evelina was friends with his wife and doted on his son, so I was pleased that she viewed me without any resentment. Whether Xavier’s parents knew of my existence or not, they didn’t acknowledge it.
Evelina was wearing a white knitted dress and matching bolero jacket. While Margarida was boisterous, Evelina was quiet in a way I found intriguing. She reminded me of a rosebud — tightly closed but full of potential.
‘Francesc is travelling again,’ she said, when I invited her into the suite’s sitting room. She did her best to smile, but I noticed the frown lines that had appeared on her forehead.
I wasn’t surprised that Francesc Cerdà spent as much time away from home duties as he could. The fact that he preferred men to women was obvious to me. I had worked and performed with many homosexual men and enjoyed them as friends. But I couldn’t imagine that Evelina and Francesc’s marriage was bliss for either of them.
‘I saw you dance at the Samovar Club the other night,’ Evelina said in her soft, cultivated voice.
‘Oh? Why didn’t you come and greet me afterwards?’
She folded and unfolded her hands. ‘It was late … I didn’t want to bother you.’
She fell silent and I sensed there was something weighing on her mind that she wanted to talk about. Then it occurred to me that she might have witnessed Salazar leaving my dressing room. I hoped it hadn’t given her the wrong idea.
‘Xavier came to visit me afterwards,’ I told her. ‘You should have come too.’
But she wasn’t listening. She took a breath and looked at me. ‘I was wondering if you would teach me to dance flamenco?’
I was startled and didn’t respond straight away.
Evelina blushed. ‘It’s presumptuous of me to ask a star like you … but you don’t just dance flamenco, you embody it.’
I was flattered and confused. It was true I had become a polished performer, but flamenco was considered a lowbrow form of dance compared to Spanish dance and ballet. It wasn’t a pursuit for upper-class women, let alone Catalan ones. Why did Evelina want to learn it? She’d never be able to dance it for anyone.
‘I don’t know if I can teach you,’ I explained to her. ‘I learned from watching others and from living with flamenco dancers. But I would be happy to try. When should we start? Now?’
Evelina looked surprised, then enthused. ‘Truly?’
‘Why not? I have nothing else to do today.’
I found a rehearsal dress for her to wear. She was a natural dancer. When I showed her how to use her arms, she mirrored me exactly. She had a good sense of rhythm. But she was all technique and no fire.
‘I enjoyed that,’ she said, when we had finished and the maid brought us coffee and cakes.
I had found her company pleasing too. Although there was something sad and a little repressed about her, she’d lifted my spirits.
‘Why don’t you come again tomorrow?’ I asked her.
Her face broke into a smile. ‘Truly … I’m not wasting your time?’
It touched me that she should speak so humbly to me. I remembered the first time I had seen Evelina, as a baby in a pram. She had been so pretty, like a fairy princess.
‘Of course not,’ I reassured her. ‘I love everything about dance.’
‘So do I!’ she said, a sparkle coming to her eyes for the first time.
I watched from the window as she sent me a girlish wave before stepping into her chauffeured Bugatti. In many ways Evelina was my opposite: she was reserved and I was not; she was cultivated and I was a savage. What an unusual friendship we are making, I thought. I wondered if asking me to teach her flamenco might be the most daring thing Evelina had ever done.
Because Evelina progressed with the individual flamenco steps so quickly, we soon moved on to combining them into basic patterns. By the time we were a few weeks into our lessons, she was moving well enough for us to dance with each other.
‘Don’t try to imitate me,’ I told her. ‘Find something of your own.’
I could see that she understood what I was asking of her, but she had trouble executing it. I wondered if she had ever been given the opportunity to be her true self.
One day when we were dancing, the door buzzer rang. A minute later, my maid appeared and told me that Gaspar Olivero had come to see me.
‘Tell him to come in,’ I said.
I glanced at Evelina, expecting her to be pleased to see her friend. But she had turned pale and was standing frozen to the spot. I wondered what was wrong wit
h her. Had she overexerted herself?
Gaspar strode into the room and stopped in his tracks when he saw Evelina. For a fraction of a second they held each other’s gaze before looking away. Then I understood. The young woman Gaspar had been pining for all these years was Evelina Montella.
What followed was a stilted and awkward conversation. Gaspar told me he’d only dropped by for a minute because he was in the area. He looked towards the door as if intending to leave, but didn’t move. Evelina said several times that it was a pleasure to see him again, all the while staring at her feet. I wondered if I should make an excuse to leave the room, or whether being alone was going to make everything worse for them.
Before I could decide, Gaspar said that he would call me later about doing another show at the Samovar Club and finally mustered the courage to actually leave us. I walked him to the door of the suite and kissed his cheeks. His skin was ice cold.
When I returned to the sitting room, Evelina was sobbing.
‘I’m so unhappy,’ she told me. ‘I’ve been married for two and a half years and everyone keeps asking when Francesc and I are going to have a baby. This morning, the Marquesa hinted that maybe I should see her specialist. Even the old doyennes are whispering their fertility secrets to me at parties or at the Liceu. What I want more than anything else in the world is a child to love. Each birthday that passes without a child sends me into a depression — but Francesc won’t come anywhere near me!’
The pain and despair in Evelina’s voice touched me. So this was what she had been keeping inside her all this time. No wonder she was scared to express her true self. Ladies of the upper class were not meant to reveal family unhappinesses of any kind.
I sat down beside her. I didn’t share her deep urge for a child; I had never experienced that maternal pull although I was thirty-two years of age. Xavier and I took precautions against pregnancy. Not being one to hold back my opinion, I clasped her hand and said, ‘You know, even if a man prefers men he can still make a woman pregnant.’
Evelina shook her head and replied in a hushed voice, ‘I’ve tried everything. He just can’t.’
I sighed. Rich families and their marriages! Xavier was miserable in his, and now I’d learned that Evelina was unhappily wed too. No wonder Margarida had avoided matrimony altogether.
A few days later, when we were having coffee after our lesson, I brought up the subject again. I couldn’t stand the pained look on Evelina’s face any longer, and she seemed incapable of finding a solution to her unhappiness herself.
‘What about Gaspar?’ I asked her. ‘You like him. He obviously likes you. Why don’t you ask him to give you a baby? Surely Francesc can’t object if he isn’t up to the task?’
Evelina looked at me with a horrified expression on her face. ‘I couldn’t do that!’
One of the things that I found so amusing about her was that even though she was married to a homosexual man, she was still so easy to shock.
‘Why not? It sounds like your husband would be relieved. It would stop any rumours about him.’
‘But … I love Gaspar.’
I waited to hear why that was an obstacle to the plan.
Evelina shook her head. ‘It wouldn’t be right to tie him to me that way. He should be married and happy himself. I want him to forget me.’ She burst into tears.
I brushed aside a strand of chestnut hair that was sticking to her cheek. Well, that suggestion didn’t go well, I thought. Evelina and I moved in two different worlds. I promised myself never to try to give her my proletarian advice again.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. ‘That was probably … not the right thing to suggest to you.’
She looked at me with tears in her eyes and shook her head. ‘Apart from Margarida, you are the only true friend I have.’
I saw then that Evelina hadn’t really wanted to learn flamenco at all. She had simply been looking for something to fill up her empty life.
The November 1933 election went exactly as Xavier had predicted. The Socialists and the Republicans refused to cooperate and it cost them their power.
The evening the result was announced on the radio, Xavier and I sat in our apartment, shocked and upset. Margarida arrived after dinner.
‘Finally, women get the right to vote and what do they do?’ she said angrily, flinging her coat onto the sofa. ‘They listen to their priests and vote for the Right! The Church is the very institution that oppresses them! Haven’t they read the story of Adam and Eve?’
‘At least that’s one step up from following their husbands,’ I said, trying to inject some humour into the melancholy mood. ‘Seriously, the working-class women would have voted for the Socialists if the Anarchists hadn’t run such a successful campaign to discourage the working class from voting altogether.’
‘The Right’s victory seems a bigger landslide than it actually is,’ said Xavier. ‘Due to our stupid electoral law, the side that wins at the polls is given representation in the Cortes way out of proportion to the voting results.’
‘One thing’s for sure,’ said Margarida, ‘the Right are going to undo all the reforms that were started when the Republic came to power. Wages are going to be cut, landowners will have their estates restored to them, the peasants will be evicted, and women are going to be forced out of their jobs.’
I thought of my father and Teresa. ‘The only way things will change for the poor in this country is with a revolution,’ I said. ‘I don’t think anyone will believe in reform any more after this.’
Xavier, Margarida and I spent the rest of the evening debating whether revolution was the only recourse open to the peasants and workers. As we discussed the ins and outs of various political systems to help the most downtrodden elements of society, we didn’t see that much more dangerous forces were lurking on the horizon. When Xavier and I climbed into our bed in the early hours of morning and embraced each other before falling asleep, we had no idea how swiftly and brutally things were about to change. And that the sweet life we shared was about to be cut short.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Paloma
With Mamie keeping me on the edge of my seat with her stories about Spain, and the surprising developments in my relationship with Jaime, I hadn’t given much thought in the past few days to what Madame Genet had said about me taking the examination for a second time. But when I arrived at the ballet school on Monday morning for my lesson with Mademoiselle Louvet, I was overcome by feelings of defeatism. What was the point of training until my body cried out in pain and my feet bled if it was all going to be for nothing?
‘What’s the matter today, Paloma?’ Mademoiselle Louvet asked me, when I’d finished my barre work. ‘You are not extending yourself completely or finishing off your movements. Why are you holding back? Last week you gave me everything.’
I bowed my head. I was a perfectionist and this was not what I wanted to hear. But I knew Mademoiselle Louvet was right. If I couldn’t put my heart into what I was doing there was little point going through with the training.
‘Can we talk for a moment?’ I asked.
Mademoiselle Louvet sent me a concerned look. ‘You can always talk to me, Paloma.’ She nodded to the accompanist, Monsieur Clary, who took the opportunity to get himself a cup of coffee.
‘Last week, after our lesson, I ran into Madame Genet outside the administration office,’ I told her. ‘She said that I haven’t a chance in getting into the corps de ballet because Mademoiselle Marineau’s prejudice against me will override all my efforts.’
Mademoiselle Louvet’s beautiful face scrunched into a frown. ‘It was quite out of place for Madame Genet to say that. If the head of the school has decided that you are fit to take the examination, then it really isn’t any of Madame Genet’s business. Mademoiselle Marineau said she didn’t think you could take the load of a professional dancer, but you did that examination under the strain of having lost your mother less than a year before. Things will be much better for you the next ti
me around.’
I wanted to believe what Mademoiselle Louvet was saying, but Madame Genet had been right when she’d said that I’d performed exceptionally well in the examination despite everything that had happened.
‘Madame Genet said I didn’t have a chance for personal reasons,’ I told Mademoiselle Louvet. ‘That the reason Mademoiselle Marineau hates me has something to do with my father.’
‘Your father?’ Mademoiselle Louvet looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Well, your father was the orchestra’s pianist when your mother was dancing Giselle and fell pregnant to him. Mademoiselle Marineau was playing the role of Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis. They could have had some falling out about the music perhaps?’
The ballet Giselle was often interpreted as a battle of the sexes. The Wilis were the spirits of young women who had died before their wedding day and sought revenge on male victims by making them dance until their hearts gave out. The answer occurred to Mademoiselle Louvet the same time as it did to me.
‘My father had an affair with Mademoiselle Marineau, didn’t he? And he broke it off to marry my mother!’
Mademoiselle Louvet shook her head. ‘I find it too hard to believe. Mademoiselle Marineau has been in love with the choreographer Christophe Valois all the years I have known her. Even though they have never married, I think he is the only man she’s ever been in love with. Some would even go so far as to call it an obsession.’
‘It’s not my place. You will have to ask your father,’ Madame Genet had said. Mademoiselle Louvet might find it hard to believe, but I was sure now that my father had been two-timing even then! I would never have thought my father capable of such a thing if he hadn’t married Audrey so soon after my mother’s death. He was due back in Paris on Wednesday, but there was no way I was going to see him now. His philandering had ruined my life!
I continued as best I could with my lesson. Afterwards, Mademoiselle Louvet and I went back to her office and she gave me her recording of Brahms’s ‘Intermezzo’ that she had played for me after my last lesson. ‘Listen to it,’ she told me, ‘and you will feel your mother’s love.’
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