Golden Earrings

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘Would you like to come in for a cup of rosemary and lemon tisane?’ Conchita asked me.

  I had an hour before my first afternoon class. I’d intended to write down the events of the morning so that they would remain real to me. But I hadn’t visited Conchita for a while, and I knew she was lonely. Although she wasn’t as affectionate with me as Mamie, I’d grown up with her. She’d played dress ups with me when my parents were away on tour and had taught me how to put on make-up properly.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, taking her spindly arm.

  Like its inhabitant, Conchita’s tiny ground-floor abode exuded a kind of standoffish elegance with its encaustic tiled floors, chandeliers and lace curtains. It was morbid too. On top of her radio cabinet, Conchita kept two framed pictures: the first was of her French husband, Pierre, embracing their rosy-cheeked baby sons; the second was a newspaper clipping detailing a fatal car accident. With these two pictures, Conchita told the story of the events that had punctuated her life in France. When the few people who ever entered the apartment — the doctor, the occasional salesman, a delivery boy — saw the pictures, they knew what questions not to ask.

  There was no photograph of Conchita’s eldest son, Feliu, nor of his Spanish father. I had seen Feliu a few times over the years. He drove trucks through Europe for a French transport company and when he was in Paris he sometimes visited Mamie, but never his mother. He was friendly enough to me, but always gave me the impression that he was something like a sparrow: happy to visit, but as eager to flit away.

  ‘Why doesn’t Feliu see his mother when he comes?’ I asked Mamie after one of these visits. ‘It must hurt her.’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ said Mamie. ‘He left home at fourteen, and he and Conchita have never been close. But he always leaves me some money to help with her expenses, so he still has a sense of duty towards her.’

  I guessed the root of the rift had something to do with the Civil War, and therefore it was never likely to be revealed to me.

  While the water for the tisane was boiling, Conchita turned on the radio. The announcer was translating a statement that Richard Nixon had given in honour of Franco. ‘A loyal friend and ally of the United States,’ the former American president had called him. ‘A true leader.’

  Conchita listened with tears in her eyes. ‘He was not as bad a man as your grandmother thinks, Paloma,’ she muttered. ‘Franco wanted to make Spain great.’

  I sat back in the upholstered chair and wondered how Conchita and my grandmother had remained friends when their views of Franco were so polarised. But they never seemed to discuss politics, and Conchita didn’t attend Mamie’s gatherings of émigrés.

  Conchita and I drank the tisane together and kept our conversation to the weather and the new chocolatier that was opening near place Victor Hugo. I promised that I would be first in line outside its Art Nouveau windows to buy her favourite coated almonds.

  ‘Ah,’ said Conchita, clapping her hands with delight. ‘You are always so good to me.’

  When it was time for me to go, she accompanied me to the front door. I bent to kiss her and the leaflet for the Spanish dance school dropped onto the tiles.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked, picking it up. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Flamenco lessons?’ She gave me a sharp look, which took me by surprise.

  ‘I’m thinking of taking lessons to improve my character dancing,’ I explained. ‘And it might be fun.’

  Conchita’s back stiffened. I wondered if she had the same objections that Mamie did to a ‘low-brow’ art that had been forced on the Catalans.

  I shrugged awkwardly. ‘I know it’s not Catalan,’ I said, ‘but it could be good for my repertoire. It’s very expressive. Please don’t tell Mamie. She doesn’t seem to like it. I guess because it’s not from her part of Spain.’

  Conchita cleared her throat. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said, pursing her lips as if she was trying to contain what she really wanted to say. ‘Ballerinas need inspiration from other forms of dance. I understand. It’s not the culture you are looking for, but the style.’

  She opened the door for me and I stepped out into the corridor. As I turned towards the stairway, I heard her say in a small voice from behind the door, ‘It’s not because she’s Catalan that your grandmother hates flamenco.’

  FOUR

  Celestina Barcelona, 1909

  You who judge me: come! Let me tell you a story. Let me take you to a part of Barcelona not glorified by intellectuals for Gaudí’s revolutionary architecture, for its impressive paintings and sculptures, for its elegant Modernista style; the ‘Pearl of the Mediterranean’, the ‘Paris of the South’. No, this place is far from the passeig de Gràcia with its shops selling gold-embossed inkpots and mother-of-pearl hair combs. You will not find tree-lined boulevards here, nor cafés serving vanilla wafers with their fine filtered coffee. Follow me along las Ramblas where the street vendors peddle everything from parakeets to corn cobs, where the prostitutes lean on lampposts and stare indolently at the passers-by, and the cabarets play music all night. Here now, let me lead you through these streets that grow narrower and grimmer. Hold your handkerchief to your nose lest the stink — of rancid garlic and urine trapped in the hot, humid air — assaults your nostrils.

  A woman opens a door and shouts something to another in the sing-song inflection of Catalan. Her friend answers with the inflated expressiveness of an Andalusian dialect. A third woman, taking threadbare shirts from a clothes line, adds her nasal Majorcan tone to the conversation. We turn a corner and see a beggar worrying at his sores with a stick in the hope of eliciting more money; and we evade the dogs feeding on the refuse thrown in the street. Walk with me across this square that is nothing more than mud and give no thought to your precious shoes. Let us come to a stop before a tenement building that was built to accommodate twenty people, but whose landlord has been subdividing the apartments into smaller and smaller units as rents have risen sharply over the last few years. This building now houses sixty wretched souls, who share one working toilet. Disease has visited this place many times: cholera; tuberculosis; meningitis. An outbreak of typhoid took a much-loved mother’s life just last year. Turn your eyes to the empty lot next to it, piled with shards of rubble. Another tenement building once stood here, like the one we are looking at, with cracked walls and stained windows. But its foundations collapsed in the winter rains, crushing all those inside.

  Here, let me take you up the narrow, worn stairs of the building and show you an apartment on the top floor, where a family is sleeping. It is five o’clock in the morning and summer light is beginning to penetrate the broken slats of the shutters. The heat-laden air is pungent with the smells of rust and mould, but the apartment’s occupants have become so used to the odours that they no longer notice. The apartment consists of a kitchenette and one room that serves as both bedroom and eating area. In this room, on a narrow iron bed, lies a prematurely grey-haired man. On his left, with his back turned to him, is his eighteen-year-old son. Tucked under his right arm is his ten-year-old boy. In a corner of the room, where most of the paint has peeled away from the walls and a stain darkens the ceiling, stands a cot bed with a girl lying in it. The girl is eight years old and too big for the bed; she has to twist herself like a piece of rope to fit in it, but there is nowhere else for her to sleep — the rats prevent her from stretching out on the floor. Look at her, curled up tightly, not only to fit into the tiny bed but also to curb the hunger pangs she suffers each night when she goes to sleep. Her arms and legs are raw with flea bites, made worse by the heat. Her greasy hair has not seen soap and water for weeks. Can you find no pity in your heart for such a child? Look at her carefully before you judge. For that young girl is me.

  ‘Celestina!’

  I opened my eyes at my father’s call, although I’d already been awake for an hour. The hunger pangs in the pit of my stomach gnawed at me like rats. But one look at Papá’s haggard face and all desire to complain left me. He had given m
e his share of bread the night before, and it hurt me to think he would go to work with worse pains than I suffered.

  I stood up and Papá lifted me out of the cot. While he sat on the bed to put on his workboots, I struck the floor gently with the soles of my feet, responding to a rhythm no one else could hear. Papá said I had danced before I could walk, that it was in my blood. My mother had always danced too.

  Anastasio was at the dresser, crouching so he could see himself in the speckled mirror. I watched him contorting his face to shave. Although I was young, I understood from the way women turned when he passed by on the street that my eldest brother was handsome. My father said that Anastasio had inherited his good looks from our mother. She, on the other hand, had always insisted that he was the spitting image of Papá when he was a youth. I glanced from Anastasio to Papá and tried to discern in that beloved wrinkled face Anastasio’s chiselled features and dark broody eyes. Papá was only forty-two years of age, but the troubles that had plagued him since he left his village in Andalusia twelve years earlier had aged him. He’d come to Barcelona with my mother and Anastasio after a peasant uprising, but had only found more of the same poverty and suffering he’d tried to leave behind.

  ‘Dancing! Dancing! Always dancing, Celestina!’

  My brother Ramón grabbed me in a headlock. His fingers caught in the tangles in my hair and I yelped.

  ‘Be gentle!’ scolded Anastasio, turning from the mirror. ‘She’s little.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Ramón, pinching my cheeks. ‘I only have one sister.’

  This was true. Those who had been born in the years between Anastasio and himself had all died in infancy.

  Ramón was not handsome like Anastasio. He had a head the shape of an egg and his body was round like a stuffed artichoke. But what he lacked in looks, Ramón made up for in personality. He charmed the street vendors into giving us their spoiling fruit and vegetables, and had even managed to convince our avaricious landlord to give us a week’s grace on our rent during the strike at the factory. Whenever Ramón had a big win, like the time a shopkeeper had given him an entire box of almonds, he was always generous in sharing it, even with the sickly Fernández children who lived in the apartment next to us.

  ‘Come on, or we’ll be late,’ said Papá, opening the door to the corridor. We filed out in order of age, then Ramón picked me up in his arms. Although I could walk perfectly well and Ramón was only a few inches taller than me, he liked to carry me about.

  ‘Put her down, Ramón,’ said Anastasio, taking both our hands. ‘She’s not a doll.’

  A few streets away, on our way to the markets on las Ramblas, we came across workmen clearing up broken glass and twisted metal outside a bicycle shop. The air was putrid with the stench of burnt rubber. There was a gaping hole in the blackened wall of the building and the inside of the store looked to have been reduced to ash. Policemen were in attendance, searching through the rubble and questioning witnesses.

  ‘Another bomb,’ muttered Papá.

  The explosion had been close enough to our building that we should have heard it, but we’d become so used to the blasts lately that none of us had woken up. We were no longer surprised by the sight of a bicycle pump embedded in the wall of the shop opposite, or the saddle that had melted into a lamppost and now resembled a wilting flower. A few years earlier, the city had suffered a series of fatal bombings in revenge for the execution of four anarchists. But those attacks had been directed against the wealthy and the authorities. These latest bombings seemed to have no political purpose. They occurred in the streets of the poorest neighbourhoods in the early hours of the morning, as if those responsible were trying not to hurt anybody.

  Something shiny in the gutter caught my eye. I recognised the brass dome as a bicycle bell, still in one piece and barely even scratched. Ramón noticed it too and bent to pick it up out of curiosity. A policeman spotted him and shouted, ‘Get lost, you little thief!’

  Ramón straightened, red with mortification at the accusation. Charmer? Yes. Salesman? Yes. Talented persuader? Yes. But thief? Never!

  Anastasio’s lips drew into a thin line and he clenched his fists, ready to defend his brother’s honour. But Papá grabbed his shoulder. ‘Come, or we will be late,’ he said. He spoke with measured calm, but the look he gave the policeman was as sharp as a knife.

  The plane trees that lined las Ramblas were in their full summer leafiness. Housewives and housemaids were bustling about the Boqueria Market. That cornucopia of fruit and vegetables, meat, seafood and sweets was Ramón’s favourite place in the world. Many of the vendors knew him by name and were happy to give him a little something — some olives in winter, some overripe fruits in summer — in exchange for the fanciful stories he told with such aplomb. I could never forget the day he returned with a piece of tortell: a round pastry stuffed with marzipan and topped with glazed fruit. We shared it between us, and the sweet sensation on my tongue was so blissful I was sure I had died and gone to heaven. Inspired by Ramón’s acquisitions I’d followed him into the market the following day. But the sight of boiled goats’ heads hanging from hooks and other animals’ organs laid out on cabbage leaves horrified me. I was sure I could see the kids’ hearts beating still. I screamed when one of the butchers touched me with his icy finger and fled back out onto las Ramblas. The market became associated with the stench of death and I never wanted to return there.

  My idea of paradise was the place we were headed now: the flower market, on the opposite side of the street to the Boqueria. I loved to spend my day there amongst the rainbow of colours and alluring scents, the blooms bursting from buckets and cascading from pots: trailing geraniums, fragrant roses, waxy begonias, vivid marigolds. My favourites were the blood-red clusters of carnations, like dancing girls swishing their skirts. The beauty, charm and exotic fragrances of the flower market were the exact opposite of the world in which I usually existed.

  ‘Buenos días!’ called out Teresa when she saw us. She lifted a bucket of gardenias onto her stall table and the sweet, summery scent of the flowers wafted through the air.

  Big-boned Teresa was a widow who looked after me and Ramón when Papá and Anastasio were at the textiles factory, a responsibility for which she refused to accept payment. She had met my father at a meeting of the Radical Party, where she was a leader of one of the women’s groups: Damas Rojas. The other group was Damas Radicales, which was more conservative in its politics. Teresa owned her own stall at the market and wore tiny pearl earrings, both of which made her fabulously wealthy in my eyes. In reality, however, she was only a little better off than we were. Teresa was originally from Madrid, which was why she spoke in Spanish to us instead of the Catalan she used with her customers. She had come to Barcelona with her husband, who had intended to fulfil a lifelong dream of working on a ship. But before he could realise his ambition, he cut his finger on a piece of wire and died a week later of an infection.

  Teresa placed her man-sized hands on her hips and shared her theory on the latest bombing. ‘It’s the Radical leaders inspiring the workers to revolution.’ She cast a reproachful look at my father. ‘You know that these strikes, negotiations and do-gooder social legislation are getting you nowhere. The factory owners show some mock resistance, then send you all home with a few more céntimos. The only way for real change is to create an entirely new system.’

  ‘You might be right,’ agreed Papá wearily. ‘The economy has recovered since the loss of the colonies, but our wages have stayed the same. Yet costs go up and up.’

  Delfina, the flower vendor at the next stall, looked over her bluebells and winked at Anastasio. He nodded courteously to her but his mind was on other things.

  ‘You know what I think?’ he said to Teresa. ‘I think the factory owners are setting off the bombs themselves to discredit the labour movement. Every time one goes off it’s an excuse for the police to arrest and torture the union leaders and scare off the workers.’

  The marke
t clock struck six. Papá and Anastasio still had a way to walk to the factory, so they hurriedly kissed us goodbye. Before they left, Teresa reached into a basket and gave them each a long sandwich wrapped in newspaper. The salty smell of anchovies tickled my nostrils.

  ‘Teresa, you shouldn’t …’ began Papá. He’d just paid the rent on our apartment and there was no money for ‘extras’.

  Teresa raised her hand to stop him. ‘I had a very good day yesterday, and I’m sick of seeing the two of you get scrawnier and scrawnier,’ she said.

  My father cast a glance at me and Ramón. He would never eat if we were going without.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Teresa told him. ‘I have something for them too.’

  After Papá and Anastasio had departed, Ramón and I ate the olive oil and garlic sandwiches Teresa had prepared for us and then helped her set up the flower table. As we were finishing, Laieta came by on her way home from work. She was the daughter of a friend of Teresa’s who had died three years before. I didn’t understand what it was that twenty-year-old Laieta did for a living, or that she’d been forced to take up her current trade when she was laid off from the sweatshop where she had worked. I simply thought her glamorous in her narrow ankle-length skirt, her wavy hair swept up on top of her head and her hat cocked jauntily to one side. Her sweet, powdery perfume was as exotic to me as the Arab markets down by the port.

  Laieta greeted Teresa with kisses, then she turned to us.

  ‘I have a gift for you, my little ones,’ she said, reaching into her bag and taking out a tin. She handed it to me. ‘A friend of mine gave it to me last night.’

  I prised open the container and a sweet aroma wafted out. Although I had devoured my sandwich, I was still hungry and my stomach rumbled with anticipation when I saw the tiny nut cookies inside. Ramón grabbed the tin from me and offered the cookies to Teresa and Laieta first, who both refused, before handing it back to me.