‘No, it was my wife, Rosalba. Yes, she was muy linda . . . so beautiful. We married at twenty-one . . . the other half of my heart.’ Chilly clutched his chest.
‘Where is she now?’
Chilly’s expression darkened and he looked down. ‘She gone. Lost in Civil War. Bad time, Hotchiwitchi. The devil entered hearts and minds of our countrymen.’
‘Chilly, I am so sorry.’
‘It’s life,’ he whispered, as he caressed the face of his poor wife with his filthy thumb. ‘She do speak to me still, but her voice is fainter because she be travelling further away.’
‘Was that why you left Spain? I mean, after you lost your family?’
‘Sí. Nothing left there for me, so I did move on, best leave the past behind.’
‘And ended up here?’
‘After many travels in England before, yes. Now . . .’ Chilly went back to the pile of photographs, the ones he discarded flying to the floor yet again. As I collected them, I saw they were all of guitarists and dancers in different bars and clubs, yet the look of ecstasy on each artist’s face – caught on camera for eternity – was identical.
‘¡Aqui! Here she is.’
Chilly beckoned me towards him and I looked down at another photograph of a flamenco scene. At the forefront was a diminutive dancer, her hands raised above her head, but instead of the flowing traditional dress, she was wearing a pair of fitted trousers and a waistcoat. Her skin was pale, her hair black and slick with oil, a single curl in the centre of her forehead.
‘La Candela! The flame that burns in the heart of all our people. Can you see, my Hotchiwitchi? Look at her eyes . . . they are your eyes.’
I stared hard at the eyes of the tiny woman in the photograph, but it was black and white and for all I knew, the tiny dots could be blue or green.
‘That is her! Lucía Amaya Albaycín, your abuela, La Candela, the most famous dancer of her day! She be born in Sacromonte and delivered by Micaela’s hands . . .’
Yet again my mind conjured a fleeting glimpse of candlelight flickering on a whitewashed oval ceiling above me as I was lifted up towards it . . .
‘Now, Hotchiwitchi, I do tell you the story of your family. We do begin in 1912, the year of your grandmother, Lucía’s, birth . . .’
María
Sacromonte, Granada, Spain
May 1912
Spanish castanets (castañuelas)
A percussion instrument used when dancing a zambra, siguiriyas or Sevillanas in the flamenco tradition.
10
The air was eerily still, as if even the birds were holding their breath in the olive groves that fell below the steep winding paths that wove between the caves of Sacromonte. María’s groans echoed around the walls of the cave, the abnormal silence amplifying her own guttural sounds.
‘Where is everybody?’ she asked Micaela.
‘At Paco and Felicia’s wedding, remember?’ Micaela answered. The bruja’s long black hair had been pulled back into a practical knot on her head, at odds with the elegant ruffled dress she was wearing.
‘Of course, of course . . .’ María murmured as a cool cloth was placed on her sweating brow.
‘Not long now, querida, but you must push again. The baby needs your help.’
‘I can’t,’ María groaned as another contraction ripped through her body. ‘I am spent.’
‘Listen, María,’ said Micaela, one ear cocked. ‘Can you hear it? They are beginning the alboreas. Listen to the rhythm and push!’
María heard the slow, steady beat of hands on the cajón drum, a pulse that she knew would soon build into a joyful explosion. The guitars joined in, and the ground beneath them began to vibrate from the stamping of a hundred feet as the dance began.
‘¡Dios mío!’ she screamed. ‘This baby will kill me!’ She moaned as the child surged further down through her body.
‘It wants to come out and dance, like its mamá. Listen, they are singing for you both. It is the alba, the dawning of new life!’
Minutes later, as the air filled with the glorious sound of flamenco guitar and voices as the alboreas reached its climax, the baby made its entrance into the world.
‘It’s a girl,’ said Micaela as she cut the cord with a knife then dealt swiftly with the afterbirth. ‘She is very small, but she seems healthy enough.’ She turned the baby over and patted its tiny behind. With a small cough, the baby opened its mouth and began to scream.
‘Here,’ Micaela said as she expertly swaddled the infant as though wrapping up a piece of meat. ‘She is all yours. May the Virgin bless her with health and happiness.’
‘Amen.’ María looked down at the tiny face – the large eyes, bulbous nose and plump lips seeming too big for their setting. Little hands were balled into fists and punched the air angrily as the baby gave full voice to her lungs. Two determined feet unlocked themselves from the sheet and joined the two arms in exploring their first taste of freedom after release from the womb.
‘She is a fiery one. She has the power, the duende, in her, I can feel it.’ Micaela nodded at the baby as she offered María some rags to stem the bleeding, then washed her hands in the already bloody basin. ‘I will leave you together to get to know each other. I will tell José he has a daughter and I am sure he will return from the fiesta to see her soon.’
Micaela left the cave and María sighed as she latched the baby onto her breast to quell the squawking. No wonder the bruja had been so eager for the birth to come quickly; the entire village of Sacromonte was at the wedding – anticipated for months as the bride was the granddaughter of Chorrojumo, the late gypsy king. The brandy would be flowing and there would be a feast fit for royalty. María knew her husband would no more leave the ensuing fiesta to visit his wife and new daughter than he would ride through the streets of Granada naked on his mule.
‘It is you and me, little one,’ she whispered as the baby finally suckled and silence descended once more in the cave. ‘You are born a girl, and that is your bad luck.’
María staggered out of bed, the baby still clasped to her, desperate to take a drink of water. Micaela had left in such a rush she had not filled her patient’s mug. She walked from her bedroom to the kitchen at the front of the cave feeling dizzy from thirst and exertion. Grabbing the water jug, she put it to her lips and drank. Looking out of the tiny window hewn into the rock at the front of the cave, she saw it was a beautiful clear night and the stars shone brightly, framing a perfect crescent moon.
‘Light.’ She whispered and kissed the top of her baby’s downy head. ‘I shall call you Lucía, little one.’
After making her way back to bed, still clutching the baby in one arm and the jug in her other, María finally fell into an exhausted sleep, lulled by the distant rhythm of the flamenco guitars.
*
1922, ten years later
‘Where have you been, you naughty girl?’ María stood with her hands on her hips at the mouth of the Albaycín cave. ‘Alicia told her mamá you were not in school again today.’
‘Alicia is a sneaky she-devil who should mind her own business.’ Lucía’s eyes flashed in anger.
María saw her daughter had mimicked her stance and was also standing with her own hands on her tiny hips.
‘Enough of your cheek, pequeña! I know where you were, because Tomás saw you by the fountain, dancing for coins.’
‘So what if I was? Someone has to earn some money around here, don’t they?’ Lucía pressed some pesetas into her mother’s hand, then with a toss of her long black hair, she marched past her and into the cave.
María looked down at the coins, which were enough to buy vegetables from the market and even a blood sausage or two for José’s supper. Still, it did not excuse the child’s insolence. Her ten-year-old daughter was a law unto herself; she could be taken for a child of six due to her tiny stature, but that fragile outer packaging contained a volcanic and passionate temperament, which her father said only added to her exceptional flamenc
o skills.
‘She was born to the sound of the alboreas! The spirit of the duende lives inside her,’ José said that evening, as he hoisted his daughter onto the mule to take her off to dance in the city’s main plaza to the sound of his guitar. José knew the money he’d earn with Lucía’s tiny form stamping and whirling would triple his usual tips from those drinking at the surrounding bars.
‘Don’t bring her back too late!’ María called to her husband as the mule clopped off down the winding path.
Then she squatted back down on the hard dusty earth outside the cave to continue weaving her basket out of the esparto grass that had dried since harvest. Leaning her head back against the wall for a moment, she enjoyed the mellow warmth of the sun on her face. Opening her eyes, she glanced down into the valley beneath her, the River Darro running through it, swollen with springtime thaw from the Sierra Nevada mountains. The setting sun cast a rich orange glow on the Alhambra, which sat above her on the opposite side of the valley, its ancient towers rising up out of the dark green forest.
‘Even though we live little better than mules, at least we have beauty,’ she murmured. As she worked, a sense of calm flowed through her, despite the ever-lingering anxiety that José was using Lucía to earn the family a living. He was too lazy to take a normal job, preferring to rely on his precious guitar and his daughter’s talent. Sometimes, they would receive an offer from a rich payo – a non-gypsy – to perform at a party in one of their grand houses in Granada. This had only added to Lucía’s delusions of grandeur – she didn’t understand that the payos came from another world that she could never hope to aspire to.
Yet Lucía seemed to thrive on it. It was hard to remember a time when she had not been tapping out a rhythm – even as a baby sitting in her highchair eating with her iron spoon, her feet would be continually beating. The child was never still. María remembered the moment when, at only nine months old, Lucía had hauled herself to her feet by grabbing the table leg and determinedly taken her first few teetering steps unaided. It had been reminiscent of watching a fragile china doll getting up to walk. The residents of Sacromonte had backed away in fear at the sight of her when María had taken her out and about.
‘Devil child,’ she’d heard one neighbour whisper to her husband, and indeed, as Lucía’s toddler rages had made her ears ring, María had thought the same. Desperate for some peace, she had eventually discovered her daughter would only quieten to the sound of her father’s flamenco guitar, tapping her little hands and feet along to it. Then, as María had practised her alegrías in the kitchen in preparation for a fiesta, she’d looked down and seen two-year-old Lucía’s diminutive form copying her movements. From the proud tilt of her chin, to the way her hands swept gracefully about her little body and the fierce stamping of her feet, Lucía had managed to capture the very essence of the dance.
‘¡Dios mío!’ José had whispered, glancing at his wife in amazement. ‘You want to learn to dance like your mamá, querida?’ he’d asked the child.
Lucía had fixed her father with her intense gaze. ‘Sí, Papá. I dance!’
Eight years on from that moment, there was no doubt that María’s own ability as a flamenco artist – she was considered one of the best in Sacromonte – had been surpassed by her daughter’s prodigious talent. Lucía’s feet could tap out so many beats to the minute, that even though Lucía begged her to count them, María could not count fast enough. Her braceo – the use of her arms in the correct position – was almost faultless, and above all, there was a light in her eyes, which came from an invisible flame inside her and elevated her performance to another level.
Most evenings, as white wisps of smoke rose from the chimneys of the many caves, the mountain of Sacromonte was alive with the strumming of guitars, the deep male voices of the cantaors, and the clapping and stamping of the dancers. No matter that its gypsy residents were poor and hungry, they knew the spirit of flamenco could lift them up.
And Lucía embodied that spirit more than anyone. As she danced with the rest of the village at fiestas in one of the large communal caves used to celebrate such events, others would stop to marvel at the duende inside her; a power that could not be explained, that soared out of one’s soul and held the onlooker hypnotised, because it contained the gamut of human emotion.
‘She’s too young to know she has it,’ José had said one night after Lucía had performed for a crowd that had gathered outside their cave, drawn by the pounding feet and the flashing eyes of a small child who did indeed seem possessed. ‘And that is what makes her even more special.’
*
‘Mamá? Can I help you with the baskets?’ Lucía asked her a few days later.
‘If you have time in your busy schedule, yes.’ María smiled, patted the step next to her and handed her daughter some esparto grass. They worked together for a while, María’s fingers slowing down as weariness overcame her. She’d been up at five to feed the mule, the chickens and the goats that lived in the cave which served as a stable next door, then she had lit the fire under the pot to provide her four children and husband with a meagre breakfast of maize porridge. Her lower back ached after carrying water from the large cisterns at the base of Sacromonte mountain up through the steep cobbled alleyways of the village.
At least she now felt a rare moment of peace, sitting here with her daughter working quietly beside her. Even though on so many occasions, she’d looked up at the great Alhambra, its position and grandness signifying everything that was so unfair in her life, and had railed at it – at her life of constant struggle. Yet she had the comfort of being surrounded by her own people, tucked away in their small hillside community. They were gitanos, Spanish gypsies, whose ancestors had been forced outside Granada’s city walls to carve out their homes in the unforgiving rock of the mountain. They were the poorest of the poor, the lowest of the low, those who the payos looked down upon with disdain and mistrust. They only came to the gitanos for their dancing, their ironmongery, or their brujas, like Micaela, the medicine woman, whom the payos would consult in secret when in desperate need of help.
‘Mamá?’
‘Yes, Lucía?’ María watched her daughter point to the Alhambra.
‘One day, I will dance up there in front of thousands.’
María sighed. Had any other of her children uttered such a thought, María would have boxed them round the ears. Instead, she nodded slowly.
‘I don’t doubt you will, querida, I have no doubt at all.’
*
Later that evening, when Lucía had finally subsided onto the pallet that lay wedged next to her parents’ bed in the small hollow built deeper into the rock behind the kitchen, María sat outside the cave with her husband.
‘I worry about the girl. Her head is full of ridiculous dreams, inspired by what she has seen at the payo houses you have danced in,’ María said.
‘What’s wrong with dreaming, mi amor?’ José ground out the cheroot he’d been smoking with his boot heel. ‘In this miserable existence of ours, it is all that gets us through.’
‘José, she does not understand who she is, where she’s come from and what it means. And you taking her so young to see the other side’ – María pointed to where the city wall of Granada began along the hillside, half a mile away – ‘is turning her head. It’s a life she can never have.’
‘Who says so?’ His eyes, so like his daughter’s, flashed angrily within the dark skin inherited from his pureblood gitano forefathers. ‘Many of our people have risen to fame and fortune through their talents, María. Why can that not happen to Lucía? She certainly has enough spirit. When I was a guitarist in Las Ramblas in Barcelona, I met the great dancers Pastora Imperio and La Macarrona. They lived in grand houses like payos.’
‘That is two out of tens of thousands, José! The rest of us must simply sing and dance and struggle any way we can to earn enough to put food in the pot. I worry that Lucía will be disappointed when her big dreams come to nothing. The
child cannot even read or write! She refuses to go to school, not helped by you encouraging her, José.’
‘What does she need with words and numbers when she has her gift? Wife, you are turning into a miserable old woman who has forgotten how to dream. I’m going to find some better company. Buenas noches.’
María watched her husband stand and saunter off along the dark, dusty path. She knew he would head for one of the drinking dens, housed in one of the many hidden caves, where he and his friends would carouse until the early hours. He’d been out all night more often recently and she wondered if he had a new mistress. Even though his once taut body was ageing fast with the passing of years, brandy and the harshness of the life they led, he was still a handsome man.
She vividly remembered her first sighting of him; she only about the same age as Lucía was now, he a strapping sixteen-year-old, standing outside the mouth of his family cave, strumming his guitar. His dark curly hair had shone mahogany in the sun, his full lips curved into a lazy smile as she’d passed. She’d fallen in love with him then and there, even though she had heard bad things about ‘El Liso’ – ‘The Smooth One’ – his nickname due to his skill on the guitar. And – as she would sadly discover later – for his reputation with women. At seventeen, he’d gone off to Barcelona in a haze of glory, having been contracted to play in Las Ramblas, a district packed with famous flamenco bars.
María had been convinced she would never see him again, yet five years later, he’d returned, sporting a broken arm and a number of yellowing bruises on his handsome face. Local gossip told her he’d got into a fight over a woman, others that his contract at the flamenco bar had been cancelled due to his drinking, and that he’d had to turn to bare-knuckle fighting to earn a crust. Whichever it was, María’s heart had beaten faster as she had walked past his family cave on her way down to the Alcaicería, to buy vegetables from the market stalls in the town. And there he’d been, smoking on his parents’ doorstep.
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