Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Juliet Nicolson
Dedication
Title Page
Seven Generations, One Family
Prologue
1. Pepita: Dependence
2. Pepita: Independence
3. Victoria: Bargaining
4. Victoria: Loyalty
5. Vita: Ambivalence
6. Philippa: Loneliness
7. Philippa: Trapped
8. Juliet: Confusion
9. Juliet: Escape
10. Juliet: Guilt
11. Clemmie and Flora: Forgiveness
12. Imogen: Love
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Copyright
The Perfect Summer
The Great Silence
Abdication
For Clemmie and Flora and also for Imogen, with all my love
This is a book about seven generations of women in one family, my family. Beginning with the birth of my grandmother’s grandmother in 1830, the story travels down the centuries until it reaches my two-year-old granddaughter in 2015. The historical span stretches from nineteenth-century southern Spain, through the diplomatic world of Washington DC at the end of the Civil War to England’s Edwardian house parties, the wartime deprivation of the 1940s, London in the 1960s and Manhattan during the boom years of the 1980s before concluding in England in a new century. However, it is not really the historical context with which I am concerned, but rather the women who preceded me and who lived through those times.
The habit of writing down the story of our lives has long been a tradition in our family. My great-grandmother Victoria kept diaries and wrote a book of reminiscences; her daughter, my grandmother Vita, wrote several books about her predecessors including a joint biography of her mother and grandmother, within which she included memories of her own childhood and young adulthood. She also used her autobiographical experience (barely disguised) in her novels. My father devoted a large part of his professional life to writing and editing books by and about his parents, adding a portrait of his parents’ marriage to an unpublished memoir by his mother. At times writing has assumed the role of unjudgemental family therapist, with each new version of an often repeated family story an attempt by the latest in the line of writers to be the most accurate, the most truthful.
Having reached a middle point in my life when I began to find it as tempting to look backwards as forwards, I too wanted to explore those generations that preceded me. There were stories I thought I knew well, assumptions I had made myself, or accounts that had been handed down by my parents which I had never bothered to question. But familiarity can render truth enigmatic. Just as it is possible to listen but not hear, so it is easy to look but not to see. This book is an attempt to hear and to see, to connect myself as truthfully as possible to a long line of women, and to hollow out some footholds into a generational path that is already crumbling with time and fading memory.
I wanted to look in chronological sequence at these women who were related to each other either genetically or through marriage, to see what conclusions I might draw from their collective stories. I wanted to try to understand them, be grateful to them where I should be, forgive them where I could, learn from their mistakes, find the courage to change when, perhaps, they had not been able to.
I also wanted to see how they would respond to the charge of privilege. In monetary terms all but one was born into a materially comfortable existence, even an aristocratic world rich with grand houses and centuries of ancestral culture behind them. Gleaming spoons shine from several of the mouths in this story. But I wondered if wealth and class always amounted to privilege in a broader sense. If a privileged child is one that enjoys a happy upbringing, with parents who love not only their children but each other, then some of these women could not claim that sort of advantage. And if privilege involves having a parent who encourages their daughter to succeed in the world then privilege was not always a feature in my family.
By considering the group of individuals who were responsible indirectly and directly for my existence, I thought a great deal about the one relationship that every woman has in common. We are all daughters. Whether you are a sister, an only child, adopted or orphaned, a mother, childless, married, divorced, single or widowed, all women are born and remain daughters. I began to see how daughterhood can trap as well as enhance lives. If there is any truth in the old saying that ‘a daughter is a daughter for life, a son is a son until he takes a wife’, parents have always had different expectations of their sons and daughters. There must be a reason why the word ‘daughterhood’ has no counterpart in sons. In our family sons have been encouraged to distinguish themselves and therefore become distinguished, distinctive, independent, free-standing from their parents. But daughters have at times struggled to leave dependence behind them and to embrace autonomy.
A daughter’s attempt to break free from the parental bond can become an act of rebellion against an assumption that submission is not only expected but integral to the relationship. In our family one response to the feeling of entrapment was to run away, even if it meant abandoning young children. Another was to stand up to paternal authority and other male-dominated relationships by striking unspoken bargains involving money, sex or filial subservience. Although I had set out to write a book about the women in my family, as I moved from one generation to the next the role of fatherhood emerged as powerfully as that of mothers. I began to see that fathers not only played a hugely influential part but that in four of the seven generations, bargain or no bargain, fathers were the better, more loving, more engaged parent.
During the writing of the book repetitive patterns began to emerge with often surprising regularity. Sometimes these patterns were imposed by the circumstances of the time and by the slow-to-change prejudices and opportunities that women have encountered for centuries. And sometimes the patterns became blurred and eventually abandoned as equality for women edged ever nearer. But often the patterns were more personal and more disturbing. The story I slowly uncovered turned out to be riddled with secrets that parent kept from child and child from parent. Usually these secrets concerned romantic relationships. My great-great-grandmother concealed her love life from her mother; my grandmother went to great lengths to prevent her mother discovering the nature of her attachments to women; my mother conducted chunks of her life on the other side of locked doors and I found it impossible to confide my most important feelings to her.
Another pattern concerned parental, and particularly maternal, jealousy. This often occurred when a daughter established her personal and professional independence, especially when a new generation was able to benefit from new freedoms, both social and political, that had not been available to her mother. Sometimes the response to this jealousy was to sabotage a daughter’s chances. At others it was to abandon her altogether.
Some of the women inherited a fear of intimacy, especially when the example set by their own parents proved lacking, through distrust or infidelity or simply the erosion of the original loving bond. Several of the women demonstrated their lack of self-worth and self-belief, slipping in middle age and later life into loneliness and isolation, numbing unhappiness in an addictive dependence on drink, money and sex. Only rarely did an individual, ensnared in this way, manage to break through the dependency.
The importance of place, sometimes in exchange for a human relationship, reoccurred in several generations. There are beautiful places in this story, Knole and Sissinghurst among them, two of the houses that several women in my family, including me, have at times loved above anything or anyone else. When relationships were at their most fragile, or had failed, a place, a house, a room of their own, even a pair of gates behind which to hide, offered the reassurance of security and uncritical continuity. And yet a sanctuary afforded by bricks and mortar rather than human comfort is open to its own peculiar vulnerability. Not only does it encourage isolation and therefore loneliness but the quirks of inheritance laws, wills and financial difficulty can destroy such seemingly indestructible bonds.
A book that travels though generations moves to the rhythm of birth and death. Only with my parents’ deaths did I consider mortality as something I too might one day experience. Penelope Lively has identified how with age ‘the capricious nature of time’ suddenly accelerates at a gallop, in contrast to the earlier amble of childhood. I now try to disguise that acceleration from my daughters, glossing over a painful arthritic thumb, vaulting a gate to show I still can, easing myself whenever possible out of daylight and into the softening glow of a candle whenever a camera is directed towards me. In part this book is an attempt to overcome the fugitive nature of time and, in many cases, the transitory nature of love.
My father loved to quote Virginia Woolf at me, from whom he had inherited his favourite refrain. When he was a schoolboy, lazy about homework and exhausted with the idea of keeping a diary, she had told him that ‘nothing has really happened unless it is written down’. Despite the ubiquitous presence of Twitter and Instagram ensuring no single happening or fleeting thought goes unrecorded, this premise now seems crazy to me. It vaporises the concept of immediacy, even the existence of the moment for anyone who may be incapable or unwilling to commit their experience to paper or photographic documentation. The oral tradition has no place in this argument. But while my susceptibility to my father’s caution has taken a long time to wane, I am growing increasingly sceptical. I wonder about the purpose of writing things down, of making records, of continuing to store the huge quantity of yellowing notebooks that have filled drawers and filing cabinets in passages and hallways all my life when most of it will mean little to later generations. At the very moment when I am adding to the clogged-up family cabinets, piling yet more words on top of a word mountain, part of me is rebelling. Just this once, but never again, I feel. The thing is, of course, things happen, people love and live and cry and laugh and die without a permanent record being made. Precious moments – the birth of a child, the death of a parent, the sun glinting on the sea – are more precious for their fleetingness in the mind than their dry durability in print. It is the fallibility of memory that gets in the way, plays tricks, distorts, blurs and causes an illusion that time has veiled the experience of life so effectively making it invisible to the mind’s eye. Records can be useful, but only if one identifies the meaning within their jumble and attempts to find a buried narrative. With the flimsiest scraps of information – a photograph here, a letter there, a wisp of bridal lace, a dancing slipper, a glass obelisk, a hedge in a garden, the dedication in a book, the scent of lemony soap, a snatch of song, the glimpse of a once-familiar painting, the picking of home-grown raspberries, still dewy in the early-morning garden – it is possible, with thought and time, to discover what a mother and father were once like. Clues, both written and preserved through objects, can lead to discoveries about a long-dead grandparent, great-grandparent and even further distant ancestor, and invite an exploration of one’s own relationship to them.
Once again it was Virginia Woolf who compared thinking to fishing, ‘the little tug – the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line’. The act of remembering can often prompt this little tug, the ‘Oh, that is what it was all about. Now I understand.’ Of course this search for the illumination of mysteries carries with it the danger of uncovering things that were never meant to be shared; one can be left with uncomfortable secrets that cannot be unremembered. And yet it is often when those people who made us are no longer alive that we can reassess and be free of them and work out for ourselves exactly who we were and who we are.
PEPITA, MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER, is responsible for the one-sixteenth of me that is proudly Spanish. Throughout my life I have been aware of the famous dancer, a spectacular beauty with what my grandmother Vita called her ‘rapscallion background’ who emerged from the backstreets of a southern Spanish town to conquer the stages of nineteenth-century Europe. My father always spoke her name with a deliberately exaggerated lilt, just as he pronounced ‘Lolita’ in the way Nabokov stipulated in the opening line of his novel. A framed drawing of Pepita wearing the tight-bodiced, sleeveless dancing dress that identified her as the ‘Star of Andalusia’ at the time my great-great-grandfather fell in love with her always hung on the sitting-room wall in our house. Pepita was a curious figure to me, foreign not only in look, but also in time and in culture. Hers was a sensibility wholly alien to an English upbringing in which teatime jam sandwiches had to be eaten before cake was allowed and children were more likely to learn the androgynous, cigarette-extinguishing footstep of the twist than the sexually charged strutting of the mid-nineteenth-century flamenco. My father was enchanted by the romance of Pepita’s story, his mother having impressed it on him since his own childhood. He once gave me a Spanish doll made of hard pink plastic with a black lace mantilla over her face and highly rouged cheeks, and after a trip to Spain he brought me back a pair of wooden castanets with the word ‘Malaga’ in black ink painted over a pink hibiscus. Clueless what to do with them I was encouraged to be pleased by even the faintest hint of a Spanish heritage.
Pepita was born in 1830 in the throbbing, poverty-riddled city of Malaga. Her father, Pedro Duran, was a barber while the local glamour of her gypsy mother, Catalina Ortega, was enhanced by rumours that as a young girl she had earned money leaping though hoops at a circus. After the birth of her daughter, Catalina took in washing from neighbours and the local hotels, the clean sheets of Malaga’s smarter districts hanging out to dry, suspended like huge truce flags, over Catalina’s balcony. The family lived in Calle Puente, a small alley tucked away in a maze of slums not far from the river and where the heavy air, thick with southern heat, was impregnated with the smell of rancid olive oil, rotten fish, fresh manure and the combined scent of crushed cinnamon and chocolate. Calle Puente was choked with animal and human life. Neighbourhood chickens squawked for scraps on the earth floor and the jangle of bells alerted dawdling pedestrians to mules carrying vegetables in their panniers and luggage on their backs. Bumping their way along the alley, the animals paused only to raise their heads, stretch their necks and bray, an alarming, jarring, semi-human combination of sobs and sighs. Dozens of tiny naked children ran and played together in the sunshine, while the women swept rubbish from outside their doorways and gossiped, the men plotted and smoked cigars, and the exhausted faces of the very poor were just visible in the shadows, retreating from the harshness of the sun and of life.
On the morning I went to Calle Puente, determined to begin at the beginning and to find Pepita’s birthplace, flowery housecoated women were scrubbing their front steps as skinny dogs ran circles around them. There was no sign of a donkey but families of cats and their kittens occupied the darkened street corners, licking and hissing, purring and scratching, tumbling and entwining and dozing in furry, sleepy heaps. A man in a blond wig with a five o’clock shadow and dressed in a silver miniskirt was making his unsteady way towards me on high heels while his companion, six inches smaller, trotted beside him, puffing on a cigar, a silky Pekinese tucked under his arm. The old 1830 houses of Pepita’s day had crumbled away, but although the replacement buildings were new, a sense of deprivation and struggle lingered. A builder’s van with its back doors open revealing a stack of tools was parked halfway down the street. The driver nodded a good morning and at the sound of our voices a couple of windows above us flew open. Two women, cigarettes hanging from their mouths, stared down at me. In hesitant Spanish and much backwards gesticulating with my thumb to indicate centuries past, I mentioned Pepita’s name. At once one of the women broke into a smile pointing with her finger in the direction of the river. ‘Conservatorio Professional de Danza,’ she said triumphantly, mimicking a little dance movement as she spoke. How was it possible that memories of a child who had danced as light as a bird in that tiny street in the southern sunshine had lingered for nearly two centuries? I did not question it. Maybe they had been handed from mother to daughter in the way that family memories should be.
In Pepita’s day, Malaga was an ancient, bandit-riddled city, encircled by vine-clothed hills, a rough place to live, although foreigners were reassured that the Spanish knife was not as effective a weapon as the stiletto, the sharp instrument used by Italy’s fiercest gangsters. The sunny, warm and dry climate attracted visitors looking for a cure from asthma and tuberculosis. The wide central thoroughfare was an aqueduct during the winter months, the murky water choked with rubbish and sewage, but during the summer it provided the parade ground for Malaga’s best-dressed show-offs. Each week between twelve and fifteen thousand spectators would assemble in Malaga’s bullring for the fight. Outside the arena, shouting above the great din of the crowd, pedlars hawked fans, paper parasols, cigars, oranges, slices of watermelon, phials of brandy, yeasty churros fried in oil and dipped in sugar, and iced barley to refresh the mouth. Inside the ring, the procession was headed by the picadors, secure on horseback, high above the sawdust, hands on hips, their lances carefully balanced, as was the custom, on the crook of one ankle. Next came the capeodores twirling their heavy violet-and-gold capes, followed by the banderilleros brandishing their icicle-sharp hooks, before finally the matador himself arrived, strutting into the ring in his brilliantly coloured silk-and-velvet costume, preening, proud, lethal. Women joined their men in the auditorium, flashing their sequin-spangled fans. Known for their impervious expression in the presence of the puddles of darkening gore that pooled across the bullring each week, the Malagueñas, the women of Malaga, wore their blood-scarlet mantillas especially high on their heads for the fight. Their distinctive red lace veiling, in contrast to the dour black of their counterparts in Madrid, was pinned in place onto their luxuriant loops of hair with a dried thorny cactus branch onto which sweet-smelling jasmine had been spiked. Richard Ford, travel writer and enchanted British onlooker, respected the haughty dignity of these women, aware that ‘a Spanish woman’s hair is the glory and the secret of her strength, a theft from Samson for her gender, while her fan is the index of her soul’. As the bullfight got under way to a backdrop of roaring spectators, each group of assassins took their turn in the murderous dance between man and beast, their lances and hooks progressively weakening the bull. When the final sword was plunged into the heart of the animal, the cacophony reached a crescendo and the huge beast fell to the ground.
Away from the flamboyance of the bullring, violence and criminality, prostitution and poverty, desperation and ruthlessness were endemic in the darkened corners of Pepita’s city. Woe betide the visitor who wandered into the backstreets. By flipping a man’s cape over his face from behind, a robber was free to stab him in the back while at the same time whipping his wallet from out of his pocket.
When Pepita was six years old her father, Pedro Duran, was killed in a brawl during a street procession. His widow was left alone with their two children, Pepita and her brother Diego. Catalina began selling women’s clothes, knocking on doors in alleys so narrow that it was possible to shake hands across the streets by leaning out of the protruding top windows. Diego was an independent child, wild, troublesome and determined to indulge in all the freedoms offered to an untamed and fatherless son. At liberty to be out and about with his gang of friends, he joined the army at the first opportunity and left for Cuba, remaining abroad and out of touch throughout the early years of Pepita’s childhood. Although their house was small and cramped and even their friends considered it ‘old and bad’, Catalina treated her daughter ‘with great delicacy’. A fellow washerwoman was struck by the remarkable devotion Catalina showed to the child with the tiny waist, luminous olive skin and magnificent gold-brown hair that flowed down her back as far as the crook of her knees. As the other children of the Calle Puente ran freely around the streets, Catalina scarcely let Pepita out of her sight, sharing a bed with her, ceaselessly combing and dressing her daughter’s magnificent hair and behaving with what the friend described as ‘the fierce and possessive love which Latin women do often display towards their children’. While Pepita was Catalina’s ‘jewel, her treasure and her pride’, the child’s reciprocal devotion was interpreted by Catalina’s disapproving neighbours as ‘excessive’, the absence of any familial male presence exacerbating the exclusivity of the relationship.
Against all the odds, Pepita, a child born into poverty and hampered by the seemingly insuperable boundaries of her class and her sex, was inadvertently fortunate. Nineteenth-century Spain, contained behind the barrier of the Pyrenees, slouched in comparison with the rest of Europe in its progress towards the emancipation of even the most privileged of women. Queen Isabella II nominally ruled the country but she was quite unlike Queen Victoria, her imperially powerful contemporary in Britain. Isabella was born in the same year as Pepita and acceded to the throne in 1833 aged three. She maintained her precarious hold as sovereign for thirty-five years even though it was continuously battered by challenges from male claimants. However, Isabella set no example for her sex and was never popular, described unkindly by an ex-patriot Englishwoman, Mrs William Pitt Byrne, as ‘bulky rather than stately’, possessing ‘no dignity either in her face or figure’. Unlike the Queen of England, constitutional duties were never Isabella’s priority. As the mother of a dozen children of varying paternity, she preferred instead to concentrate on keeping an impressively buoyant love life afloat. In contrast to the Spanish Queen, Pepita was blessed with what her neighbours called ‘a face divine’, but her greater, immediate advantage lay in being brought up by her widowed mother. Catalina, the hard-working saleswoman and washerwoman, was single-mindedly determined to overcome the restrictions of her circumstances and Spain’s limited financial prospects for women.
Spain’s all-powerful Catholic Church enforced women’s accepted dual purposes as wife and mother, keeping academic and professional opportunities to the minimum. A working-class girl was instructed in the virtues of meekness and obedience and made to understand that a woman’s body was under the direct control of her husband. While female adultery could result in imprisonment and even the death penalty, male infidelity was only punished if a mistress was actually caught in (or, equally culpably, beneath) the marital bed. Up until 1931 male marital supremacy was still so powerful that a wife could be sent to jail for between five and fifteen days if she went shopping without her husband’s permission, or lost her temper and swore at him. If a woman owned any property prior to her marriage, the legal bond to a man required her to relinquish that ownership. The laws for a married woman were no different from those for the deaf, the dumb and the insane.
In contrast, the single Spanish woman of 150 years ago was entitled to a more liberal life than her married counterpart, with none of the obligations imposed by marital duties. Even so, until the age of twenty-five a woman still needed her father’s permission to leave home and was barred from signing any commercial or legal contract without parental authority, including that of marriage. One way round the cat’s-cradle of limitation was to be blessed with an indulgent or preferably dead father, or to marry and then leave your husband without annulling the marriage. However, if a gifted daughter was born into the poorest of circumstances, into a gyspy family, and if a parent encouraged her talent, then her opportunities to escape convention were far greater than if she had been born rich. Pepita was such a daughter.
The word ‘flamenco’ is arguably derived from the Arab ‘felag’, meaning fugitive or escapee, and ‘mengu’ meaning peasant. The flamenco dance had originated with the arrival in Spain of gypsies from countries as diverse as Morocco, Egypt and India, and as Arabian and Jewish refugees joined them, an oral tradition of dance and song grew up. Flamenco weaves together ancient stories of joy and desolation, loss and gain passed down by society’s outsiders, refugees from oppression, and after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in the early part of the nineteenth century, the influence of the bullfight culture, its taming and conquering of the wild, began to merge with the inherent gypsy customs. Contemporary paintings show aristocratic Spanish men looking down from astride their horses with a combination of fascination and lust on the colourfully skirted and fringe-shawled Andalusian gypsies who inhabited backstreets like Calle Puente. The women, their hands on their hips, return the gaze with their chins tilted, their expressions provocative, fearless and knowing. These uninhibited women have a vulgarity and a physicality that might be intimidating not only to the delicate sensibilities of well-born girls but to the opposite sex, who appear mesmerised but also threatened by an unmistakable demonstration of female supremacy. Here was a matador in female clothing, capable of dominating and taming the machismo male bull with one sweep of her dress, one glance from her haughty, hypnotic eyes. With ivory castanets slipped over their knuckles and clasped within the palm of each hand, and gold embroidered ribbons streaming from their heavily embroidered skirts, they would arch their supple bodies into curves of such sensuality that as soon as they began to dance an electric current of desire ran through every onlooker.
Pepita learned to dance at the flamenco school near her house as soon as she learned to walk. She took at once to the lessons that her mother washed, haggled and worked so hard to pay for, performing with a lightness and delicacy that outshone the other students. Neighbours watched her drifting and floating down through the dust and mud of Calle Puente ‘like a bird in the air’. Before she was twenty she had adapted the traditional Andalusian steps to suit her own style, merging the high leg kicks of la Aragonesa, the rhythmic el jaleo de Jerez and the encircled arms of the la Madrilena, working out for herself the choreography of an exhilarating performance. A stamp of a foot, a cleavage glistening with the energy of her movement and an expression both dismissive and alluring completed the composition of her pièce de resistance, the back-arching, leg-flaunting, spirit-rousing dance known as el olé. In one contemporary drawing Pepita is wearing her vêtements de scene, the dark blue velvet panels let into an ivory, breast-moulding top from which the shoulder ribbons slip provocatively, the outfit completed by a strikingly short ballet skirt of rose-red silk flounced at the edges with white and blue. In the picture Pepita’s eyes flash and her lips are parted in a smile, and if you look carefully the shiny enamel of a perfect tooth is just visible between the parted lips. The demarcation between the dancers and those other women who lived in the sweaty, throbbing density of Calle Puente and the surrounding streets who earned money from the sale of their bodies was sometimes hard to identify.
One and a half centuries after Pepita had electrified her audiences I sought out the Spanish dancers for myself. In the plush upholstered atmosphere of a smart north London theatre I watched a restrained, controlled, almost sexless performance by a well-known visiting dancer. She was no less skilled than the younger members of the company who joined her in the chorus on the stage but at first I missed the haughty dangerous sexiness of youth and the heady atmosphere of liberation that I had read so much about. However, before long I was drawn to the subtle defiance of the limitations of the body and began to notice something else. Even when the dancer stood still and the music stopped there was a statement of dominance in that stillness, the dancer’s supremacy needing no more acknowledgement. If the younger women demonstrated sexuality, this older woman exuded power, a balance of arrogance and assurance, before unleashing a seemingly unattainable sinuosity, standing her ground, entwining and releasing her arms and fingers with the dexterity of a world-class contortionist, lifting a skirt, flashing a thigh, wearing a red dress so tight and so revealing and yet so fluid that she appeared to be clothed in water.
In Malaga, dance is all around you, in the streets, in the cafes, in the cellars. In a small central square not far from the birthplace of Picasso, a young woman in a red-and-black body-skimming frock stood motionless in front of us, her audience, a scarlet hibiscus flower tucked into long black hair held off her face with black and red combs. Her neck was bare, her eyes dark and focused, her physical contact with the floor so secure that she seemed to have grown from the wooden boards beneath her feet. Slowly, teasingly, she tightened the leather threads of her castanets. Eventually she began to move, the seated guitarist beside her anticipating and reflecting as well as accompanying her every move. Alternating between a flirtatious combination of reserve and promise, she controlled an imagined beast. It was an astonishing display of female matadorial dominance acted out through the sevillanas, the dance taught by Andalusian mothers to their daughters. As she finished her performance an older woman took her place. Unlike the dancer in London this woman substituted coarseness for fineness, crudity for subtlety, vulgarity for classiness, her movements simulating a total lack of sexual inhibition. Whispers of disapproval ran through some of the onlookers. Others marvelled. But at the climax of the dance even the uneasiest members of the audience found themselves cheering.
Late one evening we took the small lift down to a cellar where long tables had been laid for a supper of cheese, spicy sausage and beans, and sweet honey cakes. A buxom woman dressed in purple stood in front of us, embarking on a long song, a lament of loss, the struggle audible in the notes and visible on the genuine anguish in her face alternating with a wild piercing cry of joy. The verses were interspersed with rhythmic bursts of hand-clapping and apparently random shouts of ‘olé’ and only at the very end of an hour-long performance of song did the woman kick off her shoes and burst into spontaneous dance. My fellow diners, a group of flamenco devotees, explained to us the concept of el duende, ‘the spirit of evocation’, the sensation aroused by a deep response to an artistic performance and which has an unforgettable effect on those watching and listening. When we emerged into the busy streets of Malaga, I felt as if I had participated in a seance and that El duende had taken me closer to the reality of Pepita’s world.
In 1849, when Pepita was nineteen, her dancing having mesmerised local audiences in the Theatre Principal in Malaga since childhood, Catalina knew her daughter was ready to make the next professional step. Together they travelled to Madrid where they rented a room in a basement apartment near the capital’s main theatre, the newly revamped Teatro del Principe. Catalina, whose determination to get her way was often hard to resist, persuaded a reluctant Antonio Ruiz, the director of ballet, to give Pepita an audition. The management of the great Spanish theatres of the mid nineteenth century, like the Teatro del Principe, associated such raw, uninhibited movement as Pepita’s with the servant and peasant class, and preferred to offer their sensitive audiences the more reserved steps of classical ballet.
Ruiz was bemused not only by this excitable, overbearing mother but also by Manuel Lopez, Catalina’s vulgar, self-important escort with his unappealing goggle eyes. Catalina had taken a lover soon after her husband’s death but Manuel Lopez was no substitute for paternal authority. A reformed bandit, smuggler and dealer in charcoal who more recently had worked as a cobbler, Lopez was a comic character, flashy and opportunistic, unscrupulously on the make in his broad-brimmed and high-crowned hat with silken tassels. Despite the dubious nature of her two chaperones, Ruiz overcame his prejudice against Pepita’s companions and her extrovert style of dancing. Enchanted by Catalina’s lovely daughter he decided to try and mould her to the theatre’s own dancing standards and agreed to arrange lessons for her. But the lessons were not a success and Ruiz cancelled them with baffling speed. An angry Catalina blamed his decision on his failure to recognise Pepita’s own version of ‘excellence’, even though it was so at odds with the Teatro’s more conventional tastes.
Catalina remained convinced that her daughter was as gifted as any of the greatest Spanish dancers, her ambitions for Pepita as determined as ever. During their visit to the capital mother and daughter had met a young ballet teacher, a year older than Pepita but the same height, with attractive, sloping eyes, a fine long nose and an impressive physique. Juan Antonio Gabriel de la Oliva was an experienced dancer accustomed to the stages of Madrid, although his family of harness makers and tailors meant his background was much like Pepita’s. Being a Spaniard of hot blood and ardent feelings, he accepted Catalina’s invitation to give Pepita dancing lessons and within the time it took to perfect a stretch of the foot and an arch of the arm he had fallen in love with his pupil. He was not the first to be taken by Pepita with her astonishing hair, lithe body, dimpled chin, her graceful walk and tantalisingly black eyes, remarkable for their distinctive almond shape, or rasgado, which in Spanish also means ‘outspoken‘ and ‘generous’. But Oliva had an advantage over his rivals. Oliva pledged to forgo his fee for the dancing lessons in return for Catalina’s approval of their courtship, promising to conduct his suit with every propriety. Under his tuition Pepita began to shine, her reputation growing with every performance and beginning to spread throughout Spain. Two years later, Pepita persuaded herself that she had fallen in love with her dancing teacher. Catalina gave their betrothal her blessing, satisfied that Oliva had a secure future as a teacher and that she had negotiated a decent marriage contract that included the continuation of the dancing lessons. However, Catalina did not consider the impact that this arrangement might have on her own relationship with her daughter. The bargain she was making on her daughter’s behalf included the assumption that Pepita’s daughterly loyalty and devotion to her mother would remain unthreatened and intact.
On Friday 10 January 1851 at eight in the morning, the engaged pair walked together through the crowded, boisterous streets of Madrid to be married in the local church of San Milan. On saints’ days and at weekends, religious processions regularly weave their way through the alleys that surround the church, the cymbals clashing, the trumpets blowing, the noise from the column of drums beaten by alternating pairs of hazy-moustached schoolboys and burly men reverberating around the old city. At the heart of these processions a huge bier sways at shoulder height, cigars smouldering in the free hands of the bearers, their marching feet crushing bunches of rosemary strewn on the path in handfuls as the procession approaches, releasing the sudden pine-like smell that competes with the sweetness of incense. On the day I visited a pickpocket was caught working the dense crowd, a warning shout went up as the thief, his face white, his nose bloody, was apprehended by the mingling police and marched off to jail.
On her wedding day, Pepita chose to wear black lace in the Andalusian marital tradition. After the ceremony the protracted celebrations began with coffee and chocolate in the popular Café Suizo, followed by a family dinner in the fashionable Fonda de Europa restaurant where a feast of Andalusian dishes – salty, deep-fried anchovies, tangy-sweet orange, cod and potato salad, and delicious cinnamony almond milk – went on long into the night. And still the celebrations continued at a riotous party where the guests danced polkas, waltzes and quadrilles, and the groom held his beautiful bride swaying in his arms as they threw themselves ‘with zest’, as one fellow reveller noticed, ‘into every dance’. It had been a full day and night of unforgettable gaiety.
However, not long afterwards it all went wrong. Catalina began to whisper to whoever would listen that Oliva was turning out to be an unfit husband for such an exceptional child. She implied that the new groom felt uncomfortable at being outclassed on the dancing stage by his pupil. But the friends and neighbours who had witnessed the stifling dependency between Catalina and her daughter suspected the real truth behind Catalina’s sudden disapproval of the man she had appointed as her son-in-law. The predictable emotional backlash had hit the possessive Catalina as the consequences of her matchmaking became clear. Catalina suspected that her son-in-law had usurped her position as the most important person in her daughter’s life.
Unprepared for the sense of loneliness and jealousy that followed her daughter’s marriage to the lowly dancing teacher, Catalina panicked. Incapable of preventing her throttling maternal love from sabotaging Pepita’s own happiness, Catalina had fallen into a paradoxical parental trap by simultaneously wanting the best for a daughter while being disinclined to lose her. Only three months after the wedding Catalina suggested to Pepita that Oliva had already been unfaithful to her. Allowing her shocked daughter Pepita to absorb the news of Oliva’s treachery, Catalina then took Oliva to one side and informed him that his wife had betrayed him with another man. Astonishingly, despite a complete lack of evidence both Pepita and Oliva believed her. Catalina’s meddling had momentarily paid off as the shaken pair began to live apart But Catalina had forgotten how well she had taught her daughter the importance of ambition. As Pepita’s reputation and popularity grew she emerged, not only from her wrecked marriage but from under the thumb of the wrecker.
AS PEPITA GOT richer, so she became grander. Her fame and wealth as a dancer prompted an unpredictable swing between indulgence and neglect of the intrusive, possessive but devoted Catalina. During a short stay in Granada Catalina and Manuel Lopez left the city, alarmed by the lethal presence of cholera which riddled the congested streets and which in one particularly bad epidemic in 1845 had resulted in the deaths of over a quarter of a million Spaniards. For safety Pepita, the still dutiful, if often absent, daughter, moved her mother and quasi stepfather to a substantial new house in the central square of Albolote, a small country town a few miles from Granada.
Catalina celebrated her splendid social and financial elevation by arriving at the Casa Blanca in a suitably ‘fantastic equipage’ led by a unicorn. Delighted by the amazement that her account of such fabulous transport inspired in anyone who would listen to her, Catalina would eventually give way and explain that ‘unicorn’ referred to the horn shape formed by two horses led by another. However, Catalina’s developing taste for the extravagance funded by her newly rich daughter was real enough and continued to swell as she indulged herself in a new taste for lovely clothes, beautiful linens, a personal maid and elegant furniture. Each Sunday before Mass, a pair of large, matching velvet armchairs would be carried with some ceremony by Catalina’s servants into Albolote’s church and placed at the head of the congregation at the high altar to ensure that the villagers were aware of the hierarchical order of things. As the congregation glared, and Lopez consulted his splendid new gold watch, his fingers laden with rings, Sunday mornings in Albolote began to resemble a night out at the theatre rather than a morning spent in devotion. Eventually the priest put his foot down. He banned the chairs and the affronted Catalina never entered the church again. But while Catalina was all too visible in Albolote, the provider of all these riches, Pepita herself, was usually nowhere to be seen.
Dancing continued to supply the passport that lifted Pepita out of the confines of maternal control and across the barrier of the Pyrenees. She began to accept bookings in theatres all over Europe, causing a sensation wherever she went. Audiences clamoured for the newly established ‘Star of Andalusia’ to prove that her hair, her implausibly magnificent crowning glory, was not fake. To a roar of approval, one by one she pulled out the pins that held the much-admired locks in place, allowing them to fall in a waterfall to her knees as she enchanted sell-out auditoriums in Bordeaux, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Berlin, Stuttgart, Vienna, Budapest, Prague and then triumphantly in Paris and at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. Cartoonists showed men whipping fresh flowers from the garlanded headdresses of their exasperated wives and hurling them with uninhibited enthusiasm in the direction of the stage, aiming for Pepita’s outstretched arms. I treasure the much-thumbed, four-page programme of piano sheet music for la Madrilena that Pepita once gave to a pianist in Vienna in 1853 so that he could provide her with her favourite performance music. The cover drawing shows Pepita in her dancing costume, her hair streaming down her back, castanets in her upraised hands. She is a terrifically impressive sight.
Abandoned and frustrated in Spain, with only the self-aggrandising Lopez and the curious neighbours for company, Catalina found herself edged into the margins of her daughter’s life. Explaining to the villagers that her daughter was away ‘triumphing in Europe’, Catalina ensured that her outward pride remained undimmed, boasting ‘in confidence’ to her new friends in Albolote of her daughter’s financial generosity and of the distinguished suitors that competed with one another for the chance to court the lovely dancer. Several of the residents of Albolote remained gratifyingly impressed, at least for a while, by Catalina’s increasingly elaborate anecdotes and were left in no doubt that ‘la estrella de Andalusia’ was intimately acquainted with some of the most distinguished members of European society. Sumptuous dinners at the Casa Blanca would be interrupted the moment that Pepita’s frustratingly unrevealing letters arrived. The cursory news would be read aloud and every detail, however scant, savoured as the letter was passed from hand to hand. Some villagers were led to suspect a close association with royalty, although they understood that discretion prevented Catalina from divulging identities. Rumours involving the Emperor of Germany were not denied, despite the fact that no such person existed. Perspicacious villagers stated years later that they had privately congratulated themselves in detecting ‘traces of an inferior origin’, in the garrulous Catalina, the gypsy turned ‘bourgeoisie’ for whom nothing but an emperor would suffice as escort for her daughter.