Pepita Read online

  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

  Part One

  PEPITA, 1830–1872

  1

  Cosa De España

  I

  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.

  II

  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.

  2

  Gypsies in Spain

  I

  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 Prínc
ipe. 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.

  II

  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.

  III

  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’.