Pepita

by Vita Sackville-West

  This time it was no brass band which came from Atarfe, but bullock-carts from Atarfe instead, to load quantities of material, tiles, beams, wood and bricks, and to take them away. Oliva would go back to Granada in the evening and tell his friends at the theatre about the progress his sales were making. ‘One day he would say, “I have sold so many cartloads of bricks”; another day, “I have sold a doorway”, or, “the frame of a window”, and so forth. Whilst that was going on he had a little cash in hand, but when he wrote to his wife for the power of attorney he was dreadfully hard up.’

  One can imagine what the gay rooms of the Casa Blanca looked like, windowless, roofless, smothered in the dust and plaster of their own demolition. The fireplaces were gaping and blackened holes, the doorways were merely gaps leading from one room into another. Catalina after her own depredations had not left much, but after Oliva’s operations it looked as though a shell had fallen through the roof and exploded. At this point the Ayuntamiento, not only alarmed but active, intervened and explained to Oliva that he had done enough and must not pull down the external walls as well as everything else, since the house, after all, adjoined the public place and such destruction would be dangerous to the buildings as well as to the passers-by. Oliva cannot have been pleased with this prohibition, but he had filled his pockets and now wound up his business in Albolote by selling the surviving walls and the site to Manuel Gonzalez.

  He then took his departure, having got his profit and having also spited Catalina. He was not too much to be pitied, for apart from the cash he carried away from Casa Blanca he had also acquired a woman named Josefa Gallardo, a dancer, who stuck to him in the surprisingly enduring way that these Bohemians did use towards one another. They travelled together, danced together, shared lodgings together, and begat several children. Oliva’s friends noticed, however, that he called her Pepa and not Pepita, for short.

  V

  I do not imagine that either Pepita or Lionel Sackville-West cared very much what Oliva was doing, so long as he left them in peace to pursue their own happiness in their own way. This happiness, as we have seen, they were pursuing in almost idyllic circumstances in Italy with their small Max growing up between them. Max was just over three years old when his parents took a furnished apartment at 4 Avenue de l’Impératrice near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, for they were awaiting another baby.

  This baby was born on September 23rd, 1862, and was named Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina. Pepita thought it was a nice idea to call her daughter Victoria after the Queen of England; Josefa after herself; Dolores after her aunt and godmother (Lola); and Catalina after her grandmother. I doubt if Queen Victoria had ever found herself in more incongruous company. As she was baptized in France, her names had to be recorded in the French form: Victoire Joséphine Dolores Catherine. She was described on the baptismal register as the daughter of Josefa Duran and of an unknown father (fille de père inconnu).

  This was my mother.

  It was odd for me to read in my grandfather’s statement that both Catalina and Lopez were present at the birth and that Lola was invited to be the godmother. These three persons had become so extraordinarily familiar to me, though with a measure of remoteness, that the discovery of their personal association with my mother came to me as a slight shock. It was so odd to think of her being handled by Catalina, prodded by Lopez, crooned over by Lola, those three whose adventures I had followed in such detail ever since they left Malaga to seek fortune in Madrid and who had become such living people to me.

  VI

  Pepita took her two children to Como with her as soon as she was able to travel, but for about two years her lotus-eating existence with my grandfather was frequently interrupted. I do not know for certain, but I suspect that a temporary coolness then arose between her and my grandfather; at any rate, he alludes rather darkly to ‘a break’ with Pepita, and professes ignorance of what she was doing during most of this time. Even more darkly, he alludes to an urgent telegram which reached him from his banker in Berlin (1864) saying that Pepita was very ill. ‘I left Turin and went to Baden Baden, where she had gone with Max and Victoria. At Baden she told me she had had a miscarriage and confessed that she had been living with someone else, but who he was I never could find out and never heard.’

  It was perhaps not to be expected of Pepita that she should remain wholly faithful. Romantically, I would far prefer to draw a picture of her as a single-hearted woman from first to last, but such a picture would show only half the truth. Single-hearted she may have been, but certainly not faithful. There had already been Prince Youssoupoff, even when her love of Lionel Sackville-West had been comparatively young…. It is idle trying to gloss over those things. She was a dancer, beautiful, desirable, and temptations were rife. My grandfather seems to have been, to this extent, a realist, for as on a previous occasion, he adds, ‘I became reconciled with her, and shortly afterwards she joined me at Turin’.

  This reconciliation was shortly interrupted, and for a double reason. For one thing, she had resumed her dancing, and for another he had been transferred from Turin to (of all places) Madrid. At first sight, one would expect Pepita to welcome this opportunity of returning to live in her own country, but the unexpected happened: she flatly refused to go near Madrid, for fear of meeting Oliva. Meanwhile, my grandfather went off to take up his new duties and also to indulge his personal curiosity in a way with which one is able humanly to sympathise: he went to the theatre to see Oliva perform. ‘It was a small theatre in a back street. Seeing his name on the play-bill, I asked a man next to me, who was a Spaniard and a total stranger to me, to point him out, which he did. That was all that passed and I never spoke to Oliva in my life. My curiosity was merely to see Pepita’s husband and it carried me no further.’

  After the performance was over, Oliva presumably went home with Josefa Gallardo to their poor lodgings, ignorant of the young foreigner who had sat among the audience and who had then made his way back to the British Embassy wondering, perhaps, where Pepita and her children lay that night.

  VII

  The break, if break there was, was presently healed. It was very completely healed, and several facts confirm it. Not only do we find my grandfather taking a flat at Bordeaux for Pepita and her children in expectation of yet another child, but we also find him involved in one of the queerest and least orthodox incidents of his whole very unorthodox diplomatic career. I wish I could explain my grandfather’s character satisfactorily to myself, once and for all. I myself knew him later on as intimately as a child of eight can ever know a very reserved old man of nearly eighty. I knew his little habits and his funny ways. I knew the way in which he would slam his tweed cap down on to the settee on the way to the dining-room, stumping along towards luncheon without speaking a word—for he was without exception the most taciturn man I have ever known, which may I think perhaps explain the charm Pepita’s gay volubility held for him,—and I knew also his rare little phrases which recurred at the appropriate seasons. ‘Nice fresh taste’, he would say when the first gooseberries appeared in a ‘stick tart’ on the table; ‘nice fresh taste’, glaring round at us all lest we had failed to appreciate it. And then again he would suddenly invent the most disconcerting rhymes, aimed suddenly at me in the middle of luncheon: ‘Rosamund Grosvenor’, he would aim at me, ‘got nearly run overner’. This phrase bothered me because I could not see how he could get it to rhyme properly, but at the same time it suggested something alarming, something I had certainly never thought of in connexion with the Rosamund Grosvenor who came daily to share my lessons with me and my governess. I think he addressed these spasmodic remarks to me because he was too shy to speak to anyone else, even though he was sitting at the head of his own table. He had many other little idiosyncratic tricks, and I always, even as a child, recognised him as in some unexplained way an unusual old man. I remember for instance that he used to squirt the juice of orange-peel into my eyes, and when I screamed in agonised protest used to reassure me
by saying that Spanish women always did that to their children to ensure their having beautiful eyes,—a hint which he had certainly learnt from Pepita, but which I did not in the least appreciate. I remember, also, that once when I came into his room hanging on to the end of my mother’s long plait of hair, he sprang up exclaiming, ‘Victoria, never, never let me see that child doing that again’. He was habitually a very mild, meek old man, and this was the nearest I ever got to his feeling for Pepita; I remember my mother looking frightened, dragging me quickly out of the room, and then saying to me at the bottom of the stairs outside, ‘Remember, darling, we must never let Grandpapa see us like that again’. This made a great impression on me. I felt I had entered into some unexplained conspiracy with my mother. I didn’t understand, of course; I merely guessed, as children do, at something in the background of which I knew nothing.

  All this personal acquaintance with my grandfather leaves me still wondering at that very unorthodox incident which occurred at Malaga during his early diplomatic career. My grandfather, as I knew him, was not a person whom one could readily connect with such romantic and injudicious incidents. Yet the fact remains on record that the English Consul at Malaga was obliged to lock him up for three whole days in a room, in order to prevent him going through a form of marriage with Pepita.

  That was a very high-handed thing to do to an English gentleman who was by then quite high up in the Diplomatic Service. Of course the Consul acted rightly, for he must instantly have realised that the Secretary of the Embassy would merely have involved himself in a charge of bigamy, Pepita already being married to Juan Antonio Oliva. The Consul did nothing but save the Secretary from a very awkward ensuing situation. Both Pepita and Lionel Sackville-West owed a great deal to that Consul, although I doubt whether they recognised it at the time. More likely they put it all down to red tape.

  I think perhaps I had better let the witness speak. It is the witness whom I have already introduced as the washerwoman friend of Catalina, at the beginning of this book. It may be remembered that she was sometimes employed at the Hotel Alameda in Malaga as a general servant to help the chambermaid. In this capacity she speaks again: ‘On going one day into one of the rooms of the hotel to arrange the toilet service, I saw there, sitting down, Catalina, Manuel Lopez, Pepita, and a strange gentleman. None of them noticed me except Catalina. She went out with me into the corridor. (That was like Catalina: she never forgot an old friend.) She asked how I was, and I did the same to her, and said how glad I was to see them looking so well. They were all well dressed and wore much jewellery. They had two female servants, who were both foreigners.

  ‘All the servants said that the strange gentleman was a Count. They did not say his name. He was a foreigner. He wanted to marry Pepita but the English Consul dissuaded him from it. To prevent the marriage, the Consul locked the Count into another room overlooking the Alameda. The Consul kept the key and used to go and unlock the door when the Count had his meals. After the Count had been locked up for about three days, the Consul sent him off on a steamer.’

  No comment is necessary. One can only say, as Matthew Arnold said of the Shelleys, ‘What a set!’ Still, it does seem odd to think of Grandpapa trying to behave in that wildly bigamous way at Malaga in 1865, and being locked up by his Consul in order to save him from making a fool of himself. He must indeed have been very much in love. Heaven only knows what the Consul thought. It is not usually given to consuls to lock secretaries of His Majesty’s Embassies into a hotel room for three days, unlocking the door only in order to introduce food, and then to send them off by steamer.

  VIII

  The domestic situation, already sufficiently delicate, had been complicated during my grandfather’s incarceration by the arrival of Lopez’ wife upon the scene, making a disturbance in the hotel, so that she had to be given money to keep her quiet. Apart from this, they had other occupations; it seems that they held one of their favourite sales, perhaps of objects dating from the days when Pepita was a child and they all lived in Malaga; and there were relations with whom acquaintance could be renewed. Catalina’s cousin Juan, for instance, received a message to say they were in Malaga and would be pleased if he would come to luncheon. By that time, however, they had tired of living in the hotel and in their impulsive extravagant way had taken a house behind the Church of the Concepcion. The cousin Juan went, and was dazzled by the friendliness and luxury of his entertainment. To his surprise he found them ‘all dressed like gentlefolk, especially Pepita, who was dressed in silk with jewellery’. Last time he had seen them, Catalina was selling old clothes, but now they had silver plates and dishes, and silver forks, spoons, and knives which they had brought with them from Granada and used at luncheon. Catalina explained that they had come to Malaga just for a change of air and to see the family; she told him all about Buena Vista, and was in fact as communicative as usual, but did not forget to ask after the fortunes of her guest. ‘She asked me how I was getting on, and I told her I went about with my donkey selling fruit, and managed to make a living for my family.’ Truly Pepita had a mixed existence, between German royalties on the one hand and relations like the fruit-seller of Malaga on the other.

  IX

  The reader may have observed that my grandfather has by now been raised to the rank of Count in the eyes of his Spanish friends. The explanation of this entirely unjustified title lies with Pepita. Pepita wanted to be a Countess. Pepita, just because she was born a true and not a sham Bohemian, esteemed aristocracy and respectability as her greatest prize. The sham Bohemian rejects respectability with calculated deliberation. The born Bohemian strives after the thing which, to him or her, represents a mixture between security and romance. Romance and respectability, for Pepita, were represented by becoming Countess West. That such a title as Count West did not and could not exist in the English peerage meant nothing to Pepita. It sounded well, and that was all that mattered. It was the childishly snobbish side of her. It fondly amused my grandfather. It was like a toy he had given her to play with, a toy which meant nothing to him but much to her. Countess West,—his English upbringing made him smile when he read those words printed on her visiting-card, and realised how little, how very little, they meant; so little, that he could not even introduce her to his colleagues at the Embassy, because they all knew she was his mistress, not his wife. She put a coronet on her visiting-cards over those words: Countess West. He let her put both the coronet and the words; he said, ‘it did not matter’. The pathetic part is that although she had her visiting-cards, she knew no one to visit; she was not respectable enough to leave cards on any of his friends.

  Yet the break was repaired. They had lived apart for nearly two years, and at the end of those two years they came together again. It seems as though they were not able to stay apart. My grandfather was still attached to the Embassy at Madrid, and Pepita still refused to come to Madrid because she was afraid of meeting Oliva there, so between them they arranged to take a flat at Bordeaux, which was not too far across the frontier; and at 105 rue de la Course, Bordeaux, my poor little short-lived aunt Elisa Catalina was born in the hot month of June 1865; was registered as the daughter of Lionel Sackville-West and Josefa Duran, grandparents Pedro Duran and Catalina Ortega on the mother’s side, John and Elizabeth, Earl and Countess de la Warr, on the father’s; and died aged seven months in January 1866.

  X

  After this, they never again parted. Pepita gave up her career as a dancer, and settled down into the life for which I believe she was really best suited: the loving woman and mother of an ever-increasing brood of babies. After the effort and the excitement and the adulation, she was at last finding her natural fulfilment. Those half-English, half-Spanish babies,—what an odd upbringing they had! My mother could remember Pepita covering her and Max with her skirts and screaming at Lola and Diego to go away, for they should never have her children. When they were alone, Pepita alternately raged at them and spoilt them. ‘Ah, ces pétits maudits!’ she would
exclaim in French with her Spanish accent when they exasperated her beyond endurance, and she would catch them up and cuff them as one might cuff a litter of unruly puppies. Then when they shrieked in fright she would repent and hug them to her breast: ‘Mes pétits,—mes amours chéris,—mes pauvrés pétits,’—and then she would make them all sit on a row of hassocks against the wall and would dance El Ole for them till they were comforted. They liked her dancing, and they particularly liked her castanets. My mother remembered this very well. She often told me about it, and I thought she must be romancing, until I met the same story in her legal evidence: ‘I remember my mother (Pepita) dancing with castanets to amuse us children. I remember her valuable dancing dress covered with black lace. She always spoke French with us; she knew no English. She had very long and abundant black hair; she sometimes wore it in two long plaits, which hung down her back and reached down below her knees.’ My mother remembered this hair very vividly. (She also remembered her elder brother Max trying to comb her own hair with a fork, which she much resented.) She remembered being made to pick up the plaits to keep them out of the mud when crossing the street, much as a bridesmaid might have picked up the train of a bride. My mother often told me about this, adding that she was Pepita’s constant companion on their charitable expeditions, which were called, ‘going to see mes pauvres’. ‘Dieu, qu’elle avait du charme! Dieu, qu’elle était gentille!’ my mother would add when telling me these stories; ‘ils lui racontaient tous leurs malheurs’ (‘Lord! what charm she had! Lord! how sweet she was! They told her all their troubles’).