The Snow Gypsy(41)
“Why are you doing that?” Rose’s curiosity got the better of her. This time her voice was a little steadier.
Juanita glanced at the sky. “The heat of the sun will bring out the smell,” she said. “It drives away any snakes that might come near.”
Rose nodded. Bill Lee’s sisters had talked about using garlic to keep away vampires. And it reminded her of something her aunt Ruth—a cousin of her mother—had told her when she was a little girl. Aunt Ruth’s brother, who had been a pearl trader, said the pearl fishers of Aden, in the Persian Gulf, strewed garlic in front of their shacks to keep away the great water serpents. Strange, Rose thought, that this Spanish Gypsy mother was using it in the same way.
Nieve appeared with the lemonade. Following in her wake were Juanita’s older children, Juan and Belén. Juan was heartbreakingly like his father. He had the same blue-green eyes. When he smiled Rose had to look away. Belén settled down on the rug next to Gunesh. Rose’s skirt was in the way, and as the child lifted the folds of cotton aside, she remarked on how pretty the fabric was.
It was a relief when Lola came out of the house to join them. There was nothing in the way she greeted Rose that suggested she had found out about Cristóbal’s dalliance.
A few minutes later the baby woke up and let out a lusty wail. Juanita scooped him up and headed toward the house.
“He’s hungry, I expect.” Lola watched Juanita disappear through the door. Turning to the children, she said, “Why don’t you take Gunesh for a walk?”
When they had gone she said, “Poor Juanita’s in a terrible state. We had some awful news this morning. Yesterday a baby girl was taken to be baptized—the daughter of a friend of ours—and she never returned.”
Rose shook her head, mystified. “You mean she died? In the church?”
“No, she didn’t die—she was taken.”
“Taken?” Rose echoed. “By whom?”
“By the authorities, we think. The parents don’t know. They weren’t there. But that’s what people are saying.”
“But . . .” Rose trailed off, trying to make sense of it. “How could the parents not have been there—at their child’s christening?”
Now it was Lola’s turn to look puzzled. “Is that what happens in your country? The mother and father take the baby to church? Well, it’s different here. The parents stay at home. The godparents come and collect the baby and bring it back when the ceremony is over. That’s what’s supposed to happen. But not yesterday. They never brought her back. Juanita says her friends were told they’ll never see their daughter again.”
“Why would the authorities do that?” Rose wondered if the parents had been accused of some crime. She knew from her time with the English Gypsies that they were always afraid of being accused of any bad thing that might happen in a neighborhood—whether they were responsible or not.
“Because she’s a little gitana.” Lola sucked in a breath. “A rojo child.”
“A red? Her father fought in the Civil War?”
“No—he was too young. His elder brother was a partisan, I think. But it’s not that. Not really. It’s about the government taking charge of children they consider to be born into the wrong kind of family. We come into that category. People are saying that General Franco has spies in every city. The church is sending people to call at homes like ours. They pretend to be interested in our religious beliefs, but really they’re nosing around. And the next thing you know, the baby disappears.”
Lola gazed into the distance, her eyes narrowing as she took in the honey-colored ramparts of the Alhambra. “The tourists have no idea. They only see the beauty. But Granada is a wicked, sinister place. It was bad enough during the war—but it’s getting worse. Much worse.”
“Where do they take the babies?” Rose pulled her shawl tight around her. It wasn’t cold. But what Lola had described chilled her to the core. She pictured Juanita, tucking cloves of garlic under the mattress of Rafaelito’s cradle. Clearly there was something much worse than snakes lurking out there.
“They send them to families the government approves of so they’ll grow up as payos, not Gypsies. To save the race. That’s what General Franco says.”
It was horribly familiar. Like Hitler all over again. Rose was only too aware of Franco’s Nazi sympathies. But she had never imagined that the evil doctrine of racial purity would outlive Hitler; that in a time of supposed peace, babies would be snatched from their mothers because of their kawlo rat. Their dark blood.
“It’s not only the babies they’re taking.” Lola turned to Rose, her eyes full of foreboding. “I heard they took nine-year-old twins while we were in France. They said they were too old to be adopted, so they sent the boy to a monastery and the girl to a convent.”
Rose stared back, stunned into silence. So it was not just Rafaelito who was in danger. Juan and Belén could be taken, too. And Nieve. Darling Nieve.
“The sooner we can move away, the better,” Lola said. “No one knows us in Madrid. We’ll get a place far away from the Gypsy quarter. Nieve will go to school while I look for work.”
Rose nodded. No wonder Lola was so keen to swap the taverns of Granada for the film studios of the capital. No wonder she had embraced the idea of learning to read and write with such unbounded enthusiasm. Education was a passport to anonymity, a way of shaking off the tags that marked her out to the authorities.