Golden Earrings Read Online Free PDF Page A

Please don’t tell Mamie. She doesn’t seem to like it. I guess because it’s not from her part of Spain.’
    Conchita cleared her throat. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said, pursing her lips as if she was trying to contain what she really wanted to say. ‘Ballerinas need inspiration from other forms of dance. I understand. It’s not the culture you are looking for, but the style.’
    She opened the door for me and I stepped out into the corridor. As I turned towards the stairway, I heard her say in a small voice from behind the door, ‘It’s not because she’s Catalan that your grandmother hates flamenco.’

FOUR
Celestina Barcelona, 1909
    Y ou who judge me: come! Let me tell you a story. Let me take you to a part of Barcelona not glorified by intellectuals for Gaudí’s revolutionary architecture, for its impressive paintings and sculptures, for its elegant Modernista style; the ‘Pearl of the Mediterranean’, the ‘Paris of the South’. No, this place is far from the passeig de Gràcia with its shops selling gold-embossed inkpots and mother-of-pearl hair combs. You will not find tree-lined boulevards here, nor cafés serving vanilla wafers with their fine filtered coffee. Follow me along las Ramblas where the street vendors peddle everything from parakeets to corn cobs, where the prostitutes lean on lampposts and stare indolently at the passers-by, and the cabarets play music all night. Here now, let me lead you through these streets that grow narrower and grimmer. Hold your handkerchief to your nose lest the stink — of rancid garlic and urine trapped in the hot, humid air — assaults your nostrils.
    A woman opens a door and shouts something to another in the sing-song inflection of Catalan. Her friend answers with the inflated expressiveness of an Andalusian dialect. A third woman, taking threadbare shirts from a clothes line, adds her nasal Majorcan tone to the conversation. We turn a corner andsee a beggar worrying at his sores with a stick in the hope of eliciting more money; and we evade the dogs feeding on the refuse thrown in the street. Walk with me across this square that is nothing more than mud and give no thought to your precious shoes. Let us come to a stop before a tenement building that was built to accommodate twenty people, but whose landlord has been subdividing the apartments into smaller and smaller units as rents have risen sharply over the last few years. This building now houses sixty wretched souls, who share one working toilet. Disease has visited this place many times: cholera; tuberculosis; meningitis. An outbreak of typhoid took a much-loved mother’s life just last year. Turn your eyes to the empty lot next to it, piled with shards of rubble. Another tenement building once stood here, like the one we are looking at, with cracked walls and stained windows. But its foundations collapsed in the winter rains, crushing all those inside.
    Here, let me take you up the narrow, worn stairs of the building and show you an apartment on the top floor, where a family is sleeping. It is five o’clock in the morning and summer light is beginning to penetrate the broken slats of the shutters. The heat-laden air is pungent with the smells of rust and mould, but the apartment’s occupants have become so used to the odours that they no longer notice. The apartment consists of a kitchenette and one room that serves as both bedroom and eating area. In this room, on a narrow iron bed, lies a prematurely grey-haired man. On his left, with his back turned to him, is his eighteen-year-old son. Tucked under his right arm is his ten-year-old boy. In a corner of the room, where most of the paint has peeled away from the walls and a stain darkens the ceiling, stands a cot bed with a girl lying in it. The girl is eight years old and too big for the bed; she has to twist herself like a piece of rope to fit in it, but there is nowhere else for her to sleep — the rats prevent her from stretching out on the