by Sarah Bird
“Especially not now. Now that the country was at war with itself. Gustavo turned on the car radio and they listened to the warbly voice of Generalissimo Franco on Radio Zaragoza. He called Manuel Azaña, the president of the Republic, ‘a monster who seems more the absurd invention of a doubly insane Frankenstein than the fruit of the love of a woman. Azaña,’ Franco insisted, ‘must be caged up so that brain specialists can study perhaps the most interesting case of mental degeneration in history.’
“Elena and Gustavo burst out laughing. When Clementina asked if this meant they were on the side of Franco’s Nationalists, they laughed even harder.
“ ‘Side?’ Gustavo asked. ‘This damn war has more sides than you can count. The Carlists, the Falangists, the Communists, the Church, the aristocracy, the unions, the laborers, the miners. Everyone has a side. Now even the Germans who are flying Franco’s troops from Morocco in their Junkers and the Italians who aren’t doing anything except seducing our women have a side in this war. The only ones who don’t have a side in this unholy mess are us, the entertainers.’
“ ‘Oh yes, we do!’ Elena disagreed, then asked Clementina, ‘You know which side is our side, Rosita?’
“Clementina shrugged.
“ ‘The side that claps for us. The side that pays us. The side that puts bread in our mouths. That is our side. That is the only side entertainers ever have.’
“ ‘Shut up, you. Listen to this.’ Gustavo tuned in Radio Sevilla and the high-pitched voice of General Queipo de Llano came in very clearly. ‘We must kill the enemies of the Spanish nation, like the animals they are. We must kill the Reds. Kill the leftists. Kill the Republicans. Kill the Masons. Kill all those who would bring down Holy Mother Church and Spain herself.’
“ ‘Find some music!’ Elena cried out and was not happy until Gustavo tuned in La Bella Dorita chirping her syrupy songs about roses and butterflies. She asked Clementina to pass her the basket sitting atop the suitcases in the backseat. It was filled with costumes in the process of being either repaired or constructed. Clementina volunteered to help. Elena was so impressed with the precision of her needlework while mending a tear in the crotch of Gustavo’s clown costume that she declared, ‘We have found a new wardrobe mistress!’ and dumped the entire basket on Clementina’s lap. Clementina was delighted with her new title and stitched away happily as the barren landscape slid past her window.
“She woke that night with her head resting on the nest of ripped costumes as the Hispano-Suiza came to a halt in the alley behind the Teatro Olimpia Seventy years later, long after Clementina had forgotten everything she had to do to survive for all the years of the war when the starving country chewed itself to bits like a mad dog, Clementina would remember one thing about her first moment in the fabled city of Sevilla: the smell, an ineradicable combination of cement dust, death, and perfume.
“She would learn later that the smell of death hung over all of Sevilla and that it came from the plaza de toros where thousands of ‘Reds’ had been executed, labor leaders, teachers, leftists, students, anyone who opposed the Church or spoke out against the landowners. A few of the condemned were allowed to escape the massacre in the plaza so they could tell how Moorish soldiers, men dark as café solo, were encouraged to rape the victims before executions. It was August in the south of Spain and the mass graves could not be dug fast enough. The stench of the corpses mixed with the smell of cement dust from the Santa Marina and San Roque churches blown up by the Republicans. The odor of burning rubber from the trucks set on fire by the Nationalists and cordite from the rifles that fired sporadically through the day added to the stink that choked all of Sevilla.
“But the smell of perfume could be detected for only a few blocks around the Teatro Olimpia because just a few streets away the Perfumería Tena had been blown up, allowing the fragrances of jasmine, sandalwood, tea rose, musk, lily of the valley, lavender to pour out over the stink. Their sweetness tricked the nostrils into opening so that each inhalation was a fresh horror.
“Barely awake, frightened by the smell of death, Clementina clung to Elena and rushed with her into the safety of the theater. Elena and Gustavo were not surprised when Clementina confessed that she knew no one in Sevilla and had nowhere to go. And, also, Clementina added, she was starving.
“ ‘You want to eat?’ Gustavo demanded, adding in an aside to Elena, ‘She wants to eat!’
“ ‘Rosita,’ Elena yelled, ‘we all want to eat!’
“Gustavo tossed her a costume. ‘You’re a dancer, right? Okay, dance. Señor Vedrine pays after the show. Then we eat.’
“Clementina nodded dumbly.
“Elena explained, ‘Okay, you’re dancing La Pulga. Anyone with a nice pair of legs can dance La Pulga. Just watch me.’ In the hubbub backstage, with girls penciling their eyes in black and rouging their cheeks, with a plate-spinner rattling his china, with five poodles in bow ties and jackets yapping, Elena taught her La Pulga, a dance routine about a girl with a pesky flea in her clothes.
“That night, Espectáculos Vedrines put on a show for Generalissimo Franco’s troops. Clementina, now officially Rosa, did not dance in golden gaslight for an elegant crowd that revered flamenco and would crown una bailaora queen simply for the quality of her exquisite brazeo. No, Rosa was but one of many acts in a traveling variety show, each one coarser than the last.
“Just before Elena shoved Clementina onstage, she hissed at her, ‘Remember, Señor Vedrine only pays if the audience claps!’
“Clementina swatted at herself as Elena had shown her and danced faster and faster to the accelerating music. The theater ‘liberated’ by the Nationalists was filled with troops wearing the blue uniforms of the Italian army, the gray-green of the German. Their officers wore peaked caps and sat in the front row next to General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, who was surrounded by the leaders of the Army of Africa and officers of the Spanish Legionnaires. Behind them were soldiers wearing the red berets of the Carlists, the dark blue shirts with yellow arrows of the Falangists. Germans with blond hair and big, square heads sat next to Italians with the soulful eyes of poets. Standing in the very back, allowed to enter yet not to sit, were Franco’s Moorish soldiers. Black as ink, they wore red fezzes on their heads and had dusty puttees wrapping their legs. All the men were different, yet to Clementina they were all the same. In her fear, their gaping mouths seemed to meld into one voracious maw poised to gobble her down.
“They watched with a hungry insatiability. But they didn’t clap.
“She danced more furiously, her footwork better that night than even Rosa’s had ever been. Yet not one man clapped. Perhaps they couldn’t see how her heels hammered like pistons? She raised her skirt the tiniest bit and a sprinkling of applause broke out. Offstage, Gustavo prompted her to raise her skirt higher. She did and the applause grew. Only Clementina could hear the growling of her stomach, but it told her what she had to do next. She had to do what Clementina could never have done. Only Rosa could do what was necessary to survive. She raised her skirt higher and the men clapped louder.
“Señor Vedrine, owner of several companies touring the country in his Espectáculos, resplendent that night in black evening cape, mustache waxed to fine points, dropped a few centimos into ‘Rosa’s’ hand. What he gave her was exactly enough to stay alive for one more day and to arrive back at Teatro Olimpia the next night hungry enough to do again whatever was necessary. He welcomed the newest addition to his company with these words, ‘More clapping, more centimos. Tomorrow, look a little harder for that flea.’
“ ‘Rosa’ didn’t begin her search for the flea in earnest the next night. No, she had to get much, much hungrier before she even removed her shawl. But when she did, oh the applause. Better still, Señor Vedrine parceled out a few extra centimos as a reward. Enough to buy a tomato to eat with her bread. The next night, off came her shoes and she earned enough applause to buy a small piece of cheese. So it went until ‘Rosa’ stood beneath the blinding lights weari
ng nothing but her corset, pink stockings, and a false Gypsy’s false smile plastered on her face.
“For this Señor Vedrine gave her a little more, but never enough. Never enough to fill her stomach. Perhaps, if Clementina had grown up like Rosa with an empty stomach growling her whole life, she would have been stronger. But she hadn’t and she wasn’t. So, when a German officer gestured for the pretty chica, light-skinned and delicate unlike her swarthy sisters, to join him at his table, a table piled with candied chestnuts in syrup with brandy, perfectly grilled sardines, tender marinated octopus, mantecaditos!—the little cookies of almonds and olive oil she had used to lure Rosa into friendship—was it any wonder she said yes?
“And that is how Clementina survived the war in which a million died. A million in a country of twenty-two million. She became the puta her father had cursed her for. She entertained in all the ways in which a half-starved young woman can entertain a man. She thought of all the men, German, Italian, Spanish, as señoritos, as the wealthy patrons who had always supported flamenco performers. She smiled at the German officers who told her how lucky she was to be a little Gypsy girl in Spain. Back in the Fatherland, they had been sterilizing people like her and putting them in concentration camps since 1932. She smiled when the Italians complimented her manners, saying she wasn’t a pig like most Spaniards. She smiled when Spanish officers joked about making the maricón poet Lorca dig his own grave—‘The only work that fairy did in his life!’—before they shot him in the back of the head.
“German bombs fell on Spain and anyone with enough influence or money left. Carmen Amaya, Sabicas, all gone to Paris, New York, Buenos Aires. In 1939, the Civil War ended. The Germans, the Italians, and the Moors left, but the memory of what they had done remained. Spaniards on the left and the right remembered the nineteen thousand Luftwaffe personnel who had rotated through the Condor Legions learning all they needed to know about bombing civilians in places like Guernica before they moved on to Poland, to Czechoslovakia, to France, to the rest of Europe. They remembered the tanks flying Italian flags that had bombarded their homes. They remembered what Franco had incited the Moors to do to their women. The foreigners left, but those who had danced and sang for them remained. And people remembered.
“Life after the Civil War ended was grimmer in many ways than it had been when guns were being fired. Franco tried not just to freeze time, but to turn back the hands of history. Spain became a prison camp secured by la guardia civil against dissent, against progress, against the outside world and the war sweeping the Continent, then the globe. While the rest of the world fought the Second World War—the war that Germany and Italy had rehearsed in Spain—the only blood Spain spilled was her own. Franco exacted a terrible revenge upon all who had opposed him. All who might oppose him still. Rumors that a person did not attend Mass regularly were enough for him to end up in front of a firing squad. Franco purged the country of ‘Reds,’ of anyone suspected of supporting the Republicans. Thousands starved in the years of poverty that followed.
“As the people grew hungrier, their memories grew sharper. They remembered the girl who’d searched for a flea, throwing her clothes off for Nazis, both on the stage and off. But no one dared say anything to Clementina. No one would castigate a girl who had entertained Franco’s generals and all the foreign generals who had aided him. Not when Franco was still executing prisoners by the thousands. In Sevilla alone eighty citizens a day were killed. In the light of day, no one dared whisper a word to Clementina. But in the safety of a dark theater, when the curtains parted and ‘Rosa’ went onstage, the whistles that are a Spaniard’s boo would shriek through the theater.
“Clementina knew that scores were being settled. A knife between the ribs in a dark alley, a piece of wire around the neck, a lead pipe to the back of the head, that was how the defeated, how ordinary Spaniards, retaliated against their conquerors. On moonless nights when even the wary slept, when even la guardia could not protect them, that was when revenge was exacted. Clementina, who had survived the war eating delicacies fed to her by Nazis, who had taken her clothes off for captains and done so much more for majors, who had lived when so many others had died, knew that her name was on the list of those scores waiting to be settled.
“Which is why on a night seven years after the war ended, when Clementina’s feet hurt so badly she could barely drag herself home, she was not surprised that a heavily built man stepped out of the shadows and blocked her path. She had been expecting him or someone like him for a long time. It was right that it should happen there, in an alley, with only the faintest glimmer of moonlight shining on the cobblestones slick from the damp night air, an alley just like the one where she and Rosa last saw the poet Lorca. What did surprise her, though, was that the man knew her name, her real name.
“ ‘Clementina.’
“Then she realized that, of course, it would be someone sent by her father who would kill her.
“ ‘You don’t recognize me, do you?’ He tilted his head up so that moonlight found the scar on his face and turned it into a silver pucker running from his scalp, over his whitened eye, down to his chin.
“ ‘El Bala.’
“ ‘Well, I barely recognize you either. You look like you’ve aged twenty years. Wait until I tell Rosa.’
“ ‘Rosa? Rosa is alive?’
“ ‘Rosa is my wife. The mother of my three children with another on the way. The woman whose name, whose very blood, you have taken and dishonored.’
“ ‘Rosa is alive?’
“ ‘Only because I rescued her from the side of that mountain you had led her to.’
“ ‘You stole her? Not Long Steps? You stole Rosa just like her father stole her mother?’ The weight of memory, of longing for her friend, pressed down upon Clementina so heavily that she could not draw a breath. ‘Is she happy? Does she still dance?’
“ ‘She is my wife.’ Those four words were the walls that imprisoned Clementine’s friend. They described the prison she had been sentenced to by her own parents. ‘I have come to collect what you owe us for stealing her name.’
“ ‘You are looking at everything I own in this world,’ Clementine answered.
“ ‘Then I will have to kill you for the shame you have brought upon my family.’ El Bala was used to speaking these words, then watching hard men turn into babies, crying, begging for their lives, soiling their pants. Clementine barely shrugged, and El Bala saw what the years of hunger and shame had taken from the little aristocrat: her fear of death. So he selected another weapon from his arsenal, blackmail. If regular sums were not sent to him, he would expose Clementine for the fraud she was.
“ ‘Send money to Rosa?’ The flicker that had been Clementine’s interest in staying alive flamed back to life. ‘Where? How much?’
“El Bala had never had such an eager extortion victim. He named an outrageous sum and Clementina agreed so eagerly that he doubled it.
“ ‘It will take me a few months. Let’s say six, no, three, at the most, to have the first payment. I assume you’ll expose me if the first payment is not made. Then find me and kill me if I miss the second.’
“ ‘Uh, yes.’
“ ‘Good, good. Fine. Oh, this is wonderful. Rosa is alive.’
“El Bale stood alone in the dark alley for several moments after his wife’s strange payo friend bounded off looking twenty years younger. Yet again he cursed his heart, his fate, for making him fall in love with Delicate. The daughter, Rosa, grown thin and silent, was nothing like her explosive, fiery mother and now, for the rest of his miserable life, he was trapped. A churro vendor pushing his cart to the plaza to sell his fritters to late-night revelers and early risers startled El Bala. He sheathed his knife and slipped into the shadows. It was a long trip back to Sacromonte.
“After that night, Clementina was reborn. She had a reason to live. To make money. Lots and lots of money to send Rosa. There was nothing but poverty, deprivation, and revenge in Spain. One of the compa
nies of Espectáculos Vedrines was setting sail next week for a tour of Argentina and they needed a dancer. Just someone for the back row who could shake a ruffled skirt and do the tourist kind of flamenco that Franco had promoted since banishing the real thing. Clementina seduced the manager of the overseas companies and convinced him that since all the Nazis had fled to Argentina anyway, the old Luftwaffe pilots and Panzer commandants would be delighted to see the girl who had searched her clothes for a flea while they were training in Spain. She got the job. They gave her an advance on her salary. Clementina intended to send it all to Rosa, but somehow, when she passed the shops that sold candied chestnuts in syrup with brandy, perfectly grilled sardines, tender marinated octopus, mantecaditos!, the money flew out of her hand. She boarded the ship for Argentina without having sent one centimo to Rosa.
“Though Clementina felt guilty about abandoning her friend, Argentina was a new country where it was almost possible to forget old memories, old obligations. The streets were broad and clean, there was plenty to eat, and no one had scores to settle with her. No whistles of derision greeted her when she appeared onstage. She danced with the company at the Teatro Maravillas and the Teatro Mayor right on the broad, tree-lined Avenida Mayor in the middle of town. When their engagement was finished, the company moved on, but Clementina stayed. A woman as strong as she was en compás never had problems finding work. She danced in the chorus with La Argentinita and even the great Carmen Amaya herself. Though a sturdy and reliable dancer, she was known as someone who kept to herself. It was rumored that she was a lesbian, though she didn’t seem to have any more interest in women than she did in men.