‘I’ll be really glad if you come with us. My parents hardly speak and we’ve got a long way to go. I could really do with some company.’
By the time they had returned to Ana’s mother, her father was also there. He had been queuing all afternoon and had an onion and half a cabbage to show for it. Introductions were made and Mercedes was welcomed politely by Señor Duarte.
Though he had no bandages or visible signs of injury, Duarte was like a wounded man; it was as if he might snap beneath the burden of his grief. He certainly did not want to make conversation. Mercedes realised that these people were much younger than she had at first thought. Señora Duarte could easily have been mistaken for Ana’s grandmother, and Mercedes wondered if it was the death of their only son that had aged them so many decades beyond their years.
Señora Duarte was a little friendlier now, perhaps because of the additional loaf that Mercedes offered her, and they formed a tight circle before sharing the soup between four enamel bowls and dividing up the bread. There were other people in the room and it was considered bad manners to display what you were eating, however little it was.
‘So, Mercedes, you want to come up to the north with us?’ said Señor Duarte, breaking the silence when they had all finished their meal.
‘Yes, I do,’ she answered. ‘As long as I’m not going to be in the way.’
‘You won’t be. But you will have to understand something.’
Ana looked nervously at her father. She did not want him to scare away her new friend.
‘Let me do the talking when we get stopped,’ he said brusquely to Mercedes, his cold eyes fixed on hers. ‘As far as anyone is concerned you two are sisters. You do understand that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ she said.
She felt uncomfortable with his manner but she would have to put this aside; the mother seemed kind enough and it would make sense to be part of a family. To get to Bilbao they needed to cross territory occupied by Nationalist troops. That did not seem to concern Ana, so Mercedes told herself she must not worry either.
After their meagre supper, the girls intended to go for a stroll in the street to get away from the overcrowded building but, as they were about to leave, they heard the unexpected sound of music coming from a classroom down the corridor. It drew them towards it. For the first time in weeks the sound of something other than conflict reached their ears. Even when the bombs were not falling, or when they were not being strafed or machine-gunned, the noise of it all had left a continual ringing in their ears. The delightful fluid sound of an arpeggio quickened their heartbeats and hastened their steps.
They soon found where the music was coming from. Already encircled by people, the top of his shiny bald pate reflecting the light from a single bulb illuminating the room, they saw the tocaor. His whole body was curved as though to protect his guitar.
People streamed from every door in the corridor and gathered in the room and a crowd of children sat on the floor looking up at him. During the journey from Málaga they had lost the naïvety of childhood and now seemed to understand the tragic potency of this sound.
No one knew the flamenco’s name. He seemed not to have any family with him. By the time Mercedes and Ana arrived, several people were accompanying him with quiet palmas. His long, stained fingernails skimmed lightly and airily across the strings. He was playing for himself but he occasionally looked up and his eyes registered the growing crowd. Mercedes slipped back to her own classroom. There was something she might need.
As she returned, she heard a familiar sequence of notes that sent a shockwave through her. Just four notes played in a unique sequence and she could tell this toque apart from a million others. It was a melody that meant more to her than any other. A soleá. It was the first piece she had ever danced with Javier.The melancholy of the tune might have lowered her spirits, but instead she took it as a sign that she would see him again.The thought lifted her heart.
Other people recognised the compás too and clapped in time with the beat. For a while she held back and then, almost involuntarily, she found herself removing the shoes from her pocket and slipping them on to her feet, buckling them with shaking fingers. The soft leather felt so familiar, so warm. She did not hesitate to step round the children who were sitting just a few feet from the guitarist. Her steel heelcaps click-clacked on the parquet as she approached the guitarrista.The children gazed with rapt attention at this girl, who now blocked their view of the musician.
A year ago, it might have seemed audacious to present herself to a stranger, ready to dance, but such rules no longer mattered. What did she have to lose in front of an audience who knew neither her nor her family? They were all strangers to each other here, brought together by bitter circumstances.
The man looked up and gave her a broad, encouraging smile. He could tell from her attitude, her position and the way she held herself that she had danced many times and would know how to direct him.
She bent to whisper in his ear, ‘Can we have the same again?’
As he listened to her, his fingers chased a tune up and down the strings, his nails flicking the strings with a virtuoso’s dexterity.
The arrival of this girl by his side felt like a glimpse back to an old life where evenings might evolve with delightful spontaneity. He was often hired for juergas and the only guaranteed thing was the uncertainty of how the evening might unfold, who would play well, how the women would dance, whether the gathering would have any spirit, any duende.
He smiled up at her. For Mercedes and everyone else who caught a glimpse of his face at that moment, it was as if the sun had burst out on an otherwise dull day. Such glimpses of warmth had become a rare thing of late. Now, from the introductory passage, emerged the soleá that she so much wanted him to repeat. Mercedes began to clap her hands, just lightly at first, until she could feel that the audience had the rhythm running right through them and could not tell it from the beating of their own hearts. Some women joined their hands together with her, eyes fixed on this girl who had come from nowhere to take centre stage. As their palmas strengthened, she began to tap her right heel until she established a stronger and more forceful beat. A moment later she banged her left foot down hard and the dance began, her wrists and arms moving in fluid motion above her head, her long slim fingers so much thinner than they had been a month before.
For the first time in days, the profound sense of defeat that many of these people had carried about with them was lifted.
The tocaor’s playing echoed her movements, increasing in passion as the dance went on. It was almost violent now, the way in which his nails ripped through the strings and tapped on the plates on the front of the guitar. Slung across his back, this instrument had been carried for miles, withstanding several falls on the way. Though these accidents had done miraculously little damage, the way he was playing it now made it seem as though he was hellbent on its destruction.
He had complete confidence in the strength of its pinewood body to withstand this treatment and now he used his instrument to express not just his own anguish but that of his audience. The music echoed it.
For the duration of the dance this stranger became someone else for Mercedes.When she had danced for that first time in the cueva two years earlier, she and Javier had been equally unknown to each other. Her eyes shut tight with concentration, the music had transported her back to that same evening and once again she gave every part of herself.
After the soleá, with its strong, quiet control and an expression of feeling that ran unfathomably deep, the crowd was almost tense with its agony and pathos.They knew that this was a spontaneous performance. The mutterings of ‘Olé ’ were hushed. It was as if they did not want to break the spell.
The tocaor knew to relieve the atmosphere with the lighter mood of the alegrías and found his dancer more relaxed as she picked up the new beat and felt her way into the movements. The stiffness Mercedes had felt from all the weeks without dancing had g
one, and now she was able to bend and twist her body with the same suppleness she used to have, and to click her fingers with their usual sharp precision.
The joy of this dance took everyone’s mind away from shattered lives and burned-out homes, from the images of corpses and the cruel faces of the people who had driven them out of their own city. Many of them joined in, clapping the rhythm more enthusiastically as the minutes went by.
By the end, Mercedes was tired. Sweat ran down her neck and down her back; she could feel it trickle between her buttocks. She had given everything of herself, forgetting both where she was and almost who. Like the audience she had been transported away from the present. In her mind she had been at a fiesta, surrounded by family and friends. She eased her way through the applauding crowd to the edge of the room where she saw that Ana was standing. Her new friend’s face was beaming in admiration at the way Mercedes had danced.
‘Fantástico,’ she said simply. ‘Fantástico.’
The guitarist had not missed a beat. There was not a breath between the final, closing stamp of Mercedes’ alegrías and the quiet first chord of his next piece. His audience was entranced and he wanted to hold them in that state.
It was almost an impossibility that the music he was making came from only one guitar. The volume of sound and the depth and richness of the notes seemed to come from several instruments, and when the warm tone of the guitar’s hollow body being tapped was added, it magnified into layers of rich velvet. With the sound of the palmas and now one or two people tapping the rhythms on their chairs and on table tops, music emanated from every corner. Everyone in that room was enraptured now, swept along by a fast-flowing river of notes.
Mercedes tapped her fingertips gently against her palm. She stood leaning against the wall with Ana, their shoulders touching.
A man emerged from the shadows. He was a bulky individual, a head above most of the men there. He had a mass of dense, dark curls that fell well below his collar and the texture of this hair was coarse. His pitted skin was only half concealed by the patchy stubble of an unshaven face.The audience cleared a path for him since his manner showed that he would not hesitate to push his way through. There was no warmth in his gruff face.
As the guitarist brought his piece towards a conclusion, the new arrival was drawing up a chair. The two men looked easy together, side by side, as though they had met before. For a moment they spoke under their breath though the guitarra never for a second lifted his fingers away from his strings, continuing to pick out a tune while they whispered, not for a second losing the attention of the crowd.
The audience could not locate the source of the first sound they heard. It seemed unconnected with the singer. Everyone who had watched this man take his place to perform had a preconceived idea of how he would sound, but the reality of it defied their expectations. From his lungs came a low, sweet note, quite unlike the gypsy rasp that they had expected. It was the soft sound of someone’s soul. After an introductory passage to the song, a taranta, the voice began to climb and the gypsy cantaor’s fingers and hands started to express the emotions that poured from him. In the low light of the room his big pale hands stood out against his black jacket and performed like puppets in a mime show. The characters they played were pity, anger, injustice and grief. It was the story of the gypsy ghettos that he had been telling his whole life, and the tragic essence of his words seemed more appropriate than ever before to the exiled Malagueños.
This audience understood him now.When they looked at themselves, they realised that the roughness of his demeanour only mirrored their own.This was how they all appeared now - coarse, dirty, hunted, sad.
Ana turned to Mercedes at the end of the first cante.
‘I wonder if he always sings like this,’ she said.
‘Who knows?’ responded Mercedes. ‘But it’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.’
The appreciation for the gitano was immense. He described their story and their lives. In his expression their own feelings were miraculously told.
‘How does he know?’ muttered Ana under her breath.
Before the evening ended, many others danced, some with such exuberance that the dark mood that hung over Almería seemed to lift. Another guitarist appeared, followed by an elderly woman with astonishing mastery over the castanets that she had kept in the pocket of her skirt since leaving home. Rather as a pair of shoes had been for Mercedes, these simple pieces of wood had brought great comfort to this old lady every time she felt the reassuring shape of their cool domes beneath her fingertips. For her they were the only continuity in this strange, awful nightmare of the new life suddenly thrust upon her.
It was a feria like no other. By four in the morning, almost every man, woman and child sheltering in the school had squeezed into the room. It was rarely hotter than this in August. People forgot their situation and smiled. It was only when the tocaor finally exhausted himself that the evening came to an end. Everyone had a few hours of the deepest sleep they had enjoyed for many days and even dawn’s grey light did not stir them.
Mercedes and Ana shared a blanket on the same patch of hard floor. Friendships were formed quickly under these circumstances and when the girls woke, they remained huddled under the blanket, exchanging their stories.
‘I am looking for someone,’ Mercedes explained. ‘That’s my reason for going north.’
She could hear her own voice, so resolute and determined, but the look she saw on Ana’s face made her realise how ridiculous this might sound.
‘And who is it you are looking for?’
‘Javier Montero. He has family near Bilbao. I think he might be trying to get there.’
‘Well, we’re all going in the same direction,’ Ana said. ‘And we’ll do our best to help you. We’ll be leaving later today. He’ll be ready by then.’ She nodded in the direction of her father, who still lay sleeping, a motionless shape under a blanket by the wall.
Mercedes already knew that she could not expect any warmth from Ana’s father. The night before, when she had returned to the classroom to fetch her dancing shoes she had overheard a conversation that shocked her. Just before going in, she had heard raised voices and her own name.
‘Look, we don’t know anything about this Mercedes girl,’ Señor Duarte was ranting to his wife. The classroom had been vacated by most of its occupants, who had gone to find the music that was drifting so irresistibly towards them. ‘Supposing she’s a communist?’
‘Of course she isn’t a communist! Why do you say things like that?’
Mercedes continued to listen at a crack in the door.
‘Because there are communists everywhere. Extremists. People who have caused all of this.’ With a sweeping arm movement, he indicated the chaos of miscellaneous possessions around them, all such potent symbols of deracination.
‘How can you say it’s their fault?’ Señora Duarte asked. Her voice was raised. ‘You’re beginning to sound like your brothers.’
Mercedes was transfixed by the argument. Ana had said that her father was very angry with the Republican government, but she realised herself how careful she would have to be now.
‘Without those rojos,’ he spat out the word as though it was phlegm, ‘none of this would be happening.’
‘Without Franco it wouldn’t even have begun,’ she retorted.
Señor Duarte’s fury now overcame him and he lifted his hand to strike his wife. This answering back of hers was intolerable.
She raised her arm to parry the blow. ‘Pedro!’
He regretted his action immediately, but it could not be undone. He had never been roused to hit his wife before, perhaps because she had never stood up to him in this way.
‘I’m sorry, I am sorry,’ he whispered almost helplessly, full of remorse.
Mercedes was horrified to see a man striking his wife. She knew for certain that her father would never have laid a finger on her mother and wondered for a moment if she should intercede. Señor Dua
rte was obviously casting about wildly for somewhere to place the blame for his only son’s death. In his view, everyone was guilty, not just the bombers, who had mown down his son, and the Nationalist troops, who had seized half the country, but also the Republicans for failing to put up a united front.
Señora Duarte was stirred to continue the argument: ‘So you’re saying that you’ll live under the Fascists and just go along with them, rather than stand up for what you voted for?’
‘Yes, I’d rather do that than die . . . yes, I would. Because dying is pointless. Think of our boy,’ Señor Duarte retorted.
‘Yes, I do think of our boy,’ answered Señora Duarte. ‘He was killed by the side that you now want to support.’
Grief and anger clashed within them both.There was no possibility of their discussion taking any rational course.
The Return Page 31