‘Yes, why don’t you come in and show don Miguel what she can do. We don’t want to deprive the world of talent.’
I followed señor Chacón and Diego into the Villa Rosa unable to believe that Diego’s scheme had worked. I was so overwhelmed to be in that esteemed place that I barely took in the Moorish tiles on the walls and the plaster arabesques on the ceiling. The club was crowded and I kept my eyes on the backs of señor Chacón and Diego so as not to get lost, but I did notice the polished bar stacked with wines and sherries in classy bottles. I gave a start when I recognised the matador Juan Belmonte speaking with the dashing film star Antonio Moreno, who had a successful career in the United States. The other lavishly dressed people were probably just as famous, but I had no idea who they were.
Señor Chacón led us to a room where the flamenco artists were sitting. The dancers were dressed in black with their hair elegantly pinned behind their ears. By comparison, I looked like some sort of strange sea urchin in my bright dress. My heart leaped to my throat at the sight of the guitarist Ramón Montoya holding his famous guitar, la Leona: the Lioness. The attractive dancer Concha la Chícharra was there that evening too. She was known for a rather risqué dance called El Crispin, where she stripped off various layers of clothing, supposedly searching for a flea.
‘Don Miguel!’ señor Chacón called out to a man who was sitting next to señor Montoya. The man looked up and raised his thick eyebrows.
‘I have brought you a new talent!’ señor Chacón said.
If I had not been standing next to señor Chacón, I doubt that señor Borrull would have looked at me twice. He rose from his chair and nodded to señor Montoya, who started playing a farruca. My heart dropped to my feet. I could feel la Tanguera’s eyes boring into me. How could I dance something for which she was famous? But I knew this was my only chance to impress señor Borrull and the others, and I had to do my best.
I slipped off my sandals and placed them under a chair. I glanced once at Diego before lifting my chin and beginning to dance. I twirled my wrists, swung my arms and stamped my feet with all the passion I could muster. It was a long time since I had felt the dark angel, but something took me over when señor Montoya began to play faster and my feet moved with him. A surge of power and majesty ran through me. I was the mistress of this dance, not its slave. I forgot about impressing señor Borrull and danced with my full spirit.
When I finished, the effect on the room was electric. I held my proud stance as the artists shouted ‘Olé!’ for me. Señor Chacón smiled at señor Borrull, who nodded his approval. Diego, who didn’t know a farruca from a bowl of olives, folded his arms and smiled smugly, as if the victory had been his alone.
‘Her!’ a voice behind me said.
I turned to see a hollow-cheeked man with a hooked nose and red-rimmed eyes staring at me. His intense gaze gave me an eerie feeling, but it was clear from the excitement that ran through the room, and the two burly men standing on either side of him like guards, that the man was important.
‘Señor Salazar,’ señor Borrull said, putting his hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘This señorita has just started with us tonight. I don’t know what else she can dance. She may not be up to your standard. Ask la Tanguera instead.’
Salazar laughed through his yellow teeth. ‘You’ve forgotten that I am the best judge of what I want! That señorita burns with gypsy fire. Send her and Montoya for me.’
Señor Borrull looked worried but gestured for me to go with the men.
‘You’d better be as good as that first dance,’ señor Montoya whispered in my ear. ‘El señor Salazar doesn’t stand for games.’
‘Who is he?’ I asked.
Señor Montoya was shocked by my question. ‘Oh God!’ he muttered. ‘He is one of the most famous breeders of fighting bulls in Spain … and also something of a gangster.’
I glanced at Diego, who ran his hand through his hair nervously. We were out of our depth now.
We followed the men up a staircase to a room decorated with wrought-iron chandeliers and with tiled murals of Moorish castles on the walls. The air was thick with cigar smoke and the hazelnut scent of fine sherry. The audience was mostly men, as it had been in the cafés in the barri Xinès where Manuel used to take me to dance, only this time the few whores present were wearing Jeanne Lanvin dresses.
Salazar signalled to the guests to make room so I could dance. He pulled a pistol from his jacket before sitting down in an armchair.
‘Oh God,’ whispered señor Montoya again. ‘Can you dance an alegrías?’
I glanced at him. ‘Yes.’
Most flamenco dancers specialised in two or three musical forms, devoting their lives to mastering every detail of that rhythm. But I was obsessed by dance in all its forms. I could have performed the Argentine tango or the American cakewalk if señor Montoya had asked me to; or, at least, my interpretations of them.
Señor Montoya seemed dubious but began to play.
I did my best to ignore the pistol in Salazar’s lap and the stern expression on his face and began my paseo. Luckily for me, I could tell by the way the crowd shouted their encouragement that they appreciated gypsy flamenco. I raised my arms and arched my wrists, letting the dark angel take me. I felt myself transform. My torso grew heavy and solid. Horns sprouted from my head and my shoulders bulked up with muscle. I caught sight of myself in the wall mirror. My skin was black and my head was enormous. I had turned into one of Salazar’s bulls …
My blood on fire, I rushed from the dark toril into the arena. I was dazzled by the light. The crowd roared. My heart thumped with fury and fear. The matador in his suit of lights was waiting for me along with his banderilleros. The matador raised his satin cape, testing my courage. A picador on a horse stabbed me in the neck. A searing pain burned through me and I could no longer hold up my proud head. Warm blood trickled down my legs into the sand …
I danced with ferocity, my anger burning up my insides. I wanted to live but I hated life. Injustice was all I had known. I must kill those who had hurt my family …
The spectators were a sea of brilliant colours. Women in lace mantillas waved their handkerchiefs. I could not win but I knew I must fight … I spun like a whip. Not once but twice. My hair flew from its pins. My feet beat the floor like war drums … I ran at my tormentors. My triumph was the glimmer of fear in the matador’s eyes, even though it lasted only a moment and all was stacked against me …
The Villa Rosa’s glamorous guests jumped from their seats, screaming and shouting. Salazar fired shots into the ceiling …
The barbed spears they jabbed into my shoulders drained my strength. I was outnumbered and alone. But I charged with all the courage I had left. An agonising pain ripped through my shoulder blades. The matador’s sword had pierced my heart. I collapsed to my knees. My vision blurred. The spectators cheered. My last view of the world was thousands of white handkerchiefs being waved in victory as my life ran out of me …
I ended the dance with my right arm raised and my eyes cast down. Sweat poured down my face and back. My lungs pulsed, desperately trying to suck in air. There was stunned silence for a few seconds, before a man lifted his chair and threw it against the wall. Another picked up one of the splintered legs and smashed it into a mirror. The women sobbed hysterically. One of them tore her scarf from around her neck and shredded it in her hands. Her companion broke his wine glass and thrust the jagged vessel into his shoulder. My legs were trembling and the room was turning white around me. The people in the audience were demonstrating how deeply I had moved them.
Señor Montoya struck up another alegrías but I had nothing more to give. I looked from señor Montoya to Diego, and then fainted.
When I regained consciousness, señor Montoya and Diego were leaning over me. ‘Alegrías means “joys”,’ señor Montoya said to me, a scowl on his face. ‘Wherever you went with that one, it was troubling.’
Diego, however, was beaming. It was clear from the loud voices
around me and the murmurs of ‘spectacular’ that I had been well received.
The men helped me to my feet and I found myself face to face with Salazar. He took my hand and pushed a wad of notes into it. It was more money than I had ever earned in my life. Disoriented and confused, I turned to go.
He grabbed my arm and yanked me towards him. ‘I warn the matadors who fight my bulls that it is dangerous to turn their backs on them.’
Salazar’s grip was painful. At first I averted my eyes from his cruel face. I sensed his darkness was deep. But then I thought of the bull I had become during my dance and courage returned to me. I locked eyes with him. A smile curled his lips. My defiance seemed to please him. He laughed loudly and leaned his face towards mine.
‘Encaste, nobleza, bravura,’ he said. ‘The most important quality I look for in my bulls is courage in the face of pain.’
He released his grip and I stumbled backwards. I kept my eyes on him as I backed out of the room. It was obvious that Salazar had the devil in him. I did not know then just how much pain he would one day cause me.
Señor Borrull had invited me and Diego to return the next night to the Villa Rosa. Although I was excited to be in the company of the finest flamenco artists, I was afraid Salazar would pick me again for a fiesta. At least Diego had decided to spend some money on me, ‘as an investment’, and had purchased an elegant black dress with a ruffled skirt and white piping for me to wear.
I breathed a sigh of relief when Salazar wasn’t at the club. Instead, I danced for some English and American tourists. The Englishmen said nothing, although they paid me generously, but the Americans were exuberant. ‘Darling, you should go to New York,’ a man in a white suit told me. ‘Americans are having a love affair with Spanish dancers. You’ll make millions!’
As well as dancing at the Villa Rosa, Diego and I were invited to other famous clubs in Barcelona: la Taurina; el Manquet; la Criolla. If a club wasn’t busy on a particular night, the flamenco artists would perform for each other. No dance academy could have given me what I learned from watching the masters up close.
One evening the following year, a month after my nineteenth birthday, I was demonstrating my ability to do two or three turns and stop precisely on the spot when I sensed someone watching me. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a man in a double-breasted suit sitting at a table in the corner. He had broad shoulders and his hands, which were clasped in front of him, were large and square. He wore a gold signet ring on one and a diamond ring on the other. The man gave the impression that he could crush someone in his grasp, but was too suave to do so.
I finished my dance, and was waiting at the bar for some iced water when the man approached me.
‘You dance very well,’ he said, in an accent that wasn’t Spanish. What was it? French? German? He had the sleek brown hair and strong jaw of a younger man, but the droop of his hooded eyes and the grooves around his mouth made me guess his age to be about fifty.
‘Do you want me to dance for a fiesta?’ I asked him, hoping for an engagement for the evening. The man looked like he had money. Another epidemic of the Spanish flu was keeping the tourists away and I had an entire gypsy clan to support.
He shook his head. ‘No, I’d like you to dance in my cabaret.’
The memory of the insipid acts Manuel and I had performed in variety shows when we were low on money didn’t make me jump at the offer. If I ever danced in one of those places again, it was going to be on my terms.
‘If you’re looking for a “flamenco act”,’ I told him, ‘you’ve got the wrong dancer.’
The man shook his head. It was hard not to be mesmerised by his eyes. They were the same cobalt blue as the water bottles the waiters placed on the tables.
‘I’m not looking for a dancer,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for a star.’
The word made me think of great beauties like la Argentina: women who had four or five costume changes a show. Not poor girls like me, who borrowed their clothes.
‘You think I could be a star?’ I asked with a laugh.
The man shifted on his feet. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’re a bit of a rough diamond. I don’t know what I’ll get when I polish you.’
‘Polish me?’ I cried, lifting my chin defiantly. ‘What if you can’t polish me?’
‘We’ll see,’ he replied, reaching into his jacket and taking out a card. He passed it to me.
The Samovar Club, las Ramblas, Barcelona
I had heard of the club. The best international acts performed there. So this man was serious. He turned to go.
‘Excuse me, senyor,’ I called after him. ‘You didn’t tell me your name.’
The man looked over his shoulder. A half-smile danced on his lips and his eyes shone brighter. ‘My name is Maxim Tarasov,’ he said. ‘But in Barcelona they call me “el Ruso”.’
That was how I met the impresario el Ruso: the Russian. The man who would change everything.
TWENTY
Paloma
It was both wonderful and daunting to be back at the School of the Opera Ballet. When I exited the Métro at the place de l’Opéra and stood before the rose marble columns of the Paris Opera House, a thousand memories flooded back to me. The first time I had seen the Beaux Arts building, considered to be one of the most beautiful in the world, I had been with my mother. I was only three years old at the time and I’d gaped in awe at the gilded statues representing poetry and music, and the bronze busts of the famous composers. When Mama showed me the stage where she had danced, I felt as though I had stepped into a world of magic and fantasy. I’d craned my neck to admire the grand chandelier suspended above the auditorium and to take in the Baroque opulence of the gold-leafed cherubs and nymphs that decorated the walls. When I entered the ballet school, it was the dream of dancing on the Paris Opera’s stage that gave me the strength to endure the gruelling dance classes and brutal competition. On the occasions when ballet school life became overwhelming, all it required for me to pick myself up again was to imagine gazing out at the audience from that stage and taking my final curtain call to the sound of thunderous applause.
The entrance to the Ballet School was through a courtyard. When I crossed it, I suddenly remembered that Mama had once told me about a ghost she had seen one evening when she was hurrying from her dressing room to the wings. The apparition was of a dark-haired woman and it had rushed towards her from a door in the corridor. Mama had stopped in her tracks to avoid a collision with what she thought was another performer. Then, to her surprise, the woman had vanished into thin air. I wished I had asked her more about that encounter when she told me about it, but ghost stories were frequently exchanged among the ballet students — after all, the Paris Opera House was the setting for Gaston Leroux’s Gothic novel The Phantom of the Opera — and the associated practical jokes of missing ballet shoes and moved pictures had made me cynical. Despite Marcel’s assertion that all Spaniards see ghosts, I had never believed in their existence until la Rusa.
I made my way to the dressing room, where I changed into my leotard and tights and did some preliminary stretching before applying full stage make-up, including two sets of false eyelashes. The students of the Ballet School were expected to maintain a high level of grooming, but Mademoiselle Louvet, who would be helping me prepare for the examination, had standards that were even more exacting. She was from the glamour era of the ballet, when étoiles had the same status as film stars and took their roles very seriously. They always had to be beautiful and conduct themselves with decorum whether they were performing or not.
‘You are not just dancers,’ I remembered Mademoiselle Louvet telling my class one day. ‘You are muses … you must inspire the human race to appreciate and live for beauty.’
I did have to smile though when I recalled Mama once telling me that Mademoiselle Louvet had been temporarily suspended from the Ballet in the 1930s for dancing in a Monaco nightclub like a ‘common music-hall star’.
I was w
alking to the rehearsal room when a group of petits rats, as the young students of the school were known, passed me on their way to their afternoon dance class. The sight of them in their maroon wraps and leggings made me smile. They were about nine years old and the worst of the competition and strain hadn’t yet begun. Ballet was still magic, beauty and fantasy to them. I envied them their innocence — and pitied them because I knew they would soon lose it.
Mademoiselle Louvet was waiting for me in the rehearsal room, with the pianist, Monsieur Clary. As to be expected, she was wearing full make-up with dramatically shaded eyes and elongated eyeliner and was looking chic in a shirtwaister dress and low-heeled pumps. I patted my hair to make sure it was perfect.
‘Ah, bonjour, Paloma,’ Mademoiselle Louvet said when she saw me. She kissed me. ‘How lovely it is to see you again. I’ve missed your pretty face.’
Mademoiselle Louvet was my favourite teacher. There was nothing insincere about her. If she welcomed you with kisses, you could be sure that she was not going to turn on you later in a fit of bad temper.
‘Are you warmed up? Are you ready to start?’ she asked, guiding me to the barre.
I took my place, and Monsieur Clary began to play so I could commence my tendus and glissés. For an institution that stuck rigidly to the rules, the Ballet School was making an exception for me, and pulling out all stops by assigning one of its most highly regarded teachers as my coach. Although it was permissible for me to attempt the audition for the corps de ballet again externally, I was past the age where I could officially return for classes at the school or take the examination from there. Perhaps the school was helping me out of respect for the memory of my mother, who had been a popular student and who had gone on to be a star of the ballet, or maybe it was because they were angered that their best student should have been rejected from joining the Ballet because of unfair prejudices. Perhaps they believed that if I took the examination again, the judging panel, including Arielle Marineau, would have to concede to my determination.
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