A Barcelona Heiress Read Free

in Barcelona and handled all kinds of cases (including those to which I was assigned as a court-appointed attorney), specializing in criminal law. I balanced my legal career with my activity as a journalist; since my adolescence I had cut my teeth working for several newspapers, an experience that had allowed me to become familiar with the city’s political and cultural circles—especially those of the theater, which was my passion.
    One afternoon Vilches had come to see me in the company of my friend Blasco—the manager of the Teatro Goya, where the actor had enjoyed a string of successes. He had come to ask me for an odd favor. A Chinese cargo ship had docked at the Port of Barcelona and, not long after mooring, a fight had broken out among the sailors. During the scuffle the boatswain had been killed, stabbed by a messman on the ship. The story had been widely reported in the press. What Vilches wanted was for me to arrange a meeting so that he could talk to the imprisoned killer, as he was preparing for the starring role in a play set in China, and he wanted to do as much research for it as possible. He asked me to accompany him to meet the prisoner.
    The prisons in those days, if one knew the right people, could be really quite accommodating. The director of the facility agreed to our request and arranged for a room to be reserved for us. For one hour Vilches and the incarcerated Chinese man engaged in an intenseinterview. The actor would later tell me that the sailor had taken him for the examining judge assigned to the case and, given the impossibility of communicating verbally, had resorted to gesticulating to indicate what had happened during the altercation that led to the boatswain’s death. “It was just what I needed,” Vilches told me; he came away armed with an arsenal of gestures and expressions he would be able to reproduce down to the last detail. Thus was born his character Wu-Li-Chang, the protagonist of the work of the same name by Harold Owen and Harry Vernon about a cultured and powerful man forced by his country’s traditions to sacrifice his own daughter, who was in love with a westerner. The play triumphed on stages across Spain and America. And thus was also born a friendship that led me to represent Vilches on several occasions.
    * * *
    So it was Vilches who had sent María Nilo to me and, given the actor’s reputation as a Don Juan, it was not difficult to surmise the tie that bound them. Evidently this reputation spurred the young showgirl to quickly insist, “Don’t get the wrong idea. There’s nothing between us. Don Ernesto has been like a father to me. He’s from Tarragona, like me, and when I came to Barcelona I asked him to open some doors for me in the entertainment business, and he did. He took me to see his friend the singer Marta Oliver at the Gran Peña on San Pablo Street. She saved me from living hand-to-mouth and got me up onstage, where I sang, scantily clad, for seven pesetas a day. I was doing well. I landed contracts in Seville and Madrid, and a few months ago I returned to the Alcázar Español as the main act.”
    * * *
    The Alcázar Español on Unión Street functioned as the center of what was then called
sicalipsis
—venues featuring raunchy songs, light music (which small, slapdash bands struggled to play as best they could), and generous amounts of female flesh onstage in silk fishnet stockings while an audience of revelers shouted obscenities through thick clouds of smoke.
    There was flamenco during the intermissions,
manzanilla
sherry and
mojama
salt-cured tuna to satiate the crowd’s hunger, and
aguardiente
to top it all off. Rumor had it that the place’s waitresses offered complementary services to those patrons who could afford them. Although it was a working-class joint, it was frequented by more than a few members of my city’s bourgeoisie—people with sordid weaknesses who, far from keeping a lid on them, flaunted their
nostalgie de la boue
.
    I,