HAVE A HEART
Take a jigger of gin and a pony each of Swedish Punsch, fresh lime juice and imported grenadine. Shake the ingredients together in a well-iced glass, before straining. A drink of sharpness and spice.
Ifrahim used to have a phrase, for whenever I was cowardly or hesitant about something. ‘Ale,’ he would say – for he knew I preferred to be called that, rather than Alejandra – ‘Ale, hacer de tripas corazón.’
Ale, make a heart out of your guts.
I first remember him saying it when I was little, perhaps six or seven.
I had tripped over in the yard and was crying to see blood on my knee.
He sat me on the kitchen table, washed it off and told me solemnly to make a heart out of my guts.
I didn’t understand him fully, and had wondered at the idea of my guts squirming up through my body to wrap around my heart.
My heart must be too soft, I thought. That’s why it needed the guts to protect it.
It was good advice to a child growing up in that place.
Ifrahim was the inn’s cook, and he had been there almost as long as I.
Mama Morales hired him after she found out that María, the old cook, had been cheating her on prices and pocketing the difference.
I don’t know what happened to María. People said that Morales paid a man to break her hands, but that might just be rumour.
Ifrahim was as different to María as could be.
Where she was loud and sour he was quiet and gentle.
He wore a faded red shirt and never opened his eyes too wide, as if it hurt to look at things.
No one was sure where he came from, with his deep brown skin that seemed almost silver beneath, and his wiry, pepper-black beard.
I once heard him say that his father was from Zanzibar, and was a sailor.
One of the girls told me that his mother had been a fine French lady from Réunion Island, but that he had been given up, and raised by a ‘grandmother’ in Lisbon.
Any of that was enough to make people at the inn sneer at him, especially Morales.
For all her defiance of others, she was a fierce Spaniard, and a proud cordobesa, and that was why she despised me, I think, for my aimless blood.
Everyone wondered why she had hired Ifrahim, until we tasted his food.
I was just a child, but I still remember it, that first meal.
He served salmorejo; poor man’s food, made from bread too hard and tomatoes too soft to be of use.
But Ifrahim’s salmorejo tasted different.
Beneath the hot blue sky, that cool soup calmed and kindled at once; it bit with acid and licked with oil, rewarded us with salty little stars of ham.
We wiped the bowls of every last trace, and all the while Ifrahim sat at the door of the kitchen, smiling quietly and shelling hard-boiled eggs.
There was never any question of his employment, after that.
Later, I found out that Ifrahim had a bad heart and had been thrown out of the Foreign Legion on account of it.
Sometimes, in the night he’d cry out and we would rush to where he slept in the storeroom to find him sweating and clutching at his chest. We would steady him, and spoon him oil and milk of magnesia until the racing began to slow, until his heart stopped trying to escape through his ribs.
Perhaps it was an ill fit, too big or tender to last in our world.
Anything good I took from the inn, I took from Ifrahim. I wouldn’t be here now, speaking, if not for him. It was he who spoke for me, when not another soul would have.
I should explain. There are things you must be wondering about me, about the inn. You must have already guessed, with the little you know about her, that Mama Morales would not have kept me there for free.
Morales took guests and served meals and charged peasants and farmers to water and stable their mules while they were in town.
She also kept girls, and that was where most of the inn’s money came from.
About half a dozen year-round, who had to double up and share their beds with newcomers during the busy months.
Most didn’t last too long, a year perhaps, or two.
There were only five people who were constant: the old groom called Antonio who barely spoke, Ifrahim, when he came, Mama Morales and Elena and me.
Elena was Morales’ daughter.
People said she had hidden herself in Morales’ belly until it was too late to be rid of her, that even when Morales tried, the little thing wouldn’t be budged.
She was a year older than me. Morales told me that if she hadn’t still been paying a woman to breastfeed Elena when I came along, I would’ve starved and died, for she certainly would not have fed me.
That was Morales for you.
The girls looked after Elena and me, and when we were old enough Morales sent us to school in the mornings, saying that she didn’t want ignorant lumps in her house who couldn’t figure a bill or read a name.
The rest of the time we skivvied. Elena got an easier time of it, because she had fairer skin than me, and nice hands, and Morales didn’t want them spoiled by too much sun or hard work.
It wouldn’t make a difference to mine, she observed.
I didn’t mind. Kitchen and stable, courtyard and storeroom, those were my domain.
I didn’t like to venture up the stairs too often, on to the wooden balcony that surrounded the central yard, where the rooms were.
If I did, it was only to collect chamber pots or laundry.
I wasn’t fond of the sickly stab of violet perfume, covering the reek of men’s sweat and cologne, or the way they always forgot that the inn leaked sound like a sieve and we could all hear their noises, even through a closed door.
I thought they were foolish, the men. Still, I couldn’t help but watch as they strolled uncaring along the corridor, their trousers half-buttoned and their jackets over their shoulders.
Something made me want to follow them, to walk as they did, out into the night.
There was a power in their lifted chins, in the way they paused at the edge of the street to light a cigarette, and though I imitated them in secret, I knew it was a power that could never be mine.
Elena spent more time upstairs than me, especially during the day, before business started.
Then, she would let the girls fuss over her and make her up with waxy lipstick and powder, while I played with the kittens in the warm stink of the stables, or helped Ifrahim among the old cooking fat and fresh peelings of the kitchen.
But at night, the pair of us shared a bed, in the smallest wedge-shaped room under the eaves, lulled to sleep by the creaking of the gate, the snorting of horses and the noises of the girl working the room next door.
It went on like that, slow winters and busy summers, morning lessons and chores and the smell of Elena’s hair against my nose at night, until my thirteenth year. That was when everything changed.
It happened during the feria, the festival of our Senora de la Salud: Our Lady of Health.
Morales always laughed and said we should rename her Our Lady of the Health Inspector.
It was May, our busiest month, and the city was overrun.
People came in from all over to drink and dance at the festival; farmers, miners, factory workers, even people from as far away as Extremadura.
As a child, I’d been excited by the feria. Elena and I would run to the river to see the old, striped canvas tents go up, to watch the gitanos arrive to entertain the crowds with their wailing, roaring songs and their feverish guitars and clacking heels.
We’d have performances at the inn too, whether we wanted them or not.
Motorcars from Granada and Seville would bring the swells, slumming it in fine clothes that they would ruin with sweat and wine.
They’d drink and weep and turn their starveling eyes on the girls and the gitanos, and the air would become raw with smoke and lust and gut on wood, and by the end of the first evening, the whole of Córdoba would have lost its mind.
On the night it happened, there were four of them; four men determined to drink the deep wells of each other’s pockets dry.
They were from Jaén, and I wondered why they should have come all the way to Córdoba, when they had their own feria at home.
If I’d looked closer, I would’ve found the answer in their indifferent laughter, in their loosened clothes, in the way they sucked on their cigars and put their boots on the chairs and never once lowered their voices.
They were here precisely because this was not their home; here, they had the freedom to act how they pleased.
The four of them had already spent a great deal of money when they asked to see Morales.
Their request, whatever it was, did not take long to convey, for she soon came weaving through the crowded courtyard towards the kitchen door, where Elena and I were shirking our table-clearing duties, laughing as we watched a large gitano woman try to sing her throat right out of her mouth. We jumped up when Morales approached.
‘Go and wash and put your Sunday clothes on,’ she told us.
We stared at her. Elena was silent. I was the one to ask why.
‘Because I say so.’ She turned and beckoned over one of the older girls, ‘Caterina!’ I did not hear what Morales murmured in her ear.
Was it the heat of the night that made Caterina’s hand so slick in mine? ‘Why must we wash?’ I asked her, as she pulled us up the stairs. ‘No one is looking at us.’
‘Someone’s always looking,’ she said, and gave us both a push into our room.
We did as we were told, with a cloth and pitcher of water.
Grumbling, I scrubbed my face and neck, my underarms, and did Elena’s while she shrugged into her blouse.
She had breasts now, mostly, whereas I only had vague swellings that sometimes hurt in the night.