A House Full of Daughters Read online

  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 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 friend and 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. While the other children of 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 washerwoman 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’, with 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 at age 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; she was described unkindly by an ex-patriot Englishwoman, Mrs William Pitt Byrne, as ‘bulky rather than stately’ and possessing ‘no dignity either in her face or figure’. Unlike the Queen of England, Isabella never made constitutional duties her 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.

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  Spain’s all-powerful Catholic Church enforced women’s accepted dual purposes as wife and mother, keeping academic and professional opportunities to a 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 punished only if a mistress was actually caught in (or, equally culpably, beneath) the marital bed. Up until 1931 male marital supremacy was still so powerful in Spain 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, including that of marriage, without parental authority. 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. Flamenco weaves together ancient stories of joy and desolation, gain and loss, passed down by society’s outsiders, refugees from oppression. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in the early part of the nineteenth century, the influence of the bullfighting 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 and 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 for which her mother washed, haggled and worked so hard to pay for, performing with a lightness and delicacy that the other students lacked. 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 Madrileña, 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 the oth
er women who lived in the sweaty, throbbing density of Calle Puente and the surrounding streets and earned money from the sale of their bodies was sometimes hard to identify.

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  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 her 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 Málaga, 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 was tucked into her 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 came from 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 I took a 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 the diners, embarking on a long song, a lament of loss, the struggle audible in the notes and visible in the genuine anguish on her face, alternating with wild piercing cries 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 hourlong 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 I emerged into the busy streets of Málaga, 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.

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  In 1849, when Pepita was nineteen, her dancing having mesmerised local audiences in the Theatre Principal in Málaga since childhood, Catalina knew her daughter was ready to take 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 theatre’s 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 the 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 their dubious nature, Ruiz overcame his prejudice against Pepita’s two chaperones and her extrovert style of dancing. Enchanted by Catalina’s lovely daughter, he decided to try to 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 del Teatro Principe’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, 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. He 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 grew with every performance and began 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 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 on 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 the bunches of rosemary strewn on the path in handfuls as they approached, 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 wed
ding 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.