Pepita

by Vita Sackville-West

  ‘We were from six to eight days travelling by diligence from Madrid to the French frontier. We stopped at certain spots to rest, sometimes by day and sometimes by night. From the French frontier we went by railway first to Paris. We stayed there from twelve to fourteen days. The weather was intensely cold. Pepita stopped there to enable me to see all Paris. She accompanied me in all my excursions.

  ‘From Paris we went by a continuous journey with many changes of carriages to Munich. At Munich we stayed at a very fine house, which I think must have been her own. There were four or five servants besides a watchman and footman. She had her carriage and four magnificent horses.

  ‘Pepita performed in the Teatro del Príncipe in Munich every night during the whole time. I used to go with her to the theatre and remain there whilst she was there and return home with her. Almost always the Prince of Bavaria was there. On various occasions when we were passing the play-bills, which were in German, she called my attention to them and said to me, “Look here, see what that says”, and, pointing to one part of it, said the translation of it was, La Estrella de Andalusia.

  ‘She made various calls at times and received many. The calls she made were generally on people of Granada extraction, such as the Count and Countess of Miravilla and the family of General Gavarri. The visitors to her house all appeared distinguished, and were often gentlemen alone. The Prince of Bavaria called several times, often at night time.

  ‘I recollect seeing many letters from time to time from Spain for Pepita.

  ‘From Munich we went direct to Heidelberg. We there stayed at an hotel. I do not recollect the name of it. She danced at a theatre there. I do not remember the name. It was, of course, a German name and strange to me. I accompanied her always to and from the theatre in Munich. She again called my attention to the posters in the same way as in Munich. She was much applauded and received many bouquets there, but not so much as at Munich.’

  It is a pity to have to destroy the entrancing story of his travels which Juan de Dios invented and perhaps believed himself, but unfortunately some of his contemporaries and fellow-villagers testified contemptuously that to their certain knowledge he had remained at Albolote all the time. Pedro Quesada remarked with justice that a boy of that age could not have left the village without everybody knowing it and asking where he had gone. But it is the Coadjutor who tells us what really became of Juan de Dios, a story quite as dramatic as any which that flighty mind could compose.

  ‘I lived next door to Manuel Gonzalez in Albolote. About the 12th or 13th of June, on the Eve of San Antonio, whilst sitting in my house, I heard a shot, and on going immediately into the house of Gonzalez, I saw his wife lying dead upon the landing and his son Juan de Dios standing on the stairs with his arms folded. He was arrested a few minutes afterwards.’

  4

  The House of the Royal Peacocks

  I

  Catalina and Lopez, however, were no longer living in Albolote when Juan de Dios got himself into this trouble. They had already acquired the new house which Pepita had agreed to buy. Pepita had gone away, vaguely authorising them to hold a sale at Albolote and to transfer themselves elsewhere. Pepita, for all her jewellery and the ‘treasures’ she had shown to the visitors at the Casa Blanca, was always singularly casual about her personal property. Very shortly after her departure, Catalina held a sale of all the effects she did not wish to remove. Such dealings were no novelty to Catalina, for her friends well knew that she was ‘fond of buying furniture and other things, which she speedily tired of and re-sold by auction in order to buy something else’; besides, it is on record that she had sold off most of her effects before leaving Malaga. A volatile nature in some ways, though anything but shallow in others, she loved excitement in any form, whether it came in the shape of quarrels with Lopez and the servants, or in the fascinating occupation of changing and renovating houses. On this occasion she was quite in her element, directing everything and keeping Lopez strictly in his place. ‘During the sale Don Manuel, as he was called, would attempt to intervene in the bargaining and the lady would stop him and say, “Not you, Manuel, I will attend to that. You don’t know how to manage these things”.’ It is easy to see the reason for her severity, for the witness adds, ‘She drove a hard bargain, but he was more indulgent’. 68

  Fortunately for us a certain widow Pinel has left a realistic account of how such sales were conducted. The Señora Pinel, by no means a widow then, was living in Granada at the time, in the Plaza del Matadoro, and although it was not very long before the birth of her first child her curiosity was such that she could not resist going out to Albolote several times with her husband, when she heard that there was a sale in progress at the Casa Blanca. She had not seen any public announcement of the sale, but had heard it spoken of on every side. This was not surprising, for although such sales in private houses were sometimes advertised, it was possible to save money if the people had a sufficiently large circle of friends and could make the thing known merely by talking about it. The arrangements were all somewhat elastic, nor was there any fixed duration for the sale: it just began on a certain day and went on from day to day until everything was sold that could be sold.

  Señora Pinel could go out to Albolote only in the evening, after the office hours of her husband, who was then a clerk in the Administration Department in Granada. The first time they went, there were only two or three other intending purchasers in the house. Señora Pinel, who had several times seen Pepita driving in Granada, in ‘a magnificent open carriage drawn by either two or four horses’, was much interested. She and her husband were shown into a large room containing all the articles which were for sale, and there they found a lady who introduced herself as Pepita’s mother. In the course of conversation she informed them that she was having the sale because her daughter had gone away; she only referred to her as Pepita, evidently judging that no further explanation was necessary. Whenever the Pinels returned to the sale, which was on three or four occasions, they always saw the same lady presiding. Of an auctioneer there is no mention at all, and it appears that their transactions were all conducted with Catalina in person. We know exactly what they bought of Pepita’s little treasures. There was ‘a cut glass toilet bottle, having the name Pepita de Oliva cut in it; a carved wooden egg-shaped case with a rosary of mother-of-pearl beads; a handsome hair-brush; and some plated forks and spoons with the initials C.O. engraved on them’. When they were buying the forks and spoons, the lady informed them that C.O. were her own initials and stood for Catalina Ortega.

  Señora Pinel kept the toilet bottle, the rosary and its case, and the forks and spoons. The hair-brush she gave away. To whom, she does not say.

  Some of Catalina’s humbler friends were deeply impressed. One of them went to look, though she dared not enter the house. ‘I did not know anyone who bought the things, because they were all magnificent things and were bought only by the rich.’ El Defensor de Granada was impressed too, and later on published an article headed ‘El Lord y la Bailarina’ (The Lord and the Dancer), from which the following is an extract: ‘The dancer had at various times sales when she lived at Albolote, at which sales only the wealthy people of Granada attended, when there were sold pictures of merit, rich jewellery and gorgeous dresses of the latest fashion and without having been worn, as well as lovely shoes of irreproachable make and as to which one does not know whether they exhibited the skill of Don Manuel Lopez or of some expensive shoemaker of Berlin or London.’

  There was also a merchant of Granada, one Enrique Duran y Manella, whose tone in speaking of some of Pepita’s possessions is almost one of reverent awe: ‘I bought a tablecloth with a dark ground and raised cloth colours and designs on it which may well be considered a work of art’. He bought also a glass dish which he admired equally: ‘It is glass of foreign manufacture, not Spanish [his italics], and is very good. It is a dish of the kind placed in the centre of a table. It is of cut-glass with blue fillets and has engraved on it an in
scription which says “Pepita de Oliva”. The letters are cut into the glass and it is not done by machinery. The glass is of the natural colour except that the base and part of the ornamentation are blue. The servants in the house who handed the dish to me at the sale told me that the words on the dish were the name of the dancer. I also bought a small mother-of-pearl jewel stand with gilt ornament, two candlesticks to match, and a gold ring with a dark flat stone.’fn1

  ANOTHER OF PEPITA’S ‘TREASURES’—THE TABLECLOTH

  Señor Enrique Duran y Manella was still in possession of these things in 1896 when his evidence was taken, but with others he had been less lucky. He had, for instance, bought ‘a china figure which represented a dancer in ballet costume with her hair hanging down loose and her arms raised; people said that it represented La Oliva’. He retained this figure in his possession for some years, until it got broken, he did not know how. (Perhaps, like the young man who missed his photograph of Pepita shortly after he had married, Señor Duran y Manella had also acquired a wife.) He ends his evidence on a rather wistful and very human note: ‘I bought other things also, but they have been destroyed by time and children’.

  The Director of the Provincial Hospital, in spite of his disapproval of Catalina and Lopez, was another purchaser to make his way into the large and dusty saleroom. Here he bought an album, about eighteen inches by twelve, containing lithograph portraits of musicians and others, views, and comic coloured pictures. Under some of these pictures she had written the words ‘Souvenir de Frankfurt’, or ‘Brussels, October/55’, or ‘Baden-Baden, August/55’; and sometimes she had written Pepita de Oliva, but sometimes simply Pepita.

  I wonder what has happened to all those objects, apart from the ones that were destroyed by time or children? I have some of them in my possession. I have the album which had been acquired by the Director of the Provincial Hospital and which proves all too clearly that Pepita’s taste was pathetically atrocious; indeed, it fills me with affectionate embarrassment to look through these glaring coloured pictures of little girls playing with kittens or fitting spectacles on to the noses of puppies, nor do I care at all for the caricatures of bathers at Ostend, with their appropriate jokes underneath. Pepita’s taste was naïf; she was a simple, childish soul.

  I have the cut-glass toilet bottle with the name engraved on it, a hideous object which I dearly love, and I have also a fork and spoon with the initials C.O. But where is all the rest of the treasures? They may still be somewhere in the world, and I would give anything to handle them. The only other thing I have of Pepita’s is a little silver pin-tray, with two almost obliterated initials in the middle, under the coronet to which she had no right. My mother gave it to me, and I value it. I value everything which I have been able to rescue that had any connexion with Pepita.

  II

  These details of purchases, too few to satisfy my curiosity, do at least give us some idea of the ‘treasures’ of the Casa Blanca. It is not possible to deduce very much from them, save perhaps that Pepita was fond of recording her own name whenever she could, and that with a certain sentimental expansiveness she liked preserving things which reminded her of various passages in her life,—the portraits of friends, the views of places. As for the comic pictures, I have often enough seen my own mother laughing till she cried over something she thought funny, to imagine very vividly Pepita doing the same. My mother had no sense of humour at all in the English sense of the word, but the rich Latin sense of farce was generously transmitted by her Spanish blood. Over and over again I have seen her standing outside a village shop, unable to control her laughter (and indeed not attempting to control it) before a string of funny postcards dangling in the window. ‘Mais regarde donc!’ she would say to me, ‘mais regarde donc, je t’en prie. Peut-on? Ah non, franchement, peut-on?’ and she would go off again into convulsions of laughter, heedless of the astonishment of the village children. Like Pepita, too, she delighted in cutting things out of newspapers and sticking them into albums; and like Pepita she liked dating and signing everything. How clearly I can see Pepita coming out in her!

  And Catalina too. Generous soul that Catalina was, she liked acquiring money as much as she liked spending it on herself and others. My mother was like that too, and although she might have given away a hundred pounds today (but more often it ran into thousands), she would still feel that she was to the good if the post brought her an unexpected postal-order for ten-and-six next morning. I can thus quite well imagine that a protracted sale at Albolote furnished Catalina with a daily store of satisfaction; and can see her after the last buyers have gone, sitting down to add up the duros and maravedis she had managed to collect during the day. It was not so much greed that inspired her, as a purely childish pleasure in the game. I am sure that it gratified her to dispense with the services of an auctioneer, not only on account of the economy thus effected, but on account of the fun she got out of the personal bargaining. It is clear enough from the all-too brief recital of Señora Pinel that the personal element was very prominently introduced: in strictly businesslike transactions it was not really necessary to inform the customer that Pepita had gone away, nor that the initials on the forks and spoons were the vendor’s own. But such things, to Catalina’s mind, made everything much pleasanter and more amicable; they sent a little warm blood through the dry veins of business; perhaps also, they sent up the price…. My mother would have felt exactly the same. Of course, in her case, she would have exerted such charm that anybody would have given her the last penny out of his pocket, and gone away, slightly bewildered, to discover only next day that he had spent more than he meant. I doubt whether Catalina had it in her to exert an equal charm, but I do at least believe that she flung herself into the game with equal zest.

  Life in the denuded Casa Blanca must have been very uncomfortable during that period of transition, for Catalina had sold the dining-room table on condition that one leaf was not to be delivered until after they had left, and in the meantime they ate their meals off that solitary leaf balanced on packing-cases.

  III

  Of course Catalina did not put all her goods into the Albolote sale. Far from it. She had the new house to consider, and when the excitement of the sale was over, the excitement of moving into the new house took its place to occupy her mind. This new house was not in a mere village, but was a real country property, with labourers and vineyards of its own. It lay on the road between Granada and Jaen (Camino de Jaen), and was officially known as Buena Vista, but sometimes also as the Caseria de los Pavos Reales (the House of the Royal Peacocks), and, after Pepita had bought it, as the Caseria de la Bailarina (the House of the Dancer). Both very pretty names, but for the sake of brevity I shall refer to it by its original name of Buena Vista.

  It was quite a big property, really a homestead or farm, about nineteen fanegas in all. There was a garden, a kitchen garden, some pasture and arable land, and two vineyards, one of them about one hundred yards from the house, the other a little further off, beyond a narrow strip of rough ground. The labourers used a side entrance of their own, but the family had a big important entrance gateway, which they built themselves and over which they presently put the date 1858. There was a fountain in the patio, surmounted by a bronze figure of Pepita dancing El Ole. Internal evidence leads me to suppose that there was also a large population of peacocks. Altogether the family might consider itself worthily housed.

  Lopez became more and more genteel. He took to using fancy writing-paper, and to enclosing addressed envelopes to his friends for their replies, of so diminutive a size as to be useless. Manuel Gonzalez, annoyed by this new trick, showed two of these envelopes to his son, saying, ‘How is it possible to send papers or letters in such small envelopes?’ So whenever he wrote to Lopez, he used his own envelopes and kept the others. Why he kept them I don’t know; perhaps it was in order to make fun of Lopez behind his back.

  The property was, of course, a Paradise for Lopez. He could indulge his taste for shooting
‘such things as rabbits, or any small birds he could see, dressed anyhow, though when out with the carriage he dressed luxuriously’. The note of contempt and even dislike is unmistakable in any mention of Lopez; the witness I have just quoted was Water Guard at Buena Vista. He could also indulge his taste for lording it over men who by birth were his equals, but whose superior he had become owing to circumstances,—the same circumstances as allowed Pepita to take foreign villas and engage the most splendid apartment of the Hotel Peninsular. According to these men he spent nearly all his time interfering with them at their work among the vines,—‘Don Manuel, who was said to be the husband of Catalina’. Domingo Martirez did not think much of Don Manuel, though he admitted that his own term of employment at Buena Vista was irregular, and thus gave him little opportunity for judging, merely a week’s digging round the roots of the vines in January, then a second digging in May, and another fortnight in October for the vintage, about the same thing every year for three or four years. Fortunately for Manuel Lopez, he could go shooting his rabbits and little birds, and give his orders to his subordinates in 1856, without any anticipation of what those subordinates would say about him in 1896, when their evidence was taken.

  For Catalina also the new property was a Paradise. It is easy to see that she was a house-proud woman, with an insatiable taste for display and also for the fussiness which accompanies the type. Have we not, indeed, expressly been told that she was ‘much given to alterations and reformation’? a trait which reappears later most faithfully in both her daughter and her grand-daughter. At Albolote, thanks to Pepita’s generosity, she had been able to indulge this taste to a great extent, but now at Buena Vista she was able to indulge it still more. And she did. She had had all the amusement and excitement of the sale, but that was nothing to the excitement and amusement which lay before her now. No sooner had they transferred themselves from the Casa Blanca at Albolote than she started taking the house itself to pieces for the purpose of removing everything removable to Buena Vista. By the time she had finished with it, there was very little left but the shell of the Casa Blanca. She took the doors, the balconies, the marble fireplaces, the grates, the sinks, the iron gates, the windows, and the ornamental iron bars (rejas) from before the windows, in fact she ‘stripped and gutted the house of everything that was useful. After this they ceased to make any use of the Albolote house.’ I don’t wonder.