The Snow Gypsy(37)
She would have to hide the newspaper from Cristóbal. No point in making him even grumpier than he already was by flaunting her plans. She’d thought that winning the competition would lift his spirits—but since leaving Provence he seemed to have sunk into a black mood. Perhaps he was more worried about Juanita and the baby than he was letting on. She hoped so. It was about time he started taking his responsibilities as a husband and father more seriously.
While the woman in front of her was being served, Lola’s mind drifted back to her own childhood. She wondered what it would have been like to have two parents. Her mother had always told her and Amador that their father had died when they were too young to remember him. Growing up at their grandfather’s forge in Capileira, they had been happy enough—until the war came. At twelve years old she was too young to realize that the shooting of her grandfather meant that the writing was on the wall for the whole family. Nor could she have known that the lie her mother had told would be revealed in the most horrific way possible.
“?Qué quiere?” What would you like?
The baker derailed her train of thought. He was looking at her with a crooked smile. No doubt he thought her simple or slightly deranged, standing there at the front of the queue with her head in the clouds.
“Un pan grande y cuatro galletas,” she said quickly.
She tucked the loaf of bread and the four biscuits into her bag and set off down the street to find a place to buy a newspaper. The thought of poring over the property section with Rose set off a frisson of excitement. It banished the unbearable thoughts that had descended in the bakery to the dark corner of her mind where they lurked like savage dogs, always trying to escape. The banishment was only temporary, of course. Memories like that could never be held at bay for long. But having a dream helped. A couple of weeks ago, it had seemed no more than a fantasy—but winning the competition had made it less of a dream and more of a tangible reality.
The man in the newspaper shop gave her a withering look when she handed over the money. Was it that obvious she was a Gypsy? Clearly he was wondering what a person like her was doing buying a paper. She glanced at the big black letters at the top of the page. El Correo. Yes, that was the right name—the one Rose had told her to get.
When she got outside she hurried off down the street. Without speaking a word, the man in the shop had made her feel degraded, humiliated. She sank onto a bench in an ornamental garden with a fountain. Beyond the rainbow splash of the water, she could see the terracotta rooftops of houses and the ancient tower of a church. And beyond that, green rolling hills dotted with poplar trees.
Nieve must never feel the way he made me feel.
The words rang out in her head as if she’d spoken them aloud. Over those hills lay Madrid. A place where she and Nieve could shake off the past. A place where no one would whisper the word gitanas when they went into a shop. She glanced at the newspaper on her lap. It wasn’t just about moving to a new place. What Rose was teaching them held magical power—the power to give Nieve dreams of her own.
The Gypsy wagons rolled away from Segovia, traveling south through the province of Castilla-La Mancha, across great plains dotted with vineyards, castles, and windmills. The sun beat down on the canvas roof, making it too hot for Rose and Nieve to stay inside. Instead they sat on either side of Lola, where the forward movement of the wagon created a welcome breeze. Rose had made two columns on a piece of paper, writing Spanish words on the right and their equivalent in kalo on the left so that Lola and Nieve could see the different patterns the letters made.
“What’s sleep in your language?” Rose asked.
“Sobar,” Nieve replied. “That’s Mama’s nickname for my uncle—instead of Cristóbal she calls him Cris Sobar.”
Rose wrote the word down, concentrating on keeping the pencil steady as they bumped over a pothole in the road. She was past the stage of wincing inside every time his name was mentioned, but she still didn’t trust herself to look Nieve or Lola in the eye when it happened.
“So dormir in Spanish, sobar in kalo.” She held up the paper for them to see. “Think of another word, Nieve.”
“Chungo,” Nieve replied.
It was a word Rose had heard Cristóbal mutter under his breath more than once in the past few days. It wasn’t like any Romany word she’d ever come across. “What does it mean?”
“Malo,” Nieve replied. Bad. She glanced sideways at Rose. It was only a fleeting look, but Rose got the distinct feeling that the child had sensed what was going on and was testing her out.
“Those are very different sounding, aren’t they?” Once again, she bent over the paper, hoping her voice wouldn’t betray her. The thought that Nieve might have even the slightest suspicion of what had happened was unbearable. She had grown very close to the child during the journey from France. She had even begun to fantasize that Nieve could be the child her brother’s fiancée had been expecting.
In all their time together over the past few days, Lola had never spoken about the fact that Nieve was adopted—and Rose hadn’t let on that Cristóbal had told her. She longed to know more about Nieve’s story, but she sensed that it was buried deep with Lola’s painful memories of leaving her mountain home.
The evening of the next day was their last one on the road. They camped a few miles south of the city of Jaén, in a grove of Aleppo pines on the slopes of the Sierra Mágina—the Mountain of Spirits.