The Dancer and the Raja Read Online Free PDF

fact that people wanted to forget their hardships.
    Anita and Victoria made up a duo known as the Camellias, and they acted between the different numbers to make the wait seem shorter during scene changes. On the program that night were no less than la Fornarina, Pastora Imperio, Bella Chelito, the Bird Man, and Mimi Fritz. At ten o’clock sharp the Camellias came out on stage dressed in short, bell-shaped skirts, a shocking bright red, with stockings to match. As soon as they heard the strumming of the guitar they began dancing flamenco sevillanas , and then seguidillas and finally boleros . They were not the best dancers in Spain, but their Andalusian gracefulness amply compensated for their lack of technique. That was sufficient for them to be successful as curtain raisers at the Kursaal, which that night had a full sign hanging. An audience of the most varied kind filled all the tables: many foreigners linked to the royal families invited to the wedding, politicians, journalists and correspondents, and the usual faithful Bohemians: Romero de Torres the painter, Valle-Inclán with his flowing beard, a journalist known as the Audacious Gentleman, the writer Ricardo Baroja, the nephew of Don Pio, a young Catalan from a well-to-do family called Mateo Morral, who said he was a columnist and who had just joined the café meetings, although he rarely opened his mouth. “A dark, silent man,” as Baroja would describe him. And above all there was Anselmo Miguel Nieto, a young painter from Valladolid, tall and thin, with penetrating dark eyes, who had come to make his way in Madrid. Anselmo never missed a night at the Kursaal because he was in love with Anita. With the excuse of painting her portrait, he had become friendly with her and had met her parents. Uncertain of her own feelings, she simply let herself be loved.
    That night all the talk was of the discovery—which occurred in the morning, on the bark of a tree in the Retiro—of an inscription carved with a knife, which had managed to shake the whole of Madrid, especially because it appeared after a series of death threats received in different ministries and even in the Royal Palace: “Alfonso XIII will be executed on his wedding day. Unrepentant” ran the inscription. The imagination of those present had been deeply impressed. “What kind of terrible man and at what moment of devilish solitude could he have carved that?” they asked each other half seriously, half jokingly. “Would he smile sardonically like the bad men in Sherlock Holmes, a very popular character of the time?” “Would he have a black beard?” Would his eyes gleam?”
    â€œLet the king and queen get away and get married in an unknown country, on a desert island, if possible!” exclaimed Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán.
    The regulars always sat in the same place, behind the first box, in a corridor that ran the length of the premises. There they could socialize after every act with Pastora Imperio or la Fornarina, the witty dressmaker who had moved up to being a cabaret singer singing Don Nicanor or Frufru . They did not mix with the Camellia sisters because their parents appeared punctually at the end of the dancing to take them home, “in case,” said Don Angel, “they are taken for what they are not.” But the beauty, youth. and Andalusian grace of the sisters made them very popular among the regulars at the Kursaal. Ricardo Baroja described Anita thus: “Tall, with clear, unblemished skin and very dark hair, huge, languid eyes. Her features, not yet firmly established, promised to achieve the classical beauty of a Greek Venus when her youth blossomed.”
    A tall, distinguished foreigner, surrounded by a group of people, must have been thinking the very same thing, having taken a seat at a table close to the stage. The man could not take his eyes off Anita and seemed entranced by the music. The sound of the guitar