About the author
Aníbal Malvar is a journalist and novelist from A Coruña, Spain, winner of the Xerais Prize 1995 and the Violeta Negra Prize 2015.
About the book
Lucero is Aníbal Malvar’s third novel, and tells the story of the death of Federico García Lorca through the lives of all those who conspired to assassinate him.
Contact me to learn more
Lucero by Aníbal Malvar, published by Ediciones Akal, 2019. 358 pp.
(from pp. 50-62)
The five espadrille makers are sitting on the bank of the Genil river in the shade of the ash trees. There is little conversation. They are happy to listen to the cries of the sandpipers and the buzzards, and the melody the water makes as it slips downstream. Not that there’s much to talk about anyway. It’s past ten and not one overseer has sent a wagon round looking for hands. With no coin for tobacco, the men chew straw and herbs, and drink only infrequently from the two wineskins they are sharing. One brought by Reviro (real name Ramiro, but so called because one eye veers all over the place), the other by Juanes. They were meant to be celebrating. Marranero had promised he’d pick them up at first light, without fail. But Marranero never turned up. Something more urgent came along, or he just forgot. Or more workers from Galicia and Portugal had been shipped in, on the promise of little more than a bowl of soup.
Olmo, returning from the railway station in Granada on muleback, spies them from afar and approaches.
‘Hey-hey,’ he cries and leaps to the ground.
‘Aye-aye,’ they respond in greeting.
‘No trains today, then?’ Reviro asks, maliciously.
‘Trains there are,’ Olmo replies, ‘but they’re not stopping for me.’
The five chuckle lethargically among themselves. Olmo sits down.
‘Nothing doing here either, eh?’
‘You’re telling us.’
Olmo passes round the tobacco and they all start rolling their cigarettes in silence. The station supervisors appreciate his strong shoulders and robust physique. Three pesetas and two reales for fourteen hours’ work is nothing to sneer at. Fifty cents more than day labourers get.
‘Are your boy’s arms still growing, then?’ Donato asks as he takes his first drag.
‘No, he’s just the same,’ Olmo replies, without taking offense. Everyone knows Donato is a daydreamer, and a bit slow. He’s the only one of them, besides Olmo, who finds something to laugh about almost every day.
‘Yesterday there were twenty getting off at Badajoz. They looked half-starved,’ Olmo reports.
‘Bastards,’ grumbles Manuel.
‘They’ll be the ones your Marranero picked up, then,’ scoffs Reviro, looking at Juanes.
‘No,’ Olmo put him right. ‘I asked. They were here for García.’
‘Bastard,’ grumbles Manuel.
‘He was at the station again yesterday.’
‘Who,’ Donato asks.
‘García. Blathering with that Ratón,’ Olmo adds.
‘Don’t come here with the same stories, Olmo, dammit. We’ve got families to feed.’
‘Let’s see how long that lasts.’
‘Leave it out, eh? Just leave it out,’ Reviro objects.
‘Well, I think we should see how long we last.’ Olmo spends a minute gazing at the trees and the river before continuing. ‘Sixty quintals of potatoes. For the Germans.’
Donato does the sums: ‘That’s a shitload of quintals.’
‘García taking them himself?’
‘No, he’s splitting them with Roldán.’
‘Bastards,’ grumbles Manuel.
The September sun is becoming oppressive. But it’s pleasant in the shade. An ox-cart loaded with straw plods up the road. The men watch it go by for a long time. Not until it disappears beyond the rise in the road do the espadrille makers slowly turn their gaze back.
‘They’re loading up Sunday at the old halting place in El Trébol,’ adds Olmo, as if whole minutes hadn’t passed.
‘I told you to shut up about it,’ Reviro repeats.
‘I’ll go if you go,’ Manuel starts up.
‘Even if it’s just to give them a scare,’ Olmo says.
‘If it’s to give them a scare, I’m up for it,’ slow-witted Donato joins in, grinning.
From over the rise in the road an open gig now appears. Once again, the men turn their heads to watch it. It is lightly loaded. Olmo squints and sees it is Doña Vicenta and Lucero. He raises his arm to greet the teacher of his son, but she is bound up in her conversation and doesn’t spot him.
‘Bastards,’ grumbles Manuel.
The gig is built of rough, strong wood, with sturdy wheels. Lucero is at the reins. His face is tense because he’s never been good with horses and can’t get them to slow down for the potholes in the unpaved road. His mother is gripping tightly onto the seat and bouncing up and down, but she’s chatting away happily because it’s a fresh and clear morning and the La Vega countryside in late summer displays that Chopinesque melancholy that does so much to console manic depressives like her.
With difficulty, Lucero manages to persuade the horses to pull off the track and into a copse of oaks and carob trees. At last, he brings them to a gentle trot. In the dense shade of the wood it is almost chilly. Lucero halts the gig at the foot of a sunlit slope smothered in southernwood.
The gypsy Ramón lives in the outskirts of Chauchina, in a natural cave he lights with oil lamps.
‘And how on earth do you know this place?’ Vicenta asks.
‘Uncle Baldomero brought me here when I was three years old. When I grew up I came back many times. He is the best luthier in all Granada. Though he doesn’t even know the word.’
‘But son, there’s no need for him to know.’
Lucero pulls aside the curtain protecting the mouth of the cave.
‘Ramón!’
‘Come in, come in.’
‘I’ve brought my mother. Ramón, this is Vicenta.’
The cave reeks of smoke and fuel oil, on top of the smell of ash wood, thyme and sawdust, of vegetable stew and other aromas harder to decipher. A half-built guitar dozes on a kind of miniature carpenter’s table. There are unfinished guitars dotted all over, along with ebony and boxwood flutes, pigskin and calfskin tambourines, and other wonders. Lucero is enchanted, and picking up a tambourine he dances clumsily around his mother, who joins in the song:
Vestida de raso verde
desde abajo para arriba,
pandero lleva en sus manos,
ricos romances decía.
‘Ha! Your son’s quite the character,’ the gypsy Ramón chuckles.
The gypsy Ramón must be in his eighties. His eyes have become cracks hard to tell apart from his wrinkles. His nose hangs down at the sides like the lips of a Spanish Mastiff, and trembles when he exhales.
‘Here you are, Lucero. Custom-made just for you.’
With evident pride, Ramón passes Lucero a very small violin, no more than forty centimetres in length.
‘Just look at that thing!’ exclaims Vicenta.
‘Now let me play it for you,’ the luthier says.
And he sets about a swift and garrulous melody that fills the cave with the air of a circus. When he’s done, the bodies of the guitars around the walls sigh with a deep timbre. Ramón places the violin in a little sheepskin case and hands it to Vicenta.
‘You hold it, for your son and I must now settle our business, and we may come to blows.’
‘How much?’ asks Lucero.
‘Two hundred reales, and cheap at the price.’
‘Not even the large violins are worth that much.’
‘The small ones are harder to make. It’s all in the tuning.’
‘One hundred,’ counters Lucero.
‘One hundred and fifty.’
‘There’s no dividing that amount. One hundred and forty, which makes seven duros.’
‘You want to pay with duros?’ The gypsy thinks for a bit. ‘So, ten duros.’
‘But then we’re back at two hundred!’
Vicenta looks from one to the other, open-mouthed.
‘Well, however much you reckon.’
Lucero counts out eight duros and places them in the gypsy’s hand, who checks them with a broad smile, his teeth inexplicably perfect.
‘But now you have to tell me what duende is,’ Lucero implores him.
‘Not that again, my boy. Duende either comes or it doesn’t. You can’t explain it. It’ll come for you one day, I’m sure of it.’
On the way back to Asquerosa, as they bounce along the dirt roads in the gig, Vicenta breaks her silence to ask:
‘So, what’s all this about duende?’
‘It must be like explaining springtime to an Eskimo. Uncle Baldomero couldn’t tell me anything about it either.’
‘Well, I reckon you should forget about duende and what have you and study harder, or you’ll end up the worst lawyer in Granada. A public defender, if you’re not careful.’
‘One can only hope!’ Lucero smiles.