Golden Earrings Read Online Free PDF

floor. Look at her, curled up tightly, not only to fit into the tiny bed but also tocurb the hunger pangs she suffers each night when she goes to sleep. Her arms and legs are raw with flea bites, made worse by the heat. Her greasy hair has not seen soap and water for weeks. Can you find no pity in your heart for such a child? Look at her carefully before you judge. For that young girl is me.
     
    ‘Celestina!’
    I opened my eyes at my father’s call, although I’d already been awake for an hour. The hunger pangs in the pit of my stomach gnawed at me like rats. But one look at Papá’s haggard face and all desire to complain left me. He had given me his share of bread the night before, and it hurt me to think he would go to work with worse pains than I suffered.
    I stood up and Papá lifted me out of the cot. While he sat on the bed to put on his workboots, I struck the floor gently with the soles of my feet, responding to a rhythm no one else could hear. Papá said I had danced before I could walk, that it was in my blood. My mother had always danced too.
    Anastasio was at the dresser, crouching so he could see himself in the speckled mirror. I watched him contorting his face to shave. Although I was young, I understood from the way women turned when he passed by on the street that my eldest brother was handsome. My father said that Anastasio had inherited his good looks from our mother. She, on the other hand, had always insisted that he was the spitting image of Papá when he was a youth. I glanced from Anastasio to Papá and tried to discern in that beloved wrinkled face Anastasio’s chiselled features and dark broody eyes. Papá was only forty-two years of age, but the troubles that had plagued him since he left his village in Andalusia twelve years earlier had aged him. He’d come to Barcelona with my mother and Anastasio after a peasant uprising, but had only found more of the same poverty and suffering he’d tried to leave behind.
    ‘Dancing! Dancing! Always dancing, Celestina!’
    My brother Ramón grabbed me in a headlock. His fingers caught in the tangles in my hair and I yelped.
    ‘Be gentle!’ scolded Anastasio, turning from the mirror. ‘She’s little.’
    ‘Of course,’ said Ramón, pinching my cheeks. ‘I only have one sister.’
    This was true. Those who had been born in the years between Anastasio and himself had all died in infancy.
    Ramón was not handsome like Anastasio. He had a head the shape of an egg and his body was round like a stuffed artichoke. But what he lacked in looks, Ramón made up for in personality. He charmed the street vendors into giving us their spoiling fruit and vegetables, and had even managed to convince our avaricious landlord to give us a week’s grace on our rent during the strike at the factory. Whenever Ramón had a big win, like the time a shopkeeper had given him an entire box of almonds, he was always generous in sharing it, even with the sickly Fernández children who lived in the apartment next to us.
    ‘Come on, or we’ll be late,’ said Papá, opening the door to the corridor. We filed out in order of age, then Ramón picked me up in his arms. Although I could walk perfectly well and Ramón was only a few inches taller than me, he liked to carry me about.
    ‘Put her down, Ramón,’ said Anastasio, taking both our hands. ‘She’s not a doll.’
    A few streets away, on our way to the markets on las Ramblas, we came across workmen clearing up broken glass and twisted metal outside a bicycle shop. The air was putrid with the stench of burnt rubber. There was a gaping hole in the blackened wall of the building and the inside of the store looked to have been reduced to ash. Policemen were in attendance, searching through the rubble and questioning witnesses.
    ‘Another bomb,’ muttered Papá.
    The explosion had been close enough to our building that we should have heard it, but we’d become so used tothe blasts lately that none of us had woken up. We