The Summer of the Spanish Woman

by Catherine Gaskin

  I reacted to the vineyard house with a passion that surprised me. It sat there, on the top of a rise, the gentle swell of the land undulating about it, looking to other rises above other vineyards also crowned with their own white houses, against which the purple bougainvillaea flamed. I held Half Moon quiet for some minutes while the others rattled into the courtyard. A light breeze fanned the sweat on my forehead and neck, and pushed tiny, puffy clouds before it, so that the shadows ran across the vines, light and dark, dark and light, like the ripples on a pond. A stab of homesickness swept through me. I rode Half Moon into the courtyard and dismounted without help from Andy.

  A smiling youngish woman, the second wife of Antonio, cousin to Paco, showed us through the house. Her name was Conceptión; she was dark-eyed and had once been beautiful. The child she carried on her hip, and the young ones about her skirts had wearied her beyond her years. But she was proud of the simple things she did to keep the vineyard house presentable. The tiled floors were polished, the whitewashed rooms were clean. There were a few pieces of lovely, simple dark oak furniture, also polished. Great sweeping chimney breasts gave the rooms character. There was a marvellous simplicity in that place ‒ bare, austere, with clean, uncluttered lines. It was the first time I had been aware of beauty of quite that character; it was the first time I was aware of something which was, at its heart, truly Spanish. A feeling of love for the place swept over me, and the wave of homesickness receded.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I breathed to Maria Luisa. ‘I should like to live here.’

  For the first time she stared at me completely without understanding. ‘You are mad,’ she said quite simply. ‘I have told you no one lives in their vineyard house. Only if you are very poor, and then you don’t count. It is a plaything ‒ a place for short visits, for picnics. You would have no company here … no society.’

  ‘I wouldn’t care,’ I muttered, and went on to walk the dim shaded rooms, to re-emerge into the aching glare of the courtyard with its stone-faced well and row upon row of clay pots brilliant with scarlet geraniums. The children played here, and they trooped about me as I went once again to the great arch and looked out over the vineyards. It was easy to see where the land my grandfather had bought began and ended. On each side the demarcation line was plain. His land was overgrown with scrubby brush. If any vines still existed, they bore no fruit. Small patches about the house had been cleared, and Antonio farmed crops of corn, alfalfa, beet ‒ there were rows of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers; chickens scratched the stony ground; goats were tethered to browse what they could from the brush; there was a lean pig in a pen. But beyond, where the land was tended, there was orderly beauty. The long straight lines of vines were trained on their low trellises, the ground between them hoed and clean of weeds. I stared at it a long time, and then put my hand down and gathered some of the soil that nourished this pale grape from which the wine was sprung. It was strangely greyish-white in colour, this albariza, and seemed full of small, sharp stones ‒ curious soil from which to gather such a harvest. I think it was at this moment that I was first aware of the desire to see this ground cleared, to see the straggling brush give way to the ordered vines, to see the pale grape grown on this, our own land. It was madness. I let the soil dribble back from my hand to where it had come from, and shrugged. The children, who had been silent, watching me intently as I had scrutinised what was their home and their only horizon, began to laugh softly, from shyness. We could exchange few words, but dark eyes looked into mine, and smiled. I smiled back and went to join the others for lunch.

  A snowy darned cloth was spread on the table in the big main room, and clay bowls of the delicious cold soup they called gazpacho were ready. Hard-boiled eggs were set on coarse platters decorated with grape leaves; dishes of olives were at hand, a board of manchego cheese, and slices of hard, dark ham. It was Conceptión’s contribution to our ‘picnic’. She showed me a bedroom, windows hung with plain white cloth and a bedspread of yellowing lace, where I could wash my hands. The towels were coarse, and so was the soap. She looked at me anxiously. ‘Thank you ‒ you are very kind.’ I was trying out my Spanish, and she beamed in appreciation.

  We had a full, leisurely lunch, Nanny grumbling gently, continuously, in the background. By now Andy was perfectly at home in a Spanish kitchen. He knew enough words to make sure he wanted for nothing. My mother liked it here, I thought. She seemed gently contented to eat quietly and drink her wine, saying little. A drowsiness stole over us. Conceptión came to clear away the dishes, and through Maria Luisa indicated that there were beds enough if we wished to take a siesta. We did.

  A bluish dusk was creeping over the landscape as we rode back to Jerez ‒ there was the first hint of dew in the air, the nightly, soaking dew that the grapes needed. I felt a pang of regret as we descended along the track, my grandfather’s ragged acres on one side, the rows of vines, patiently tended on the other, until we reached the road that led back to Jerez. Conceptión and Antonio had stood to bid us good-bye, their children gathered about them. ‘Go with God,’ they called. Now all I could discern of the house I loved was a vague shape against the skyline, the faint glow of an oil lamp. Pepita had been put in the landau, and now my mother urged Balthasar forward, urged Andy to a quicker pace; for her the somnolent pleasure of the day of the picnic was over. She hastened towards the lights of the town, and wondered aloud if we would have visitors that evening. I sighed, and no one heard.

  IV

  We may have brushed Don Paulo’s path many times, but we never saw him. He did not visit our house again, and we were not invited to his. ‘Las Fuentes it is called,’ Maria Luisa said. ‘Now there is a palace for you. It is furnished with fine pictures and statues. Everything is velvet and silk, silver and crystal. His stables are the equal of another man’s mansion. I wish he would call again, and then we might visit him, but few people go there without invitation. He is available at the bodega, as he always says, but it is a privilege one does not lightly take. His three sons live with him. They say they fight like a bag of cats for their father’s favour. I wonder how long it is now since the Marquesa de Pontevedra visited? … When she comes to Andalucia she nearly always stays at her palacio at Sanlucar, or goes to her castle at Arcos. It seems her husband’s home is hardly good enough for her …’ We grew accustomed to that lively mind of Maria Luisa’s filling us in on the details of life in Jerez. She had a natural affinity for gossip, but was generally able to sift fact from rumour. We sipped our copitas and listened, while everyone and everything was dissected; we were entertained, sometimes spellbound.

  ‘If you had been born in England, Maria Luisa,’ my mother said, ‘I believe you would have been a writer ‒ a lady novelist.’

  ‘If I had been born in England ‒ if I had been born a man ‒ I would have been Prime Minister!’

  She almost persuaded me it was the truth.

  Sometimes in the salons of acquaintances we came across Carlos. He was deliciously charming, smiling, flattering both my mother and myself with the same words. I thought his gaze flicked over me with more than a little interest, but it might merely have been the new clothes. He introduced us to his two half-brothers, Pedro and Ignacio. They were all markedly different, Pedro having something of his father’s broad, impressive build; Ignacio was lean and dark of face, with clever, intense eyes. ‘Ignacio is the accountant of the family,’ Carlos said disparagingly. ‘He knows how to keep his nose in the company books.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  He laughed. ‘It is far more important to keep in my father’s good graces. Other people can keep the books.’

  ‘And Pedro? ‒ what does he do to keep your father’s favour?’

  ‘My brother Pedro cultivates his nose!’ He laughed at the expression on my face. ‘I mean he spends his days in the Cuartode Muestras ‒ the Sample Room. That’s where we keep samples of all wines we export or sell in Spain. So when a customer writes and says he wants so many butts of such and such, wh
ich he may want to bottle under his own label, we know exactly what we must send him. It’s also the place where we sample the musts and fix the price to be paid to the vineyard owner, and where we decide what category a wine belongs in ‒ and keep sampling it to see how it develops. My father has the most famous “nose” for sherry in all Jerez. At least no one disputes that claim to his face. It is Pedro’s ambition to please him by being a “nose”. Myself ‒ I think “noses” are born, not made.’

  ‘And have you a “nose”?’

  He laughed with charming arrogance. ‘Dear Carlota, I have everything. At least I make my father think I have everything. That’s what’s important. The truth may be something different. It’s what one can make other people believe that’s important. But yes ‒ I have a “nose”. We all spend our apprenticeship in the Cuarto de Muestras.’

  It was a rather frightening cynicism in so young a man; once I would have turned away from him in scorn, but now I didn’t do that. He had, in a sense, reached out to me, breaking through my shyness, breaking through his own custom of charm and good manners, to show me a side of him that the circumstances of life had scarred and roughened. Sons of different mothers, brought up away from those mothers, they all fought for the favour of the man who had fathered them. They had been brought up with silk and velvet, and under the whip of that man’s power. For a moment, behind the bragging arrogance, Carlos had betrayed the lack of security that his birth had given him. Illegitimate ‒ bastards, all of them ‒ none was first in the eyes of the law; they must fight to be first in the eyes of their father. And did they also seek, through their father, the favour of that unseen woman, the Marquesa? ‒ childless, and with a huge fortune to bestow? In claiming to have so much, to have ‘everything’ as he had said, Carlos had revealed the poverty of fear and insecurity.

  * *

  Most vividly of those first weeks I remember the dance. Maria Luisa was excited when the invitation came. ‘It is from Luis de Villa Thompson.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You have met him,’ she said impatiently. ‘He is Don Paulo’s partner at Fernandez, Thompson ‒ the one I told you of ‒ the distant cousin of the Marquesa de Pontevedra who was put into the Fernandez bodega to look after her interests. But he has money in his own right, and vineyards that are not the property of Fernandez, Thompson. Oh, well ‒ you will sort it out in time. That is not so important. What is important is that this is the first invitation to a formal gathering. Very important for you. I must see about a dress …’

  ‘Will Don Paulo be there?’

  ‘For a time, I would think ‒ yes. It would be an insult to Don Luis to stay away.’

  So Maria Luisa squeezed out the money for pale green silk, and a dress was made. ‘You should wear your mother’s pearls, but she will want to wear them herself. But then, young girls look best with flowers … You will have to make do.’

  My mother wore emerald silk, an old ball-gown refurbished, and Maria Luisa wore her usual black, but lace this time, to mark the occasion. ‘The same lace dress I’ve had for years. It goes everywhere.’ A relic of her former state was displayed in a black lace fan, with ends inlaid with mother-of-pearl; a little cameo dangled from black ribbon on her neck. ‘One has to make an effort,’ she said, shrugging it off. But there was the faintest flush of excitement in her sallow cheeks as we set off.

  I suppose it was because it would be the first, and, in a way, the last ball for me that I remember it so well ‒ or was it the composite of all the balls I had dreamed of and had never attended, and the ones I would attend in the future, when everything had changed? But I was young, I had a new dress, and I knew I looked well, even beside my mother. I was curiously innocent, and for a few hours I forgot Richard Blodmore.

  Don Luis greeted us. I did remember him then from some other occasion when we had merely exchanged small courtesies. I should have remembered him better. He had the long, thin face one sees in some Spaniards; he was not handsome, but his deep brown eyes were well set, alert and kindly. With this darkness, he had the strange combination of greying hair that had once been gold. There were lines deeper than his age in a sensitive face, but he was no longer young. He was tall, lean, and seemed to have permanently hunched shoulders, one of which appeared higher than the other. He greeted us with an expression of gentle pleasure, and presented us to his wife, a much younger woman, hardly more than a girl, dressed in an over-elaborate dress, and wearing diamonds. She was too thin, and her face was peaked with fatigue. Maria Luisa had said to us on our way to the party, ‘So sad for Luis. This is his second wife, and not a child between the two of them. Of course they say it is the fault of Luis … He is not macho. But no son, and a good deal of money to leave … well, it is a pity. This girl, this Amelia he has married. Not a good choice. She hasn’t the spirit to rouse any man when … when there are difficulties. A whining, miserable little thing I remember her as, even as a child. Always with a cold, or falling over and howling for her Nanny. The Nanny has gone to live with her and Luis. But it will be, I think, a miracle if there is a child for the Nanny to bring up. They say Amelia had taken to going to Mass every morning and lighting candles. May God hear her prayers …’ But she clearly thought the situation beyond God’s interference.

  It was a wonderful party. Every woman looked beautiful to me that night; every man was handsome. The fans waved, the tongues savoured the gossip and the delicious food. The men looked closely at me, and it did not seem rude merely flattering. I was happy because my dance card was filled almost at once. Carlos came to my side and claimed the supper dance.

  ‘Be careful,’ Maria Luisa whispered to me once when I retired to the room where the ladies had left their wraps. ‘Don Paulo is here, and watching.’

  ‘Let him watch. Carlos is a man, and will make his own choice.’

  ‘Carlos is Don Paulo’s son. That is more to the point.’

  What point, I didn’t quite see. It didn’t matter. I was happy. I danced, and laughed, and forgot to be overshadowed by my mother. She also danced every dance, and never once retired to the sidelines where the young matrons thought it proper to be, where the old aunts gossiped. As I swayed in the waltz with this man and that man ‒ not all of them young, but to me that night, all of them clever and distinguished, I knew why my mother would never sit on the sidelines. I did not want to myself, and I vowed I never would. ‘You are very brilliant tonight,’ Carlos said to me. ‘You have opened up ‒ like a flower.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said happily, and meant it. Everything seemed both true and possible that night.

  The garden of Luis’s great house was lighted by lamps in massive wrought-iron stands, and for this evening, by Chinese lanterns strung through the trees. I missed the dance after supper to walk with Carlos along the path to the artificial lake where an ornamental fountain played, the whisper of water welcome on that warm night. ‘The Moors loved the sound of water,’ Carlos said. ‘And we have it wherever we can. Some day you will see ‒ and hear ‒ the gardens of the Alhambra of Granada.’

  Swans, made restless by the unaccustomed activity, the lights, and the sounds from the house, glided like wraiths on the other side of the lake. Along with the white swans, there were mixed some rare black ones. They and their progeny had inhabited the lake so long that the house was known as Los Cisnes ‒ The Swans. They seemed so much a part of their majestic setting. There was no moon; the warm dark blue of the sky made an almost unreal backdrop to that extravagant blaze of stars, as if it also was something arranged especially for that grand party of Don Luis. Carlos kissed me, as I knew he would. I found myself liking it, which was something I had not known before the moment it actually happened. He kissed me in a practised, experienced, and deeply sensual way. With him there was no fumbling, no hasty movement, and I did not pull away from him. In time we drew apart gently, and walked on, without speaking.

  After the circle of the lake we came back to the house. Two great sweeping arms of staircase curved down to the garden. As
we approached, the whole throng of guests began to appear, crowding down the stairs, coming on to the balconies that overlooked them. Behind the opened shutters the chandeliers blazed, but the servants were bringing more lights, a chain of lights to set about a small area of raised platform between the house and the lake. More servants came with tiny gilt chairs, and the guests moved down to take their places in a wide circle about the platform.

  ‘We will stay here,’ Carlos said. ‘La Llama is going to perform. She is the greatest exponent of flamenco in all Spain. She was born quite near here …’

  In an almost desultory fashion a short, slight man mounted the platform. He was dressed in very tight trousers, and an elaborately embroidered jacket; his soft boots seemed to be studded with silver. He carried a guitar, and almost as if it made no difference to him whether or not he was there at all he placed his foot on a stool, and plucked a few languid notes from his instrument. And then, as if she came out of the night itself, the woman appeared. She wore her dark hair pulled back in the classic style, a carnation placed in the low knot at her neck; her dress was flame-coloured, tightly fitted to just above the knees, and falling in a great cascade of frills below that. She was neither young nor old, not particularly beautiful, but she carried an air of immense authority. On the instant of her appearance the chatter among the guests died. In silence she stood on the platform, commanding those all about her. She waited ‒ it seemed an age ‒ before the first smallest movement of her arm; very slowly it rose behind her head, her body arched backward, and then for the first time in my life I heard the dialogue of the castanets with the guitar, knew the subtle, wild, passionate magic of the dancer’s movements, the rap of her satin heels on the bare boards, the interaction between herself, the guitar, the castanets. The rhythms grew wilder, and faster; she had us hypnotised, spellbound. I felt again that wonderful surrender to something strange but yet familiar that I had known at the vineyard house. I felt tears prick my eyelids as a weird, oddly mournful and harsh sound broke from her lips. I felt I came close to the soul of this land in the form of this woman in the dress of flame.