Rose for Winter Read Free

pensamientos in hushed, grave tones. ‘God is a fable writ in holy water,’ he would whisper, passing me with a bowl of soup. I would savour this with a low ‘Ah!’, and we would nod solemnly to each other, then go on about our business. Presently, on my way out into the street, I might find him standing by the door, taking a breath of air. He would draw back, bowing slightly. ‘Love’s dart is like a mosquito,’ I would hiss in his ear, ‘for both engender fever.’ At this his body would stiffen for a moment, struck still with the truth of my words, then he would shake his head and sigh heavily, giving me a look of professional admiration. For Manolo, flicking the dishes with his butterfly napkin, or gazing blindly at the ceiling with his melting eyes, was, at all times, a professional indeed.
    On another night we went out to the ‘Street of the Two Brothers’, to a wine cave that had attracted us by its shabby look and by the merry sounds we heard coming from within. The place was nothing more than a low-arched drinking tunnel, full of fishermen, dim lights and flickering gothic shadows. There were no glass-topped tables here, no cubist mirrors, paper flowers, brass barmaids and chromium-plated pin-tables. The tavern was stripped down to the bare boards of good fellowship – a whitewashed wall, a rough wooden bar, wine in great vats and men in tempestuous good humour.
    We entered to the cry of a fisherman singing an ecstatic fandango that shivered the roots of one’s hair. The singer, who was leaning against a huge sweating barrel of amontillado, was a short wiry little man, scrub-haired, swarthy faced, with a profile from Egypt. He wore a blue jersey and torn linen trousers, and he was surrounded by a rapt group of friends whose shining weather-beaten faces were creased in the very excesses of pleasure.
    We drank black wine at sixpence a bottle and listened to him. He stood there stiffly, his eyes closed, his dark face raised to the light, singing with a powerful controlled passion that shook his whole body through. At the beginning of each verse his limbs convulsed, as though gathering their strength; and at the end he reached such shuddering paroxysms of intricate invention that the whole room roared with praise. He sang through the nose, with the high-pitched cry of Africa, and he sang with the most natural grief and happiness, varying the words with little phrases of his own full of sly wickedness and tragic beauty.
    They told me his name was Pepe, and that he came from Huelva, the old Phoenician port east of Cadiz. And from the look of his sharp dark face and slanting eyes, remote as a buried mask, he might easily have been one of the founders of that city. He looked as though he had landed that day from a voyage that began five thousand years before. And he sang – making up the words as he went along – of boats and storms, of saints and monsters, of mysterious longings and mysterious loves. He sang, too, a saetas I shall never forget, a savage impromptu of adoration to the Virgin, harsh, scalp-raising, and accompanied by sonorous drum-beats on an empty barrel.
    As the evening wore on, and more wine was drunk, Pepe grew more and more excited. He seized a straw hat and a broom and became a most agile clown. With rolling eyes and a perfectly controlled body he aped the Civil Governor and the Governor’s wife, a crab caught in a trap, the soldiers of Napoleon, and the ‘Due de Vellinton’. The last two, brushing aside a hundred and fifty years with a few superb gestures, brought down the house as though they were the most topical of jokes.
    Flushed with triumph now, Pepe looked round the bar seeking for further inspiration, and his eyes fell on Kati. She was the only woman there. He snatched off his hat and pressed it to his heart, then advanced towards me, and bowed.
    â€˜With your permission,’ he said, ‘I am you.’
    He stood close