The Summer of the Spanish Woman

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘The Marquesa!’ Maria Luisa hissed.

  I went to her. ‘I heard you were giving a wedding feast for your servant,’ she said. ‘I heard all were invited.’

  ‘All are invited. But it is a wedding celebration for our friend.’

  I was furious with her intrusion. She had the unhappy habit of appearing when she was least wanted, without warning or invitation. No one knew she was now in residence at Sanlucar ‒ or with Don Paulo at Las Fuentes. And even if we had known, it would have been unthinkable to invite her on such an occasion. The Marquesa was a person who did not wait for invitations, and did not heed them when they were sent. She lived by her own clocks, and at her own whim.

  Now she nodded, and her mouth twisted wryly at the spectacle of the courtyard set with trestle tables, the decimated hams and chickens, the spilled wine, the group of musicians, somewhat drunk themselves, the colourful swirl of the dancers.

  ‘So … And where are my godchildren?’

  ‘Our children are too young for this, Marquesa.’ Now my mother held the centre of attention, that lithe body swaying in perfect time with the rhythms, as if she had danced to them all her life. The Marquesa studied her for a moment longer, then turned to me.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘In their nursery, of course.’

  I led her along all the passages of the house, up the stairs to come to the wide, long room, with its flaking white paint, its children’s clothes hung to dry on a rack, the toys neatly disposed on the shelves, Juan in a bed, Martin and Francisco in their high-sided cots. Nanny dozed in a chair by the window, the top buttons of her dress undone because of the heat, her head nodding to one side. A night-light burned on the mantel. At the sound of the door opening, Juan’s head popped out from the sheets; he was fully awake, his eyes bright.

  He recognised her at once. ‘Tía Isabel!’

  She held out her arms. ‘My little one!’ He sprang from the bed, perhaps knowing that in her presence there was little chance of his being chastised. He was tall for his age, and his thin nightshirt was a long way above his bare feet. He was five years old, and trying out life with all the eagerness of an intelligent, wilful child. He had never lost the dominance, the sureness that had come to him with being the first-born. He had never been jealous of the arrival of his brothers; they had seemed very secondary to himself.

  Nanny started out of her doze. ‘Master John ‒!’ Then she stopped, heaved herself to her feet and sketched a curtsey. ‘My lady …’

  ‘There’s my good boy.’ The Marquesa bent and embraced him. ‘And why are you not at the party?’

  He glanced quickly between me and Nanny. ‘They said I was too young.’

  ‘Never too young to learn to be a man,’ she replied. ‘Juan, will you escort me to the party?’

  ‘My lady!’ It was an exclamation of outrage from Nanny.

  She made a sweeping gesture with her hand. ‘Just a little time. Quickly, Juan, put on your trousers and shirt. Here, I’ll help you …’

  She had no notion of how to help a child to dress, but with Nanny complaining almost inaudibly, Juan was dressed, not in his everyday clothes, but in his best black, tightly fitted trousers, frilled shirt, and red sash. ‘There now!’ the Marquesa pronounced. ‘You look the grandest gentleman in Jerez ‒ in Spain. Will you take my arm?’

  The tall figure leaned to allow his short arm to link in hers. They set off along the corridor, and down the stairs.

  Nanny’s outrage broke through. ‘Miss Charlie! … It’s a disgrace! Master John should never be allowed into anything like that down there ‒’ She nodded her head contemptuously in the direction of the noise. ‘At his age! Ruined, he’ll be. Spoiled ‒ spoiled so no one will be able to manage him …’

  I shrugged, helpless, sad, angry. ‘Stay with the two little ones, Nanny. I’ll try to get him back to bed as soon as I can.’

  * *

  When I returned to the courtyard, they had merged into the dancing, swaying groups, that tall, black-clad figure with the fire of her gems on her fingers, and the small, handsome, winning boy. She had dressed for the evening in the grand Spanish manner of long ago, with the high comb in her hair, and the black lace mantilla falling back from it. In the soft light she appeared almost young, her body moving to the rhythms as easily as my mother’s had, but with a great deal more sophistication and knowledge of what the gestures meant. She led the little boy on. He had witnessed the dance many times, but this was his first time to try it with an audience, partnered by a great lady. It was as if he were mesmerised. He followed her gestures, her movements as if obeying an invisible command. He was totally in her control.

  Gradually the happy, laughing crowd of Andy’s wedding feast realised who was among them. They fell back, allowing room for that strangely-matched pair. The identity of the Marquesa was whispered among them, and more and more left the dancing area, going back behind the tables, dropping their voices, clapping, somewhat timidly, to the rhythm. On the other side of the courtyard I saw Carlos, smiling. Finally the pair were left alone, the tall lady in black, and the small boy. People had stopped talking. There was no laughter.

  She had ruined Andy’s wedding feast. And she had made a great stride in winning my son.

  Chapter Four

  I

  The dead heat of the summer months came on us, the somnolence of the long hot afternoons. In July we completed the bina, in August the rebina. This was the second year I would harvest the first vineyard, the first year for the second; more workers were needed, more money to find to employ them. As the vineyards grew so did their needs. I began to wonder if it would ever be possible to make money from tending the vines.

  Luis kept pressing loans on me, offering them gently, more as suggestions of what needed doing in the vineyard than an outright offer of money. I continued to pay the interest, and I hoped after the harvest I might be able to pay back part of the loan.

  ‘Patience is everything with the vines, Carlota. Those who look for money only, had better look elsewhere.’

  ‘There are plenty of rich people in Jerez.’

  ‘There are those who’ve lost everything, too. Look to fortunate marriages and other interests for the money. But yes ‒ it’s true. Money has been made in sherry. Before the phylloxera the vines from our own root stock produced for a longer period than the American root stock. So the initial, almost crippling expense of planting a vineyard was something a man might have to do only once, perhaps, in his lifetime. So long as he cared for his vines, they produced for him. It needed money invested in other places to survive the phylloxera, Carlota. Think of it ‒ every vineyard in Jerez to be replanted, and some, like your grandfather’s land, until you started, have never seen a hoe to this day. Those are the families who just quietly folded up, and are not heard of now. The ones who sold their big houses, or if they couldn’t sell them, just closed them, and drifted away ‒ the sons went out all over the world looking for whatever way they could to make a living, perhaps, with luck, to make a new fortune. The girls generally stayed here, living very quietly, in a few rooms in the town, being very careful with their money, never marrying because there was no dowry, waiting for their nieces and nephews to return from all parts of the world to see Jerez for the first time, waiting for their brothers to make fortunes and rescue them from their quiet poverty …’

  Luis often came to the vineyard house. He always knew from Mateo when I was there, and I would watch him ride down the track from his own vineyard house towards us. By the time he arrived the tray with the glasses and decanter and the tapas were set. He would sit and talk, very quietly. I saw him so much at ease in those plain white rooms to which Amelia had added her small, bright pieces of decoration, and I thought of him alone in the splendour of his own house, empty without Amelia. He was, of course, still in official mourning for her, and there were no parties to brighten those big silent rooms. He was a little greyer in the months since she had died, as if the effort of being cheerful
for her had drained him. He liked just to sit and slowly sip his copita, and talk. Maria Luisa shook her head over those visits of his to the vineyard house. ‘People talk.’

  ‘Then let them! I promised Amelia.’

  ‘Promises like that are easy to give, and a problem to keep.’

  ‘He is lonely. He comes only to talk for a while.’

  ‘Then he should come here to the Plaza de Asturias. He should visit his cousins. He has dozens of cousins. He has the comradeship of the bodega. They all gather each day in the sala de degustación … it is not the men of Jerez who are lonely.’

  ‘He likes the vineyards best, Maria Luisa. It is where his heart is.’

  ‘Then take care that his heart doesn’t linger too long at Las Ventanas Verdes!’

  I shrugged, and decided it didn’t matter. His friendship was precious to me, someone to talk to as I had talked to Amelia, someone to whom I could confess my worries, the small problems of our daily lives. With Maria Luisa I got companionship of a kind, but always with the cautionary tales which were part of her character; with my mother I got no relief at all, only the worry of her own problems which she brought to me, and then laughed away with the aid of a bottle of wine. I continued to write her letters for her, and to wait with dread for the answers. Some of the men we knew were dead, many were wounded. ‘Peter Brennan will never ride again,’ Lady Sybil wrote. ‘Poor fellow lost a leg right at the thigh. I don’t see how even he could sit a horse again after that. He never was a man to hang on by the reins. And do you remember young Dick Fitzgerald? ‒ he would have been just a boy barely graduated from his pony when you left. He was killed at Artois. Richard Blodmore was mentioned in dispatches. Gerry Purcell is missing …’ The roll-call went on remorselessly. I saw the hunting-field at Clonmara shrink. Anyone young enough to serve was gone. Even the women, those who were unmarried, had gone, many of them to serve as voluntary aids in hospitals, some had volunteered for factories in England, some, we learned with shock, were ambulance drivers. ‘I didn’t think there were any women who knew how to drive,’ my mother said. ‘That has to be Sybil exaggerating.’ As we moved towards the autumn of 1915 Lady Sybil wrote, ‘We’ll hardly have any hunting at all this winter. People have given up their horses, except just what’s essential. Blodmore’s hunt is under a temporary Master, who isn’t any good ‒ but that’s not so important because it’s not thought patriotic to keep hounds now. One has to set a good example you know. It matters here …’ The implication was that in our disinterested, neutral country no such sacrifices would be understandable. She wrote nothing of the rumble of discontent under the patriotic surface. The Irish continued to join the British Army in all ranks, and no one thought it strange. The war had indefinitely postponed Home Rule. ‘And a good thing, too,’ Lady Sybil wrote. ‘Perhaps by the end of the war that nonsense will have been forgotten. How on earth these people think they can run their own affairs when no two of them agree on anything …’ My mother read over the letters many times, speaking the names aloud, remembering. ‘Oh, Johnny was a beautiful dancer. I can remember …’ She actually took to reading the English newspapers which arrived in batches, reading the war news, trying to find out where the warfare actually raged. ‘Only such a few little miles, Charlie, and they’ve fought back and forth over it since it all began. I don’t understand it. We were supposed to be so good at soldiering. But then … there was the Boer War. That took much longer than anyone expected. Didn’t turn out very well, either. Poor Uncle Bertie …’ She sighed again over the death of the man who was supposed to have inherited Clonmara, married, had a son, and kept us all there. Then one day as she read I heard her give a little choking cry. ‘Charlie! ‒ it’s Thomas’s regiment. It’s been stationed somewhere near Rheims.’

  ‘Thomas who?’

  She looked across at me. ‘My darling, I’m talking about your father. He’s with the 87th Regiment, King’s Own Artillery. Terribly unfashionable regiment. They’ve never done anything very distinguished, I’m afraid. I didn’t even have the sense to pick a man from a smart regiment. Do you suppose he’s still riding horses, or have they all switched to lorries?’

  My father meant nothing to me. It was the name of a man far less real than any of those mentioned in Lady Sybil’s letters. ‘I expect they still use horses, Mother. I read that the lorries got terribly stuck in the mud last winter.’ That was all he meant, my father. A man in an undistinguished regiment hauling guns out of the mud by the brute labour of horses. I spoke of this, however, to Luis the next time we met at the vineyard.

  ‘Poor Carlota ‒ you’ve not had much love from men, have you?’

  ‘My grandfather ‒’

  He shook his head. ‘Too distant, and gone too soon.’

  ‘But Carlos …’ I protested. And then I also shook my head. ‘But we don’t have to pretend about Carlos, do we, Luis? Carlos doesn’t love me, except in bed. Perhaps he’s not capable of loving a woman any other way.’ Then I flushed because I was too close to Luis’s most sensitive point, the point of pride and wounded masculinity, the feeble virility on which so many doubts and aspersions had been cast in that close society of Jerez. Everyone acknowledged that Luis was the best, the kindest of men; it was as bad as saying openly that he was no man at all. To cover the hurt I might unintentionally have offered to him, I told him then of the man I truly did love, that love which had never been consummated, and was based, physically, on such fragile things as a few embraces, a few words spoken in private, the looks we exchanged. Yet we both felt that this love was like solid bedrock in our hearts.

  ‘So I do have a love, Luis. And I have your friendship. I have my children, and I have my vineyards. I am richer than anyone knows, except you.’

  He nodded. His sun-seamed face was serious as he studied the wine in his glass, holding it forward slightly so that the sun caught its rich colour. ‘I would have wished more for you, Carlota. No woman like you should have to love at such a distance … with so little hope. While Elena and Carlos both live … and each child born to either of you binds the bonds of each marriage tighter …’

  ‘We have never thought of breaking those bonds, Luis. Neither of us could live with the responsibility of what we would leave behind. It is not particularly noble. It is common sense.’

  ‘It is very uncommon sense, Carlota. It is a tragedy that the times were out of joint by such a fraction. If Richard Blodmore had not returned here to Jerez instead of going at once to take up his inheritance …’

  ‘Then it would have been a fairy-story, and I am, now, too old to believe in them, Luis. Life is what it is …’ I shrugged and poured more wine for him. I had told him as much as I dared, and it was sweet relief to have done so. But I could not go further. I could not tell him that the Marquesa had brought Richard back to Jerez expressly for the purpose of marrying Elena. It had been the one way she could reach back through the years to hurt the descendants of the man who had dared to cast aside her favour. I could not tell even Luis about the woman who still lived with her family of wax dolls in the castle of Arcos.

  * *

  The harvest was over, a good harvest for me. The vines had yielded well; we were busy through several weeks of September bringing in the grapes, treading them in the lagar, extracting the last drop of the must to the squealing of the marrana. I saw many butts of must go off to the bodega in the carts, and the price was better this year. I paid the interest on the loan to Luis, and when I tried to pay him back some of the principle, he gently reminded me that not all my land was yet under cultivation. I protested, and yet I agreed. I had fallen into the error of thinking of it as my land, and I loved it. And I made the mistake of letting Carlos see that I loved it. It seemed impossible that he could be jealous of anything but another man, but he was. He extracted payment for my pleasure in something beyond himself. He simply presented me once again with fresh gambling debts. And the stabling bills for his polo ponies.

  It was the price I must continue to pay for peac
e between us. This harvest there had been no such scene as had occurred the first time I had stayed at the vineyard house. I spent most of September there, and a great deal of the time the children had been with me. He had not knocked me to the ground, threatened, shouted, not even objected, in words. He waited until payment was due from the bodega. Then, smilingly, he handed me an account of what he owed to his gambling friends, and the bill for a new and flashy harness for his black mare, Carmen.

  I looked at the sum, choked back my rage, and paid.

  * *

  With the cool weather my mother brought Balthasar back from Luis’s hacienda. She began once again the exercises of the High School with him. Half Moon was again in foal by Balthasar, and Luis insisted that she be given the freedom of the campos. Andy was slightly put out by this arrangement, and rode out each day to see how she did; but finally, grudgingly, and perhaps because the headman at the hacienda was distantly related to Manuela, he conceded to the arrangement. ‘But when her time is near I will be there,’ he vowed. Perhaps he was so vehement about it because Manuela was pregnant, and for the first time Andy saw the cycle of life and birth, which he had witnessed intimately all his life, in a different and personal fashion. He was immensely proud and happy at the thought of a child. ‘Boy or girl, Miss Charlie, it’ll be called Charlie.’

  ‘Do you want a son, Andy?’

  He shook his head, and his face was strangely beautiful at that moment. ‘What God sends, Miss Charlie. I want a healthy child, and Manuela to be all right. That’s all I want.’

  I envied him to be so free of dynastic obligations and needs. Manuela should be a happy mother.