Pepita

by Vita Sackville-West

  II

  It appeared at first as though the family intended to take up its residence permanently in Albolote. Money seemed to be no object, and the Casa Blanca in the Plaza Real changed hands. It was a corner house in the principal square, with the parish church on another side of the square, the council-house on another. Thus the Casa Blanca occupied a central position in the village. Its former owner, Don Baltasar Subira y Melero, was fortunate in finding such lavish purchasers for his house, which he watched being ‘altered and decorated and converted into a perfect palace, changing it almost entirely, having it very well arranged with much and good furniture’.

  The ideas of the two witnesses I have just quoted, both of whom had been born in Albolote and lived there all their lives, may possibly not coincide with ours as to the ‘perfect palace’ and the ‘very good furniture’. I should imagine that the taste of the ex-circus gypsy Catalina and the ex-bandit Lopez was profoundly to be mistrusted. I imagine overcrowded and overloaded rooms, very stiff and uncomfortable, and all arranged with a view to the utmost display of gentility and ostentation. They had lived in poverty all their lives, and now at last knew the pleasure of having money to spend as they conceived it ought to be spent. Catalina was the one who appeared to be in control of the family purse, and was not always very delicate in her dealings with Lopez on the subject. Indeed, the Director of the Provincial Hospital, who speaks of them with a note of disapproval throughout, reports that she and Lopez (who, he has the charity to add, was looked upon as the only lover of Catalina), used often to quarrel, and that during these quarrels she would threaten to ‘kick him out and send him back to his trade as a shoemaker’. Lopez, it seems clear, was a man who inspired derision rather than respect. The villagers themselves thought him funny. He could frequently be observed riding the saddle-horses for exercise on the Plaza and showing-off as he rode; was considered ‘very odd in his mode of dress’; and before very long got his nickname in the village: el tio Caninica, he was called, meaning one who wears a belt with a lot of things stuck in it. In Granada he was known as el tio zapatero (Uncle shoemaker), because ‘he shod to perfection the members of his family’. The priest summed him up as ‘the sort of man who might have risen from the position of an artisan and had suddenly become better off’. Francisco Ramirez did not think much of him either. ‘He was just the kind of man’, he exclaimed contemptuously, ‘who would get up on the box and take the reins’. An agricultural labourer, Pedro Quesada, thought he ‘looked like a workman dressed as a gentleman’. The widow Rafaela Pinel, on the other hand, who had heard Catalina snubbing him, dismissed him as ‘a short, insignificant, common-looking man who wore a short jacket and a close-fitting cap’.

  Lola was a spoilt, merry child; people remembered her afterwards as ‘always skipping and jumping about the house’.

  This very odd and unexplained lot of arrivals must have seemed like a flock of brilliantly plumaged birds settling down on to the Plaza Real of little Albolote. They puzzled the villagers, the Alcalde (judge), and the parish priest, who were used to rich landowners but not to rich adventurers of such obviously inferior birth. But they were welcome. Catalina was reported as ‘a very good lady’, and both she and Lopez were considered ‘very charitable, doing much good to the poor’. Besides, they gave employment, engaging several local maidservants as well as the labourers employed in the restoration and renovation of the house. They were friendly, open-handed, hospitable people. Don Miguel Reyes Valdivia, who was acting as assistant priest of the parish at that time, noticed that ‘whenever anyone went to their house, they were immediately regaled with something’. Don Miguel lived quite near to them, in the Calle Real, and it was not long before he fell into the habit of calling frequently upon them. Spaniards as a rule are chary of welcoming strangers within their doors, but any such reluctance was noticeably lacking in this odd couple, who in the midst of their prosperity retained their jolly raggle-taggle Bohemianism. They were perhaps a little indiscriminating in their friendships. Señor Corral, the grocer, who supplied Catalina with pork and other articles of food, seems to have been quite as warmly received as the Alcalde. His shop in the Plaza de Aminas was quite near the Casa Blanca, and after becoming acquainted with Catalina, who did her own marketing, he was apparently free to drop in at the Casa Blanca whenever he liked. But of all the friends whom the cheerful adventurers made in Albolote, the most intimate were the members of the Gonzalez family, Manuel Gonzalez, his wife, his daughter Micaela, and his peculiar son, Juan de Dios. The Gonzalez family were next-door neighbours, and so rapidly did the intimacy between the two families advance that they ‘soon caused a door to be made in the wall between the two gardens’.

  III

  Gossip and speculation in Albolote did not long remain unsatisfied as to the resources of the new arrivals. Catalina made friends, and as fast as she made friends she talked. She talked to the grocer, the priest, the assistant priest, the Alcalde, the Gonzalez family, the labourers, and the servants. The burden of her conversation was ever the same, turn by turn boastful, wistful, vainglorious, touching. Everything was explained: the incongruous wealth, the luxury, the horses, the fine clothes, the fine furniture, the jewellery, the foreign dogs, the French maid, the German governess, the purchase and renovation of the Casa Blanca, the transformation of the gypsy and the cobbler into the prosperous bourgeois. Somewhere in the background was the mysterious romantic figure who paid for it all, ‘Pepa,—my little Pepa,—my Pepita,—my daughter the famous bailarina’, Pepita whom she ‘wished would come, that she might have her at her side’; Pepita of the many, the princely lovers; Pepita, the Star of Andalusia.

  For the little Pepa whom they had brought from Malaga to seek her fortune in Madrid, and who had suffered the reverse of having her contract cancelled at the Teatro del Príncipe, was now away from them, out in the great unknown world beyond the Pyrenees, a dancer of European reputation. Some local people already knew her; Don Gabriel de Burgos, for instance, a most respect-worthy lawyer, had lived opposite to her in Granada when she was staying there with her mother in Calle de las Arandas; he had ‘talked with her several times from their respective balconies, these being opposite to each other, the width of the street being about four metres. Our conversation was always of an indifferent nature. She was beautiful, sympathetic, and of pleasant conversation.’ She was quite well known already then, and people who saw them passing in the street would take notice and point them out to one another, saying, ‘That is Catalina’, or ‘That is Pepita Oliva’, or, taken together, ‘That is the family of La Bailarina’.

  She had left them in Granada and, from the Grand Theatre at Bordeaux, her first engagement, had gone, according to Catalina, all over the world leaving a trail of glory behind her. At Copenhagen she had lived in the most expensive hotel in the utmost luxury with a secretary and a theatrical manager; she had danced a dance called La Farsa Pepita, especially composed in her honour, and the enthusiastic audience had taken the horses out of her carriage and had drawn her through the streets themselves. Germany had acclaimed her, especially at Frankfurt-am-Main, at Stuttgart, and in Berlin; in London she had been billed to appear at Her Majesty’s Theatre. There was a newspaper cutting from The Times of May 22nd, 1852. ‘First appearance of the Spanish dancer Doña Pepita Oliva. In the course of the evening a divertissement in which the Spanish dancer Doña Pepita Oliva (from the Teatro Real del Príncipe) will appear. It is respectfully announced that a great extra night will take place on Thursday next, May 27th, when will be presented Bellini’s celebrated opera Norma, after which the admired advertisement La Tête des Rossières, to be followed by Guecco’s celebrated bouffa, La Prova d’un Opera Seria, to which will be added a divertissement in which Doña Pepita will appear.’ Here she had danced the Madrilena, the Aragoneza, and El Haleo de Xerxes. She had been a great success in London as elsewhere. In Germany she had been such a popular success that the audience had shouted for her to let down her marvellous hair on the stage to prove th
at it was not false.

  I have a picture of her dancing the Aragoneza. It is not a very good picture, being in fact a tinted and somewhat fanciful engraving by a Berlin artist, but it does contrive to give an impression of the energy and vitality she flung into her dancing. The short ballet skirt of rose red silk is flounced with white and blue. She wears a tight bodice of white satin with panels of dark blue velvet. Her throat and shoulders are bare, but for the narrow shoulder-straps provocatively slipping. She is lightly poised on one toe, her tiny foot pointed in a pink satin slipper. Two pink roses lie dropped on the ground beside her; a third one nestles in her dark hair behind her ear. A heavy gold bangle encircles one wrist; the castanets are lightly held. Her eyes flash, and her lips are parted in a smile.

  Catalina had always been proud of her daughter and now had considerable justification for her pride. She spared no pains in boasting about her to her new friends at Albolote. In the volubility of her confidences she not only exposed whatever she knew at first hand about Pepita’s private life,—‘she said that Pepita and her husband had fallen out and were separated; the husband’s name was Antonio Oliva, a Madrilenian and a bolero or dancer’—but also exposed her own confused ideas of how she might most reputably represent her daughter to the imagination of Albolote. For example, she freely told Micaela Gonzalez (who was only nine years old), that Pepita was ‘a very famous dancer in Germany’, and she said much the same thing to the Coadjutor, to the son of the Alcalde, and to Doña Francisca Navarro. To Señor Corral, the grocer, however,—perhaps with a sense of social difference,—she denied that Pepita was a dancer, but claimed that she gave ‘mimic representations which were a great success and brought her in large sums of money’. It is impossible to fathom the complications of Catalina’s mind, which suddenly made her decide that the grocer might not be allowed to think of Pepita as a dancer but only as a mimic, which, so far as I know, she never was. The subtlety of this differentiation escapes me. Why is it more honourable to be a mimic than a dancer? It is a question which I should dearly like to have out with my great-grandmother Catalina, but she unfortunately has been dead for over sixty years.

  On the other hand, she was quite prepared to be outspoken on the subject of Pepita’s lovers. She never denied that Pepita was ‘under the protection’ of some rich foreigner. Indeed, she seemed proud of this fact which, by her conversation, she spread widely throughout Albolote. Pepita lived, said Catalina, in a palace at Heidelberg. Lopez also would boast about her, saying that she earned quantities of money and was ‘very intimate’ with a foreign prince. The only point where Catalina varied her story was in the identity of the rich foreigner. Sometimes he was merely and anonymously a prince; sometimes the Prince of Metternich; sometimes the Prince of Bavaria; sometimes, on very grand occasions, the Emperor of Germany himself. That there was no such person as an Emperor of Germany in 1855 made no difference to Catalina: she had merely invented him some fifteen years before he came into actual existence. To the simple, snobbish, boastful, circus mind of the gypsy turned bourgeoise, nothing but an Emperor could suffice as the protector of her dazzling child. She created the German Empire prophetically to suit her story. It seems strange that in spite of the very close contact she maintained with Pepita during these years, she should never have known the real truth. Perhaps the truth, as such, made no appeal to Catalina; perhaps, temperamentally, she preferred the Imperial fiction. She would drive into Granada to send telegrams to Pepita in Germany. Her groom reported that she ‘used to go into the Telegraph Office to send the telegrams and when she came out she would tell Lopez that they had cost so many dollars. “Manuel,” she would say, “the telegram has cost me eight dollars.” Whenever a letter arrived from Pepita, Catalina would stop dinner or whatever we were doing in order to read it. The letter used to be passed round and Catalina would say, “Look, here is a letter from Pepita”.’ Yet in spite of this extravagantly sustained relationship she seems to have had no inkling at all as to what was really shaping Pepita’s life.

  IV

  She knew nothing of the young English attaché at Stuttgart. Lionel Sackville-West, the fifth son of the fifth Earl de la Warr, (a title which, according to the Spanish press later on, had been created by Queen Isabel Tudor), had become an assistant précis-writer to Lord Aberdeen at the age of eighteen, and at the age of twenty had entered the English Foreign Office. It seemed the prescribed career for the younger son of good family, who had then no prospect at all of succeeding to the family inheritance. Appointments followed in due course: Attaché, unpaid, Lisbon, 1847; Attaché, unpaid, Naples, 1848; Attaché, paid, Stuttgart, 1852.

  What could Catalina know of such a young man? Even had she remembered the embraces of the Duke of Osuna, she could scarcely have associated them with the upbringing of a young English aristocrat. The Duke of Osuna at any rate, was her own countryman; spoke her own language; understood, however remotely, the shape of her mind. She shared the landscape of Spain with him; knew more than he did about his own peasants, and could follow what he meant when he talked about the year’s vintage or olive-crop. But with the young English aristocrat-diplomat she could have had nothing in common. She knew nothing of the English house where he was born, or of the deer flicking their tails beneath the beeches in his English park. She could know nothing of his traditions or his codes.

  Pepita, very wisely, kept Lionel Sackville-West as a secret to herself. She was quite willing and ready to pay for everything at Albolote, the house, the furniture, the horses, and the clothes. She was quite willing to let her mother believe in the Prince of Metternich, the Prince of Bavaria, and the Emperor of Germany. Indeed, she personally and lavishly perpetuated these legends. But of the true lover she said not a word.

  Yet by the time that Catalina settled in Albolote, she had known him for three years. It was in the autumn of 1852 that Lionel Sackville-West had travelled from Stuttgart to meet his parents and his younger brother William Edward in Paris. Eluding their parents one evening, the two young men went together to the theatre, and Lionel pointed out a woman sitting on the opposite side of the house. He told his brother that this was the dancer Pepita Oliva; he knew her only by sight, he said, but hoped to be introduced to her shortly. He was then twenty-five and she was twenty-two. The rest of the story can be told practically in his own words.

  She was living at the Hôtel de Bade, situated in one of the streets leading into the Boulevard des Italiens. He was under the impression that it was a perfectly respectable hotel. His friend Sir Frederick Arthur took him there to introduce him, ‘not as a fast woman, but as an artiste and a lady and a danseuse. He (that is Sir Frederick) said, “This is a famous Spanish danseuse who is going to dance in Germany”. We treated her with respect and propriety. For aught I know she was at that time living a perfectly respectable life.’

  Then comes the simple statement: ‘I was in love with Pepita’.

  V

  They became lovers at once. The passion which swept over them threw respect and propriety to the winds. His own shyness and hesitations were overcome by Pepita herself, for he tells us that ‘she first suggested this condition of things to me; I seriously say this’, but adds with engaging naïveté, ‘I visited her with the intention of its leading up to that object, though the actual fact came about at her solicitation’. Does it matter very much? They were both young, she was intoxicatingly beautiful, he had only a week to spend in Paris, and they spent every night of it together. Pepita was absolutely honest with him from the first. She told him all about her unfortunate marriage and that she was separated from Oliva. This worried him—‘I thought it was a wrong thing to have the liaison with her’—but in spite of his scruples he was already too deeply in love to break it off. Before he was obliged to leave Paris and return to duty at the end of the week they had made every arrangement for meeting again in Germany. ‘I told her I would get an engagement for her at the Theatre at Stuttgart. I used my influence and got her an engagement and she came there and danced. S
he fulfilled a number of engagements in Germany and during that time she became famous and made considerable sums of money.’ They were together whenever they could possibly manage it, and with a lack of caution remarkable in a diplomat, he took no trouble to conceal the fact. ‘I cannot tell you whether it was known in the hotels that I was passing the night with her; there was no secrecy about it whatever. I gave my name at the hotels. Our liaison was a secret from her mother and the rest of the family.’

  When they were parted, he wrote her letters beginning ‘Mon ange, bien aimée de mon coeur….’

  VI

  Meanwhile Catalina, in ignorance of all this in distant Albolote, continued to send telegrams and to wish ardently that her daughter would come for a visit, however brief. Pepita, whose money had paid for everything, had never seen the renovations at the Casa Blanca! They had so much to show her. The spotted jaca was waiting for her to ride. The day of her arrival, always hoped for but ever postponed, was the day for which Catalina lived. Catalina must have felt, at moments, that it was a little disheartening to continue boasting about a daughter who never materialised. Yet Catalina could have had no justifiable grievance. Pepita was a good daughter; Pepita had taken her to Paris once; Pepita had now got Lola in Germany with her and was looking after Lola; Pepita sent her earnings home and maintained her family in state. There was nothing to complain of, save only that Pepita failed to come to Spain. And Catalina longed for her to come.

  They had been at Albolote for about a year when Catalina was able triumphantly to announce the imminent arrival of her daughter. Preparations for her welcome were instantly set afoot. The Gonzalez family, who by now were so intimate with Catalina and Lopez that they were to be found almost every day running in and out of the Casa Blanca, started the idea of ‘receiving her with some splendour’ and busied themselves with enlisting the help of the greater part of the village, including the Alcalde and the members of the Ayuntamiento (Town Council). It was decided that this tremendous event could best be celebrated with the assistance of a brass band, but as Albolote itself boasted of no band a message was sent to the neighbouring village of Atarfe, requesting the loan of theirs. The band of Atarfe was only too pleased to oblige. Events such as this were rare in the dusty, sun-baked little southern villages lying in the rich vega of Granada within sight of the eternal snows of the Sierra Nevada. Not only were they all inquisitive to see this Star of Andalusia who by her sobriquet carried the honour of their own province abroad, but the legend of her wealth was widespread and Catalina was both popular and generous. The local carpenter remembered ‘the general satisfaction and joy expressed in the village the first time she (Pepita) came, because of the good impression her mother had made there; she gave a deal away in charity, and had got a good name’. For one reason and another, the village flared into excitement.