The Dancer and the Raja

by Javier Moro

  The letter was serious and no doubt inflamed the Rajah’s passion even further. The profusion of details included in Valle-Inclán prose gave it such credibility that if Anita had known, she would have screamed blue murder. But, just like in a real conspiracy, they decided to send it without reading it to the girl first. Each of the five of them who were in the café at that moment put a penny on the table to pay for the postage stamp. While they were at it, they sealed the fate of Anita Delgado.

  8

  Bombay, November 30, 1907. The time has come to continue the journey. In the afternoon, in preparation for the departure of the night trains, an impressive jumble of carriages, trams, taxis, bicycle carts, rickshaws, bicycles, and horses swirled around the imposing Churchgate Station, which looks like a Gothic cathedral because of its pointed roofs. They move forward as best they can, at walking pace, amid tremendous confusion and uproar. Preceded by three carts loaded with all the luggage, a luxurious carriage with the hotel emblem on it makes its way through. Anita, Mme Dijon, and Lola, in long dresses and with immaculate sunshades to protect themselves from the sun, are shepherded along by Captain Inder Singh. They get out and go into the station building. They make a startling contrast with the crowd all around them. Bemused by the spectacle, they pause for a moment, not daring to take another step. They find themselves imprisoned in a sea of people coming and going in all directions: coolies carrying parcels and suitcases on their heads, people selling mangoes, sandals, combs, scissors, bags, shawls, saris … The shoeshine boys offer their services, the same as the ear cleaners, cobblers, scribes, astrologers, and water carriers, who sell separately to Moslems and Hindus: “Hindu pani! Musulman pani!” A wandering wise man, one of the so-called sadhus, almost naked and with his skin covered in ashes, comes up to Lola banging his bowl. He asks for a coin in exchange for pouring a few drops of holy water from the Ganges in the Andalusian girl’s mouth. “How disgusting!” she says, pushing him away brusquely. The Málaga girl is not in a good mood; quite the opposite, she has the terrified expression of someone walking through a minefield.

  There are so many people that Anita has the impression that the whole of Bombay is traveling. With great difficulty they manage to move toward their train, avoiding treading on beggars who sleep curled up wrapped in a piece of cloth, or the families that camp out in the station with their mats and little cooking stoves, sometimes for days at a time, waiting for a train or a job until they can earn enough money to pay for a ticket.

  The carriages are packed. The people hang on to the windows and doors in a desperate attempt not to be left behind. They even carry chickens and goats in their arms. The men get onto the roofs and fight for a place to sit, all crowded together. The noise is deafening, but there is no animosity, just happy hustle and bustle.

  The white people travel in first-class carriages that have the same comforts as the great European expresses; inside them you can hardly hear the uproar outside and the Venetian blinds allow you to keep the world at bay.

  Then there are the rajas’ carriages, the height of luxury, reserved for their owners alone. The special Kapurthala carriage, painted blue and with the coat of arms of the kingdom in the center, waits at one platform to pick up its distinguished passengers. The carriage is completely at the disposal of the three women, with wide, comfortable beds, bathrooms with showers, and a little sitting room that is also used as a dining room. The walls are of mahogany; the lamps are brass; the china, English porcelain; and the whole thing is carpeted in blue and silver velvet. It is hooked up to a kitchen car where the servants travel, and to another car for the luggage, in which Inder Singh travels. The custom of the royal houses is to put on as many carriages as there are passengers traveling. Once she boards the train, Anita is openmouthed: her carriage is completely decorated with white camellias brought from Kashmir. Quite a gesture. But she immediately has to deal with four servants who throw themselves on the floor, touch her feet with one hand, and then put it to their foreheads. Anita, who is not accustomed to such a servile greeting, does not know how to react. She bends down and tries to pull their arms to make them get up, but they look at her uncomprehendingly and will not let her. “You’ll have to get used to it, Ana …” Mme Dijon tells her. “It’s the greeting reserved for important people.”

  “Of course, of course …” Anita answers in confusion, as though she had forgotten her rank.

  The raja has left nothing to chance. Dinner is French cuisine and there is no shortage of bottles of Evian water to slake their thirst and fight the dust that gets in through the cracks and coats everything. As soon as it leaves Bombay, the train goes over a landscape of large fields of dry land with scrub and very few trees, mud huts, peasants who greet the travelers, and children with sticks urging on buffalo that kick up clouds of yellow dust … The sun is like a disc of fire that stains the fields gold before it disappears. The Indians call it Surya and venerate it like a god. “When the train left, my only concern was thinking it was another forty-eight hours to Kapurthala. I was impatient to see the prince. The gesture with the camellias had touched me,” Anita would write in her diary. The imminence of her arrival, the almost constant nausea, the shouts at the stations where the train stops at night, and the jolting, sometimes gentle and other times violent, conspire to steal sleep away from her.

  How different this journey is from the one she had made a year before, also by train! That train had crossed another bleak plateau, that of Castille, on its way from Madrid to Paris, after the raja had agreed to the conditions in the famous letter. Captain Inder Singh had come back to Madrid with a checkbook “as thick as a dictionary” to pay for the expenses of the journey, which more than a journey was the removal of the whole family to Paris.

  “I had the impression I was going to the slaughterhouse,” Anita would confess to her sister, Victoria. What had begun as a game had become real so quickly that Anita herself was overtaken by events. They had all played with fire, but now she alone felt the burns. The rest of them had either had fun, like her friends, or had come out on top, like her family. And she? How would she end up? she wondered as the train moved on under a pale winter sun through a landscape of snowy peaks and dark valleys wreathed in shrouds of mist. She still could not imagine herself in the arms of that Indian king who had bought her, however much her parents tried to disguise appearances. Yes, bought, just as it sounds.

  “Don’t worry, if you don’t like something, we’ll go back and that’s that,” her mother told her when she saw her so upset.

  It was certainly some comfort that her whole family was going with her on the journey. The feeling of being protected from the unexpected events that could occur on such an adventure sweetened the pill. But at a given moment, she—and only she—would have to come face-to-face with the raja. How should she behave with him? Would she hold out her hand to him, curtsy, or give him a kiss when she saw him again? And he, would he take her by the arm as if they had been sweethearts all their lives? However much concentration she put into imagining herself with the raja, there was nothing to be done, she could not.

  “In France the weather was rainy and misty,” she would write in her diary. “The country looked like a beautiful garden, as there was nowhere you could see that was not cultivated. But it was night-time and it was still raining. I felt very sad …” Perhaps out of spite at feeling she had been “sold,” or out of a desire to grasp at something safe, the day before she had agreed to pose for Anselmo Nieto, the only one among her friends who had been opposed to the arrangement with the raja. She had spent the evening with him, in his small studio overlooking the Plaza Mayor. Although she had rejected his advances for the umpteenth time, that evening she agreed to pose naked for him. Perhaps she did so to make sure of the painter’s love in the face of the anxiety ahead of her, like a drowning man hangs on to a life jacket. Or perhaps out of rebelliousness at the destiny that was dragging her off into the unknown. “Please stay. Don’t take
part in this farce …” Anselmo had begged her when he left her that night in the doorway of her house. She answered by giving him a furtive kiss, pressing her lips to his mouth. It was the first time she had ever done anything like that, and she felt a shiver run down her spine. Before she went in, she turned to look at him for the last time. With his worn, corduroy jacket, his sparse beard, and his look of an abandoned dog, Anselmo Nieto made her feel sorry for him. “I can’t go back now,” she told him. “I’m doing it for them too,” she confessed, referring to her family. The die was cast.

  She is woken by the cold. She does not know what train she is on or what country she is in. Everything is confused in her mind, and she feels tired out by so much traveling. She sits up in bed and covers herself with her gown. Through all the cracks in the carriage, where yesterday the dust filtered in, this morning cold air comes in. They are much farther north, crossing the plains of the Ganges valley, swept by breezes coming from the far-off foothills of the Himalayas. She glances out of the window and sees the countryside has changed completely: now there are green fields with yellow flowers in the mustard plantations, and peasants as skinny as reeds who stop their buffalo to watch the carriages roll past. This is not France, so gray in winter; this is bright India. But she feels a similar cold. What a pity she does not have any newspapers to put under her clothes, next to her skin, like on the journey to Paris! It is an infallible remedy against the cold, one of her mother’s thousand tricks. Train journeys seem interminably long to her, especially when it is a question of going to meet her unreachable Indian king. Will he be waiting for me at the station this time, or will it be the same as before?

  He was not at the port in Bombay the day before yesterday, and last year he was not at the Quai d’Orsay Station, when she arrived in Paris with her parents. In his place, the raja sent a chauffeur at the wheel of a De Dion Bouton, a beautiful car in which the whole family fitted, and another car for their luggage. They followed the left bank of the Seine, then they crossed the Alexander III Bridge and went across the Place de la Concorde … In spite of the drizzle, it seemed a beautiful drive to her, and Anita would have willingly gone on discovering the whole city, just like a vulgar family of tourists with money. But they were not tourists, they were foreigners carrying out an uncertain and perturbing mission. Under the appearance of a united family, they had never been so close to separation and, if they were all a little melancholic that day, it was perhaps because they felt it coming.

  At first sight Paris seemed much bigger than Madrid to them. Ampler, richer, more luxurious, though sadder too. The people walked very briskly, looking at the ground. The proportion of well-dressed passersby and cars was much greater than in Madrid. The chauffeur stopped in the rue Rivoli, outside the Hotel St. James & Albany, in one of the most aristocratic districts of the city, not far from the Place Vendôme and its famous jewelers, such as Chaumet or Cartier, where the raja was an assiduous client. In the entrance hall of the hotel, they looked like a family of immigrants in search of work more than the guests of such an illustrious person. They got into the lift, looking at each other with an expression of fright because it was the first time they had been in such an invention. The skill with which the lift-boy, dressed in a white uniform, handled the brass controls reassured them, but each time the lift jolted when it went from one floor to the next, the girls gave a restrained shriek and the parents timidly held on to the walls, as though that could save them in the unlikely case of an accident. They sighed in relief when they reached the third floor and felt firm ground under their feet. The raja had reserved a very well-lit apartment for them that looked out onto the Tuileries gardens. A pink marble fireplace reigned over the sitting room, decorated with Louis XV furniture. In the center, on a table, a lavish tea was waiting for them. Every last detail had been thought of, and everything evoked a fairy tale. Doña Candelaria looked around with relish, as though she wanted to soak up forever that comfortable, opulent atmosphere, as she heard the hot water running for the bath the girls were preparing for themselves. When they undressed and took out the newspapers, the girls discovered that the list of theater entertainments in Madrid was printed on the skin of their backs. They could not read it because the letters were back to front, but they guessed it said “tonight there is no show at the Cervantes,” which made them laugh childishly.

  The raja did not appear until the next day. He did it out of deference, to let the family rest and not to put pressure on them. But there was no way Anita could understand his behavior. “If he’s so much in love with me, why doesn’t he come now?” she wondered, biting her nails. Her sister made her furious, saying all the time “The prince is here!” Anita would go red in the face and have palpitations and run into the bathroom to get ready, while Victoria burst out laughing.

  “The prince is here!” said Victoria again around midday, pointing to the door.

  “Don’t joke anymore, it isn’t funny …”

  She had not yet completed that phrase when Anita found herself face-to-face with the raja. This time it was true: there he was, dressed like a perfect gentleman, imposing with the chain of his fob watch hanging out of his trouser pocket. He took off his turban as if it were a hat and placed it on a chair.

  “I hope you have all rested, Anita. I am very happy to see you,” he said in perfect Spanish, which left the girl amazed. She tried to mumble something, but not a sound would come out of her throat.

  How can he have learned Spanish so fast? she wondered, touching her hair because she had had no time to fix her plaits.

  “It doesn’t matter if you don’t speak,” he added, noticing the young woman’s embarrassment.

  Then he took a dictionary out of his jacket pocket and began to look up words. Actually, he did not speak Spanish, he had only learned a few phrases to welcome Anita and her family.

  The first lunch in the little sitting room at the St. James & Albany Hotel remained forever engraved on the memories of Anita and the raja. Unlike Madrid, in Paris the prince felt at home and acted as master of ceremonies. The others listened. By means of an interpreter, he told them that a hairdresser would come every day to do Anita’s hair, that a dressmaker would come by in the afternoon to measure her up for dresses “for a little lady, not for a schoolgirl.” He wanted Anita to learn French, English, horse riding, tennis, piano, drawing, and billiards. Don Angel smiled looking at his daughter, as though saying to himself that she would finally receive the education that he had not been able to give her. Doña Candelaria nodded in approval. Everything seemed wonderful to her: the “girls’” itinerary, the silver dinner service, the cut-glass jugs, the waiter with white gloves who offered her dishes she had never tried before, such as sole with herb sauce and the carrot salad that her daughters looked at in horror … Everything seemed to please her, even the taste of the warm water in a silver finger bowl that she emptied in one swallow when she finished the meal. Then she picked up the slice of lemon and bit into it, making a face at how sour it was. On seeing her acting like that, the girls thought that was “what one should do” and imitated their mother. They put the finger bowls to their lips and sipped the lemon-flavored water, somewhat mystified at the strange customs of that country. Then Don Angel followed suit. The raja had to make a great effort to hide his astonishment, while the waiters looked like statues made of stone. Standing in the corners of the little room, they only dared to exchange glances of consternation.

  That slip must have influenced the raja’s decision to separate Anita from her parents as soon as possible. At the next meeting they had, the prince arrived accompanied: “Anita, let me introduce Madame Louise Dijon, who will be your companion from now on.”

  Madame Dijon looked at her in amazement, as if surprised at the plaits and the dark, rather worn dress; in short, at the impression she gave of being a poor girl, which in Paris, out of her environment, had become accentuated in Anita. The Frenchwoman expected to find a better prepared woman,
with a little more about her, as was right for a prince, and not an adolescent from the provinces. But she had lived in India and knew how capricious and womanizing Eastern princes could be.

  “You’ll soon see how fast you learn French, Anita,” she told her kindly, as she greeted the rest of the family.

  The raja went on, saying that, although he was very sorry, Anita would have to go and live in an apartment with Mme Dijon, as it was the only way she would learn the language and the rules of protocol. Anita did not know the meaning of that word; she thought it was something in India and gave it no importance. She only thought about the separation from her parents and she did not like the idea. The raja must have noticed, because he added, “Wait.”

  The interpreter continued speaking, “Your parents will go to another apartment near yours and you can see them for an hour every day.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence, which Doña Candelaria finally interrupted, “I think it’s a good idea. Anita, that’s the only way to learn the language. And you need to urgently, otherwise … how are you going to communicate with His Highness?”

  Anita turned to her father, as though she were desperately seeking his support not to be left on her own. Don Angel looked at her with calm, sad eyes, wanting to mumble something, but in the end, when he was about to open his mouth, his wife jumped in. “The decision is yours,” said Doña Candelaria staring at her daughter. “It’s your life. But that is what His Highness wants and we all knew the moment would come when we would have to part.”