CHAPTER 47

The only prayers Soleá knew by heart were the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary. She made the rest up to suit the occasion: “Virgen del Carmen, patron saint of sailors, save me from this shipwreck” or “Sacred Heart of Jesus, have a heart,” prayers that were hardly liturgical but truly sincere, because she wasn’t the kind of person who thinks of Saint Barbara only in a thunderstorm. No, Soleá thanked God every day for the good things in her life: her mother, her grandmother, her siblings, the fifty members of her extended family, her colleagues at Librarte, her work, her flat in Madrid, and even the spicy potatoes they made in the bar on the corner. And to this list she now added Atticus Craftsman’s green eyes when he stared at her back.

She carried on up the steep little street to Dolores’s cave, praying under her breath all the way, oblivious of the fine rain, like angels’ tears, that was falling and making her hair wet and frizzy, soaking the hem of her long skirt and her ankles. She asked the Virgin Mary—because you’re a woman and you’ll understand better than the others—to help her find her way out of the impasse of her love for Atticus Craftsman, that pale, clumsy Englishman who wasn’t at all religious, which the poor thing couldn’t help, because, you see, Virgin Mary, he was born into a family of agnostic Protestants, although Granny Remedios had managed to pretty much convince him that heaven existed when she told him it was like having tea with Soleá for all eternity.

Up until that moment, Soleá had done everything she could to avoid opening the doors to her heart. They were locked shut, surrounded by crocodile-infested water, defended by an army of prejudices and customs that would be tough to dismantle now that she had fed them so fervently. And yet, with every step she took through the rain, a tower or a battlement fell, the drawbridge was lowered, offering him a way to get into the castle, the heart of darkness, where she was waiting for him, asleep, or rather, unconscious, unaware that only his kiss could save her, only his love could redeem her, only his company could be her heaven.

The cave was firmly closed. Atticus Craftsman was sleeping beside the only window, next to the door. Soleá knocked once, twice, three times, waited, and knocked again.

At last she heard the sound of scraping metal—oh, he was so clumsy!—and then the lock clicked, the door opened, and a warm darkness seeped out, carrying with it the smell of the tourists’ cigarettes, spilled wine, the spoils of the night before.

“Soleá,” said Atticus, surprised, his hair messed up, wearing only his undershirt and Ralph Lauren boxers.

“Granny Remedios is dying,” she blurted out. “She’s asked for you, she wants you to go there, she’s got a secret she wants to tell you before she dies.”

Atticus Craftsman’s reaction to that news was far from the cold response Soleá had expected. All of a sudden, he hugged her as if she was a life raft, crying inconsolably like a child, his tears soaking her hair. She was the granddaughter, the one who should have been in pieces, but instead she remained calm, stunned to find the man she secretly loved in her arms, unsure what to do or say in the face of such an outpouring.

“Your hands are freezing, míster,” she managed to whisper. “Put something on or you’ll catch cold.”

But because he carried on hugging her like a big brown bear and she didn’t really know what to do with her arms, which were hanging down by her sides, she decided to hug him back, but more in the way you hug a small boy than a boyfriend: with a touch of compassion and pity. Softly, to see if he would calm down so the two of them could set off down to the Heredias’ house, where Remedios was waiting for them in perfect health, anxious to cast the spell that she planned to use to sort out her granddaughter’s messy love life.

In fact, there was no need for the grandmother, or anyone else, for that matter, to intervene in this story of deception and disillusion. All they needed was for Soleá, there at the top of the hill, under the lintel of the cave door, to confess to Atticus Craftsman that she was crazy about him, despite being terrified by his English education, his addiction to Twinings Earl Grey, his vegetarianism, his slight limp that was a constant reminder of that fateful day on the Thames, his fierce father and his uptight mother, his aristocratic, antiquated, and cold Englishness, and his freezing-cold fingers, which that day at the beach had crawled over her back, her waist, and her belly button before coming to rest on the curve of her stomach.

“Come on, Míster Crasman, Granny Remedios is dying to see you.”

Atticus dried his face on the blond hairs of his forearm. He sniffed, ducked his head, and went into the cave. A couple of minutes later he emerged wearing a black shirt, black trousers, and a black belt, carrying a black umbrella, which he used to protect Soleá from the rain that was still falling on her wet hair.

If it wasn’t for his wheat-colored hair and the white skin of his neck and hands, anyone would have taken him for a true Gypsy. Because that was what Atticus Craftsman was becoming: He was becoming Tico from Dolores’s cave, the guy who played the guitar with all his heart and sang the saddest soleás in all of El Albaicín.

And so, slowly but surely, under the December rain, the two of them made their way to the Heredias’ house and went into the living room where the family was keeping watch over Remedios night and day so she wouldn’t be alone when God came for her.

“Granny,” said Atticus.

“Tico, my boy,” she replied from her deathbed. “Come close to me, here. And the rest of you, get out,” she ordered, echoing the words of Lola Flores: “If you love me, get out.”

The grandchildren, nephews, and nieces went off to eat bread rolls drizzled with olive oil and drink coffee. They left Remedios, Atticus, and Soleá alone, telling one another old secrets.

“Tell me, Tico,” began Remedios, “let’s see, why did you come to Granada?”

Atticus squirmed in his seat.

“I came to buy some poems,” he confessed. “Because I thought you were different, Granny, I thought you had some unpublished papers belonging to Federico García Lorca hidden in the attic and you were too ashamed to let anyone see them.”

“Ashamed of what, Tico?”

Now it was Soleá’s turn to squirm in her seat. She clearly remembered the morning at Librarte when she almost beat Atticus Craftsman to death for having insinuated that her grandfather might have been homosexual.

“That people might have thought your husband was . . .”

“That García Lorca’s thing was catching?” asked the old woman, her voice full of irony. “That they were lovers? But my boy, he gave me a child before we were even married and three more after the wedding . . . How could my husband have been gay, eh?”

“With difficulty,” he admitted.

At no point did Atticus switch his gaze from Remedios’s friendly face to her granddaughter’s vexed expression. Soleá was praying the earth would swallow her up.

“The thing is,” Remedios went on, “we needed a reason to bring you to Granada. That’s why we spun that yarn about the poems. Then we fell in love with you and didn’t want you to leave. So we kept stringing you along.”

Soleá felt as if she was suffocating. Apparently, her grandmother had just declared her love on her behalf. She had said, “We fell in love with you,” and nodded toward Soleá as she said it.

“But this time I was the one who lied to you,” Remedios confessed. “Because I was scared that my Soleá would go back to Madrid and you’d go back to England, and the two of you would go your separate ways. So I got into bed and told everyone I was dying.”

“You’re not dying, Granny?”

“No way, niño! I’m in better shape than you are.”

She couldn’t help letting out a little laugh as she said this last bit. Atticus leaped forward to kiss her wrinkled hands.

“But you scared me to death, Remedios! I believed every word!”

“I’m truly sorry, sweetie,” she replied, flattered. “I didn’t know you cared about me so much.”

Salty streaks left by the tears he had shed were still visible on the Englishman’s face, and his hands were still and cold as blocks of ice.

“But I can see that you really do care,” she went on. “And I think you’re the right person to trust with my secret. The part about me having a secret is true, and I don’t want to take it to the grave with me.”

“Granny,” Soleá protested from the foot of the bed, “don’t keep tricking Míster Crasman. We’ve pulled enough wool over his eyes already.”

“Shut up and listen, you!” said Remedios. “This secret concerns you too, the color of your eyes and the tone of your skin.”

Soleá looked fearfully at Atticus, and he returned a look full of curiosity. Soleá’s eyes were two blue beacons; her skin was the color of sand, and although she was tanned she was much fairer than her sisters and neighbors.

“You see, Soleá, you take after your great-grandfather. That’s why you’re so blond.”

“Blond” wasn’t exactly the word that Atticus would have used to describe the woman who had him under her spell. He would have said exotic, mestiza, mixed race. Dark hair and blue eyes, with tanned skin that looked peachy at times. But it was true. Compared to other women around her it was possible to describe her as blond. A different kind of blond from the Scandinavian variety, of course, a Sierra Nevada blond, which is something else entirely.

“Because you see, Tico, my boy,” said Remedios from among the bedclothes, “it turns out that my mother, when she married my father, was pregnant by another man. Only my father knew that. He’d loved her since he was a boy and cried when she went to serve in a big house in Granada because he thought the masters of the house would steal her. ‘Don’t go, Macarena, don’t go, if you go I’ll lose you,’ he said, but she went. She was a real handful, that Macarena, no one was going to tell her what to do. She went, she worked, and one day a friend of her employer’s son arrived, a young English guy who can’t have been much older than twenty and was already messed up because he’d fought in some war or other and was traumatized by what he’d seen. He used to scream at night and wake up bathed in sweat and tears. And my Macarena, God rest her soul, well, she let him convince her to sleep beside him, because he was scared, he said, of the ghosts of all those dead soldiers. So she slept with him and cured him of his demons and then, when she found out she was pregnant, she didn’t tell anyone, only my father. She went back to Camino del Monte, had her white wedding, went to live in Dolores’s cave, which before that was called Macarena’s cave, and my father gave her fourteen children, fifteen in total.”

“So, Granny,” said Soleá, “are you saying that my great-grandfather was English?”

“Yes. English. But not English from England, English from America. And he became really famous, that great-grandfather of yours.”

“Famous?”

“Well, that’s the whole point, you see,” she went on. “Why would I be telling you all this if he hadn’t got so famous. No one else knows about it, and until I met Tico I was ready to take the story to the grave with me.”

Atticus sat in stunned silence. From the date, from the man’s description and the location, he was sure he knew who Remedios was referring to.

“You already know who I’m talking about,” she guessed.

“Hemingway.”

“The very same.”

Just then, someone knocked at the door. Manuela, who was in the kitchen, rushed through the living room to answer it. She mumbled a good morning to the three of them, then turned the handle to let in whoever had come to pay their respects to the dying woman.

When she came back, she was as white as a ghost.

“Soleá, your boss, Berta, is at the door, and your friend María, with an English couple and a man who looks sort of like a police officer. Have you done something wrong, love?”