Golden Earrings

by Belinda Alexandra

  What was Xavier Montella doing in the backstage corridor? Was he another deranged Salazar? But I didn’t see the same madness in Xavier’s eyes as I did in the bull breeder’s. Nonetheless, I gave him the severe expression I saved for persistent admirers. ‘I really don’t have time,’ I told him. ‘I must get home.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. But he didn’t move. ‘Perhaps you will allow me to take you to dinner?’

  Is he out of his mind? I wondered. Could he really have no idea how much I despised him? Or did he, like so many rich men, think that all dancers were whores and easily bought?

  Xavier smiled. ‘Excuse me, senyoreta, for being so forward. I am sure that many men, captivated by your charms, invite you to dinner. But you see, I have a special reason for asking you. During the general strike of 1909 a boy and girl came with a woman to a factory owned by my father. The woman’s name was Teresa Flores García. She was exiled to Alcañiz, along with the boy, where she died a few months later. The boy was taken with the other exiles to be sent to Valencia, but he escaped en route and was never found. I tried to discover the fate of the girl but she seemed to have vanished.’ He took a step closer to me and peered into my face. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I believe that girl was you.’

  I was careful to keep my expression impassive but it was difficult to do so at the mention of Ramón’s name. My brother had escaped somewhere on the way to Valencia? I shivered when I remembered Gaspar saying that the punishment for an exile returning to Barcelona was death. Although I longed for my brother even after all these years, I’d resigned myself to the fact that we would probably never find each other again. It had been too long.

  ‘Why are you so interested in the girl’s fate?’ I asked him. ‘You obviously have used your contacts to find out about her brother.’

  Xavier sighed. ‘Because since that day … I have been haunted by her face: the hunger on it … and something else. She was about eight years old but she seemed ancient. As soon as I was old enough to do so, I made investigations about what happened to her. But I was years too late.’

  Xavier’s story was so strange. It was not what I had expected of him. He didn’t sound like a presumptuous society man at all. Rather, he gave me the impression of someone who was deeply compassionate. But how could that be? To be a compassionate person and a wealthy heir was a contradiction in terms.

  My gaze fell to his silk suit, then to his manicured hands and polished patent shoes. Anastasio’s blood had paid for that affluent lifestyle. The serpent within me stirred and hissed a warning. There were plenty of starving, homeless children in the city. Why didn’t Xavier Montella help them instead of obsessing about one young girl? I was not going to assuage his guilt by saying the girl had grown up to become an international star who divided her time between an apartment in Paris and a ranch in California, and who had jewellery boxes overflowing with diamonds and pearls. Mine was a miraculous exception to the fate of most of the homeless and orphaned children of the city.

  I lifted my chin and stared Xavier in the face. ‘You are mistaken,’ I told him. ‘That girl was not me. But I do know the family you are talking about. They were cousins of mine and that is why I resemble the girl. On the whim of a Civil Guard sergeant, she was not taken with her brother and guardian into exile. Instead, she was placed in an orphanage where she was beaten so badly she died.’

  Xavier turned pale. The devastated expression on his face shocked me. For a moment I felt sorry for him. But my sympathy faded when I remembered my family and what had happened to them.

  ‘Now, please excuse me,’ I said, stepping past him and out the door.

  That night I could not stop thinking about Xavier Montella. I remembered the boy at the sweatshop on the day of the general strike and the way he had regarded me with those earnest eyes. Then I remembered Xavier’s tortured expression when I’d lied about the fate of the girl he had wondered about for so long. I rolled over and clutched a pillow to my chest. Why was it that as I had plunged my dagger into Xavier Montella’s heart, it was my own heart that had cried out and bled? As if by stabbing him, I had mortally wounded myself.

  The night after my encounter with Xavier Montella, I was leaving the club when he appeared in the corridor again. He must have been bribing one of the bouncers to get access to the dressing rooms; I would have to speak to el Ruso about it. I slowed my step. If I was truthful with myself, I was afraid of Xavier Montella. Perhaps it was an ancestral fear of the rich and powerful, handed down by my family who, before they had suffered as poverty-stricken industrial workers, had been starving peasants in Andalusia. They had been at the mercy of landowners and had no more rights than slaves. Although I was a woman used to holding my own, something about Xavier Montella made me feel like clay in his hands.

  I took a breath and straightened my spine. No, I was la Rusa now, not a poor urchin, and I was not going to be afraid of anyone.

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’ Xavier demanded. ‘Your name is Celestina Sánchez. Your brother was Ramón Sánchez.’

  ‘Are you a police interrogator now?’ I asked, determined that Xavier Montella would not put me on the defensive.

  ‘I asked Gaspar what your real name was,’ he said. ‘Why did you tell me that you weren’t the girl I saw at the factory that day? Why did you lie to me?’

  His voice quivered, but there was no trace of anger in it, simply a distress that might have moved me if I hadn’t hardened my heart. Whatever Xavier Montella wanted, I wasn’t going to give it to him. I’d lost everything that was most precious to me because of his family.

  ‘And in your investigation did you enquire what happened to the girl’s father and older brother?’ I asked.

  Xavier held my gaze for a moment before answering. ‘Your brother, Anastasio Sánchez, was killed in Morocco. I don’t know about your father.’

  The serpent reared its head, preparing to sink its venom into vulnerable skin.

  ‘My brother was killed in Morocco defending the Montella iron ore mines!’ I shouted at him. ‘My father was shot when he protested that only young men from poor families were being sent to war, while the rich stayed home and played tennis and drove fancy cars they bought with the blood of others!’

  The doors to the dressing rooms flew open when people heard my angry voice and the corridor soon filled with entertainers and chorus girls in sequined gowns.

  ‘Are you all right, senyoreta?’ asked Pepe, the Italian mime artist. ‘Is this scoundrel bothering you?’ He hadn’t had time to clean off his white face make-up and the stars around his eyes. He pulled himself to his full height of five feet and puffed out his chest. ‘Do you want me to get rid of him?’

  I turned to Xavier. ‘Yes, you were only a boy when that happened, I understand! But your car, your house, your education, your sisters’ nice clothes and ballet lessons were all paid for with my brother’s blood! And when you are head of your household, if Morocco should flare up again you will send more poor young men like Anastasio to their deaths so that you can go to the opera and keep a country villa!’

  A troubled expression came to Xavier’s face. He was breathing hard and his mouth moved as if he intended to say something but couldn’t find the words.

  ‘Now,’ I told him, stepping back towards the performers who were waiting to swarm protectively around me, ‘have the good sense to leave me alone!’

  I strode back to the safety of my dressing room. Before I reached it, Xavier shouted at me: ‘You are wrong, Celestina Sánchez! Everything you say and think about me is wrong!’

  I did not see Xavier Montella for a long time after that night at the Samovar Club, but the memory of his distressed face continued to haunt me.

  El Ruso took me on a tour of Spain, where I sensed restlessness amongst the people of Madrid, Valencia and Seville. The monarchist dictatorship of Primo de Rivera was becoming increasingly unpopular. While Spain’s lack of integration into the global economy had softened some of the worst aftershocks of the Great Depres
sion, unemployment was rife and some important public works were grinding to a halt.

  While we were staying in Madrid, the owner of the theatre where I was performing, señor Sáinz, took me and el Ruso out to lunch in a restaurant on the Gran Vía. The wide boulevard with its ornate buildings and elaborately decorated shop windows was my favourite part of the city. El Ruso had bought me a Marin Chiclana flamenco doll there that morning and I placed her as a centrepiece on the table, where the waiters admired her frilly yellow and black lace dress and the rose she wore in her hair. As a child, I had never owned a doll and even though I was a grown woman, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  Señor Sáinz watched me savour a spoonful of the cool and refreshing gazpacho before asking, ‘How do you find Madrid?’

  ‘I always love coming here,’ I told him. ‘The people appreciate flamenco much more than they do in Barcelona.’

  ‘That is true,’ he agreed. ‘The best of the best flamenco artists always gravitate here.’

  As lunch went on and we worked our way through cocido madrileño and tortilla de patatas, the conversation turned to politics.

  ‘I’m thinking of moving to Paris,’ el Ruso told señor Sáinz. ‘There is something happening in Spain … it’s the same sort of disturbed energy that one felt in Russia before the Revolution. I sense that at any moment all order could break down into anarchy.’

  Señor Sáinz nodded. ‘It’s the same tension one feels in the atmosphere before a storm. While I think Primo de Rivera made some good decisions, he let this dictatorship go on too long. He should have moved the country towards a stable constitutional monarchy long before this.’

  ‘The divisions in Spanish society between the rich and the poor, the army and the Church, are so great that the country is a giant fermenting vat which is about to explode,’ said el Ruso.

  The waiter brought our dessert of fruit flan and tocino de cielo.

  ‘You know, the other problem is that things are never black and white,’ señor Sáinz said with a thoughtful expression on his face. ‘It’s not always easy to guess who is your friend and who is your foe. Let me tell you a story about a gentleman I once knew. His name was Félix Gómez and his parents sent him to a seminary as it was the only way their son was going to get a proper education. Father Gómez was given a role as a teacher in an orphanage here in Madrid, and he was brilliant at it. He gave the poorest boys a better quality education than was offered in the most exclusive schools. He was not interested in indoctrinating them, but in encouraging them to use all their faculties. Even without patronage, several of the boys managed to succeed in the civil service and the army. Then Father Gómez made the mistake of asking a priest in a wealthier parish if he would sell some of his church’s paintings to fund a school where Father Gómez’s teaching method, which was proving so successful, could be taught to other priests. Father Gómez was summoned by the Archbishop, who accused him of being a socialist and dismissed him from the Church.’

  The story hardly surprised me. I had seen from my own childhood that the institution of the Church had little to do with the Christian philosophy of loving and helping each other.

  ‘The story does not end there,’ said señor Sáinz, pushing aside his plate. ‘During the recent riots, some revolutionaries, believing my friend to still be a priest who was disguising himself in plain clothes, bludgeoned him to death!’

  I shifted in my seat. Señor Sáinz’s story illustrated the worst of human stupidity. The revolutionaries had killed someone who had been an excellent educator and could have improved many people’s lives. Furthermore, Father Gómez had not only been willing to help the poor but was passionate about doing so. But they’d killed him simply because they’d associated him with an oppressive institution.

  I thought of Xavier Montella, and wondered if I was so dissimilar from those foolish revolutionaries.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Paloma

  After I awoke on Sunday morning and finished my barre and floorwork, I expected Mamie to begin telling her story again. But as we ate parsnip soup in the kitchen together for lunch, she barely glanced at me. Her introverted manner gave me the impression that she was either mulling over something before continuing, or that she was hesitating about finishing the story altogether.

  I hung around the apartment, waiting for Mamie to say something. I moved Diaghilev’s cage to the studio, and let him fly around while I cleaned his perches and food dishes. I sorted the cutlery drawer so that I wouldn’t be too far away from Mamie, who was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table. But still she said nothing.

  I carried the telephone to my bedroom and called Jaime. The sound of his voice made me happy in a way I had never felt before. It was as if I’d received some wonderful news, it lifted my spirits so much.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, Mamie and I made up. She spoke a lot about Spain last night.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I have to complete an assignment this afternoon but would you like to see a film with me during the week?’

  Again that feeling that something amazing was happening to me tingled in my toes.

  ‘L’Important c’est d’aimer is showing or there is an American movie, Jaws,’ he said.

  ‘Les Dents de la mer,’ I told him. ‘That’s the French title.’

  ‘Only the French could give a horror film such a romantic-sounding title,’ Jaime laughed.

  I laughed too. ‘If the film was released in Spain the title would be twenty words long and give away the plot!’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Jaime, still laughing. ‘Maybe with everything that is going on we should see a comedy — to lighten things a bit. I’ve heard Le Sauvage with Catherine Deneuve and Yves Montand is good. I’ll find out where it’s screening.’

  I told Jaime that I would like to see the film of la Rusa that he had mentioned as well. Then we talked for a while longer before Carmen needed to use the telephone.

  ‘I’ll let you know about the la Rusa film,’ Jaime promised, before he hung up.

  After returning the telephone to the hallway, I went back to the kitchen where Mamie was still reading the paper. She looked up at me. ‘Who were you talking to on the telephone?’

  ‘The nephew of my flamenco teacher. Jaime.’

  Mamie studied me for a moment and then smiled. ‘You were laughing a lot. Do you like him?’

  I nodded.

  Mamie indicated that I should sit down at the table. I took the seat opposite her. ‘It’s good to be in love,’ she said, a thoughtful expression coming to her face. ‘But it’s complicated too.’

  I sighed with relief. So she was going to tell me more about Spain after all.

  When Francesc wrote to his parents that he was intending to stay yet another month in England, Mama decided matters had got out of hand.

  ‘Does he think our Evelina is a wallflower who is going to wait for him all summer?’ she said to Pare. ‘As there has been no formal engagement, I am going to let it be known that we are happy for Evelina to be introduced to sons of other families.’

  While my courtship with Francesc had been taken for granted, I had been given some reprieve from the rounds of afternoon teas, supper parties and balls the other debutantes had to attend. Now that Mama was on a mission to find me alternative fiancés, I appeared at social events with greater frequency: the Liceu, the de Figueroa family’s summer ball, the Manzano family’s garden party, tennis and croquet matches. I was everywhere except where I most wanted to be: with Gaspar.

  When the Marqués and Marquesa learned that my parents were no longer considering Francesc exclusively, they must have panicked and written him a letter demanding that he return as soon as possible. Margarida and I were invited by Penélope Cerdà to spend a few weeks at the family’s summer residence at S’Agaró on the Costa Brava.

  ‘Please, Mama,’ complained Margarida, ‘don’t sentence me to spending time with the aristocratic bores who hang around S’Agar�
�. They are so pretentious!’

  ‘You should be pleased,’ scolded Mama. ‘The Marqués and Marquesa are spiriting Evelina away because they don’t want to lose her as a future daughter-in-law.’

  Margarida sighed. ‘At least you can be happy, Mama, that your scare tactics are so effective!’

  The Cerdà family’s summer residence was a bougainvillea-covered villa perched on a headland overlooking the Mediterranean. Most mornings, Margarida hid herself away somewhere in the formal garden to read, while Penélope and I went to the beach to sunbathe and to swim in the calm bay. We were watched over by the gardener’s stocky wife, who peeled potatoes sitting under an umbrella while Penélope and I spread our beach mats out near the rocks and turned our faces to the sun. Tans were fashionable that year.

  ‘I was surprised when I saw you at the Samovar Club,’ Penélope told me, looking around to check that there weren’t any fishermen on the beach before slipping the straps of her swimming costume off her shoulders.

  ‘You won’t tell your parents, will you?’ I begged her. ‘I snuck out of the house.’

  ‘So did I!’ She laughed, tossing back her head. She had a long sleek neck, slender legs and the Nordic looks of her parents. I was grateful that she had lent me one of her fashionable thigh-length swimming costumes so I didn’t have to wear the hideous knee-length tank suit my mother had packed for me.

  ‘What did you think of la Rusa?’ I asked. ‘She was amazing, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Indeed she was!’ agreed Penélope. ‘What about those eyes of hers? They were the eyes of a woman who has seen things!’

  ‘Her dancing was brilliant. I hope I will see her perform again soon.’

  Penélope sat up and brushed the sand from her legs. ‘Well, luckily for you Francesc likes to go out, so I’m sure you will have an exciting nightlife when you are married. I’m to be engaged to Felip Manzano, who rises at dawn to ride his horses. We are going to be in bed by ten o’clock! Still, he is very good-looking, so our children are sure to be beautiful.’