When the coffee, and biscuits with delicate rice paper at the base were finished, Rosita would select a length of black cloth, pay for it, thank Alba kindly for the refreshment and walk two doors up to the dressmaker.
Rosita did not like the dressmaker so much. The bespectacled woman always seemed to be in a hurry, stubbing out a cigarette as she darted here and there, searching for pins and tape-measures. Her children were allowed to be noisy. The woman let the radio blare while she measured Rosita. She and her husband frequented the modern dance-halls.
Even as a young woman, Rosita belonged to the old school.
In her youth and before her marriage, Rosita’s heart had been taken up for a while with the gypsy siguiriya songs she heard at the Taberna Verde in Jerez de la Frontera. People came there to sing and to dance flamenco in the cabaret. Forbidden to visit such places by her father, she sneaked out a few times on the pretext of ministering to a sick friend. Then she and Alba would slip into the long, dark room, which reeked of burning lamp-oil fumes. In the taberna, packed with bodies, they would listen to musicians who could make them shudder and set their new breasts tingling with the death rattle of their guitars and the sobbing in their voices.
One regular performer of the siguiriya was a young gypsy man with a hookah tattooed on his neck. The anguish in his voice and the unexpectedly breathtaking silences of the deep song made Rosita’s palms turn sweaty and her hair stand on end. People said that he was in the Foreign Legion, stationed at Aubagne in the South of France, but that every year at this time, when the gypsies passed through, he discarded his uniform, absented himself and came with them to sing.
Those few clandestine visits to the Taberna Verde took place in her early adolescence before her husband had even begun to think of courting her. In those days she was driven by a passionate desire to dance flamenco. Whenever she was at home on her own, the sturdy, serious fourteen year old practised those heel-clicking steps, holding her arms aloft in the shape of a bull’s horns and swivelling her hips, following their lead with her eyes. The cool, gloomy entrance to their yellowing limestone house was laid with darkly patterned tiles that enabled her to hear the drumming rhythms of her heels clearly, and she practised until she was exhausted under the sad eyes of the Virgin Mary whose picture hung on the wall.
But, although she longed to do so, she never dared to get up on the stage and perform in the taberna as did some of the other girls. And gradually, the phase passed and she could hardly remember the shivers and fast pulse-rate of her early puberty. She stayed at home, working with her mother who taught her to make lace, and, according to what the seasons required, she helped the rest of the family on the land when it was time to pick tomatoes or olives.
Rosita, at the age of nineteen and not remarkably pretty – her lower jaw stuck out too squarely – had married the best-looking man in the village. His hair was black as a crow’s feathers and he had wide-set eyes, greeny-blue as if the Mediterranean sea had been poured into them. Rosita concluded later, when life in the vast acreage of time lived without him had given her more experience, that, fortunately for her, he had never realised how good-looking he was. When she was much older still, she realised that there is something a little lacking in a man who does not appreciate his own good looks and who has no idea how to take advantage of such a god-given asset.
‘Perhaps my Manuel was even a little stupid,’ she sighed as the thought occurred to her.
Years later, after her husband’s death at an early age, she suffered from guilt because when her neighbour had come banging on the door that hot afternoon shouting that he had been found dying in the street, the news pierced her in exactly the same way as the siguiriya songs had done and she wondered if the one had been a portent of the other. She felt that the songs were connected to his death and that he died because she had heard it and not understood that it was a warning for the future.
The story of her husband’s death was both tragic and simple. Each morning of their married life, she packed up olives, bread and cheese, some tomatoes and lemonade for his lunch. He worked at the limestone quarry and preferred to eat there in the dazzling white crater, rather than face a long walk home in the midday sun. The couple had waited nearly ten years until their long hoped-for first child arrived. She was two years old at this time. They both adored her. Rosita stayed at home to watch over her precious toddler.
Manuel carried a bone-handled, fold-up knife in the pocket of his overalls, as did all the men. The knife was used to cut bread or sever a rope that had become entangled round a limestone block, or cut a prickly pear off the branch to eat. It had a thousand and one uses.
Coming home one May afternoon, with the white quarry dust stinging his eyes and covering his workman’s coarse dungarees, Rosita’s husband was thirsty. He climbed on some loose boulders by the stone wall to cut himself a prickly pear. He slipped, doubled up, and the knife seized the unexpected opportunity to enter under his ribs and kill him. By the time Rosita came flying down the hill, he was already dead with a frilly carnation of blood blooming halfway down his white shirt where the knife had entered.
The whole village watched as the men shouldered the coffin, silhouetted against the empty sky, and trudged, in their best suits, over the arid, sun-baked fields, then down the slope alongside the dried river bed towards the churchyard, Rosita and her small daughter following behind.
As Doña Rosita studied the black dress in her hand, she wished she had something more colourful to wear that would suit her mood that morning. But she owned no other dresses. She put on the black dress that smelled least stale. Then she caught sight of a bunch of withered myrtle that she had nailed up by the window years before. She unhooked it and threw the dried twigs and leaves out of the window on to the street.
Downstairs, she poked her finger through the bars of the canary’s cage to say good morning to the dingy bird and sat down to eat the breakfast her daughter had prepared for her.
Every day, in that village four miles from Jerez de la Frontera, people were accustomed to seeing Doña Rosita. When she had breakfasted on olive bread, goat cheese and a small cup of black coffee, she would collect her lace-making equipment and place her low stool just outside the front door in the sunshine. There she squatted, the bobbins clicking gaily as her fingers automatically drew the threads, deftly tossing the bobbins, one across the other, around the spindle. Doña Rosita had for years fabricated slow-moving glaciers of lace: the edging of pillow-slips, tablecloths, the lace borders of confirmation dresses and mantillas, the snowy hems of petticoats, ruches and lace collars for blouses. She was a fixture in the village. Other women often joined her to make lace and to chat, bringing their own spindles and bobbins. She was always there unless illness or a rare thunderstorm, a wedding or a funeral prevented it. Just before midday she would go into the cool of the house and emerge again at about half-past three for another hour or so.
On this morning, however, overtaken by uncontrollable restlessness, Doña Rosita’s feet decided to take her for a walk. Her daughter had already left to work in the fields. She locked the house and set off up the sandy road, past the spiteful briars that clung to the dry-stone wall, ignoring the stray, scrawny yellow dog that swayed in the middle of the street like a high-noon cowboy.
At the top of the hill she stopped to look out over the bare, parched scene, the stone-walled fields white and colourless as a moonscape and the dark patch of the Peña family’s lemon grove in the valley. A sickeningly warm wind blew. She continued until she came to the quarry which opened suddenly to the right of the path. It was silent. No one was working there. She wondered about her husband’s last day at work and imagined him climbing up to this very spot to take his path home. Since that day, her own life seemed to have remained motionless. She stared down into the quarry. It looked much the same as when she was a young girl, a little bigger perhaps. A small brown bird sang fearlessly on a dusty shrub next to her. She looked north past the quarry. The landscape looked exac
tly as it had done all her life. In the morning haze, the white square buildings of the next village two miles away remained unchanged. Nothing had altered. Everything seemed to have stayed the same under the weight of eternity.
Doña Rosita suddenly had an overwhelming desire for change before it was too late.
Slowly, she walked on down the other side of the hill towards the cemetery. The visit to the quarry made her husband’s death seem to have happened only yesterday. The fresh ache somehow served to make her feel more alive.
At the cemetery, under a hazy sky, she sat down by the burning stone of her husband’s grave and patted the dry earth.
‘Manuel. I feel in need of a change. I hope you don’t mind. It’s just that I feel time has been standing still and I would like to start it moving before I come and join you.’
A short walk later she reached the next village and stood by the yellow wall of a house under the metal Coca-Cola sign that hung squeaking in the breeze. The wind fluttered her black dress against her bow legs. Now the road was white. In the distance, the noon bus came into sight, caked with dust from its twice-daily journey into town and back. It wound along the road and dipped out of sight. Ten minutes later, it stopped and Doña Rosita clambered on and bought a ticket to Jerez de la Frontera.
‘Where are you off to?’ asked a woman passenger, screwing up her face in undisguised curiosity at the unusual sight of Doña Rosita clambering on to the bus.
‘I’m going to town,’ she replied. ‘I have business there. I’m going to kick up my heels,’ she joked. In fact, she had no idea what she was going to do.
As the bus manoeuvred down the steep part of the road past her own house, Doña Rosita looked at the spot where she normally sat as if she half expected to see herself there.
She got off the bus by the clothes market near the main square. It was a relaxed and innocent sort of market. The stall-holders seemed to be there as a form of courtesy rather than through an urgent desire to sell. They sat by their mounds of T-shirts and kiddies’ short pants, gents’ trousers and cheap dresses, some of which had been pegged out on lines for display, and watched, smiling, as passers-by lifted up the goods and inspected them.
Doña Rosita walked past the market, downhill towards the only place with which she was really familiar – the draper’s shop.
Inside was so dark after the glaring sun, it was like going underwater. She could barely see whether her friend Alba was still there or not. Then she saw the tiny pale face in the dark. The shop assistant came out from the back and greeted Doña Rosita.
‘Doña Alba doesn’t speak to us any more, but you can sit with her as long as you want. I will fetch you both a lemon tea and a sandwich. We don’t have any coffee at the moment.’ She set about shutting up the shop for the afternoon siesta.
Doña Rosita pulled up a cane chair and sat opposite her friend who did not appear to recognise her.
‘Good afternoon, Alba. It’s good to see you after all this time.’
Her friend’s white hands fumbled with the skirt of her dress. Rosita leaned forward to look more closely at her. Her face was still almost youthfully plump but there was only vacancy behind the faded brown eyes set in their two dark, olive-coloured sockets.
Alba’s mind has gone fishing, thought Rosita.
Then she did something she had always wanted to do. She gently pinched Alba’s face to see if the skin felt as soft and doughy as it looked. It did. She ran a finger along the leathery hide of her own face and marvelled at the difference.
All afternoon, Rosita sat and talked to her friend who made no acknowledgement of her presence, but occasionally pulled the flesh of her face back with her hands into a sort of grimace, as if to say she had somehow wasted the whole of her life in the shadows, trying to keep pale. Rosita gave her all the latest news, quite matter-of-factly, about her own daughter and son-in-law, the condition of the sheep, the likelihood of a big tomato harvest this year, the Bishop’s forthcoming tour of the neighbourhood. When Doña Alba knocked her lemon tea to the ground, Rosita rescued the glass and wiped Alba’s skirt down.
After a while, Rosita too lapsed into silence and both women fell into a quiet doze in the dark. She was woken by the assistant opening up the shop again which she always did between the hours of four and six o’clock.
‘I will stay with Alba until you close,’ said Rosita, ‘and before I leave I should like to buy some cloth.’
At a quarter to six, the assistant reached down the two bolts of black cloth from the second shelf behind the counter.
‘No,’ said Doña Rosita, using the arms of the chair to lever herself up, as she had become a little stiff. ‘I want to see what colours you have.’
The assistant, excited by this change in routine, enthusiastically pulled down some brightly coloured bolts of scarlet and blue cloth.
‘I don’t want to go mad,’ said Doña Rosita firmly. ‘Get me down the green one there and the maroon.’
The green was dark like the leaves of an orange tree.
‘That one,’ she said.
With the parcel under her arm and having said goodbye to her absent friend, Rosita stepped out into the pleasant evening just as it was becoming dusk.
There was one other thing she wanted to do.
The road down to where the Taberna Verde had once been was steep with large, flat cobbles still warm from the day’s sun. Doña Rosita made her way to the bottom of the town, past the rows of smaller, more expensive shops, past the police station and the post office to where the town levelled out near the bus terminal.
The Taberna Verde was still there. It had a new glass front and the sign-painter had done a good job of painting a guitar and a gaily fluttering ribbon on either side of the name. The pavement was too narrow for there to be any tables and chairs outside, but a hand-written placard announced the flamenco competition that was already in progress. Reflection from the glass stopped Doña Rosita from seeing inside properly. But she could hear the muffled strumming of a guitar and the familiar, stomping shuffle of feet on boards that made her feel as excited as she had been when she was fourteen.
She pushed open the door and went in.
Inside, everything had changed. There were electric lights and round metal tables with chairs instead of the long, dark benches and tables that she had known as a girl. Tall mirrors hung along the walls between lurid, life-size paintings of famous bull-fighters. But the wooden stage was the same, ancient and even more scuffed than she remembered. Competitors and performers sat at the front tables. The singers wore jeans and shirts, the dancers wore traditional flamenco dress. The judges sat a little further back at one table.
Doña Rosita placed her package on the floor and sat down at one of the back tables. The place was half full. A waiter in black with a white apron swivelled around, flicked her table with a napkin and asked for her order.
She ordered a Manzanilla sherry. On stage, a lithe fair-haired girl of about fourteen was performing a traditional flamenco solo. Her twists and turns were full of a vigour and energy that was attractive because of her exuberance, but wasted somehow because she did not understand how to contain the feeling so that it burned slowly for everyone to enjoy. She won a good round of applause all the same.
I could show you a thing or two, thought Doña Rosita, who kept one foot touching her package in case anyone tried to pinch it. She sipped the sherry and felt it begin to work through her old body. An animated couple, a plump girl and a young man with oiled, crinkly, reddish hair and smudged freckles, made their way over to Doña Rosita and asked if they could sit at her table. She took her bag off the chair to make room for them. The taberna was starting to fill up.
Rosita leaned sideways so that she could observe the performers. She caught herself looking for the familiar figure of the man with the hookah tattoed on his neck. But he was not there. And she realised that by now he would be in his eighties too. Probably dead, she thought.
The sherry made her head feel light.
Cigarette smoke hung in front of the dark paintings on the walls. She should have brought her fan. The taberna was beginning to bustle. She shifted in her seat to stop getting stiff. After an hour or so, the first singer of the siguiriya came on to the stage. Rosita craned to get a good view of the skinny young man with black hair, his sharp face concave like a crescent moon.
He was impressive. Rosita broke out into a sweat of pleasure. The audience whistled appreciation as the tension mounted during the song. The taberna was now so crowded she could barely see the stage. The waiter pushed his way through and put more Manzanilla sherry on their table. The young couple were on their feet applauding. The singer bowed and stepped to one side.
Another siguiriya singer took his place. The audience erupted with delight as his guitar wept and wailed like a trapped demon. The song sounded to Rosita like a battle against death. She held her breath, willing life to continue after the silences in the song, thinking that she would burst with the suspense of those unexpected silences. He started a new song:
Ay. My love.
The ship has sailed,
Suddenly and for ever.
Rosita leaned back in her chair and took another sip from her glass, letting the sound of the music spread through the channels carved out by the sherry.
The Migration of Ghosts Page 5
