Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Vita Sackville-West
List of Illustrations
List of Principal Characters
Title Page
Introduction
Part One Pepita, 1830–1872
1 Cosa De España
2 Gypsies in Spain
3 The Star of Andalusia
4 The House of the Royal Peacocks
5 El Lord y la Bailarina
6 End of the Dancer
Part Two Pepita’s Daughter, 1862–1936
1 Pepita’s Daughter
2 Knole
3 Seery
4 Trouble
5 More Trouble
6 The Last Years
The History of Vintage
Copyright
Heritage
The Dragon in Shallow Waters
The Heir
Challenge
Seducers in Ecuador
The Edwardians
All Passion Spent
Family History
Grand Canyon
Passenger to Teheran
Saint Joan of Arc
English Country Houses
The Eagle and The Dove
Sissinghurst: The Creation of a Garden
PEPITA
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Epub ISBN: 9781473545045
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Vintage
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Copyright © Nigel Nicolson 1937
Introduction copyright © Juliet Nicolson 2016
Vita Sackville-West has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This edition printed by Vintage in 2016
First published in Great Britain by Hogarth Press 1937
www.penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784871161
Pepita was my grandmother’s grandmother, a figure once as enigmatic and romantic to me as she had been to my grandmother Vita Sackville-West. A framed portrait of Pepita, with her lilting name, a distant relation, dressed in her flamboyant theatrical clothes and staring provocatively down from our dining-room wall, formed a constant if mysterious backdrop to my own early years. Only when, decades later, I read Vita’s biography of this curious figure did I discover the full truth of her implausible, convention-defying story.
Pepita was a Spanish gyspy child born in 1830 on Calle Puente, one of the poorest streets in the poorest districts of Malaga in Southern Spain. Vita writes that Calle Puente was so narrow that neighbours on opposite sides could stretch their hands across the alley and shake hands with one another. Pepita’s mother Catalina Duran was a washerwoman and a pedlar of old clothes, the sole provider for her daughter and her son Diego. Pepita’s father Pedro, who had been a local barber, was killed in a street brawl when Pepita was about six years old. The transformation of a child who Catalina’s friends observed moving ‘like a bird in the air’ down the cramped streets of her natal city, to the beautiful twenty-year-old flamenco dancer who captivated the crowds in Europe’s most famous theatres and fell in love with a British aristocrat, is as unlikely a tale as it is irresistible. Although the detail of Pepita’s life was always somewhat hazy to the young Vita – she died twenty years before Vita was born, in 1872 – the structure of Vita’s own upbringing, and therefore her life-long sense of identity, was shaped by her grandmother. Of course, it was also shaped by her mother, Victoria Sackville, who died not long before Vita began writing this book.
In the summer of 1936, six months after her mother’s death, Vita was sorting through papers at Victoria’s house near Brighton when she found a squat black metal trunk packed to the rim with what Vita called ‘The Spanish documents’. She brought the trunk home to Sissinghurst on 15th June and spent the whole of the next day alone, examining its contents without moving from her desk. ‘They are enthralling’ she wrote that night in her diary, beginning at once to mark certain passages on the thick cream paper of the archived documents with a scarlet crayon and to make careful notes in her distinctive brown ink in the margins. The idea of this biography was apparently forming in her mind even as she read the pages for the first time. The documents had been carefully saved by Victoria following their use as evidence in the notorious inheritance trial in 1910 which hinged on the legitimacy of Pepita’s five living children. If the eldest, Max, were able to prove that his mother had been secretly married to Lionel Sackville-West, her lover and Max’s father, then Max would supplant his cousin to become the heir to one of the greatest houses in England. The unfortunate hitch in Max’s case was the documented proof that a youthful Pepita, as a struggling impecunious dancer anxious to perfect her technique, had married Juan De La Oliva, her dancing teacher. There had been little romance involved in the contract but divorce in the rule-bound Catholic church of mid-nineteenth-century Spain was out of the question. The documents contained interviews with some of Pepita’s contemporaries, many of whom were by then a great age but all still living in Spain. The interviews provided a series of first-hand insights from close relations and intimate friends into the characters of Pepita and her mother Catalina, for whom few photographs, no film footage and no private diaries existed. Here at last was Pepita’s story told in revealing detail by some of those who had grown up with her and some who had known her best. It was as if Vita, as literary archaeologist had stumbled into a perfectly preserved paper tomb.
Apart from Portrait of a Marriage, a book based on a private memoir and only published after Vita’s death, Pepita was the most overtly personal thing Vita wrote, and for me, together with some of her poetry and her novels, The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, among her most engaging. More than fifty years after her death Vita Sackville-West is most famous, not for her writing, but for the magical garden she made with her husband Harold at Sissinghurst and for her love affairs with women. Her most famous lover was Virginia Woolf but her most notorious was Violet Trefusis with whom she eloped, threatening never to return to her husband and two small sons. For Vita the romanticist, story-teller, biographer, dreamer, rule-breaker, a woman who, like Pepita, had pushed society’s tolerance to the point of snapping, Pepita’s untold tale fell like unpredicted sunshine onto her desk. Through the telling of the life stories of her grandmother and then her mother, who occupies the second half of this joint biography, Vita began working out where she herself belonged. Her investigation into her matriarchal line was an excursion into how her heritage had shaped her and made her who she was.
As well as the invaluable contents of the tin trunk, Vita’s research for the book was multi-layered. Some of her most precious resources lay in Lady Sackville’s memories of Pepita which had remained vivid throughout her life. Victoria had cherished and burnished the nine years that she knew her mother, their mutual devotion unfaltering. At times this was the only thing mother and daughter could cling to in the face of the prejudice emanating from the local Catholic community at home in Arcachon in France, towards a Roman Catholic woman living in sin and her illegitimate children. On just one occasion Vita witnessed for herself the intensity of her grandparents’ love for one another. Years after Pepita’s death, Lionel saw Vita hanging onto the long plaits that trailed down her mother’s back and cried out in anger, the Proustian trigger of pain prompted by the reminder of how the child Victoria had once clung to Pepita’s luxuriant hair.
Vita had travelled to Spain herself more than once in search of her gypsy heritage. During her first visit in 1913 she was in the middle of an intensely physical love affair with a childhood friend, Rosamond Grosvenor, while simultaneously engaged to marry Harold Nicolson, a young diplomat. Her own memories of watching the Andalusian gypsies dance, their sensuality still potent to Vita years later, almost overwhelm her near the beginning of this book, inducing her to address Pepita directly, glad that her ‘strange career’ after ‘many vicissitudes should have made you the mother of my mother’. In a séance-like, strangely seductive plea she implores Pepita to ‘Come to me. Make yourself alive again. Vitality such as yours cannot perish.’ It is later in the same passage that she turns to her mother and gives the first indication that this is not only to be Pepita’s story: ‘Why should I be afraid of invoking you or my own mother?’ she asks Pepita’s spirit. Close your eyes after reading her descriptions of the velvet dusk of a Sevillian evening ‘as it deepened into an actual caress of the senses,’ and you too become suffused with the heat, the sexiness and the vitality of southern Spain.
In contrast to the Pepita half of the book, much of the second half is written from the direct experience of a daughter who both adored and was exasperated by her enigmatic and progressively difficult mother. Victoria’s life story is every bit as dramatic as Pepita’s. Semi-abandoned at the age of nine after her mother’s death, she was brought up in a convent in Paris until suddenly rescued by the intervention of her paternal aunt, the Countess of Derby, and by her namesake, the Queen herself. Victoria Sackville-West evolved into the enchanting and socially sought-after chatelaine of the Legation in Washington. And it was here than the men who began to fall for her contributed to an extraordinary inventory of suitors, beginning with Chester A. Arthur the fifty-three-year-old President of the United States and continuing with the artist Auguste Rodin, the architect Edwin Lutyens, the financier William Astor, Sir John Murray Scott, the heir to the Wallace Collection and the shopkeeper Gordon Selfridge. Even the Prince of Wales, the future Edward Vll, fell for her charm and beauty.
Victoria died on 30 January 1936, ten days after George V and twelve days after Rudyard Kipling. ‘Stunned’ Vita wrote in her diary that night and the following day that she felt as if she had ‘been hit over the head with a mallet’. ‘Although she went wrong’ Vita wrote ‘and got every possible value wrong,’ soon after Victoria’s death Vita almost forgave her everything. The passage of time allowed Vita to write, so she says, with ‘all the silly little irritations fading and the real quality emerging’. But in Victoria’s short Book of Reminiscences she had described the nature of Vita’s discretion with her customary double-edged flattery. ‘She is a very difficult person to know’ Victoria admitted of her daughter, ‘she is a beautiful mask. She has put on a thicker mask since the distressing V affair’. Certainly discretion was part of Vita’s etiquette in writing Pepita, as she stopped short of describing the full extent of Victoria’s sudden and dreadful decline. In the spring of 1919, Victoria had caught her husband kissing his long-time lover, Olive Rubens, among the tulip beds at Knole and suffered a nervous collapse from which she never recovered. Her volatility became terrifying, a sunshine mood replaced with hurricane ferocity, her emotional barometer flipping without warning. But if at times Vita downplayed the ‘bad-fairy’ side of her mother, the full horror of some of Victoria’s meddling and vanity was understandably softened by Vita’s still recent sense of loss. Towards the end of Victoria’s life her eccentricities are a source of some of the funniest, if saddest parts of this book. This book is in part an exercise of hope that Vita would gain a new perspective on her mother, but at the same time a celebration of the woman Victoria had once been. If at times Vita presented her mother as ‘adorable’, in contrast to Virginia Woolf’s view that there was ‘little more to Lady S. than an insipid, selfish, rather stupid housemaid of amorous propensities jumped up into the Peerage’, then that was a daughter’s prerogative. Frankness is forgivably tempered by filial loyalty and, indeed, love.
At the age of six Vita had dressed in khaki and played soldiers with the boys from the village, her rebellious, alternative nature evident from her earliest days. Vita had made wonderful fictional use of her sumptuously privileged upbringing in her novel The Edwardians, published nine years earlier. Knole, the great calendula house near Sevenoaks in Kent with its 365 rooms that had belonged to the Sackville family since the time of Elizabeth I, formed the central character in Vita’s perceptive, ironic story that is half condemnatory and half integral to her aristocratic sense of herself, packed with all the gossip and scandal that occupied bored aristocrats before the First World War. If the first half of Pepita identifies Vita with the wild impulsive gypsy culture of which she was so proud, the second reveals the world of the British aristocrat in which her mother shone and into which Vita was born. It becomes clear that Pepita is not only about two but three generations of daughters – Vita’s presence is ubiquitous. She is there watching the next generation of gyspy dancers in Spain and later as her mother dresses for an Edwardian banquet, intoxicated by the ‘vivacity which flashed and sparkled as the rings upon her lovely hands.’ Vita is there to marvel with the knowing eye of a bright child at Sir John Murray Scott’s fin-de-siècle apartment in Paris. And, on the cusp of the Second War, Vita is there to mourn her parents, as the old world fades into the new.
Patterns of behaviour emerge, common to the three women. All three loved to perform, whether dancing to the ecstatic crowds in the theatres of nineteenth-century Europe, acting the part of a bogus Countess under the disapproving eye of Catholic France, excelling at playing the hostess to Henry James in the British Legation in Washington D. C., and, although not part of this book, dressing as a wounded French soldier in the streets of Piccadilly – Vita’s audacious disguise as she escorted a girlfriend through the London streets after the First World War. None of these powerful women were easy to be married to, to be in love with or to have as mothers. Vita viewed almost all relationships as expendable. Both Vita and Victoria fought against maternal dominance, swinging between idolatry and rejection while reserving the steadier emotions of respect and affection for their fathers.
By objectifying and analysing her long fascination for her gypsy heritage, the writing of this book and the unravelling of the emotional confusion of her early life seemed to tame Vita and calm her lust for adventure. She had bought Sissinghurst in 1930 and much of her passion and creative energy became increasingly focused on making a garden from the rubble of a crumbling Elizabethan mansion. Unable as a woman to inherit her beloved Knole due to the archaic rules of primogeniture, Vita found the great house returned to her, at least on paper, in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. Similarly, in Pepita, Vita secures and confirms for herself the strength of her affiliation and debt to the first two women she loved.
On receiving the manuscript at The Hogarth Press, Virginia reported to the author that she read Pepita ‘like a shark swallowing mackerel’. The book was published on 30 October 1937, almost a year after the abdication of Edward Vlll and two years before the outbreak of a war during which Britain would shift still further from the old Edwardian sensibilities of class, privilege and restrictive opportunities for women. The book was praised in particular for the honesty of Vita’s portrait of Victoria, Edwin Lutyens writing to Vita that his old lover was revealed to him as ‘porcelain, the glaze of which is crazed’. The enthusiastic reviews were matched by sales of 10,000 copies in Britain in two months, four reprints in six months and a selection in America for the prestigious Book of the Month Club.
Unlike Vita, my lifetime overlapped with that of my grandmother for almost eight years. But although I had the advantage of knowing her at first hand, Vita was perhaps more remote to me than Pepita had been to Vita. I knew Vita as an intimidating figure, unapproachable, child-averse, her hair like hard ridges left by waves in the sand, scented with smoke that rose in small clouds from her tortoise shell cigarette holder. Long after Vita’s death, when I read Pepita, her tribute to these strong and often inspiring women, I looked long at the drawings and photographs contained within the brown clothed copy of the book that I found on my father’s shelves, happily reproduced here in this edition. There was the devoted, pushy Catalina, so young and clear-skinned, the dramatically sexy figure of Pepita in her vêtements en scène, the absurd paunchy figure of her husband Oliva and twenty years later the aging thickened-up mother of five, the sudden beauty of the twenty-year-old Victoria on her way to Washington, her later eccentricity evident as she dines in the snow with her small grandson.
For eighty years the squat black tin trunk has sat in the corner of the attic at Sissinghurst. Despite the rusting lid, the documents inside still remain as thrilling as the day in 1936 that my grandmother discovered them. At Sissinghurst we have the tiny sole of Pepita’s dancing shoe, a profile of Victoria’s lovely face made from glass, Vita’s Edwardian beauty box stained with rouge, but these tangible things do not return the spirit of their original owners with the same power as words sometimes can. A couple of years ago I went to Malaga in search of the place where this romantic tale began. The city, often thought of as the transit hub on the way to sunshine and disco-thumping beaches turned out to be filled with the sound and sight of music, song, and dance unaltered for two centuries and more. As I walked down the tiny Calle Puente, hidden away in the back streets on the unfashionable side of the river, I mentioned my grandmother’s grandmother’s name to a curious passerby. At once a window opened above me, a woman lent out, and repeated that lyrical name with a smile of recognition and pride. Pepita’s story lives on in the street of her birth, and is now brought to a new readership in this splendid new edition of her granddaughter’s book.
Juliet Nicolson, 2016
CATALINA ORTEGA, widow of Pedro Duran, a barber of Malaga, by whom she has two children:
JOSEFA, known as PEPITA; and
DIEGO, a soldier and adventurer.
MANUEL LOPEZ, a shoemaker of Malaga, living ‘apparently matrimonially’ with Catalina.
LOLA, his daughter, who subsequently marries Diego.
JUAN ANTONIO GABRIEL DE LA OLIVA, a dancer of Madrid, who marries Pepita.
LIONEL SACKVILLE-WEST, subsequently second Lord Sackville, a secretary in the British diplomatic service; Pepita’s lover. Referred to as ‘my grandfather’.
VICTORIA JOSEFA, eldest daughter of Pepita and Lionel Sackville-West. Referred to as ‘my mother’. She marries her first cousin (i.e. the son of my grandfather’s younger brother), another
LIONEL SACKVILLE-WEST, subsequently third Lord Sackville. Referred to as ‘my father’.
Pepita
Catalina Ortega
Juan Antonio de la Oliva in 1875
Some of Pepita’s ‘treasures’
The sole of Pepita’s shoe (actual size)
Another of Pepita’s ‘treasures’—the tablecloth
Lola
Pepita and her daughter in 1870
My Mother and her sisters on their way to Washington
My Mother when in Washington
Knole
My Mother and I
Sir John Murray Scott, with a Polish dwarf
My Mother in 1910
My Mother in 1917 (sitting out in the snow)
My Mother at Brighton, about 1920
Spain, in the middle of the nineteenth century, had scarcely been ‘discovered’ by the foreigner. Indeed, as Richard Ford observed in 1845, ‘the mere fact of having travelled at all in Spain (the italics are his, not mine) has a peculiarity which is denied to the more hackneyed countries of Europe’. In saying more hackneyed countries he was doubtless thinking specifically of Italy, which had for so long formed part of the Grand Tour undertaken by young gentlemen of noble birth as to become the commonplace of well-bred and cultured travel; but an acquaintance with Spain, as he and George Borrow were well aware, conferred a distinction upon the English traveller and might reasonably be regarded in the light of an unusual and somewhat hazardous adventure. That proud, aloof, and ruthless nation still dwelt self-contained behind the barrier of the Pyrenees; the expression cosa de España (a thing peculiar to Spain) really meant something quite indigenously different from any other part of Europe; the reserve, the austerity, the streak of Oriental secrecy in the Spanish character set them apart even more effectively than the frontier of their mountains. To the rare Englishman penetrating into that separate land, the difficulty of approaching the secret heart of the people soon became as obvious as the external beauty of the country or the picturesque appearance of its inhabitants. It was a time when women still wore the mantilla and the shawl as a matter of course in daily life, not only on festive 3 occasions as they do today, and looked as beautiful in them as any woman ought to look with such resources of feminine grace at her command.
I should like to explain here that nothing in the following pages is either invented or even embellished. Down to the smallest, the very smallest particular, it is all absolutely and strictly true.
Few English people can have the luck to possess documents which give so intimate and detailed a picture of the daily life of a Spanish family in the nineteenth century—a family obscure and even disreputable, in no way connected with historical events or eminent figures in the world of politics, literature, or art. The interest of this Spanish family is simply human. But for a curious chance, its members would have disappeared entirely as the grave swallowed them one by one, and nothing of their doings and sayings would ever have been recorded. Even as it is, I fear that I may be suspected of introducing some fiction among my facts, just a few touches of circumstantial detail to heighten it all and make it all a little more vivid, a little more picturesque, but I can only repeat that it has not been necessary to fall to this temptation.
The papers which have provided the material for the first part of this book owe their existence to the fact that in 1896 it became legally expedient for my grandfather’s solicitors to take the evidence of a number of people in Spain who, some forty years earlier, had been acquainted with the principal characters involved. The point, in short, was the necessity of proving whether my grandmother, Pepita, had ever been married to my grandfather or not. Several issues were at stake: an English peerage, and an historic inheritance. With these important issues, the solicitors had to deal. They dealt with them in their usual dry practical way, little foreseeing that this body of evidence collected in 1896 from voluble Spanish peasants, servants, villagers, dancers and other theatrical folk, would in 1936 be re-read in stacks of dusty typescript by someone closely connected, who saw therein a hotch-potch of discursiveness, frequently irrelevant but always fascinating.
It is upon this evidence which I have principally drawn. I have added nothing, and it is only with great reluctance that the principles of selection have sometimes obliged me to discard. I could not use all my material, as it would have become unbearably monotonous and repetitive. Even as it is, I fear that my jostle of Spaniards becomes somewhat confusing; I often got confused amongst them myself while writing this book, although I grew to know them all so well that I could enter with my heart into their separate lives. I can only assert again that I have altered nothing, and that far from inventing anything I have left out a great mass of the evidence at my disposal.
One day in the early autumn of 1849, a strange Andalusian trio presented itself at the Teatro del Príncipe, Madrid, and demanded an interview with Don Antonio Ruiz, the Director of the ballet. Antonio Ruiz, by virtue of his calling, was well accustomed to such invasions, and after a suitable delay allowed the suppliants to be admitted to his room. He saw before him ‘a stoutish well-built woman of middle-age, with a certain style about her whole exuberant personality, yet obviously of inferior origin’; a boastful, excitable, troublesome, warm-hearted woman, not easily or conveniently to be deflected from any purpose she had in hand. The man who accompanied her was far less pleasing. Shorter than she, it was at first sight apparent that he was fussy, insignificant, and self-important. He attracted much attention in Madrid by appearing in Andalusian dress, with tight high-waisted trousers, leathern gaiters, a broad red sash, and the broad-brimmed high-crowned hat with silken tassels. It was clear to any shrewd observer that Manuel Lopez—for that was his name—would readily break out into flashy garments and cheap gaudy jewellery on the slightest improvement of the family fortunes. Even as it was, he wore a heavy watch-chain and a big pin in his scarf. Broad-shouldered, with large goggle eyes of greyish-blue, he attracted the sympathy of his acquaintances far less than did the rather lovable, tiresome, dominating woman who perhaps was and perhaps was not his wife.
CATALINA ORTEGA
This person, who gave her name as Catalina Ortega, lost no time in telling Don Antonio Ruiz exactly what she wanted of him. She wanted dancing lessons to be arranged for her daughter, with a view to that daughter getting an engagement at the Teatro del Príncipe. It was an ambitious request, for the Teatro del Príncipe was at that time the leading theatre in Spain. Josefa was the daughter’s name, but her mother referred to her by the colloquial diminutive: ‘My Pepa’, she called her, or, ‘My Pepita’. Antonio Ruiz then transferred his attention to the daughter, the third member of this invasive trio from Malaga. He saw a girl of nineteen, dark, quiet, and beautiful. There can be no question but that Pepita was very lovely indeed. ‘It was a face divine’, said a labourer who had seen her in the vineyards. She had never spoken to him or he to her, yet he had remembered her all his life.
Antonio Ruiz was not easily impressed, but on this occasion he was impressed enough to promise the required lessons, and undertook that a member of his company should attend the girl at her own home for the purpose. The family from Malaga took its departure well pleased, for this journey to the capital had been a great venture and one not to be undertaken without much thought.
They were, in fact, living in exceedingly humble circumstances in a mere basement at No. 15 Calle de la Encomienda, peddling old clothes for a living. Some idea of their humble station in life may be gained from their own occupations and those of their relations and friends. Thus, Catalina’s father, of gypsy blood, had been a sandal-maker in Malaga and as a girl she had helped him in his trade; they were so poor that he had not even a shop, but worked in his own room. Her first cousin went about Malaga with a donkey, selling fruit. Her nephew was a fruit-seller likewise. Another cousin had married a stevedore. Catalina herself had married one Pedro Duran, who as a bachelor had existed on any job he could pick up, as a dock-hand, a journeyman, and what-not, but who after his marriage opened a small barber’s-shop on the ground floor of their house in the Calle de la Puente. Catalina had a great friend during those years in Malaga, and it is to this friend that we owe much of the information about Catalina’s early life. She was a garrulous person, and her evidence is abundant. Sometimes a washerwoman, sometimes a children’s nurse, sometimes a general servant at the Hotel Alameda where she helped the chambermaid, she lodged with her mother in rooms in Catalina’s house, because it was the cheapest place they could find. She saw a lot of Catalina at that time, for Catalina who had tried taking in washing for about a year abandoned that employment in favour of selling clothing instead, and prevailed upon her friend to accompany her on her rounds. They used to visit the wholesale clothing shops together, lay in their stock, and then go round to private houses selling it.
This friend of course knew Catalina’s husband, Pedro Duran, who is stated rather vaguely to have died because ‘he got shot in the finger in a revolution’. More specifically, he is said to have died in the Provincial Charity Hospital of a wound accidentally received during some fêtes held in honour of the memory of General Torrijos, leaving his widow with two young children, Diego and Pepita. The washerwoman friend of course knew these children too. They were said to resemble one another as much as a boy can resemble a girl. Diego was wild and troublesome from the first, his parents could not induce him to remain at school,—‘they wanted him to go to school, but he wouldn’t stop. He had set his mind on a soldier’s life; he was very harum-scarum and would do nothing. At about sixteen he enlisted and his mother bought him out,’—poor Catalina, with little money to spare!—‘but he enlisted again and went away as a soldier to Cuba’. This is the first but by no means the last that we hear of Diego.
The daughter Pepita, on the other hand, was far more tractable. Her devotion to her mother was of a nature to be considered excessive by their friends, who on occasion did not hesitate to describe Catalina as Pepita’s evil angel. This was perhaps going a little too far, and in any case the expression evil angel, mal angel, is too commonly current in the south of Spain for it to carry as sinister a meaning as in English; I would rather say that Catalina lavished on her daughter the fierce and possessive love which Latin women do often display towards their children, injudicious to a degree and mischievous in its consequences, but certainly not malevolent in its intention. In those early days of her widowhood at Malaga she had the girl to sleep in her bed, and never tired of combing and dressing the magnificent hair which even in that southern province was remarkable for its beauty. Catalina’s sister, a familiar and constant visitor at the house, was of the opinion that there was no more beautiful girl in Andalusia. ‘I have seen her when she has got up from bed and put on her dressing-jacket, and with her hair down she was more beautiful than when she was dressed and adorned.’
It may seem surprising to read of Pepita as being ‘dressed and adorned’ in that very poor and shoddy establishment of the Calle de la Puente where ‘the houses were very old and bad’, but it appears that the idea of making her daughter into a dancer had already formed in Catalina’s mind. She was her jewel, her treasure, and her pride, for whom nothing was too good and no ambition too extravagant. It is rather touching to read that ‘she was very careful of her and brought her up with great delicacy’; rather touching, too, to find that she not only paid for lessons at a dancing-class, but also provided four silk dresses out of her meagre earnings, different costumes for different dances. Her friend the washerwoman was much impressed by this luxury. She had seen Catalina ten or twenty times taking Pepita to the dancing-class, and had also seen the dresses which were ‘much adorned and very expensive’ hanging up in Catalina’s house. Before very long, in fact after Pepita had been having her lessons for about eight months, the washerwoman heard that an opera company had come to Malaga; she heard it said that they were foreigners and sang in a foreign language. She felt proud that her young acquaintance Pepita should be engaged to dance in connection with that company, but regretted that she never saw her dance there, ‘because I had no money to go with’. She did, however, see Pepita’s dresses being placed on a tray and carried by a boy sent from the theatre to fetch them.
Catalina’s cousin Juan was more fortunate; he went twice to see the child perform; he could not go oftener because, like the washerwoman, he ‘had not the money to spare’; also he was obliged to go alone, not being able to afford to take anyone with him. He regretted not being able to go oftener, for he came away full of enthusiasm for his young relative. ‘She danced in company with four or five others. She was the best dancer; I heard everybody saying in the theatre that Pepita was the first dancer. Everybody applauded and said she would be a good dancer. She was just like a bird in the air, she danced so well.’ He went round to Catalina’s house next day and told her what a great success Pepita had made. Catalina replied with commendable modesty that the child had a natural gift for dancing.
One might suppose that Catalina was sufficiently occupied with her friends, her relations, her troublesome son, her old-clothes trade, and above all with the daughter whom she adored, but it was not so: she still needed something to fill her life even more. It was then that she found the goggle-eyed Manuel Lopez living three or four doors up the street. He had come, people thought, from Granada. Manuel Lopez, who figures throughout the story as a comic and rather ridiculous character, was a man of precisely the same social standing as Catalina’s other associates; in other words, he had always made his living as best he might, sometime as a charcoal-burner, sometime as a bandit, sometime as a smuggler in Valencia and Alicante. At the time of his first acquaintance with Catalina, however, he was practising the respectable trade of a cobbler. As neighbours, they struck up a friendship, and the washerwoman, who envisaged these things simply and without comment, puts the situation into one neat phrase: ‘After Manuel and Catalina had fallen in love with each other, Manuel took up his abode in her house’.
The evidence that they ever troubled to go through a form of marriage is of the slightest, and may I think be disregarded. Whether married or not, they kept to one another through years of trouble, years of poverty and years of prosperity, years during which they squabbled and quarrelled and made it up, years during which Catalina snubbed him mercilessly and he unblushingly profited by the material advantages which Catalina and her daughter could offer him. So long as Manuel Lopez had a cigar to smoke, horses to ride or drive, and servants over whom he could exercise his swaggering authority, he cared very little for the snubs he incurred or for the means by which his pleasures were provided. In the meantime he adopted Pepita with as much pride as if she had been his own daughter, showed her off and boasted about her,—which brings me to another point: who was the true father of Pepita?
Officially the daughter of Catalina Ortega and Pedro Duran the barber of Malaga, ex-dockhand and journeyman, Pepita could claim a far more romantic story current in Spain regarding her birth. Catalina, born a gypsy, was said to have leapt through paper hoops in a circus in her youth; and to have been the mistress of the Duke of Osuna, on whom the existence of Pepita was unofficially fathered. The obscure barber of Malaga completely disappears behind this cloud of wild romance. For the Duke of Osuna is himself a vivid and well authenticated figure with a terrifying ancestry. I have heard accounts of him from men who had personally known or seen him. A descendant of the Borgias on their Spanish side, all Paris had trembled when he was observed to enter a box at the first night of Victor Hugo’s Lucrèce Borgia, for it was feared that he might rise up in magnificent wrath if any slight were offered to his illustrious if questionable forebears. The splendour and extravagance of the old grandee became proverbial. It was said of him that he knew no money save gold ongas, and never waited for change in a shop. It was said also that he could travel from Madrid by coach to Warsaw, sleeping in his own houses every night, where servants in livery awaited him and fires and candles were lighted and dinner prepared daily lest he should happen to arrive without warning and at any time. If Pepita, half gypsy and half aristocrat, were indeed the daughter of such a man, it was not surprising that even the most ignorant observers should comment on the difference between mother and daughter, and remark that although a considerable likeness existed between their features, Catalina, once one had got into conversation with her, was seen to be a ‘very different class of woman from Pepita’.
This, then, was the background story of the family which had presented itself for an interview with Don Antonio Ruiz in Madrid. Of course he knew nothing of it; he did not know that the encampment in the basement of 15 Encomienda included also a small child of five or six, named Lola, the daughter of Manuel Lopez though not of Catalina; and the young man, Diego, the wild tiresome son of Catalina, who was always to go threading his way in and out of their stormy history. Antonio Ruiz could naturally not be interested in such things. As Director of the ballet, he could only be interested in the discovery of a new dancer, and, as such, he had done his duty: he had noted the lovely girl and had detailed his man Perez to give her some dancing lessons at her own home. The Director could scarcely be expected to do more.
The dancing lessons were a complete failure. Pepita might have danced ‘as a bird in the air’ in Malaga, but in Madrid it was found impossible to raise her to the required level of excellence. The capital evidently had a higher standard than the provinces, and her career as a dancer seemed doomed. Antonio Ruiz, who had been so rash as to sign a contract for her engagement at the Teatro del Príncipe, cancelled it. This was not the sort of thing which Catalina would tamely accept. After all, she had paid for dancing lessons in Malaga when she could ill afford it; she had provided four silk dresses; she had succeeded in pushing Pepita on to the Malaguenian stage in connection with a foreign company; and a woman of her determination was not likely to abandon such an enterprise once she had set it in train. There is no telling what Catalina might have done to Don Antonio Ruiz for his insult to her daughter, when luckily a new element entered into the life of the family occupying the basement of 15 Encomienda, in the shape of a young man who had fallen violently in love with Pepita at first sight.
This young man, who was named Juan Antonio Gabriel de la Oliva, was only a year older than Pepita herself, in other words, twenty; but he had the advantage of having been on the stage in Madrid and also in Corunna ever since he was sixteen or seventeen. Destined for the study of medicine when he left school, he had very soon abandoned that pursuit for his chosen taste of dancing. He was thus quite a man of the world compared with the lovely provincial girl from Malaga, and moreover, being a Spaniard of hot blood and ardent feelings, he allowed nothing to stand in the way between himself and the desired acquaintance with Pepita. A reserved young man, not given to confidences even towards his most familiar friends, he was purposeful and knew how to get his way when he wanted it. In this case he wanted it badly. Fortunately for him he had a friend, another dancer, named Pedrosa, with whom he was so intimate that ‘either’s purse was always at the disposal of the other’. To this friend he now had recourse, and asked him to arrange for him, Oliva, to give lessons to Pepita instead of Perez. He also prevailed upon Pedrosa to persuade Perez to take him, Oliva, to Pepita’s home and introduce him. And finally, when the management cancelled Pepita’s contract, Oliva cancelled his own contract of his own accord, and left the theatre in a rage.
By these energetic and turbulent methods the young Oliva had succeeded in establishing himself as a recognised friend in the basement. It was an odd household that he had entered, though perhaps it did not seem very odd to him, accustomed as he was to the theatrical circles and irregular lives of that under-world of Madrid. It cannot have troubled him in the slightest to know that Manuel Lopez was living only ‘apparently matrimonially’ with Pepita’s mother, or that Pepita herself was at pains to inform her acquaintances that her own father was dead, so that she might not be believed to be Manuel Lopez’ daughter.
Oliva had eighteen brothers and sisters, and a correspondingly impressive number of uncles and aunts. His family came from the same class as Pepita’s; that is to say, his brother-in-law was a harness-maker, another brother-in-law a tailor, a nephew was also a harness-maker; his uncles were farm-labourers at Ocana in the province of Toledo. There was thus no difference in their social status, and Oliva could be accepted on an equal footing in the Encomienda. The intimacy grew rapidly, so that he fell into the habit of accompanying them on their peddling expeditions when he was not giving a lesson to Pepita. I think Oliva must then have been an attractive, sincere, and likeable young man. A most dutiful son, he lived at home when in Madrid, and whenever he went away on theatrical engagements he frequently wrote to his parents; his father would then read the letters aloud to the rest of the children. As a dancer he was evidently making a successful career, for he never seems to have been without an engagement, and as a character he inspired a remarkably deep affection in his friends. In spite of this, he was said to be unusually reticent, even for a Spaniard, so that they found it difficult to hear anything of his life even when most anxious to help him in his troubles. They recognised and deplored his extravagance, but were always ready to come to his rescue with the price of a fare in the diligence, or of a meal, whenever he wanted it. For ‘he spent every penny he earned as soon as he got it, and as he was fond of good living his money was soon gone’. Later in his life we find him doing precisely the things we should expect him to do—living with various women, fathering their children, associating with dancers and bull-fighters, even accepting jobs in connection with the bull-ring when the theatres had closed down after the winter season; but for the moment, that is to say in 1849 at the age of twenty, he appears as a rather serious, determined young man, respectably living with his parents in the Calle Riviera de Cutidores and bent only upon the perfectly honourable idea of marrying Pepita as soon as he possibly could.
These parents were decent people, country-born of peasant stock. The father had left his brothers to carry on their profession of farm-labourers, and had removed himself to Madrid, where he obtained employment in the service of his uncle as a working furrier. He never appears to have risen to be even a master-furrier, but there is no reason to suppose that he was anything but contented with his lot. It was quite a novelty in his family to have a son who insisted on going in for a theatrical career; more usually they adopted some trade such as harness-making, but since Juan Antonio’s tastes had lain so very definitely in that direction ever since he was a little boy of ten, no objection had been raised, and indeed by the time the Olivas enter this history they had every reason to be proud of their thoroughly satisfactory son. Juan Antonio himself, like many people of otherwise unconventional and happy-go-lucky life, had a certain respect for orthodox observances, and unquestionably in Spain he would not have stood much chance of success had he proceeded with anything but the most severe propriety in his courtship of the girl he desired to make his wife. Catalina and Lopez themselves, little better than vagrants though they were, would not have permitted any departure from the established rule. Lopez might make his living as a bandit or as a cobbler of old shoes, Catalina might have tumbled in the circus-ring and yielded to the embraces of a grandee so far above herself in station as the Duke of Osuna, but neither Lopez nor Catalina would have tolerated any infringement of the strict Spanish code or any disrespect towards the desirable girl they guarded.
It comes as a surprise to learn how very strict was the standard of conduct observed even by those professional dancers who had passed beyond the supervision of mother or parents. Alexandre Dumas, for simply having attempted with ordinary politeness to kiss the hand of Petra Camara on being introduced to her in her dressing-room, to his great surprise heard the lady scream and instantly afterwards received a sound box on the ear. He is writing from Seville to a friend in Paris during the winter season of the ballet in 1847: ‘Pardon, madame, I had forgotten to tell you something: that these ladies are of ferocious virtue, and when I tell you for whom this virtue is so carefully preserved, it will make you smile pityingly. Each one of these ladies has a fiancé qui Plume la dinde avec elle,—I crave forgiveness of your amorous sensibility, but in this case plumer la dinde means to stand under the balcony, to sing serenades, and to exchange glances between the window-bars. This fiancé (who by the banks of the Guadalquivir is known as the novio) may sometimes be a tailor’s boy, or a shoemaker, who, concerned with waistcoats or gaiters, has managed to slip his way into the theatre, and who, once in the wings, watches over his treasure as Argus over Jupiter’s. The only difference being, that Argus was watching over Io on Juno’s behalf, whereas these Arguses of ours are acting on their own.
‘You understand now, madame, what perturbation I, with my Parisian manners, had introduced into these bucolic idylls; I kissed a hand at first sight, in other words, I was filching (j’escroquais) a favour which is usually accorded to the novio only after eighteen months or two years of acquaintance!’
Oliva, once accepted as Pepita’s novioeverything