Page 130 of The Moon Sister
‘Of course you must! Then your talent will be captured forever for generations to see when you are dead.’
‘I will never die,’ Lucía retorted. ‘I will live forever. Now,querido, we must both get dressed and go and meet my newpayofriends for lunch in one of their fancy restaurants. I am guest of honour! Can you believe it?’
‘I can believe anything of you, Lucía, truly,’ Meñique said as Lucía pulled him out of bed.
Madrid
July 1936, two years later
24
‘What has happened?’ Lucía lit a cigarette and leant back against the pillows, the sunlight spilling across them from the window of her room.
‘There has been a coup in Morocco,’ Meñique said without looking up from his newspaper. ‘There is talk that the uprising will spread here any day soon. Perhaps we should leave Spain while the going is good.’
‘What uprising? What is there to rise up against?’ Lucía frowned.
He sighed deeply. He had done his best to explain the fraught situation in Spain to her, but Lucía did not have a political bone in her body. Her days were occupied with dancing, smoking, making love and eating her beloved sardines, in that order of importance.
‘Franco wants to take over Spain with his armies,’ he told her patiently. ‘He wishes to turn Spain into a fascist state, just as the Nazis are doing in Germany.’
‘I am so bored of these politics, Meñique, who cares?’ She yawned and stretched, her little fist bumping into his face.
‘Icare – and you should too,pequeña– because it affects everything we do. We should think about going to Portugal early – you are due to perform there very soon anyway. I fear that Madrid will be at the centre of any struggle to come. There could be violence.’
‘I cannot go to Portugal when I still have my show at the Coliseum. People have been queuing around the block for tickets. I must not let them down.’
‘Well, if nothing changes we shall leave straight after that. Let us hope it will not be too late by then,’ muttered Meñique as he got out of bed.
‘They will not harm me, I am the darling of Spain,’ Lucía called after him. ‘Maybe they will crownmequeen instead!’
Meñique rolled his eyes as he found his shirt and trousers in the rubble of the room. Sadly, he could not disagree about her fame. Not only had she been a roaring success in Madrid, but accepting the title role in the most expensive Spanish film ever produced had cemented her national status as a household name.
‘I’m going back to my apartment for some peace and quiet,’ he told her as he kissed her. ‘I will see you later.’ He left Lucía’s room and walked along the communal corridor of the apartment, tripping over a cup of day-old coffee that Lucía had left in the middle of the floor. ‘Infuriating,’ he muttered as he used his handkerchief to mop up the spillage.
Not only did Lucía live in her own private state of chaos, but also with a houseful of ever-changing people – some of them friends or family, others merely acolytes who hung around her. Perhaps it was simply the way she’d been brought up; a large family in Sacromonte, then living for years in the tight-knit community of the Barrio Chino. Lucía seemed to need people around her constantly.
‘I am afraid of being alone,’ she’d admitted once to him. ‘Silence, it scares me.’
Well, it didn’t scare him – after two and a half years with Lucía, he relished it.
Entering the stillness of his own apartment, Meñique gave a sigh of relief and wondered for the hundredth time what would become of the two of them. It was obvious that the whole of Spain – and especially Lucía herself – was waiting for him to marry her. Yet he was still to ask. They had separated numerous times after Lucía had erupted at his lack of a proposal. He would walk away from her, relief filling his soul that he was no longer on the roller coaster of his relationship with her, her career and her crazy lifestyle.
‘She’s impossible!’ he’d tell himself, ‘no one but a saint can deal with her!’
Then, after a few hours of the peace he’d yearned for, he’d calm down. A few hours after that, he’d begin to long for her until he had to crawl back and beg forgiveness.
‘Yes, I will buy you a ring,’ he’d say when Lucía stood there with her eyes ablaze, and then they’d make love hungrily, passionately, both relieved that the pain of separation was over. All would be serene until the next time Lucía’s patience ran out and they would go round in the same cycle yet again.
Why he could not make that final commitment, Meñique did not know. Equally, why he could never finally walk away was a mystery to him. Was it the raw sexual attraction he experienced when he thought of her? Or the aphrodisiac provided by her sublime talent when he watched her perform?It was all of her, was the only conclusion he could reach.She was simply . . . Lucía. Sometimes it felt to him as though the two of them were trapped in an eternalpaso doblefrom which they could never escape.
‘It isn’t love, it is addiction,’ Meñique murmured as he tried to focus on a melody he was struggling to compose. His concentration was non-existent and this, he thought, was another problem: being with Lucía was a full-time job, which left him little time for pursuing his own career. When she had received the offer to perform in Lisbon, she had not even asked him whether he wanted to go – just assumed that he would.
‘Perhaps I should stay behind,’ he told his guitar. ‘Let her go.’ Then he looked out of the window and took in the alarming sight of armed soldiers marching down the street beneath him. If civil war did break out in Spain, it was a dangerous moment to be parted, and besides that, Lucía’s rag-tag retinue of dancers and musicians did not have a clue about the real world beyond flamenco. They’d probably end up in jail, or facing a firing squad for saying the wrong thing.
But was thathisproblem? If it was, he had made it so.
Meñique yawned. They hadn’t returned until the early hours from the party held after Lucía’s sell-out performance last night. He laid his guitar carefully on the table, then stretched out full-length on the couch and closed his eyes. Yet, even though he was exhausted, he could not sleep. He was filled with an impending sense of doom.
