The Return (18 page)

Read The Return Online

Authors: Victoria Hislop

Tags: #British - Spain, #Psychological Fiction, #Family, #British, #Spain - History - Civil War; 1936-1939 - Social Aspects, #General, #Granada (Spain), #Historical, #War & Military, #Families, #Fiction, #Spain

BOOK: The Return
12.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Like all Granadino children, Antonio, Ignacio, Emilio and Mercedes Ramírez had grown up playing in the streets and socialising in the squares. They mostly stayed quite close to the Plaza Nueva where their parents’ café was situated and, when they were small, amused themselves with games of pitch and toss, and paddled in the River Darro beneath the Albaicín. The latter was an area where many of their friends lived, and though it was one of the poorer
barrios
, its poverty did not prevent it from being one of the most cheerful and lively.
 
Brothers, sisters, parents and classmates were the population of their world. They were friends with whole groups of siblings, so if Concha Ramírez was curious about where one of her children might be, the information was never hard to find.
 
‘Oh,’ she would be told, ‘Emilio is playing with Alejandro Martínez - his brother just told me.’ Or, ‘Paquita’s mother told me to tell you that Mercedes is going to the fiesta with them tonight.’
 
In that way, the city seemed a very small place. They were free to wander about and there was more danger from being trodden on by an irritable mule carrying firewood in from the countryside than being knocked down by one of the few cars that drove about in the city. In daylight hours, Pablo and Concha Ramírez never gave a second thought to their children’s whereabouts. It was a city without danger, somewhere impossible to get lost in, and the influence of the outside world remained firmly at bay. They had very little experience of anywhere but this city. Once, a long time back, there had been a visit to the seaside, but it was never repeated. The only journey they made on a regular basis was to a village up in the mountains north of Granada where Concha’s sister, Rosita, lived.
 
In 1931, when the Second Republic began,Antonio was twenty, Ignacio eighteen, Emilio fifteen and Mercedes twelve. Pablo and Concha Ramírez loved them all equally and unreservedly.
 
Antonio, the eldest, was broader than his father, and like everyone in his family he was dark. Behind his spectacles glittered earnest chestnut eyes. He had been a serious child and the fully grown young man was no different from the boy. Listening to adult conversation had always been his favourite pastime, and growing up in a café had exposed him to plenty. Pablo and Concha were always nagging him to play with his peers, but he lost interest in childish games at an early age. He did, however, have two very close friends, both known to him since early childhood.
 
One of them was Francisco Pérez, whose family lived on the corner of Calle Elvira and Plaza Nueva. In this confined world of theirs, the Ramírez and Pérez families were as close as blood relatives. Luis and María Pérez lived above their locksmith business, which had been set up many generations before, with their two sons, Julio and Francisco. When he was not behind the counter in his shop, Luis was always in El Barril, and in more than four decades of friendship he and Pablo had never run short of conversation.
 
The second of Antonio’s close friends was Salvador. ‘El Mudo’ they called him, unabashed by the bluntness of the nickname.The mute boy. Over the years, Salvador’s good friends had become fluent in sign language and the three of them would sit for hours engaged in discussion. Naturally Salvador, who had been both deaf and dumb since birth, was the most eloquent and graceful of them all in the way he communicated: crocheting the air with his hands, making patterns that built into expressions of humour, joy, anger and concern. Some of the time, his feelings would be greatly exaggerated, and at other times a subtle shrug or movement of his fingers would be all that was required.
 
When the Second Republic was declared, one of the new government’s priorities was to make sure that everyone had the opportunity to learn to read and they launched a campaign to stamp out illiteracy. Antonio had just qualified as a teacher, which had always been his ambition, so the aim of the Second Republic to provide education for all met with his approval. He relished being part of something bigger than just the day-to-day work in a classroom. He saw that illiteracy made slaves of people and that every ‘
analfabeto
’ taught to read was one less person to be an underpaid servant to the capitalists. He knew that education was a powerful liberating force.
 
After 1931, Señora Ramírez tried to persuade him not to go to political meetings. She regarded them as more dangerous than bullfights. It was ironic really, but she was not entirely wrong. At least in a bullfight, the struggle is occasionally balanced and the fighter and the animal have an equal chance. In politics this was not always the case.
 
Ignacio was the most colourful of them all. Although he was the most conceited person imaginable, he was also exciting company to be in.With ebony hair and eyes, he had a bewitching effect on people, particularly women. They could not leave him alone and that often made his life complicated. He only had to look in their direction and they were smitten. It was often like that for many men in this macho world of the
torero
- they were put on the same pedestal as movie stars.
 
The bullfighting obsession had begun very early. From the age of three, a café tablecloth had doubled as a cape while Ignacio practised his turns, his
verónicas
. Before he could even form sentences he knew what he wanted to do when he grew up.
 
Ignacio often performed his miniature
corrida
in front of a willing audience in the café, where drinkers would cheer and gasp as he killed his imaginary bull. When cajoled, both friends and brothers would take the bull’s part for him. It was done with reluctance, given they knew it would probably mean feeling the bruising thrust of his wooden sword between their shoulder blades. For Ignacio, there was no acknowledgement of the boundary between fantasy and violence.
 
‘
La hora de la verdad!
’ he would cry in triumph, a bloodthirsty grin on his face. He was emulating ‘the moment of truth’, when the matador is poised to plunge the blade into the bull. With the charging animal now close, he had no time for hesitation and he knew, even as a child, that the cleaner the kill, the safer the man and the more impressed the spectators. As he held the toy sword aloft, it was as though he heard the crowd’s collective intake of breath and the uncanny hush of a vast mass of humanity held in pure suspense. Who knows how many times he performed this dress rehearsal for what would become reality so many years later? When he was five, his grandmother had made him a little costume for his birthday and he wore it until all the seams frayed and finally split.
 
At the age of fifteen, Ignacio had left school. He had kicked his heels and just about everything else since he was born, and his parents found him hard to control.The classically perfect measurements between oval eyes, strong nose and a mouth such as only a painter would devise, made him seem untouchably divine. His behaviour was far from godlike, though. It was not even human some of the time. As a child he often acted like an animal and indeed he had the strength of an ox, making him a good match for the bull when he eventually went into the ring to fulfil his inescapable destiny.
 
Sturdy but slim-hipped, he could not have had a more perfect form for the bullfighter’s costume: the jewelled jacket known as a
traje de luces
, and the leg-skimming hose that clung to buttocks, thighs and calves. He had earned the title ‘El Arrogante’ by the time he was nine and it would follow him into adulthood and around the
corridas
of Spain. He had spent the past three years almost continuously shadowing one of Granada’s matadors, watching him fight and observing him rehearse his turns with an imaginary bull, just as he had done himself as a child.
 
If he had ever had a nickname, Emilio’s might have been ‘El Callado’, the silent one. He could not have been more different from his swaggering, self-aggrandising older brother, Ignacio, but occasionally when he did break his long silences, there was no mistaking the strength of his passions. His horizons were the nearby meadows of Granada’s Vega in one direction and the Sacromonte in another, and he felt no need to know what was happening beyond them. His world was contained within the smooth and shapely body of his prized possession: a honey-coloured flamenco guitar.
 
Emilio was taller than his brothers. He was also the palest and the frailest. Like a tree reaching upwards to find the light, Emilio outgrew the other men in his family in height if not in width or weight.
 
Unlike Ignacio, who had been constantly out in the street, playing football and occasionally disappearing until very late at night with his friends, Emilio was usually in the attic room of the apartment. There he would sit for hours at a time, his back grazing the roof tiles, doubled like a hunchback over his guitar, his strong fingers picking out the notes of some forlorn tune. There was no question of him needing the light to read the notes on a printed page. The music was entirely in his head and in the gloom of that attic room, he would shut his eyes tight to block out any remaining chinks of light.
 
If anyone was drawn by his playing to the top of the narrow staircase, he rarely noticed their presence. He would carry on plucking his strings, enveloped by the enchanting waves of sound, locked inside his own rapturous music-making. He needed no one. Anyone who did eavesdrop would soon slope away, feeling guilty that they had intruded on his private world.
 
Emilio was not ambitious like Antonio and Ignacio, which was just as well really, as his parents were eventually going to need someone to work in the bar and he had anticipated doing that job since he had been able to see over it. He wanted nothing more than to stay in Granada. The guitar was his real passion. He had been taught by one of the customers in the bar, an old gypsy type called José, and though the old man died before Emilio was even twelve, the boy had already learned the basic techniques of flamenco. He worked on those until he was nearly as good as the stars of the Sacromonte.
 
He was already playing for his sister quite a bit when her parents allowed her to perform. Indeed, the only person Emilio acknowledged when they climbed the laddered stairway was his little sister. Mercedes could not keep away from the sound of her brother’s playing and he tolerated the girl’s interest in a way he would not have done with anyone else.
 
Like many little girls, Mercedes could dance flamenco from the age of five. Before this, it was discouraged as a child’s bones were considered too soft to cope with the heavy pounding. So at a very early age, she would steal up to the attic and in the claustrophobic darkness beneath the sloping roof, she would find the rhythm with her palms, at first sitting down on the floor by Emilio’s feet. Later she would rise to her feet and begin to stamp and twirl and by now Emilio might even open his eyes to show her that he did not mind her being there.These were their private fiestas.
 
It was common to see little girls, knee-high to their fathers, performing in private homes at local
juergas
and their precocious brilliance was a spectacle that quickly drew an audience. Even if her mother worried about those soft bones, Mercedes was not a child to be told what to do. In that tiny space she learned to snap her fingers, twist her body and click the castanets. There was no one teaching her, she simply emulated the
señoritas
that she had seen, picking up their haughty demeanour, watching their steps and absorbing the sound and the fury of their movements. It seemed to come completely naturally to her, even if she was not of gypsy blood.
 
Concha was always surprised that Emilio did not find Mercedes’ presence an irritation and then, one night when she stood at the bottom of the stairs listening, she realised why. Mercedes added to his music. The beat of her heels on the wooden flooring and the clapping together of palms gave it percussion.
 
People in the street below sometimes heard the quick pattering of her feet and they would look up to see if they could detect the source of the sound. It was as fast and as smooth as the sound of someone rolling their Rs, as rapid as the vibration of a tongue against the roof of the mouth.
 
At the age of twelve, there was a strength and sturdiness about Mercedes that within a few years would bloom into voluptuousness. She had the same heart-shaped face as her mother, with dimples in her cheeks and chin, and the furrow on her brow was beginning to deepen. The glossy waves of black hair that flowed down her back were long enough for her to sit on.
 
She had a best friend, Paquita Maneiro, who lived in the Albaicín. The pair of them were often to be found sitting in a courtyard watching Señora Maneiro spinning and weaving. The woman’s fingers did not stop from morning until night, and even then she seemed able to see in the dark, working on her rugs in the flickering candlelight. It looked a hard way to make a living, but it had been a conscious choice. Her husband had died five years earlier and she could easily have taken to the streets to earn her living. It would have been a quicker way to make a few pesetas than the back-breaking work she now did. While she wove, the two girls would dance in front of her, their steel toecaps catching the edges of the rounded cobbles. Like Mercedes, Paquita loved flamenco but she struggled to dance with the same fluency.

Other books

Widows' Watch by Nancy Herndon
True Pleasures by Lucinda Holdforth
When eight bells toll by Alistair MacLean
Falling Under by Jasinda Wilder
Till Dawn Tames the Night by Meagan McKinney
A Ghost of a Chance by Evelyn Klebert
A Wolf's Oath by Alli, Jennifer T.