A week later, she packed her bag. A crisp new flamenco dress spilled out. Antonio had given her some money to buy it.
‘I think you’ll need a spare,’ he had said, kissing her on the forehead.
Mercedes and her father travelled on a bus to Málaga. They were to be away for three days. It was the furthest distance she had ever travelled, the longest time she had ever been alone with her father, and the first time she had danced away from her home city. Even without the prospect of seeing Javier, everything about this trip to the bustling friendly city of Málaga was an adventure. They rented a room close to where Javier lived and on the first morning he collected them for a rehearsal, which was to be in the back room of the café where they were to perform that night.
Pablo was amazed by the transformation in his daughter’s dancing. He sat, mesmerised, as they went through their repertoire of tangos, fandangos, alegrías and soleares. This was a different Mercedes from the one he had seen dancing at a fiesta only a few months before. The little girl had become a young woman.
They were on a stage set up in the café and the audience was receptive. Javier was familiar to them, as was his father, Raul, who played at the beginning of the evening.
Mercedes was more nervous than she had even been in Granada. Everything was so unfamiliar and she was sure the audience would not like her, but the performance went as well as the rehearsal. No one failed to appreciate the grace and energy of her dancing, the fineness of her hand movements, the love, the fear and the fury that she expressed through them all.
Neither of them could stop smiling, an expression that was so at odds with the mood of much of the music and dancing. They could not stop themselves. Mercedes felt euphoric and, when she saw the pride on her father’s face, was unafraid to show it.
At the end of the evening, a photographer wanted to take pictures of them, together and separately. The following morning when Javier came to meet Mercedes, he had a set of portraits for her.
‘You can show them to your mother,’ he said. ‘You look beautiful in them!’
‘But there isn’t one of you!’ she protested. ‘I want a photograph of you!’
‘I’m sure your mother doesn’t!’ he teased.
‘It isn’t for my mother,’ she said.
‘I’ll swap you a photograph,’ he said. ‘I want one of you as well.’
In every photograph, the subjects beamed almost from ear to ear.
The second night’s performance was in Málaga’s movie theatre. It was a much bigger room than the café and the stage was higher. As she waited in the wings behind some thick red curtains, Mercedes’ anxiety almost got the better of her.
Javier took her hand gently and lifted it to his lips.
‘You will be fine, my sweet, you will be fine. Don’t worry.They will love you.’
His tender concern gave her courage. After only a minute or so on stage, she heard a murmured ‘Olé’ and knew that the audience was with her. There was no play-acting of emotion in her dancing. In her mind, she merely recreated the anguish of separation from Javier, and the passion she required to dance poured out of her.
It was another magnificent performance. The local paper described it as a ‘triumph’ and their photographs appeared on the front page.
Pablo was persuaded to travel with his daughter on some future engagements and Mercedes’ career and reputation grew. As did her devotion to the guitarrista. Their love was absolutely mutual, as equal as their limelight on the shared stage. When they were apart, both of them meticulously counted the days until they would be reunited.
Emilio tried to hide his sense of rejection. He stayed at home playing his guitar much less now that he did not have his sister’s encouragement. When he was not working, he did not want to hang around in El Barril, especially when Ignacio was about.
A favourite haunt of his was the Café Alameda in the Plaza Campillo, a place much frequented by artists, writers and musicians. Without ever having the nerve to join his table, Emilio and his friend Alejandro would sit on the periphery of Lorca’s circle, a coterie known as ‘El Rinconcillo’, simply because it usually occupied the ‘corner’ of the room.
Lorca was a regular visitor to Granada. He spent as much time as he could with his family on the outskirts of the city and his arrival there was considered significant enough to be mentioned in the local papers. Drawn there by the anguish and mystery of Andalucian culture, Lorca embraced flamenco as an embodiment of everything the region stood for. He had friends who were flamenco dancers and gitano companions who were guitarists and taught him to strum in the gypsy style. For Lorca this place felt like home, and the way in which people lived there inspired his work.
Emilio’s admiration of Lorca was little short of hero worship. He was happy to be in the shadow of his shadow, and on the occasions when Lorca cast a dazzling smile in his direction Emilio felt as though his glowing heart might burn right through his shirt. He loved everything Lorca produced, from his poetry and plays to his music and drawings. But perhaps what he admired above all was his openness about his sexuality.
Perhaps I shall have the same nerve one day, he thought to himself.
Ignacio used his brother’s attachment to the Café Alameda as an excuse to goad him. During the long winter months when Ignacio had no cause to be away in other cities for bullfights, he would spend long nights of drinking with his banderillero friends and return belligerently drunk. With too little to occupy them, some of these boys became indolent in the winter months. Like a few of the others, Ignacio was waiting for his next chance in the bullring.
Emilio would wince when he heard the characteristic slam of the door, long after El Barril itself had closed. If he heard whistling too, it was a bad sign. It was his brother’s way of feigning nonchalance before he made trouble and Ignacio was in the mood to do so on this particular night.
‘How is “El Maricón” today then?’ asked Ignacio, using a derogatory expression to refer to Lorca. In the snide way he phrased the question, he managed to call his brother a ‘poofter’ too, knowing that he would not retaliate.
This taunting of Emilio made Antonio hate Ignacio more than ever.
‘Why don’t you just leave him alone?’ shouted Antonio. His anger was not only for the way he abused his brother. Ignacio’s hatred of homosexuals represented a more general bigotry that was common to many on the right wing of politics. Theirs was a narrow, macho and intolerant vision.
The country’s politics continued to be troubled and Antonio was glad when he heard that there was talk on the left wing of a coalition. The appalling events in Asturias eighteen months earlier had made the left realise they needed political unity to get back into power. They wanted to give themselves a fresh start and put social justice at the top of their agenda to appeal to the average voter. It had been a tense few months in the Ramírez household, not just because of the personality clashes between the brothers, but because of their political differences too.
Elections were held in February of 1936 and, across the country as a whole, the socialists gained the majority of votes. In Granada, things were not so simple.The right-wing party won, but following claims of intimidation and infringements of the law, the results were annulled. Clashes broke out between right-wingers and trade union members, and antagonism between the parties intensified. In Granada churches were gutted, newspaper offices were wrecked and the theatre was destroyed by fire. The way Ignacio reacted, anyone would have thought that Emilio had personally struck the match.
Concha tried to calm the storm that raged in her own household, but the situation both inside their home and in the wider world did not improve. That summer a sequence of events triggered an outbreak of widespread violence. After a police lieutenant was gunned down by four Fascists outside his house in Madrid, the leader of the right-wing monarchist party, Calvo Sotelo, was killed in revenge.A shoot-out followed between police Assault Guards and fascist militia near the cemetery in the capital city where both f
unerals were taking place and four people were killed.The political temperature was high and tensions even higher.
Mercedes was preoccupied with her next flamenco engagement and counting the days until she next saw Javier. Now that she had left school, their performances could have been more frequent, particularly with the number of requests that they received, but Pablo was only prepared to leave El Barril for a few days each month. She had ceased to notice the growing dissent between her brothers and was unaware of the turbulence in the country as a whole. A series of performances was scheduled in Cádiz for July and she was busy mastering some new steps, spending hours each day cocooned with María Rodríguez, enveloped in the warm anticipation of seeing Javier again in a week or so.
Alone in her room Mercedes would gaze at the photograph of her guitarra propped against her bedside lamp. His strong cheekbones and the shock of straight glossy hair, a slim strand of it across one eye, seemed more beautiful to her every time she looked at the picture. The camera lens had captured so well the directness of his gaze, and the power of those smiling eyes reached down into the depths of her.
Meanwhile the rest of her family watched the gathering storm. They had heard the distant rumbles, but none of them had foreseen its scale.
Chapter Fifteen
JULY 17 WAS a typical summer’s day in Granada. The heat was blistering. Shutters were down to keep out heat, light and dust. There was listlessness in the air. No one knew what to do with themselves.
Concha and Mercedes sat outside the café under the shade of the awning.
‘It’s even warmer outside than it is indoors,’ said Señora Ramírez. ‘There’s nothing cooling in that breeze.’
‘It’s just too hot to do anything,’ responded Mercedes. ‘I’m going to lie on my bed.’
As Mercedes rose, her mother noticed that her daughter’s dress was transparent with sweat. She got up too and gathered their glasses onto a tray. There were no customers that afternoon. The square was devoid of life and even the leaves on the trees crackled listlessly in the breeze, so dried out in these oven-hot temperatures that some had already begun to fall.
The city’s siesta was as deep as a coma. Mercedes was almost unconscious until well beyond six o’clock that evening, when the mercury fell for the first time since midday. Even for Granadinos these were soaring temperatures. In a feverish sleep, she had a vivid dream that Javier and she were dancing in the bar downstairs and when she awoke, there was a moment of sadness at realising he was a hundred kilometres away in Málaga.
The next day, customers coming into El Barril each reported a different version of the rumours that military movement was taking place across the water in North Africa. There was some confusion at the time, with one radio broadcast announcing one thing and another contradicting it, but the truth soon became apparent. A group of army generals were rebelling against the government and staging a coup d’état.
Under the leadership of General Francisco Franco, the Army of Africa, comprising foreign legionaries and a fighting force of Moroccan mercenaries, were to be transported across the strait from Spanish Morocco to mainland Spain. Once they had landed, generals in army garrisons across Spain were to stage a rising in their own towns and cities and proclaim a state of war.
Granada melted in forty degrees of heat, cobbles burned through shoe leather and the mountains disappeared in a shimmering haze. That morning, the local paper, El Ideal, had carried an announcement on the front page that they could not bring any general news ‘owing to forces beyond our control’.
In the café, Pablo was agitated. ‘Something’s really wrong, Concha, I know it is,’ he said, pointing to the headline.
‘It’s nothing, Pablo. Probably a strike or something.The government isn’t going to lose control. Don’t worry so much,’ she tried to reassure him, but he was unconvinced.
Pablo’s sense of ill-ease was well founded, as both of them really knew. The government’s claim that on the mainland business was as usual, in spite of a military pronunciamiento in Morocco, did not reassure them.
It seemed at odds with the rumour that a certain General Queipo de Llano had seized command of the garrison in Sevilla and, with only one hundred or so soldiers, had swiftly taken over the city.
‘So how can they tell us that everything is normal?’ Pablo said to anyone listening.
Like those in many other towns, the people of Granada felt vulnerable. They demanded weapons from the government but, to everyone’s concern, the Prime Minister, Casares Quiroga, had forbidden the distribution of arms to the people and was absolutely adamant that what had happened in Sevilla did not affect the rest of the country. He maintained that everywhere else, the army remained loyal to the government.
On a different radio wave, the voice of General Queipo de Llano could be heard shrieking his victorious message. Except for Madrid and Barcelona, he raved, the whole of Spain was now in the hands of Nationalist troops. Neither of these contradictory messages was accurate and they left the people of Spain in total confusion.
In Granada, there was considerable alarm. Rumours were spreading that, in Sevilla, people opposing army rule were being massacred and thousands more were being detained. Suddenly, neighbours who had seemed to support the Republic came out against it. Pablo and Concha could feel it in the café, even on the morning of the eighteenth. Customers did not know whether to trust each other, or even whether to trust Pablo and Concha themselves. The ground had shifted beneath their feet.
The fate of individual towns and cities seemed to depend on whether their army garrison remained loyal to the Republican government. In Granada, a new military commander had arrived in the city only six days earlier. General Campins was staunchly loyal to the Republic and firmly, if naïvely, believed his officers would not rebel and join Franco’s cause. The workers were not so confident, but when they asked to be armed in case the army rebelled, their civil governor, Torres Martínez, followed government instructions and refused to distribute arms to the workers.
Most of the Ramírez family was still awake at two o’clock on the morning of the nineteenth. No one had any intention of sleeping, even if the stifling heat of the day had allowed them.
‘But why won’t they give us any weapons? Who’s to say that those soldiers aren’t going to turn on us?’ Antonio demanded of his father.
‘Come on, Antonio!’ his father urged him. ‘That’s exactly the point. What good will it do to have all you young men running about in the city brandishing guns that you don’t even know how to use? Eh? Tell me what good it would do!’
‘Try not to be so anxious,’ urged his mother. ‘We must keep calm and just see what happens.’
‘But listen!’ bellowed Antonio, disappearing to turn up the dial on the radio they kept in the cramped office behind the bar. ‘Listen to this!’
The voice of Queipo de Llano echoed around the bar, as he bellowed his list of towns where the Nationalists were already victorious.
‘We can’t just sit here and let this happen, can we?’ Appealing to his parents for even the slightest sign of agreement or support, Antonio’s eyes filled with tears of frustration.
‘Perhaps Mother is right,’ suggested Mercedes.‘It’s probably best not to get too worked up about it. Everything seems to be all right here so far, doesn’t it?’
Antonio’s reaction was not just born out of the youthful desire to wield a weapon. He had heard that it was not only the military that should be causing anxiety to Martínez. There were two other key players in this unfolding drama: the blue-uniformed Assault Guard and the green-clad Civil Guard.
Though both of these gendarmeries theoretically owed allegiance to the civil authority, their loyalty to the Republic also turned out to be questionable. The disloyalty of the Civil Guard to the government in most places was unsurprising, but the loyalty of the Assault Guard, which had been formed and organised under the Republic, might have been expected. Antonio had heard that in Granada a conspiracy against the Re
public was brewing in both these forces. In the Civil Guard, Lieutenant Pelayo was plotting, as was Captain Álvarez of the Assault Guard.
Even if Martínez and Campins had not fully grasped the situation, the workers sensed that something was afoot and, that night, a huge group gathered in one of the city’s most central squares, the Plaza del Carmen. Granada was like a pressure cooker with its contents almost at boiling point. At any minute it seemed as if the lid could be thrown sky high by the force of an explosion.
They were mostly manual workers and, without the lethargy-inducing heat, their anger would have tipped them into earlier action. People were desperate for weapons. Anything would do. In order to arm themselves, men wiped dust from the oldest of pistols. Soon, the streets were full of boys and men ready to fight, and even those who had never given more than a passing nod to politics found themselves whipped up into a frenzy of sympathy for the Republic.
Antonio and his two friends Salvador and Francisco went to the Plaza del Carmen to see what was going on. Everywhere they looked they saw men brandishing weapons, even up on the rooftops. At this point the troops were still confined to their barracks. No one knew where the power lay or what was going to happen but the city was brimful of tension and fear.
The Return Page 18