The Return (6 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
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For a few years there had been a steady wave of people wanting to learn salsa and Felipe and Corazón, old and experienced as they were, had no difficulty in becoming experts. Given a short demonstration of the steps, the pair could have danced any dance in the world. Just as musicians with perfect pitch can listen to a complex tune and then repeat it back, note perfect, and then a second time with variations and inversions, so it was with these two. One day they might watch a series of moves and the very next they had mastered it, having observed the male and female parts just a single time.
 
Salsa instruction now began. It was Corazón who did most of the shouting. Her voice cut through the music and even the strident tone of jazz trumpet that blasted its way through the salsa tune.
 
‘
Y un, dos, tres! Y un, dos, tres!
And! Clap! Clap! Clap! And! Clap! Clap! Clap! And . . .’
 
On she went. Repetition, after repetition, after repetition of the beat until it would haunt them and penetrate their dreams. Every turn their pupils mastered was greeted with huge encouragement and enthusiasm.
 
‘
Eso es!
’ That’s it!
 
When it was time to move on, to try something new, Felipe would call out: ‘
Vale!
’ OK! And a demonstration of the next turn, or
vuelta
, would commence.
 
‘
Estupendo!
’ the teachers would cry out, unashamed of the hyperbole.
 
Between attempts at each new move, the women would move round one partner, so that by the end of the lesson’s first half, they had danced with all of the taxi dancers. Even if none of them could speak English, these young men were all fluent in the language of salsa.
 
‘I love this,’ said Maggie as she passed Sonia on the dance floor.
 
In dancing, mused Sonia, perhaps Maggie showed her true self. She certainly looked happy being passed across a man’s body this way and that, her hand running down the back of his neck to an instruction given precisely by him. A dismissive flick of his hand was all that was required to tell her when to spin. She responded on the beat, without hesitation. Sonia watched her friend being used to demonstrate a complex sequence of steps and found it strange that Maggie seemed so attracted to a dance where the man played an entirely dominant role. The feisty feminist who wanted to be in charge seemed happy being twirled.
 
Maggie received praise from the teachers and an expression that Sonia remembered from schooldays passed across her face. It was a look of slight surprise, accompanied with a huge beam of pleasure.
 
There was a break when big jugs of iced water were brought in and poured into plastic cups. It had become stifling in the room and everyone drank thirstily while polite snippets of stilted conversation were exchanged between people of different nationalities.
 
When they had quenched their thirst, the two Englishwomen went off to the cloakroom. Sonia noticed huge quantities of graffiti, particularly several sets of initials heavily scored into the old wood. Some of the scratches had almost been polished away through the passing years, and others were freshly done, the recent carvings still the colour of naked flesh. One particularly ornate set of letters reminded her of a church carving, a work of art. It must have been a labour of love to have made such deep dents in these solid doors. Anyone who had bothered was not making a careless expression of short-lived passion but a declaration of real, lasting devotion. ‘J - M’ - the heavy doors would never shed this expression of affection until they were taken from their hinges and turned into firewood.
 
As they sauntered back into the corridor, they paused outside the studio, where the framed posters jostled with each other. Felipe and Corazón appeared on one of them. The style of type dated it to around 1975 and it was advertising a flamenco performance.
 
‘Look, Maggie, it’s a picture of our teachers!’
 
‘God, so it is! Hasn’t age been cruel!’
 
‘They haven’t changed that much,’ said Sonia in their defence. ‘Their figures are pretty similar.’
 
‘But those crow’s-feet - she didn’t have them in those days, did she?’ commented Maggie. ‘Do you think they’d show us some flamenco? Teach us how to stamp our feet? Give us a bit of a clatter on the castanets?’
 
Maggie didn’t wait for an answer. She was already back in the studio, explaining and gesticulating to the teachers what she wanted them to do.
 
Sonia watched her from the doorframe.
 
Finally, Felipe found some English words: ‘Flamenco can’t be taught,’ he said gutturally. ‘It’s in the blood, and only in gypsy blood at that. But you can try if you like. I’ll show you some at the end of the lesson.’
 
It was a statement designed to challenge.
 
For the next hour they repeated the movements from the first half of the lesson and then fifteen minutes before the end, Felipe clapped his hands together.
 
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Flamenco.’
 
He strutted over to the CD player, flicked swiftly through his wallet of music, and carefully extracted what he wanted. Meanwhile, Corazón changed her shoes in the corner, to a pair with heavy heels and steel-capped soles.
 
The class stood back, quietly expectant.They heard palms against palms and low drums. It was dark and very different from the happy-go-lucky sound of salsa.
 
Corazón strode out in front of the group. It was as though she no longer knew they were there. As a guitar played, she raised one arm and then another, her sinuous fingers fanning out like daisy petals. For more than five minutes, she stamped her feet in a complex sequence of heel and toe, heel and toe, that accelerated to a thunderous vibration before it stopped dead, with a final, decisive ‘BANG’ of her hard shoe on the solid floor. It was a virtuoso display of strength and breathtaking technical prowess as much as a dance, somehow the more impressive because of her age.
 
On the very beat that she stopped, a wail emanated from the speakers and eerily wrapped itself around everyone in the room. It was a raw-throated male voice and seemed to express the same anguish that had shown on Corazón’s face as she had danced.
 
Just before she finished, Felipe had begun and for a few seconds mirrored his wife’s movements, proving to the audience that this dance was not pure improvisation, but a well-rehearsed piece of choreography. Now Felipe took her place centre stage. Narrow-hipped, his slim back arched into a ‘C’, Felipe briefly struck a pose before spinning himself around and beginning a series of floor-hammering steps. The sound of metal on wood bounced off the mirrored walls. His movements were even more sensual than those of his wife, and certainly more coquettish. It was as though he flirted with the class, his hands travelling up and down his body, his hips rocking one way and then another. Sonia was transfixed.
 
As though to compete with Corazón, he executed an ever more complex sequence of steps, time after time landing by some miracle on precisely the same spot, the music drowned out by the hammering of feet. The passion of it was extraordinary and it seemed to have come from nowhere.
 
Felipe’s finishing pose, eyes to the ceiling, one arm wrapped around his back, the other thrown across his front was one of pure arrogance. From the back a quiet voice said ‘
Olé
’. It was Corazón; even she was moved by her husband’s display, his total absorption in the moment. Then there was silence.
 
After a moment or two, Maggie broke it by applauding rapturously. The rest of the group clapped but with less enthusiasm.
 
Felipe’s face broke into a smile, all traces of arrogance melting away. Corazón came out in front of the audience and challenged them.
 
‘Flamenco? Tomorrow? You want?’ she enquired, flashing her yellowing teeth.
 
Some of the Norwegian girls, slightly embarrassed by this display of naked emotion, turned to chat to one another; meanwhile the taxi dancers were looking at their watches to see whether their time as hired hands was nearly over. They did not plan to do overtime.
 
‘Yes,’ said Maggie. ‘I want.’
 
Sonia felt uncomfortable. Flamenco was so very different from salsa. From what she had seen in the past twelve hours, it was an emotional state of being as much as a dance. Salsa was carefree, an emotional escape route and, moreover, it was what they had come to improve.
 
By now the rest of the class had dispersed and Sonia needed fresh air.
 
‘
Adiós
,’ said Corazón, packing up her bag. ‘
Hasta luego.
’
 
Chapter Four
 
IT WAS ONE o’clock. The dance studio did not have glamorous neighbours and the workaday side street in which they found themselves offered little more than a car parts depot and a key cutter. As they walked to the end of the shadowy street and turned into the main road the atmosphere changed and they were dazzled by the glare of sunlight and deafened by the crazed cacophony of lunchtime traffic, brought to a standstill.
 
The bars and cafés were now crammed with builders, students and anyone else who lived too far out of town to get home for their lunchtime siesta.All the other shops - greengrocers, stationers and the plethora of hairdressing salons - were firmly shut up again, having opened for just a few hours since Sonia and Maggie had last passed. Their slatted metal grilles would not be raised again until some time after four.
 
‘Let’s stop at this one,’ suggested Maggie, outside the second bar they came to. La Castilla had a long, stainless-steel bar and several tables down the side of the room, all but one occupied. The two Englishwomen quickly went in.
 
The smells were intense and mingled together to form a distinctive aroma of Spanish café life: beer,
jamon
, stale ash, the slightly sour smell of goat’s cheese, a whiff of anchovies and, wafting across it all, strong, freshly ground coffee. A row of uniformly blue-overalled manual workers sat up at the bar, oblivious to everything but the plates in front of them. They were intent on sating their hunger. Almost simultaneously they put down their forks, and clumsy hands reached for packets of strong cigarettes, generating a mushroom cloud of smoke as they lit up. Meanwhile the patron manufactured a row of
café solos
. It was a daily ritual for them all.
 
Only now did his attention turn to his new customers.
 
‘
Señoras
,’ he said, coming to their table.
 
Reading from the board behind the bar, they ordered huge crusty
bocadillos
to be filled with sardines. Sonia watched the bar owner preparing them. In one hand he wielded a knife, in the other a cigarette. It was an impressive juggling act and she marvelled as he ladled crushed tomatoes from a bowl and squashed them on to slabs of bread, fished sardines out of a bucket-sized tin and all the while took regular drags on his Corona cigarette. If the process seemed unconventional, the end result was by no means disappointing.
 
‘What did you think of the lesson?’ asked Sonia, between mouth-fuls.
 
‘The teachers are wonderful,’ answered Maggie. ‘I love them.’
 
‘They’re life-enhancing, aren’t they?’ agreed Sonia.
 
She had to raise her voice above the clatter of falling coins that erupted from a one-armed bandit next to their table. Since entering they had listened to the perpetual warbling of the fruit machine, and now one of the café’s customers happily scooped a handful of coins into his pocket. He walked away whistling.
 
Sonia and Maggie both ate hungrily. They watched as the workmen left the bar, leaving behind them a pall of smoke and dozens of tiny screwed-up paper napkins carelessly scattered on the floor like a snow storm.
 
‘What do you think James would make of it all?’ asked Maggie.
 
‘What? This place?’ responded Sonia. ‘Too grubby. Too earthy.’
 
‘I meant the dancing,’ said Maggie.
 
‘You know what he’d think.That it’s all self-indulgent nonsense,’ replied Sonia.
 
‘I don’t know how you stand him.’
 
Maggie always went for the kill. Her open dislike of James almost drove Sonia to his defence but she did not really want to think about her husband today and quickly changed the subject.
 
‘My father, on the other hand, used to love dancing. I only discovered that a few weeks ago.’
 
‘Really? I don’t remember anything about that when we were growing up.’

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