The Dancer and the Raja (9 page)

“I want to show you the house to see if everything is as you want it …”

A piano stands in one of the sitting rooms with several armchairs and comfortable leather sofas. French Gobelin tapestries and classical pictures line the white walls. The dining room, done out in Napoleonic style, has a large mahogany table and glass cabinets filled with Limoges china and Bohemian crystal, Sèvres figurines and a collection of Fabergé eggs. Covered in a silk mosquito net that comes down from the ceiling, Anita's bronze bed seems unreal in her room on the first floor, as if taken out of a dream. The raja has not missed a single detail: the photos that Anita had taken in Paris are framed in magnificent silver and ivory photo frames. Her dressing table is stocked with all kinds of perfumes and cosmetics, including the English tuberose perfume and, another of the raja's favorites, the whole range of Bouquet Impérial from Roger & Gallet, the French perfumiers. The bathroom is all marble, with silver taps and running water. On her bedside table, a box of her favorite Belgian chocolates and a bottle of Évian. The raja has a train full of bottles of water brought from France every month.

“Will you be comfortable?”

Anita does not answer. She seems to be looking at everything as though she were in an enchanted castle. She goes over to him and hugs him.

“I want you to rest well so you're in top form on our wedding day,” the raja goes on. “Altogether there will be a number of days of celebrations …”

“You're right,
mon chéri
. I need to rest a lot … And do you know why?”

“The journey went on forever … I should know!”

“It isn't because of the journey; it's because I'm expecting our baby, Your Highness.”

The raja smiles and his face seems to light up. He takes Anita in his arms, opens the mosquito net, and puts her gently down on the bed.

“We have to celebrate this.”

“
Mon chéri
, not now …” Anita murmurs. “Mme Dijon and Lola will be here any minute …”

But the raja is not listening to her. He stands up and waves to a servant to shut the door. And then he turns round and takes her in his arms, covering her with kisses and murmuring sweet nothings that arouse feelings in her that she hardly knows exist. Her hair grips scatter, her petticoats slide onto the floor, the precious stones in the raja's rings look like lights on the bedside table.

Anita Delgado is making the most of her fairy tale. Her desire is greater than that night in Paris, when she gave herself to him for the first time. Today she does so fearlessly, painlessly, with the joy inspired in her by the great adventure she is having.

12

Five months pregnant, the gentle curve of her belly is hardly noticeable but, just in case, she tells the Indian maid to pull the sari tight when she puts it round her. It is the first time she has tried one on, and it is her wedding sari. Four men have just brought it in a box. Anita is perplexed.

“Is this my wedding dress?” she asks Mme Dijon, visibly disappointed. It does not look at all like the diaphanous white dresses that Spanish brides dream of. Actually it is not even a dress: it is just two pieces of material.

“How do I put this on?”

“Don't worry. A servant's going to come from His Highness's mother to help you to dress.”

Anita cannot see how she can wear this. The piece of cloth is six meters long by one and a half wide. She feels it with her fingers and looks closely at it. It is a piece of silk from Benares, poppy red in color, with huge roses embroidered on it in gold and silver, and edged with a silver band that is half a meter wide on one side. It is a very beautiful piece of cloth, easier to imagine on the wall of a museum than on a person's body.

His Highness's mother's servant is an older woman, an aya as they are called in India. Dressed in white and with a very wrinkled face, she is an expert at getting ladies ready. She gradually wraps it twice round Anita, and the third time with her gnarled fingers she makes a lot of pleats that she places in the front, in the shape of a fan, so that she can walk without any difficulty. The leftover material she crosses over her back and, passing it under her arm, brings it back across her front, covering her head like a veil, in such a way that she can move without it falling off. Anita looks at herself in the mirror. The sari underlines her elegance and hides her incipient bulge. She likes to see herself like this, dressed as an Oriental princess.

The astrologer has set the date for the wedding on January 28, 1908. The Sikhs, like the Hindus, get married in the winter months, which are considered auspicious. It would seem that on the chosen day the happy conjunction of Jupiter and Sun augurs long-lasting happiness for the couple and the good fortune of producing at least three children. For a number of days now gifts have been arriving at the house, from cut-glass figurines, miniatures of Moghul art, a tiger skin and clocks, to jars of honey or bags of red lentils, the gifts of peasants who venerate His Highness. But the gift that thrills Anita the most is a fawn with the long eyelashes of a girl, a gift from the maharaja of Patiala, a state that is next to Kapurthala.

The first days at Villa Buona Vista are spent sleeping and adapting to her new life. However, she often wakes up with nightmares in which she is being torn to pieces by a panther or fighting a scorpion the size of a box of biscuits, armed only with embroidery needles. The hunting tales have impressed her greatly, but, in addition, Anita has arrived with the same baggage of false notions that inflames the imagination of the Europeans: that in India they cure illnesses with magic potions made from powdered unicorn, that there are plants with leaves so wide that they can shelter a whole family, that the diamonds are the size of quail's eggs … What Anita discovers is a more attractive reality than those nonsensical beliefs: the luxury and refinement of the court in Kapurthala—with its spectacular palaces with gardens in which you hear water running all the time amid the cooing of doves and where the perfume of spikenard and carnations floats, the obsequiousness of the Punjabis, and the drives with Mme Dijon in the extravagant landau driven by a chauffeur and with two servants dressed as French lackeys, like those in Versailles, one of them carrying a sunshade to protect her from the sun and the other a big feather fan to drive away the flies … If that were not enough, they are escorted by two lancers on horseback, with the silver-and-blue uniform of Kapurthala. Anita finds it all very amusing, and so it is. Her only sorrow is that she cannot share her perpetual amazement with her family, or with her husband. The raja has said good-bye to her until the day of the wedding because it is considered to bring bad luck if the bridegroom visits the bride in the days before the celebration.

Anita lives surrounded by servants. Wherever she looks there is a servant, either crouched in a corner, or waiting for orders, or simply killing time. They are barefoot and glide over the marble floors so you cannot hear them. “They move about like ghosts,” Lola says. A growing number of sandals, slippers, and colored house-shoes fill the entrance to the rooms where they live and cook. The servants do not allow Anita to do anything, not even to pick up her scissors when they fall on the floor. Several times a day they bring her water in a silver basin with a filigree edge so it does not slop. While one holds it, and another pours water from a jug over her hands, a maid brings a dish with a bar of soap, another holds out a towel to her, and the last one rolls up her sleeves so they do not get wet. Anita has never has such clean hands. At bath time, an aya pours water over her body, water that other servants have previously warmed over burning coals and another maid soaps her skin. Lola does not know what to do; she no longer knows what her role is. She misses the intimacy she had with her mistress. Although for now, and while Anita is still wearing European clothes, she is the one to help her to dress.

The day before the wedding there is an incident that is a revealing insight into life in India. When she gets back from a walk along the riverside, Lola goes up to the bedroom while Anita remains downstairs, dealing with two tailors who have come to work on the veranda, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Stuck in their turbans they have needles threaded with different colored cottons, which they pull out as they need them. Suddenly, a heart-stopping cry, as Lola's voice pierces the calm of the villa. The scream was terrible, as though someone were cutting her throat. Anita rushes upstairs, wondering if Lola has come face-to-face with a snake or has been the victim of some kind of attack. When she reaches the room, she finds her paralyzed in a corner, pointing at the bed, where there is a dead blackbird looking up at the ceiling. There are feathers everywhere and bird excrement staining the bedcover, furniture, and carpets. The bird had probably gotten into the room and could not find its way out. Exhausted and desperate, it ended up dead on the bed.

“What a fuss!”

“Oh,
Señora
, it turns my stomach!”

Anita orders the butler to clean the room, but he excuses himself: “Me can no touch dead animal,” he mutters in very basic English.

“What?” says Anita in surprise.

The butler goes out and calls the sweeper, the person who sweeps the floors, who “moves the dust from one place to another” as Anita says. On seeing the bird on the bed, the man shakes his head: “Sorry, Memsahib, me forbidden touch dead animals.” He in turn calls the person in charge of cleaning the latrines and toilets, but he will not move the bird's corpse either. Each servant goes to find another who belongs to a lower caste. But everyone in the villa refuses.

“What shall we do then? Perhaps I'll have to sleep with that damned bird on my bed!” she shouts at the butler.

“
Memsahib
, we'll have to go the bazaar for a
dom
, a man from a very low caste …”

“Well, go and get him …”

“
Memsahib
, I can't directly address a
dom
…”

“Well, send someone else then!”

“Sorry,
Memsahib
, we'll have to pay the
dom
to perform this service.”

It is crazy. After a whole afternoon of arguments, Anita gives a few coins to another servant, who comes back at nightfall with a
dom
, an Indian belonging to the caste that handles corpses during cremations. As bony and thin as a reed, and with a really dark skin, as Anita says, he carries out his mission like a real professional. He places the dead bird in a bag and goes away.

The great number of servants is the reflection of the variety of castes in which the Indians live separated, protected by their group, but also subject to rules that they never break. And they are rules that go too far, as Anita will gradually discover. For example, the Purada Vannan are a caste whose members are not permitted to go out in the daytime because they are not considered “pure” enough to be seen by Brahmins of higher castes. They are condemned to living in the darkness of night. Or the women in Travancore, in the south, who are not permitted to cover their breasts in front of members of higher castes.

In that world, Anita has to get used to struggling with a swarm of servants, to learning that the person who serves her at table is not the same one who brings her tea in the morning; that the cook cooks, but does not wash the dishes; that there are two people responsible for sweeping the floor and they do nothing else; that the one in charge of feeding the horses is not the same as the one who gets them ready for riding; that a maid is in charge of gathering up the dirty clothes so that a
dhobi
, a washerman, can load them on his donkey and wash them in the nearest pool, and so on. She has to learn what the English officers' wives and the wives of soldiers and shopkeepers have had to learn: you must not ask a servant to do something that is considered beneath his caste or that may be against his religion. It is a golden rule that, as long as it is followed to the letter, ensures peace and a satisfactory coexistence with the servants.

The continual arrival of people who have come to finalize the preparations for the wedding creates an atmosphere of great excitement at the Villa Buona Vista. A army of gardeners spends time planting orchids and pots of chrysanthemums and pruning each and every one of the bushes. At the back of the garden, another team raises the
shamiana
,
²
an enormous multicolored silk tent that has witnessed the wedding ceremonies of all the raja's ancestors since the seventeenth century. Because of its great age and the importance of its use, it is only brought out on great occasions. One morning two oxcarts appear loaded with carpets to cover the ground inside the tent as well as the path that links it to the entrance to the mansion. Torches are then set into the ground. In the corners plates pile up with the coat of arms of the House of Kapurthala, drawers full of engraved cutlery, superb silver candlesticks, brass containers, engraved
narguiles
, and so on. It was as though Ali Baba's cave had been emptied into the raja's villa.

Anita's mood swings between euphoria and melancholy at the importance of the preparations. Precisely the day before, and perhaps given the imminence of the celebrations, she has had an attack of homesickness. She cannot stop thinking about her parents and sister. What is ahead is her real wedding—the most transcendental event in her life—and she feels very sad that no member of her family and none of her friends will be present. What is the point of having all these wonderful experiences if she cannot share them with anyone? She thinks it is like eating food without salt: however tasty the dish is, it always seems insipid. The slowness of the post—letters take between four and six weeks to arrive—increases her feeling of isolation even more. And Lola is no good for sharing anything with. The Málaga girl complains about everything because she is afraid of everything. She is afraid to stay at home, although she is also afraid to go out; afraid to walk in the garden because she says there are snakes and spiders—although she has not yet seen one—she is afraid of the
ayas
dressed in white, and she hates the taste of curry and the smell of incense; in short, everything seems very strange to her and she cannot understand a thing. Thank goodness Mme Dijon always emphasizes the other side of the coin. The savoir faire and composure of her companion is the best therapy for her worry and anguish. But that night not even Mme Dijon can console her. Anita sobs, feeling infinitely sad, until she falls asleep, while Lola, lying on her bed in the same room, having caught her mistress's mood, is also crying, and the sound she makes when she blows her nose is the only thing that disturbs the silence at the Villa Buona Vista.

January twenty-eighth. At three o'clock in the morning the
ayas
of His Highness's mother come to wake her. Anita, with her eyes still shut, gets into the bath, which is not full of warm water, but of warm asses' milk, just like the Moghul princesses of old. After soaking for a good while, the
ayas
ask her to lie on some cloth set out on the floor. This is the time for her massage. The skillful, careful hands of the women coat her in sesame oil from top to toe, urged on by a rhythm as discreet as it is inflexible. Like waves, they go from her sides, across her back, and up to her shoulders. Meanwhile, they sing a chant that tells of the love of Rama and his goddess Sita. They stretch out her arms, which they massage delicately, one after the other, and then they knead her hand to make the blood circulate from the palm toward the fingers. Her stomach, her legs, her heels, the soles of her feet, her head, neck, face, nostrils, and back are stroked in succession, toned up by the gentle, dexterous fingers of the
ayas
. It is part of her initiation into the India of the
Kamasutra
, and to the East of the
Arabian Nights
; and so the Spanish princess emerges from her lethargic sadness to bravely face the most important day of her short existence.

According to what Anita would say in her diary, they take over two hours to do her hair, put on her makeup, and dress her. They put her in a bright crimson, satin corset completely embroidered in gold with pearl buttons, which they place over the white silk corset that Indian women use instead of a brassiere. Then they wrap her in very fine white silk and then in the beautiful cloth of the sari. Scarlet slippers embroidered with gold thread, and pearl bracelets and necklaces, complete the bride's outfit. Anita is worried that when she moves, the whole thing may come apart, but the ayas hold out their hands for her to stand in front of the mirror, and then she realizes that the sari is comfortable and easy to wear. The
ayas
smile, as proud as magicians at having achieved the transformation of the
memsahib
into an Indian princess.