Читать книгу Pepita - Vita Sackville-West - Страница 7

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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 washer-woman, 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-dock-hand 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.