‘I love it here!’ she shouted down to the street. ‘And I don’t want to leave! How dare Meñique suggest I get another place?!’ Throwing her cigarette stub out of the window, she walked naked through the apartment to put some water on to boil for her normal strong coffee. Just like Meñique, the rooms were small, immaculate and organised. ‘He even cooks!’ she murmured as she took a cup down from a shelf. ‘I want him!’
Carrying her coffee into the sitting room, Lucía curled up in a chair to sip it, looking at his guitars neatly lined up along one wall. He was different from any other gitano she knew, having a payo mother and being brought up in Pamplona in the very north of Spain. His family had lived in a house – a house! – and he had grown up amongst the payos. Sometimes, Lucía felt like a wild animal in contrast to his calm sophistication. He did not see the payos as the enemy, as she had been taught to, but merely as a different breed.
‘I am both, so I must embrace each culture, Lucía. And the payos are the ones who will take both of us on to the success we crave,’ he’d said to her one night as she’d ridiculed him for reading a payo newspaper. ‘They have the power and the money.’
‘They killed my brother,’ she’d shouted at him. ‘How can I ever forgive them for that?’
‘Gitanos also kill gitanos, payos kill payos,’ Meñique had reminded her with a resigned shrug. ‘I am sorry for your brother, it is a terrible thing that happened, but prejudice and bitterness get one nowhere in life, Lucía. You must forgive, as the Bible tells us to do.’
‘Now you are a priest?!’ she’d railed at him. ‘Telling me to read the Bible? Are you trying to patronise me? You know I never learnt to read.’
‘Then I will teach you.’
‘I have no need of it!’ She’d brushed off the arm that came around her. ‘My body and soul is all I need.’
Yet Lucía knew deep down that Meñique was right. The crowds that were buying tickets in advance to see her perform were not gitanos, but payos, and it was their money that would pay the big weekly wage she had been offered.
Lucía stood up. ‘He treats me just as Papá does!’ she shouted to the guitars. ‘Like an ignorant little gitana who understands nothing. And yet, he takes me three times a night to satisfy his lust! Mamá is right, men are all the same. Well, I’ll show him!’
She drew back a foot and kicked out at a guitar. The strings twanged as it fell to one side. She looked at the ordered shelf of books and swiped at them with her hand, sending them tumbling to the floor. After walking back to the bedroom, she dressed for the first time in days in the flamenco gown that Meñique had stripped from her body. Picking up her shoes, she walked to the door of the apartment, opened it and left.
*
Having found the mess in the apartment when he’d returned home, Meñique sighed and headed for the Coliseum Theatre, where Lucía was due to have a rehearsal that afternoon.
Meñique found José smoking by the stage door, with the rest of the cuadro assembled inside.
‘Is Lucía in the theatre already?’ Meñique asked José.
‘No, I thought she was with you,’ José answered. ‘No one has seen her.’
‘Mierda,’ Meñique swore under his breath. ‘I left her in my apartment this morning . . . where would she have gone?’
‘You tell me,’ said José, barely keeping his anger under control. ‘You were meant to be her keeper.’
‘As you know, señor, no one can “keep” Lucía, especially if she is in a rage.’
‘She opens next week! We arrived here to rehearse! After all this, will she miss her big chance?’
Meñique’s brain was turning over the possibilities. ‘Come with me, I think I know where she might be.’
Half an hour later, they arrived at the Plaza de Olavide, a hub of cafés and bars. And there in the centre of the plaza was Lucía, in the midst of a crowd that had gathered around her. Two random guitarists had joined her and as Meñique pushed through the mass of bodies, he heard the ping of coins landing on the ground around her. He stood there, arms folded, watching her dance. When she had finished, he and José joined in with the huge applause she received.
He watched her as she went to pick up the coins and indicated to the crowd that her performance was over.
‘Hola, Lucía,’ he said as he walked towards her. ‘What are you doing here?’
Lucía finished collecting the coins, then stood up and looked at him, her eyes defiant.
‘I was hungry, and I had no money for lunch. So I came here and got some. Now, shall we go to eat?’
*
Despite Lucía’s reluctance to have her father in Madrid, she was at least pleased to see the rest of the cuadro.
‘Chilly, have you brought my tonic?’ she asked him, ignoring Rosalba, who was standing next to him.
‘From the look of you, Lucía, I’d say that Madrid is suiting you well,’ Chilly replied with a sly smile. ‘You are happy?’
‘I am never happy, but yes, Madrid has its benefits,’ Lucía agreed.
Over the following few days, the cuadro found an apartment in the city and José began to hold auditions to extend their troupe of guitarists, singers and dancers. After several long afternoons in the empty theatre, they had found their new members.
Sebastian was a guitar player who bought everyone drinks and cigarettes, although it soon emerged that his fingers were as smooth at picking payo pockets as they were on his guitar. He had promised to keep his nose clean, but miraculously, he still had a steady flow of pesetas to share.
Sebastian’s brother Mario, known as ‘El Tigre’, the tiger, was a lithe and masculine individual, who attacked every dance as if it were a bull to be taken down. He had been the only dancer Lucía felt could match her ferocious energy. Two other young female dancers were also engaged, chosen by Lucía simply because they were the plainest.
‘So, daughter.’ José raised a glass to Lucía after their first run-through with the orchestra. ‘Tomorrow, the Albaycín cuadro opens at the Coliseum.’
‘And so do I,’ Lucía whispered as she toasted him.
*
During the next few months, Lucía’s fame spread. Queues formed at the Coliseum box office; everyone wanted to see the enchanting young gitana who danced in men’s clothes.
Finally, Lucía Amaya Albaycín was becoming a star.
Although she missed the sea and the culture of Barcelona that so suited her gitana spirit, Lucía loved Madrid, with its grand white buildings and wide avenues. There was a sense of urgency and passion in the air, what with the daily rallies of the various payo political parties, each attempting to drum up support, most of them disgruntled after the Republicans had won the elections that November. Even though Meñique often tried to explain to her what all these men were shouting about, she would laugh and kiss him on the lips to stop him talking.
‘I am bored of payos fighting each other,’ she would say, ‘let us watch a payo square off against a bull!’
‘This place is a pigsty,’ Meñique had remarked the first time he’d visited her room in the cuadro’s apartment. Sardine bones and other food scraps festered on plates that were piled high in an overflowing sink, and dirty clothes lay where she had dropped them days ago.
‘Yes, but it is my pigsty, and it makes me happy,’ she’d said, as she kissed him.
At times, Meñique felt as if he was trying to tame a wild animal; at others, he wished to protect the vulnerable little girl Lucía could so easily become. Whichever she was, he was totally entranced by her.
The problem was, so was the whole of Madrid. Now, rather than Meñique, the famous guitarist, being the centre of attention when they were out in the city together, it was Lucía everyone wanted to meet.
‘How does it feel to be the most famous gitana dancer in the whole of Spain?’ he asked her one morning as they lay in bed at his apartment.
‘It is what I always expected.’ She shrugged nonchalantly, lighting a cigarette. ‘I have waited a long time
for this.’
‘Some have to wait a lifetime and still it never comes, Lucía.’
‘I have earned it, every second of it,’ she replied fiercely.
‘So now you can be happy?’
‘Of course not!’ Her head lolled back against his shoulder and he smelt the scent of the oil she used to smooth down her hair. ‘La Argentinita has captured the world! Me, only Spain. There is much more to do yet.’
‘I’m sure there is, pequeña,’ he sighed.
‘Did I tell you that I have been asked to dance in a film? It is some payo filmmaker – Luis Buñuel. I hear he is very good. Should I do it?’
‘Of course you must! Then your talent will be captured forever for generations to see when you are dead.’
‘I will never die,’ Lucía retorted. ‘I will live forever. Now, querido, we must both get dressed and go and meet my new payo friends for lunch in one of their fancy restaurants. I am guest of honour! Can you believe it?’
‘I can believe anything of you, Lucía, truly,’ Meñique said as Lucía pulled him out of bed.
Madrid
July 1936, two years later
24
‘What has happened?’ Lucía lit a cigarette and leant back against the pillows, the sunlight spilling across them from the window of her room.
‘There has been a coup in Morocco,’ Meñique said without looking up from his newspaper. ‘There is talk that the uprising will spread here any day soon. Perhaps we should leave Spain while the going is good.’
‘What uprising? What is there to rise up against?’ Lucía frowned.
He sighed deeply. He had done his best to explain the fraught situation in Spain to her, but Lucía did not have a political bone in her body. Her days were occupied with dancing, smoking, making love and eating her beloved sardines, in that order of importance.
‘Franco wants to take over Spain with his armies,’ he told her patiently. ‘He wishes to turn Spain into a fascist state, just as the Nazis are doing in Germany.’
‘I am so bored of these politics, Meñique, who cares?’ She yawned and stretched, her little fist bumping into his face.
‘I care – and you should too, pequeña – because it affects everything we do. We should think about going to Portugal early – you are due to perform there very soon anyway. I fear that Madrid will be at the centre of any struggle to come. There could be violence.’
‘I cannot go to Portugal when I still have my show at the Coliseum. People have been queuing around the block for tickets. I must not let them down.’
‘Well, if nothing changes we shall leave straight after that. Let us hope it will not be too late by then,’ muttered Meñique as he got out of bed.
‘They will not harm me, I am the darling of Spain,’ Lucía called after him. ‘Maybe they will crown me queen instead!’
Meñique rolled his eyes as he found his shirt and trousers in the rubble of the room. Sadly, he could not disagree about her fame. Not only had she been a roaring success in Madrid, but accepting the title role in the most expensive Spanish film ever produced had cemented her national status as a household name.
‘I’m going back to my apartment for some peace and quiet,’ he told her as he kissed her. ‘I will see you later.’ He left Lucía’s room and walked along the communal corridor of the apartment, tripping over a cup of day-old coffee that Lucía had left in the middle of the floor. ‘Infuriating,’ he muttered as he used his handkerchief to mop up the spillage.
Not only did Lucía live in her own private state of chaos, but also with a houseful of ever-changing people – some of them friends or family, others merely acolytes who hung around her. Perhaps it was simply the way she’d been brought up; a large family in Sacromonte, then living for years in the tight-knit community of the Barrio Chino. Lucía seemed to need people around her constantly.
‘I am afraid of being alone,’ she’d admitted once to him. ‘Silence, it scares me.’
Well, it didn’t scare him – after two and a half years with Lucía, he relished it.
Entering the stillness of his own apartment, Meñique gave a sigh of relief and wondered for the hundredth time what would become of the two of them. It was obvious that the whole of Spain – and especially Lucía herself – was waiting for him to marry her. Yet he was still to ask. They had separated numerous times after Lucía had erupted at his lack of a proposal. He would walk away from her, relief filling his soul that he was no longer on the roller coaster of his relationship with her, her career and her crazy lifestyle.
‘She’s impossible!’ he’d tell himself, ‘no one but a saint can deal with her!’
Then, after a few hours of the peace he’d yearned for, he’d calm down. A few hours after that, he’d begin to long for her until he had to crawl back and beg forgiveness.
‘Yes, I will buy you a ring,’ he’d say when Lucía stood there with her eyes ablaze, and then they’d make love hungrily, passionately, both relieved that the pain of separation was over. All would be serene until the next time Lucía’s patience ran out and they would go round in the same cycle yet again.
Why he could not make that final commitment, Meñique did not know. Equally, why he could never finally walk away was a mystery to him. Was it the raw sexual attraction he experienced when he thought of her? Or the aphrodisiac provided by her sublime talent when he watched her perform? It was all of her, was the only conclusion he could reach. She was simply . . . Lucía. Sometimes it felt to him as though the two of them were trapped in an eternal paso doble from which they could never escape.
‘It isn’t love, it is addiction,’ Meñique murmured as he tried to focus on a melody he was struggling to compose. His concentration was non-existent and this, he thought, was another problem: being with Lucía was a full-time job, which left him little time for pursuing his own career. When she had received the offer to perform in Lisbon, she had not even asked him whether he wanted to go – just assumed that he would.
‘Perhaps I should stay behind,’ he told his guitar. ‘Let her go.’ Then he looked out of the window and took in the alarming sight of armed soldiers marching down the street beneath him. If civil war did break out in Spain, it was a dangerous moment to be parted, and besides that, Lucía’s rag-tag retinue of dancers and musicians did not have a clue about the real world beyond flamenco. They’d probably end up in jail, or facing a firing squad for saying the wrong thing.
But was that his problem? If it was, he had made it so.
Meñique yawned. They hadn’t returned until the early hours from the party held after Lucía’s sell-out performance last night. He laid his guitar carefully on the table, then stretched out full-length on the couch and closed his eyes. Yet, even though he was exhausted, he could not sleep. He was filled with an impending sense of doom.
*
‘What is all that noise outside?’ Lucía asked him as he came into her dressing room at the Coliseum the following evening.
‘It’s heavy artillery, Lucía.’ Meñique listened to the rumbling and felt fear clutch at his heart. ‘I fear the uprising has begun.’
‘The theatre is still empty, yet it is nearly opening time. I was told tonight was sold out.’
‘It isn’t safe on the streets, Lucía. The sensible people are staying in their homes. Many of those who did come have already left. We should decide whether to cancel the performance and make our way home while we can. After all, it is our last, and given we are due to leave for Lisbon tomorrow—’
‘I have never cancelled a performance in my life and I never will! Even if only the cleaners watch.’ Standing there in full stage make-up, her face was even more luminous than usual. ‘No payo military will stop me dancing!’ she insisted.
As she spoke, the sound of a huge explosion from somewhere in the city made the sturdy walls of the theatre shudder. A handful of plaster dust fell on Lucía’s jet-black hair, and she grabbed Meñique in panic.
‘¡Ay, Dios mío! What is happening out there?’
‘I believe the Nationalists are attempting to take control of the city. The army garrison is so very close to the theatre . . . really, Lucía, we should leave now and get to Lisbon while we can.’
The rest of the company had begun to appear in the dressing room, terror on their faces.
‘Perhaps it is too late to leave, Meñique,’ said José, overhearing. ‘I just took a look outside, and there are people running everywhere. It’s chaos!’ He crossed himself out of habit.
Chilly pushed through the anxious throng and grasped Lucía’s hands, his features alive with fear. ‘Lucía, Rosalba is alone in the apartment. You know she stayed home today because of her ankle sprain! I must go to her, she could be in terrible danger!’
‘You cannot go out there.’ Sebastian, the guitarist, clasped Chilly’s arm to calm him. ‘Rosalba is a sensible woman, she will stay where she is in the apartment. You should remain here, then you can go to her in the morning.’
‘I have to go to her now! Stay safe tonight and, God willing, we will meet again in this life.’ Chilly gave Lucía a brief kiss on each cheek, then swiftly ran from the dressing room.
The cuadro stood together, shell-shocked by Chilly’s sudden departure.
Meñique cleared his throat. ‘We must find shelter. Does anyone know if there is a basement?’
A woman holding a broom had appeared in the doorway of the dressing room, her features taut. Meñique turned to her. ‘Señora, can you help us?’
‘Sí, señor, I will show you the entrance to the cellar. We can take shelter down there.’
‘Right,’ Meñique said as the rattle of gunfire made the pack in the dressing room start in further fright. ‘Everyone, take what you can to make yourselves comfortable, then we shall follow you down, señora.’
After gathering what they could salvage, the woman with the broom led the cuadro to the cellar door. From a cupboard along the corridor, she’d produced two boxes of candles and some matches.
‘Is everybody here?’ Meñique called along the passage.
The Moon Sister Page 34