Golden Earrings

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘That’s the reality for most people in Spain,’ Margarida had replied. ‘Open your eyes, Evelina. Not everyone lives as we do.’

  Some of the families were using ladders to climb to the upper niches so that they could place flowers inside. I passed a young woman dressed in black and kneeling before a niche. She was sobbing pitifully, and her grief was so palpable it brought tears to my eyes too. Then I saw a picture of a child at the front of the niche and I understood.

  My mind skipped back to the procession that I’d been part of that morning with the other ‘good families’ of Barcelona. With our expensive clothes and quality educations, we should have been living life to the fullest and deepest levels. Why was it, then, that these people, with less money and more problems, seemed more real?

  Was I starting to think like Margarida? For a Spanish woman, even for a Catalan, Margarida had progressive ideas about society. I remembered the time a maid had found a copy of La condición social de la mujer en España by Margarita Nelken, the feminist and freethinker, under Margarida’s bed. Margarida did not advocate free love, as other feminists did, but she did believe in freedom of the spirit and the right of women to fulfil their talents and abilities without the censure of men. But in our household, literature that espoused equality of any kind — between rich and poor, master and slave, men and women, human and beast — was comparable to indulging in pornography. It wasn’t that Pare was cruel; it was just that he was so completely paternal. He truly did believe that his family and his workers alike had no choice but to obey him.

  ‘What is it that you object to about Nelken?’ Margarida had demanded of Pare. ‘That she is a highly educated woman — or that she is a Jew?’

  If I had spoken to Pare like that, he would most certainly have slapped me. But Margarida’s absolute sureness of herself had exasperated my parents to the point that even my strict father had no idea how to discipline her. She had been expelled for rebellious behaviour from every exclusive school she had attended. The option in the past had been to send daughters like Margarida to a convent, but even my parents weren’t ‘Catholic’ enough for that. Then one wise nun at a school Margarida was attending advised my parents: ‘I think your daughter is simply too bright. She’s bored here. Find a way to direct her energies and you will end up with a daughter of whom you can be proud.’

  ‘Margarida inherited your keen intellect, that’s the problem,’ Mama often told Pare. Indeed, while Pare was perturbed by a daughter who defied feminine norms, there was no equal in his eyes to Margarida when it came to intellect and an understanding of politics. She grasped the details of his business dealings, and read stocks and figures with ease. I once heard Pare lament to my mother that it was a pity that his daughter had such a head for sums while his son had been born with a gift for the fine arts. ‘It should have been the other way round,’ he’d said. ‘They must have swapped talents in the womb.’

  ‘You shouldn’t indulge Margarida so much,’ my mother scolded him. ‘I sometimes think that you want her to remain a spinster so you can keep her to yourself.’

  While being so tall did not enhance her marriage prospects, Margarida’s spinsterhood was largely of her own making. Her vitality drew many men to her, but she could always tell when someone was lying and wasn’t afraid to tell them so. It was a quality that Spanish men did not like at all. Except Xavier, of course, but Xavier was her brother.

  I couldn’t find Xavier and Margarida anywhere in the cemetery and retraced my steps to the entrance. That was when I saw them. They were standing in the paupers’ cemetery, flower bouquets held between their clasped hands, their heads bowed as if in prayer.

  I did not like that section of the cemetery and usually avoided it. There were no sculptures of angels or white doves here, only a pit in which coffins were placed on top of each other with no markings or monuments except the lone Celtic cross that had to suffice for everyone buried there. If you were buried in the paupers’ cemetery, as most of the workers in Barcelona were, you were lost to oblivion. Your relatives might remember you, until they ended up in the paupers’ pit too.

  I inched forwards. Xavier and Margarida had their backs to me. They looked so absorbed in their contemplation that I was loathe to disturb them. They seemed to share such harmony of mind that I often thought no one could ever understand them as well as they understood each other. I approached quietly.

  When I was close to them, I overheard Xavier say to Margarida, ‘I’ve never forgotten her face, you know: that hungry girl who came with the others to the factory the day of the general strike. I often wonder what happened to her … Did she end up in this pit like so many of the other starving and diseased children of Barcelona? Thrown on the heap like a piece of rubbish?’

  Margarida pressed her cheek to Xavier’s and whispered something I couldn’t hear. Together they stepped forwards and placed their white chrysanthemums at the base of the cross. Goosebumps rose on my skin and I was left with an uneasy feeling in my stomach.

  Xavier stepped back from the cross and straightened. He turned around when he saw me from the corner of his eye and the serious expression on his face melted. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘The fair Evelina has come to collect us.’ He took Margarida’s arm. ‘Come, dear sister,’ he said. ‘For now we must join those whose lifetime ambition it is to die the richest person in the cemetery.’

  He was smiling, but there was a tinge of hardness in his voice that I had not heard before. An anxious feeling gripped my heart, as if I was experiencing a premonition of the sinister future.

  Mamie’s voice trailed off, the crypts and statues of the cemetery faded from my mind and I found myself back on the sofa in the living room. Until Mamie’s story, I had never considered how the rich and poor of a city could be so definitely divided, even after death. But I sensed there was something else Mamie wanted me to understand. I looked at her questioningly.

  ‘I want you to appreciate the tightness of the circle that we “good families” moved in,’ she said. ‘We Catalans had a system of a sole heir, which meant Xavier would inherit three-quarters of the Montellas’ considerable fortune on my parents’ death. The remaining quarter was to be divided between me and Margarida, as our dowries. If there had been a younger brother, he also would have inherited part of that quarter, with the expectation that he would use it to forge his own career. Xavier was seen as a young man who had every advantage: he was the eldest son, good-looking, charming, and he had married into another elite family. Conchita’s dowry had consisted of a considerable amount of cash and properties. You must understand the tremendous responsibility that lay on Xavier’s shoulders — and the burden. It wasn’t a role someone could give up on a whim. We were rich enough that Margarida’s “eccentric” behaviour might be tolerated, but an heir who flouted tradition or broke with society … there could be serious consequences.’

  I waited for Mamie to say more, but her eyes started to droop and I realised that the storytelling had come to an end for the night. I made some camomile tea, and we drank it in the kitchen, each of us lost in a thoughtful silence.

  But when I climbed into bed, I couldn’t sleep. I lay with the bedside lamp on, staring at the ceiling. I committed each of the details of Mamie’s story to memory. So her family had been wealthy before the Civil War. I had always put her regal bearing down to her ballet training, but now I understood its origins better. I reflected on Margarida and Xavier. I found something very appealing about my great-aunt and uncle and was saddened by the thought that I would never meet them. Xavier had been a talented pianist, like my father.

  I suddenly remembered the cassette tape Audrey had given me. I climbed out of bed and took it from the drawer, hoping my father hadn’t done anything as disturbing as recording a voice message on it. I put the tape in my cassette player and was relieved to hear only music. My father was playing a piece I recognised but could not name. I looked at the label on the cassette: ‘El Corpus Christi en Sevilla’ by Isaac Albéniz. I thought it a
touch ironic, given Mamie’s story that evening, that the piece was by a Spanish composer whose music Xavier might have played.

  I climbed back into bed and shut out of my mind whatever message my father was trying to send me. Instead, I imagined it was Xavier playing for me. The piece’s mood changed dramatically from sombre to flamboyant to quiet to fortissimo. It was a long piece that required both strength and flexibility of the hands. As I listened, I pondered on how Mamie had said nothing of Margarida’s fate. Had she been killed in the war too, or was she a refugee somewhere, like Mamie? Perhaps she had remained in Spain, hiding from Franco? Possible scenarios danced around and around in my head in time to the staccato phrases of Albéniz’s music. I sighed and turned off the light. I had to wait for the answer until such time as Mamie was ready to tell me.

  THIRTEEN

  Celestina

  After Papá’s death, Teresa took Ramón and me to live with her. I’d just had time to retrieve the golden earrings and secrete them in my pocket before the landlord locked up the apartment we had shared with Papá and Anastasio, and sold off our meagre belongings to make up for the unpaid rent. In the crackdown that was imposed on Barcelona after the uprising, he wasn’t taking any chances of being seen to be sympathetic to rioters. ‘Delatad!’ was a catchword promoted by the right-wing newspapers. It meant ‘turn them in!’ People were using it as an excuse to denounce neighbours, and even relatives, against whom they held grudges. Citizens were being arrested on the flimsiest of charges, such as having sold matches and oil to the rebels or having given rioters directions to convents.

  I watched Teresa take three plates from the cupboard and place them on the kitchen table. ‘How will Anastasio find us when he comes home?’ I asked her.

  Although I had seen Papá die and had witnessed his cheap coffin being lowered into the paupers’ pit at the Old Cemetery, I still believed that the events of the past few weeks had not been real. I expected that at any moment there would be a knock at the door and we would open it to find Papá and Anastasio standing there waiting to take us home, as they had collected us every day after work from the Casa del Pueblo.

  We hadn’t received any letters from Anastasio, but that was to be expected. The mail from Morocco was slow, and Anastasio was only semiliterate so he would have to wait until someone was able to write on his behalf; not something likely to happen quickly in a war.

  ‘Juana is going to write to her husband,’ Teresa said. ‘He is with Anastasio in Morocco. She will let him know that you are with me.’

  Teresa’s own position was precarious. As a leader of Damas Rojas, and one who had participated in the burning of the convents, she could be arrested at any time. One morning, when they thought I was still sleeping, I heard Teresa tell Ramón: ‘If anything happens to me, go with your sister to Juana in la Barceloneta. Now memorise the address.’

  Papá’s death meant that Teresa now had two more to feed. To lessen the burden, Ramón and I tried to help her sell more flowers at the markets. One day, when we were minding the stall while Teresa was running errands, Ramón came up with an ingenious idea.

  ‘Celestina, go around the market and see what prices everyone else is selling their geraniums and lavender for,’ he instructed me.

  I had no idea what he was up to, but I did as he told me. When I returned with the information, Ramón lowered our prices for the same flowers and upped the asking price for the roses. He was a cunning salesman. The other vendors looked on in amazement as Ramón attracted housewives and housemaids to our stall in droves, firstly catching their attention by whistling a song about a bird flitting amongst the blooms, then reeling them in with our lowered prices for standard flowers before overcharging them on the golden roses.

  ‘Look at the colour of these roses, senyora,’ Ramón would say, tilting his head and shrugging his shoulders in a charming manner. ‘Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? Now smell them. The scent is a heavenly mix of exotic spices and honey, is it not? Now touch the petals. They are as delicate as a baby’s eyelids …’

  I was amused to see the way Ramón fooled the rich women. I hated wealthy people: I was sure they had been the cause of Papá’s death. I thought of the sweatshop owner, Montella, I had seen on the first day of the general strike, and his fancily dressed wife. I no longer cared that they were the parents of pretty baby Evelina. I vowed to myself that one day, when I was older, I would find a way to avenge Papá against people like them.

  Before the morning was over, Ramón and I had sold all of Teresa’s flowers. We sat under the table and grinned at each other. Wouldn’t Teresa be pleased when she saw the day’s earnings!

  When Teresa returned and we told her what we had done, she raised her eyebrows and glanced sheepishly at the other flower vendors, who were not impressed by Ramón’s undercutting tactics. She pursed her lips, trying to suppress a smile.

  ‘You shouldn’t have left them alone at the stall!’ Delfina scolded Teresa. Her reprimand was supported by grumbling from the other flower sellers.

  Teresa burst out laughing. ‘Can I help it if they are smarter than all of you?’

  One night, after we had been with Teresa for a while, I dreamed that I was in a place where colossal limestone mountains rose from the sea. Between the mountains were valleys with torrential rivers running through them. I turned and saw that Anastasio was waving to me from a forested slope. He opened his mouth and spoke to me. But I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  When I awoke I had a strange sensation in my heart. I wasn’t sure if the place I had seen in my dream was a figment of my imagination or if my soul had mysteriously left my body and I’d truly been with Anastasio at the Rif.

  The next day, Juana came to see Teresa at the market. I could tell by their grim looks that their conversation was serious. They talked for a long while and, when Juana finally left, Teresa returned to the stall pale and shaken. She made several mistakes in her calculations, which she had never done before. In the evening, when Ramón and I were lying in our bed together, I asked him what he thought Juana and Teresa had been talking about. I jumped when he punched the mattress.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Juana gave a letter to Teresa,’ he said. ‘I saw her slip it into her pocket. I bet it was from Antoni. I thought she would read it to us at dinner, but she didn’t. Why? It must contain bad news about Anastasio!’

  The idea that anything bad could have happened to Anastasio was unthinkable. There must have been some other explanation of why Teresa wouldn’t share the contents of the letter.

  ‘Do you know where she put the letter?’ I asked him.

  He nodded. ‘I watched her read it in her bedroom through the crack in the door. I couldn’t see her face, but I saw her hide it in the top drawer of her dresser.’

  The next few days were agonising as Ramón and I waited for an opportunity to sneak into Teresa’s room and read the letter. We had to wait until Wednesday, when, as usual, she left us at home while she went to the secret food cooperative set up by Damas Rojas away from the Casa del Pueblo. Sometimes Teresa used the cooperative as an opportunity to catch up on news about the crackdown, but most of the time she didn’t linger there too long because of the danger. We watched from the window as she disappeared down the street with a wicker basket under her arm. Ramón and I ran to her room, but to our dismay the top drawer of the dresser was locked.

  ‘We’d better find the key,’ said Ramón, feeling behind the dresser.

  ‘What if she took it with her?’ I asked.

  Ramón stared at me. ‘Even two orphans like us couldn’t have such bad luck,’ he said, before continuing his search.

  We’d have to find the key quickly; the food cooperative was not far away. I searched around the room, trying to think where it could be. The only furniture besides the dresser was a four-poster bed with a sagging mattress, a washbasin with a metal jug, and a footstool. Something urged me to look behind the curtains. I couldn’t believe it whe
n I saw a key lying on the windowsill.

  ‘This must be it,’ I told Ramón.

  He tried the key in the lock and it turned. The drawer slid open when he pulled it, and I waited in torment as he took out the mud-stained letter. He was right: it was from Antoni.

  ‘Read it aloud!’ I begged him.

  Ramón’s forehead wrinkled as he read Antoni’s description of how difficult life was for the Spanish soldiers in Morocco: how they were never sure where the enemy was until it was too late; how the natives were skilled guerrilla fighters who could survive on local food sources without having to lug around supplies, and who slept in trees, forgoing the need to set up camps. Neither artillery, cavalry nor bayonet charges work against them. And these are the only strategies our officers know …

  Ramón stopped for a moment, then began to read again:

  I did eventually manage to find out information about Anastasio Sánchez, as you requested. Although this report has come to me through multiple sources, like a series of Chinese whispers, and despite the fact that his family has not been given official news, it does sound plausible to me. The young conscript died only a few days after his arrival in Melilla. He was sent as part of an exercise to a mountain where the natives were firing on troops as they tried to advance. With no knowledge or accurate map of the region, their officers led the men straight into an ambush. Sánchez was among the few survivors rescued, but he lasted only a day in the camp hospital before succumbing to his wounds. The priest who administered the last rites to the young man said that he died with the names of his brother and sister on his lips. That, my dearest, is all that I can tell you …

  Time seemed to come to a standstill. I could feel the blood rushing in my ears. My gaze moved from the letter to Ramón’s face. He reread that part of the correspondence again, desperately, as if he had missed something, as if there must be some mistake.

  We heard a noise and turned to see Teresa in the doorway. She saw the letter in Ramón’s hand and the expression on our faces and dropped her basket. Dried beans and onions spilled onto the floor. I expected her to scold us for snooping around her room but she burst into tears, rushed towards us and gathered us in her arms.