She held us silent and still for time almost beyond my reckoning, transfixed. Then she finished with savage abruptness, breaking off almost in mid-gesture, leaving the platform without a backward glance, vanishing into the darkness around the side of the house, and disdaining to return to acknowledge the wild applause that marked her departure. There was a magnificent arrogance in her leaving.
‘Will she come back?’
‘No,’ Carlos said, and I knew from his tone that he, the smooth cynic, had been as moved as I, as filled with wonder and sadness. ‘She is La Llama, and she knows she is the best. She is a gypsy, of course. All the great ones have been. She is a queen among her people, and she will never mix with us.’
His voice was almost husky, as if filled with unshed tears. All through the performance he had held my arm, and only then, as he gradually relaxed his grip, I knew how tight and tense it had been. The sudden rush of blood brought a tingling sensation along my arm. Involuntarily I shivered.
‘Come, you are cold.’
‘How could I be, on a night like this?’
‘It is La Llama. She does it to us all.’ Now he placed his arm under my elbow with only the lightest pressure. ‘To us all …’ But listening to the swell of talk that broke from the crowd which flowed up the stairs, I wondered if all of them had been caught in quite the same way, if all of them were fighting that inexplicable lump in the throat, as Carlos was. And then I remembered Maria Luisa’s words. ‘They say his mother was a gypsy …’
We were last up the stairs. At the landing where the two curving arms met, I was aware of a figure, a waiting, almost brooding figure. Don Paulo, wonderfully impressive in evening dress, a ribbon of some order worn across his chest, and the star of the order gleaming in the soft light, was standing there. He seemed a figure of great power; almost, he gave off the same air of authority and arrogance which had belonged to the dancer. We moved up the last few steps towards him.
He bowed. Without thinking, I dropped a half-curtsey, as if it were his due. I felt Carlos’s grip tighten once more on my arm. Carlos inclined his head to his father, and in total silence we passed on.
From that moment, for me, the party was over.
* *
The next day my mother insisted that we go in person to thank Doña Amelia and Don Luis. ‘It is not necessary,’ Maria Luisa said. ‘A note will do …’ But my mother, like half the town, wanted to re-live the party, so we went. Doña Amelia, her nerves frayed, and pleading a headache, had retired, leaving the great salon of the house to her husband, leaving a small host of servants to hand around the teacups. We saw the same faces as the night before, but now they wore the wilted look of those who had danced or played cards or gossiped until dawn. The crowd was so great that it overflowed into other rooms, rooms that at dawn had been heavy with the mingled perfume of the ladies and the pomades of the gentlemen, rooms that had seen a small drift of lost handkerchiefs, and fans carelessly left on chairs, glasses on the mantels, tiny gold-rimmed plates with pieces of cake from which only a polite nibble had been taken, rooms where the gentle strains of the music had been a world removed from the passions La Llama had aroused. Now all these rooms were immaculate, and shaded against the afternoon heat. The passion was gone, spent.
I put my cup down, and pushed open one of the long windows, and the shutters protecting it. I was at the top of the double curve of the staircase. Below, the lake with its fountain glimmered in dull stillness; the swans had sought the shade cast by overhanging trees. All the colour was washed from the garden by the glare, as it had been washed from the visitors by the exertions of the night before.
‘How do you find it, Doña Carlota?’ The tone was gentle, even slightly hesitant, as if he did not wish to intrude.
I turned. By daylight he seemed older; the sunlight harshly carved the downward lines of his face. I was once again struck by how deep-set his eyes were, how intelligent, intent.
‘Beautiful …’ I could not find the bright, easy reply to him. ‘But last night …’
‘Ah, yes. Last night …’ Don Luis came nearer. The hunch of his shoulders seemed more pronounced, as if he also was tired. ‘One should hold the dream of such things.’ He did not try to specify what things. ‘Especially when one is young. Youth makes so many things possible … Will you come in from the sun now? I hate to see that marvellous complexion at risk.’
I took his arm. Together we strolled through the now emptying rooms. As much as with Carlos the night before, in these moments more of the child, and of the girl who had been, gave place to the woman who was to come with such swiftness.
V
I encountered Carlos several times in the next few weeks; he neither avoided me and my mother, nor did he especially seek us out. He brought us glasses of wine as they were served, passed cups of tea, was polite, charming, and slightly distant. He did not come to call at our house. I found myself looking for his face among our visitors, and feeling a sense of disappointment when I did not find it.
‘I heard about him …’ Maria Luisa had started to say when my mother mentioned his absence, and then she had checked herself.
‘What did you hear?’ I demanded.
She kept her eyes on her sewing. ‘I heard Don Paulo was displeased by the attention he paid you at Don Luis’s party. I even heard that he had been ordered to stay away from you. But that …’ She snapped the thread off sharply. ‘That could be only the merest speculation.’
He sat with us, though, for a few minutes one day as we watched the polo at the club on the outskirts of the town. I had never seen it played before, nor seen the swift, sure, tough little ponies which were ideally suited to the sport. ‘It was brought back to England by officers who had served in India in 1871, I think,’ he said. ‘One of the González family, the Marqués de Torresoto, saw it played there, brought some polo sticks back to Jerez in 1872 ‒ and we’ve been playing it ever since.’
‘One needs a lot of ponies to play it,’ my mother observed, as she watched the players changing from one pony to the next, which was held ready. ‘It’s very hard on the legs, isn’t it ‒ all that stopping short from a gallop, and quick turning.’
‘Yes, one needs a lot of ponies. Fortunately my father has an interest in the game, and doesn’t mind providing them for me.’ He laughed without self-consciousness. ‘I could never do it out of my salary. Look, you must excuse me please, Lady Patricia. It’s my turn to play now …’
He was gone, quickly mounted, and the next game began. We watched until it finished. Carlos changed ponies a number of times. He rode cleverly, and had an eye for the ball; because of him, his side won easily. After the match he went off to change, and we didn’t see him again. ‘Awfully hard on the ponies’ legs,’ my mother said again; she wasn’t quite certain she approved of the game.
The weather grew hotter. The days seemed almost unbearable, and the nights airless. I grew bored with the round of small visits, the sound of small talk. ‘You are drooping,’ Maria Luisa said, and prescribed a day at one of the beaches near Puerto de Santa Maria. It seemed a long, tiring way to go when at Clonmara we had had the sea beside us. But we went. It was hardly a success. The breeze and the water were fresh, but the journey both ways was too long and too hot. There was no shade, except what our parasols provided. Sand got into the food. The only one who was enthusiastic was Pepita, for whom I threw sticks into the water until I was sweating and tired. ‘We should have gone to the vineyard house,’ I said. I knew I sounded like a spoiled and sulky child.
‘There will be a little excitement when the harvest comes. There are always a few parties to celebrate … and then there is the corrida ‒ the bull-fight. They say this time they have engaged Antonio Perez, who is one of the greatest matadors ‒’
‘I will not go,’ I said. ‘I can’t bear the thought of bull-fighting.’
‘You will go, even if you don’t watch ‒ or don’t let yourself see,’ Maria Luisa said. ‘Everyone will notice whether or not you att
end. We know what you English say about our bull-fighting ‒ that it is barbaric. But what do you think we think of your fox-hunting?’
‘Foxes have to be killed,’ I snapped at her. ‘And quite often the fox gets away. There’s a sporting chance.’
‘And there’s a sporting chance that the matador will be killed.’
‘But the bull is always killed.’ I stamped off and left her.
The heat hung heavily, and so did the time. I did what I could to fill it. I accompanied Maria Luisa on her visits to the market. Andy went with us to carry the baskets of food we bought. Maria Luisa was a keen shopper, she welcomed my presence because it gave me practice in Spanish, and sharpened my sense of money, and the feel for a bargain. There was a market quite near the Plaza de Asturias, and so we always walked. Pepita protested at being left behind, but she was too big to manage easily among those crowded stalls, and I was always fearful of her picking up some decayed meat. I knew now that the Plaza de Asturias was in a section of the town that was running down. It was true that there remained some big houses near by, but they were almost all occupied by families whom Maria Luisa said could not afford to move to the big new houses now appearing on the outskirts of the town, houses with large gardens like those of Don Luis and Don Paulo. So I knew now that Don Paulo’s offer to buy the house and perhaps use it as the site of a bodega had been only part of the bribe to buy us out of Jerez altogether. No bodega owner, building anew, would have chosen to build here, so far from his other bodegas, where the access was by narrow street or alleyway. He would have chosen the empty land on the south of the town, and reserved space for more bodegas, so that his business, as it expanded, could be run efficiently. Don Paulo, I thought, had offered to buy this house simply to get us out, and perhaps in time it would have become a tenement, where many families lived, and children played and fought in what once had been elegant patios and washing was strung from window to window, as we saw all about us as we walked to and from the market. No, this was no longer a desirable barrio; fashion and money were moving away, and the poor moving in.
I found I was as impatient as Maria Luisa with the siesta time, and quite unable to sleep. I opened the boxes of books my grandfather had bought; they were in English, and smelled of mildew as I handled them. I found myself now more interested in the English poets than I had even been at Clonmara, perhaps because I found the passages my grandfather had marked ‒ most particularly he had seemed to love the descriptions of the English countryside by Wordsworth and Tennyson. There was a much-thumbed edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and I read it for the first time. I felt very close to my grandfather then. Had he too been restless, sleepless, homesick under this alien sun? My curiosity was roused by a book on clocks ‒ I couldn’t remember that clocks had been of particular interest to my grandfather, but I had heard someone say that Don Paulo had a particularly fine collection of clocks, and I wondered if perhaps the book had been a gift from him in the days when my grandfather had been a welcome investor in the firm of Fernandez. So I whiled away some of the dead hours of the afternoons by studying the illustrations. There were hanging clocks, lantern clocks, bracket clocks, long clocks, mantel clocks, clocks with plain faces and clocks with beautiful faces. They came in as many shapes and varieties as people. They began to amuse and fascinate me, and they ticked off, in my mind, the long hours of the Spanish afternoons, ticked off the listless hours of my growing boredom, ticked off the hours of my mounting frustration.
* *
Tick-tock, tick-tock. I sometimes heard myself say that as I walked the corridors of the big house at night to the beat of an imaginary clock. The heat grew worse, and sleep seemed to have deserted me; I lay awake, and thought too much of Richard Blodmore. And then I walked to try to escape the thoughts. Always Pepita walked with me, puzzled by these nocturnal wanderings but happy to accompany me. Sometimes I went and sat outside in one of the patios, where there was the illusion, if not the reality of coolness. I had learned to hope there would be no rain in these last weeks before the harvest because rain at that time might mean disaster. But yet as I turned my face upward to the unyieldingly bright sky, I thought longingly of the ‘softness’ which was what the Irish so often called our misty rain. Sometimes at night I went and visited the horses. Andy always left the half-doors of the boxes open so that they might have more air, and they turned in their stalls to greet me. For these private, secret visits I saved the sugar I kept for them, not neglecting the two very ordinary carriage horses, which, as Andy had predicted, had responded to good feeding and regular grooming, and, while they would never cause a head to turn, especially here in Jerez, at least they no longer totally shamed us. They were docile, placid creatures, who enjoyed their sugar treats all the more because they had never had them before. But always the first, the biggest helping, went to Balthasar; it was his right, his due. He turned his beautiful white head to me, looking with the dark eyes that seemed unnaturally intelligent and knowing, and a ripple of recognition and anticipation seemed to run through the big frame. He took my offering of sugar like a king a gift of state, and then I was permitted to move to the next box, where Half Moon waited her turn. I talked to them quietly in the dimness, talked to them of anything that came to mind, but what came to mind most was the memory of that first day on the strand at Clonmara. ‘Do you remember how it was?’ I whispered. ‘Do you remember how we raced? ‒ the sound of the sea? Do you remember …?’
And so some of the lines I had learned from my grandfather’s books of poetry came back, and I whispered to Balthasar and Half Moon of how the Ancient Mariner saw his homeland again.
‘Oh dream of joy! is this indeed
The lighthouse top I see?
Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own countree?’
I would go back to my bed and sleep fitfully, and wake unrefreshed as the bells of the angelus began their clamour across the town.
* *
Then came the night when I discovered that I was not the only one who came to feed sugar to Balthasar, who talked to him in soft, low tones. The moon was brilliant, and it was sliding towards the horizon and towards dawn; the stables cast their own thick black shadow, and for a moment I did not see the figure beside Balthasar’s box. I had frozen in an instant’s fear as I saw that both halves of the door were open. Balthasar was gone? ‒ no, the great white figure was there, standing quietly, as if mesmerised. I heard the low words, the Spanish words I could not understand. And then from the shadow of the box the figure of a man emerged. He gave a final, lingering caress along Balthasar’s neck, and prepared to close the bottom half of the door. ‘Andy?’ It was not Andy.
‘Carlota!’
Carlos. As I had never seen him before. Gone were the slightly dandified clothes. He wore plain black trousers, and an open-necked white shirt. He could have been the gypsy they said his mother was; his hair was tousled and curling; not his eyes nor his lips were smiling. There was a streak of melancholy in him I had never suspected before.
‘What …?’
‘What am I doing here?’ he said to me. ‘I come quite often to visit Balthasar. I like to come alone, when others are not about to observe and report.’
‘But how? ‒ the gates are always closed.’
He shrugged, and for the first time smiled. ‘Do you think such a little thing could keep me out? The front doors are closed to be sure, but in an old place like this what is truly secure? I know at least three ways I can get in here ‒ shutters which are not quite secure, the gate in the stable wall there ‒ and there’s always the way by the jacaranda tree …’ He pointed to the old tree whose boughs overhung the high wall.
‘But why?’
‘Because Balthasar was once my horse. The finest horse in Jerez. A gift from my father. And given ‒ no taken from me by my father to pay a debt to Richard Blodmore. Exchanged at the chess table because my father lost to Blodmore. If Blodmore had lost, the forfeit was to have been the finest Iri
sh hunter in Blodmore’s stables. I think my father actually would have liked to have had the horse that killed your grandfather, but we heard that he also was killed. So my father took from me the best thing I ever owned, and gave it to Blodmore. One of the few creatures I have truly loved … as I might have loved Elena, who was also given to Blodmore.’
My heart was twisting with misery. ‘I don’t think Richard knew Balthasar was yours, Carlos. He wouldn’t …’
He shrugged. ‘He may have known. He may not. It makes no difference. It is the sort of thing my father does ‒ the sort of gesture he makes. The way he gave you Pepita. I had given him Pepita. A gift he throws away. As it was with Elena. At one time there was the thought ‒ the possibility, that Elena would be my wife. Not that we loved each other. We had hardly met. But still … My father would have liked the marriage. I would have liked the marriage. Then the Marquesa de Pontevedra, my father’s wife, appeared in Jerez, and Richard Blodmore was bidden to come. Then he and Elena were married. I heard my father make no protests. Elena was handed over, as Balthasar was, as Pepita was … That is the way my father is. If it would serve his purpose, or the purpose of the woman he is married to …’
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 16
