Golden Earrings (8 page)

The women and workers started to organise themselves into a formation, but before they had a chance to finish, a tram
appeared around the corner. People picked up stones to throw at it. A side window shattered. The security guard on board, a young man not much older than Anastasio, aimed his gun at the workers, who were ripping up the track ahead of the tram. He fired. Luckily for them, he was a poor shot. But his action enraged the crowd, which included onlookers and their children. Before we knew what was happening, Ramón and I were caught in a crush of people pressing towards the tram, which had come to a stop before the ruined track. The driver, guard and passengers alighted in a panic as the crowd threw its weight against the side of the vehicle, heaving against it until it toppled on its side. The workers and women cheered. A young man ran out of a nearby building with a lit torch in his hand. He threw it into the tram and the wooden seats quickly caught fire, eliciting more whoops and cheers from the onlookers.

Later in the day, Teresa took me and Ramón to the Casa del Pueblo, which was abuzz with activity.

‘What’s the latest?’ Teresa asked Núria, who was handing out food packages.

‘A short while ago some workers attacked a tram, with guns they had stolen from a police station. They forced the driver and passengers to get off, then released the brakes and sent the tram careening down the street. The Civil Guard arrived and fired on the workers, who opened fire in return. Now, two tram drivers and three of our own are dead. Many others were wounded. A little girl was killed in the crossfire.’

The news about the child who had been killed upset Teresa. ‘That’s it for the day,’ she said, urging Ramón and me back out onto the street. ‘We are heading home. I promised your father I’d look after you, and that I will.’

We stayed inside Teresa’s stifling apartment that afternoon, while women from Damas Rojas came and went with messages regarding the progress of the day. Teresa jumped from her chair
and raised both her fists in the air when Carme arrived with the news that the trams had been brought to a standstill.

‘I hope that arrogant de Foronda is satisfied now,’ she said. ‘What did he achieve? Burned-out trams and ripped-up tracks!’

A young boy brought us a note from Papá to let us know that he was unharmed.
Teresa, we’ve been told that workers in Madrid are impressed by how quickly we’ve crippled the city’s industry and commerce, and that they are now planning to strike themselves
, he wrote.

His message brought light to Teresa’s eyes. ‘If the whole country unites against the war, they will have to stop it,’ she said. ‘If we act as one, we can change things.’

Although there had been a bloody exchange of fire between police and protesters outside the army headquarters on passeig de Colom the previous evening, Tuesday morning started quietly. Women hung out the washing and children played in the streets. There was no wheeled traffic and no newspapers. There weren’t even communiqués posted on public buildings by the Captain General ordering workers to report to their factories and places of employment.

Teresa opened her flower stall at the markets until nine o’clock, joking with the other vendors that the Montella servants had wisely not shown their faces. Laieta brought the news that Governor Ossorio had resigned.

‘What?’ exclaimed Teresa, keeling over with laughter. ‘Is he that great a coward? What governor leaves his post when his city is in the midst of a battle? Who have they got to replace him?’

‘General Santiago has stepped in.’

‘No!’ Teresa laughed again. ‘I’ve heard he is incompetent.’

‘He is as long as he has men from Barcelona in his command. Did you hear what happened at the docks yesterday evening?’

Teresa shook her head.

‘That bastard General Brandeis ordered his dragoons to fire on the dock workers and their wives. But the people hoisted themselves onto crates and trolleys and shouted, “Don’t shoot, our brothers, we are fighting for you! We are fighting for your lives!”’

Teresa’s jaw dropped. ‘What happened?’

‘The soldiers refused to fire. How could they do otherwise? They may as well be shooting their own families.’

Teresa put her hands to her mouth in delighted amazement.

Laieta smiled. ‘Now the workers all over the town are doing the same thing. They cheer and applaud the soldiers who are sent to attack them and the men won’t fire.’

Despite our elated mood after Laieta’s news, the streets around Teresa’s apartment looked different on our way home from the market. The residents were ripping up the cobblestones to build barricades, and adding sewer covers, bed frames, lampposts and anything else they could get their hands to reinforce them. Where there were electrical lines, they were being cut. It looked as though people were preparing for a full-scale battle.

‘What’s going on?’ Teresa asked one of the women.

‘We’ve been told something big is going to happen this afternoon, and to ready ourselves against mounted charges.’

Teresa glanced at the men wielding weapons and practising their aim. I could see she was torn between her promise to protect us and her longing to be part of the action. We were about to move on when a boy on a bicycle came to a halt in front of us.

‘Are you Teresa Flores García?’ he asked. Teresa nodded and the boy handed her a slip of paper. ‘It’s instructions from your friends at the Casa del Pueblo.’

The boy rode off and Teresa opened the paper. Ramón and I stared over her shoulder, anxious to know what information it contained. I couldn’t read the words; all I could see was that
it was a list along with a map. Ramón, who was more advanced in reading than I was, muttered the names: ‘Sant Antoni, Sant Pau del Camp …’

Teresa looked at us, then turned to the workers at the barricade. ‘It has begun!’ she cried. ‘The Revolution!’

The people stopped what they were doing and stared at her. She waved the paper in the air so they could see it.

‘They are burning the churches!’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘This afternoon!’

T
he day after my first flamenco lesson, I returned to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, intending to continue my research on the supernatural. It was coming up to examination time at the Paris universities, and the library was even more crowded than it had been on my previous visit. The atmosphere had transformed from scholarly zeal to exhaustion and edginess. I noticed one student leaning against the staircase, who appeared to have fallen asleep standing up. I was glad to see that he shook himself awake after a few seconds and picked up his books before his knees relaxed and he toppled to the floor. If I had gone to a regular school, I could have been one of the students swotting here now. What would I have studied? Art, or the history of music, perhaps? I couldn’t even imagine it. It seemed to me that from the moment I had opened my eyes and taken my first gasp of air, I had lived and breathed ballet. Hadn’t my mother been dancing the part of Giselle when she first realised she was pregnant? Hadn’t she been listening to the waltz from
Sleeping Beauty
when she went into labour?

While I waited for the librarian to retrieve the books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, I found myself thinking about Jaime. I wondered whether he had been born in Spain or France. I guessed Spain because of his slight Spanish accent. Which region was he from? Then I wondered
why I was wondering about him, and stopped myself. I thought about what he’d told me about la Rusa instead. What had she done during the Civil War that had made her so hated that somebody might have killed her all those years later? It occurred to me that Mamie might know, but I had to stick to my promise of not asking her questions about the past.

I collected my books, but before sitting down with them, I searched the card catalogue to see if the library’s collection included anything on flamenco dancers. I found a book titled
The Encyclopaedia of Flamenco
that I thought could be a good start. The wait for the book, however, was longer than it had been for the other materials. When the librarian finally placed the encyclopaedia on the pick-up shelf, I couldn’t find a free seat at one of the desks to read it. So I balanced it on the edge of a desk and leafed through the pages on the great flamenco guitarists and singers until I reached the section on dancers. Carmen had been right about the stage names. La Joselito had taken her name from a bullfighter who had been trampled to death in 1920; Antonia Mercé was la Argentina because she was born in Buenos Aires; la Mejorana was named after a herb. Flamenco aficionados, it seemed, were not averse to designating names in reference to dancers’ physical disabilities, or those of their parents: La Sordita was deaf; and la Niña del Ciego was ‘the daughter of the blind one’. The gypsies had a particularly warped humour, or maybe it was superstition, because the contemporary dancer la Chunga’s name meant ‘the unattractive one’, even though from the photograph the encyclopaedia showed of her she was bewitchingly beautiful.

Then I found what I was looking for:

La Rusa was born in the slum area of Barcelona known as the barri Xinès to Andalusian parents in 1901. Out of her poverty she rose to become one of the most famous flamenco dancers of her time. Despite her newly gained wealth and prestige, she sided with the Republicans in Barcelona during the Civil War
(1936–1939), perhaps in memory of her father, who had been a member of the Radical Party during the strikes of 1909. Her loyalty to the masses turned out to be a decision for which she paid dearly when she was forced to live in exile. She died in 1952 in Paris.

That was all. There was nothing about la Rusa’s real name, or why she had taken her unusual stage name. There was nothing about where she had lived in Paris. But one thing puzzled me above all else: if she had fought on the side of the Republicans against Franco during the Civil War, why would anyone in the Spanish émigré community have wanted to kill her? Most of them had been Republican supporters too. Then I remembered Mamie once telling me that Franco was supposed to have arranged the assassinations of several high-profile exiles, especially if they had continued to speak out against his regime. Was that what had happened to la Rusa?

The snippets of incomplete information made my curiosity grow. I returned the book along with those on the supernatural, and went back to the catalogue to see if I could find another book that might have more information about la Rusa. The clock on the wall caught my attention. It was already half past twelve. I was cutting it fine to get back in time for Mamie’s afternoon class. If there was anything my grandmother hated, it was a lack of punctuality — especially in front of her students.

I found two other books on the history of flamenco and filled in the request slips quickly. The notice at the desk said there was a waiting time of thirty minutes for books, but those I had requested didn’t arrive until three-quarters of an hour later. I had fifteen minutes to get to the Métro station if I wanted to make Mamie’s class on time.

I didn’t even bother taking the books into the reading room, but crouched down against a wall and balanced them on my lap. I browsed through the first book, which explained flamenco in general terms.
It is an art that has been taken over by show
business, but it wasn’t always the gaudy tourist spectacle that it has become today.
Interesting, but I would have to save reading that for later. I swapped the book for the next one. It had a long chapter at the front about the history and origins of flamenco, but at the back there was a section on the artists of the past and present. It didn’t list the dancers in any logical order, however, and I had to scan the copy to see if it contained anything about la Rusa.

‘Mademoiselle, you cannot stay here.’ I looked up to see the security guard frowning at me. ‘You must place yourself at a reading desk to use the library’s books.’

I only had five minutes left to skim through the book, but I could see from the guard’s expression that pressing the point was not going to get me anywhere. One of the students in the reading room stood up and left his seat. I quickly took it, cringing inwardly when I found it so warm.

I checked the page titled ‘The Women of Flamenco’.
Zapateado — the drumming sound made with the feet — was originally performed only by male dancers. The women used mostly their hands, arms and shoulders. That was changed by dancers such as la Rusa …
I flipped over to the next page and my heart skipped a beat when I saw the woman in the black and white photograph: the mane of jet black hair; the arched brows framing panther-like eyes; the broad nose and the full lips. The lips were black in the photograph, but I knew they were blood-red in real life. I swallowed and tried to breathe. My pulse was hammering in my head. I read the caption:
La Rusa — Celestina Sánchez, 1932
.

The room around me turned white as my blood drained to my feet. I was staring at the face of my ghost. It was la Rusa who had given me the golden earrings. It was la Rusa who had come to see me.

T
he first religious building we saw set alight was the Royal Monastery of Sant Mateu, which housed an order of cloistered Hieronymite nuns. Although numerous churches, monasteries, convents and religious schools were scheduled to be burned that afternoon, Teresa and the women from Damas Rojas were keen to attend the torching of Sant Mateu because the laundries they owned had put many of the local women out of work.

The workers agreed that attacks were to be on the clergy’s property only; no lives were to be taken. It was therefore necessary to clear the buildings before setting them alight. Although the nuns of Sant Mateu had been warned in advance that their building was on the list to be destroyed, they refused to leave.

The crowd cheered and chanted when groups of youths brought ladders to scale the building while men and women worked together to force open the doors. A man in a well-cut suit and sporting a cane instructed the rest of us to build a bonfire from the materials that the youths, who had now entered the convent, were throwing down to us. We worked quickly to build a stack from the chairs, books and bedding. We had no idea that the papers being thrown down to us were stocks worth over a million
pesetas
.

‘The convents have enjoyed their wealth at your expense,’
the stranger said. ‘We are to burn everything — jewels, cash, statues. All of it. There is to be no looting.’

No sooner had he spoken than a gold chain with a large medallion dropped near my feet. I threw it on the unlit pile, but another woman, who obviously understood its worth better than I did, grabbed it when she thought no one was looking and slipped it into her pocket.

‘They are escaping out the back,’ a cry from a window alerted us.

Teresa called to Ramón and grabbed my arm and we ran together with the others to a street at the rear of the convent. The nuns were fleeing through the laundries at the back of the building, but their escape was blocked by the neighbourhood women, who were throwing stones and jeering at them.

‘Now you will be as poor as we are,’ screamed one of the women. ‘May you know what it is like to have no food in your belly!’

One of the nuns screamed back, ‘You are fools! That wealth is the dowries of nuns for over four hundred years, and all those stocks you are throwing on the bonfire are the property of private citizens!’

The women paid no attention and continued to jeer.

One nun saw a gap in the crowd and made a break for it. Some of the others raced after her, with the local women on their heels. The nuns banged on the door of a house of a leading factory owner. A servant opened the door, but Teresa shouted, ‘Let them in and we will torch your building too!’ The door slammed shut.

For a moment, the nuns were confused that their neighbours should turn on them this way. Then they began to scatter in all directions. The women were about to pursue them when a young girl cried out that smoke was beginning to rise from the convent.

Teresa called to the women. ‘Let them go. We’ve scared them enough. Long live the Revolution!’

The atmosphere that evening was eerie. From the roof of Teresa’s building, we saw fires burning all over the city and we could hear the blasts of cannons and shooting as the guards and police attacked barricades. It was a still, hot night and the smell from the drains was rank. I rested my head against Ramón’s shoulder, resisting falling asleep in case we suddenly had to flee the building. I had participated in the burning of a convent that afternoon and yet I still prayed to God to keep Papá, who we had heard was fighting in the Clot-Sant Martí area, safe.

Paquita arrived with some bean stew for us. Ramón and I were so famished that we wolfed down the hearty mix. Paquita leaned against Teresa, exhausted.

‘A Franciscan father was killed in Sant Gervasi today,’ she said. ‘He was trying to run away with cash and someone shot him.’

Teresa shrugged. ‘Barcelona will be better off without those hypocrites.’

Paquita lifted her eyebrow. ‘I am against the clergy because their manner of education perpetuates ignorance and misery. But you, Teresa, you seem to truly hate them.’

Teresa stared at her hands. ‘They’ve given me good reason,’ she said. ‘My father died when I was five years old, and my mother had to place me and my sister in an orphanage so she could work. I think she believed the nuns were good women and would take care of us.’

Paquita and Teresa exchanged a glance. ‘I’m guessing that they didn’t,’ said Paquita.

‘Good women!’ cried Teresa. ‘They spoke of God’s divine love and at the same time forced sick children to eat their own vomit. I saw a boy beaten near to death for using his left hand.’

Despite the heat, I shivered and snuggled closer to Ramón, who put his arm around me.

‘I can’t bear to hear those stories,’ said Paquita, shaking her head. ‘There are far too many of them. But there are decent
nuns and priests too. That’s why they spared the hospital for incurably ill children at Les Corts.’

We sat on the roof for another hour before Teresa decided it was time for us to go to sleep. She tucked us into her bed before accompanying Paquita to the door.

‘Decent nuns? Decent priests? I’ve never seen such a thing!’ I heard her tell Paquita. Teresa always spoke in a passionate manner, but the sound of her voice shocked me: it was the howl of a wounded animal.

Paquita, also taken aback, put her hand on Teresa’s shoulder. ‘What happened to you?’

There was a long silence before Teresa found the courage to speak. ‘My sister always stood up for me. “We will break that will of yours,” the nuns used to tell her …’ Teresa’s voice faltered. ‘And they did … They used to make her sleep in the damp cellar and turned a blind eye to the priest who went there to molest her.’

‘Oh God!’ said Paquita, putting her arm around Teresa’s shoulders.

‘She died as a result of one of his sick beatings,’ said Teresa, turning her face to Paquita. ‘She was seven years old!’

I pressed closer to Ramón. Molested? I didn’t understand the word. But I could see from the way Teresa’s shoulders shook as she gave way to tears that something terrible had happened. Perhaps that was why Anastasio had refused to desert. If Papá had been put in gaol, maybe Ramón and I would have been sent to an orphanage too. We had been poor and hungry all our lives, but our parents were always kind. We had never been mistreated by them.

Teresa’s story stayed with me the next day when we went with her to meet some of the women from Damas Rojas at the plaça del Pedró. Housewives and factory workers had gathered there to exchange news of the rebellion. Suddenly an excited woman
started screaming that her sister, a nun at a nearby convent, had been tortured by her fellow nuns for being attractive. The crowd followed the woman to the convent in question. Some of them entered it and a while later reappeared dragging caskets with mummified remains in them. I reeled back in horror at the sight of the desiccated faces and sunken torsos. The corpses’ mouths were stretched wide open, as if they were screaming.

‘They were buried alive,’ whispered Ramón.

‘Look, their feet and hands are tied,’ observed one woman. ‘They’ve been martyred.’

The women took the caskets to plaça del Pedró and put them on display. Juana made a sign for them: ‘Martyred Nuns’.

‘Why are they permitted to bury their dead inside the convents when the city’s health laws forbid it?’ Juana asked the gathered spectators. ‘It’s due to their unhygienic practices that the rest of us suffer typhoid and cholera.’

Typhoid? I thought of my mother, buried in a pauper’s grave. Had she died because of these nuns? Rage boiled in my blood. My reaction was reflected in the crowd as several women cried out that they had lost children to those diseases.

‘We’ll take these corpses to City Hall,’ said Juana. ‘And demand they stop the practice of cloistered orders burying their dead in their walls.’

Her announcement brought enthusiastic shouts from the spectators. Some youths picked up the caskets and headed for City Hall, most of the crowd following to make their demands. A few women, however, dragged some corpses to the barricades on the corner of carrer del Carme and carrer d’en Roig. We later learned that men from the barricades had dumped the cadavers on the doorsteps of the houses of the Güell, Comillas and Montella families. One of the bodies had ended up propped up in front of a church with a cigarette in its mouth, like a prostitute; while a simple-minded coalman danced with another. He was later arrested and executed for his profane act.

The following evening, my father returned for us. He looked weary and exhausted.

‘General Santiago has only been biding his time,’ he told Teresa. ‘He knows the troops here in Barcelona can’t be trusted. He’s brought in new troops — a lot of them — from Valencia and Zaragoza. These soldiers will not shoot above our heads.’

‘Yes, they will,’ said Teresa. ‘Whether the troops are from Barcelona or Zaragoza, we are fighting for them all.’

Papá shook his head grimly. ‘The reports we heard about the rest of the country striking along with us … they weren’t true. They were lies perpetrated by the Strike Committee to keep us fighting. Nobody else has stopped work in protest, not even in Madrid.’

Teresa flinched. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘While communications with Barcelona have been cut off, the Minister for the Interior has been doing a good propaganda job in convincing the rest of the country that we are not waging an anti-war movement but a Catalan separatist uprising. They are against us, not for us!’

‘So there will be no Revolution?’ asked Teresa, her voice cracking. ‘Because we are outnumbered?’

‘It is futile to continue,’ said Papá.

Teresa was as pale as a ghost. ‘So what now?’

Papá clenched his fists. ‘What there will be now are arrests and executions.’

Our meal together that evening was grim. There wasn’t much fresh food available in the barri Xinès, so Teresa made us chickpeas and rice. We ate together in silence. Afterwards, Ramón and I returned with Papá to our own apartment. It seemed strange to be there without Anastasio. Papá lay down on the bed and Ramón and I nestled on either side of him. Ramón fell asleep immediately, but Papá remained awake and listened to my story about the dead nuns with bound feet.

‘We don’t know that they were tortured,’ said Papá, trying to comfort me. ‘It might be some sort of Hieronymite ritual. Maybe the nuns bind the feet and hands of the dead so they fit in the coffins.’

‘Nobody thought of that,’ I said.

Papá stroked my hair. After a while, he sat up and slipped out of the bed. He took a knife from the cupboard and kneeled to loosen a floorboard. After lifting it, he placed his hand into the space and pulled out a box. When he opened the lid, I caught a glimpse of something shiny inside. He took out two golden hooped earrings and lifted them for me to see.

‘Do you remember these?’ he asked. ‘They were your mother’s.’

‘Yes, I remember them,’ I said. I saw my mother before me, as she had been when she was well: her dark skin and flashing eyes; her mane of rich black hair. She was dancing, her feet connecting with the ground as if she and the earth were one.

‘She didn’t want to take them to the grave,’ Papá said. ‘She insisted that they be left for you. Do you remember the legend she told you about them?’

I nodded. ‘They must never be sold,’ I said, repeating the exact words my mother had said. ‘If they are stolen, the thief will die a terrible death.’

Father put the earrings back in the box and returned them to their hiding place. ‘Now you know where they are,’ he whispered, fixing the floorboard back. ‘You mustn’t tell anybody.’

I gave him my promise.

Truthfully, the powers my mother had told me that the earrings possessed frightened me and I didn’t like to think too much about them. But what was more upsetting was the pinch of sadness in my heart. Why was my father showing me where the earrings were now? Did he have some premonition that something would happen to him?

The following morning, we rose at five o’clock as usual. It could have been any ordinary morning, except that Anastasio wasn’t with us and the defeat we had always felt in our hearts now lay heavily upon us. The last of our hopes that anything might change for the better left us when we saw officers of the Civil Guard holding workers at gunpoint, ordering them to dismantle the barricades. In some of the outer suburbs, the fighting continued, but without the support of the rest of the country the hope of a revolution was futile. The number of troops being brought in far outweighed the strikers. All the workers could do now was go back to their daily lives and wait for the repercussions that would surely follow their acts of protest.

When we arrived at the market, Teresa was putting on display the few carnations and geraniums that she had on hand.

‘Paquita’s been arrested,’ she told my father.

‘You’d better lie low,’ Papá warned her. ‘Although it might be because she worked at the Ferrer School. You know the government and clergy have been dying to get their hands on them for years.’

‘And you?’ Teresa asked, looking at my father with a worried expression on her face. ‘You are going back to the factory?’