Free Rose for Winter by Laurie Lee Page A

widowed sister who served the food; and another sister, the fat, no-good Caridad, whose only value to the establishment lay in the fact that she had a butcher-lover who sold them bull-meat cheap. There were also two worn-down servant girls: Concha, a good-natured, sentimental dwarf; and La Sorda, a red-cheeked, short-sighted, half-deaf girl from the hills. These last two slept in cupboards behind the kitchen and spent their days in scrubbing the house, washing the dishes, peeling potatoes, running for wine, and fleeing from the embraces of the students.
    On that afternoon of Christmas Eve, as we sat down for lunch in ‘The House of Peace’, the students and carters were in holiday mood and calling for second helpings. Elvira stood in the kitchen doorway, surveying them.
    â€˜You’ll get no more,’ she said. ‘One plateful’s enough, and one is all you’ll have.’
    â€˜Go on,’ they shouted. ‘Even the cockroaches here eat better than we do.’
    â€˜You eat like kings,’ she said.
    â€˜Ay,’ muttered a carter, ‘one meal here, and by five o’clock we’re as empty as street-thieves.’
    Elvira, keeping up a running battle with her tongue, wiped the grease from her hands and descended upon them. Weaving gracefully among the tables, she swept up their plates and drove them beaten into the street. When she brought us our steaks, she said: ‘When you’ve finished, go and sleep, for you won’t sleep much tonight.’
    We asked her why.
    â€˜Tonight is Noche Buena,’ she said. ‘In Granada no one sleeps on such a night. All the world goes to the streets. There will be walking and singing all through the town, with pom-poms and bombas and radidas and bonfires – stupendous noise all night. You wait. You will be much diverted.’
    She asked us if we had made any special arrangements, and we said no.
    â€˜Then you must eat with us,’ she said. ‘At nine o’clock we have a big feast here, with all the family at a long table. There will be wine and butter-cakes and all you can eat. The grandmother invites you, and so does Don Porfino.’
    So we accepted gladly, and went out into the streets and found the shops making their last festive fling, with dolls of cut paper and rings of sugared cake for the children. Peasants were coming in from the country, driving flocks of turkeys before them, or carrying bunches of squawking fowls slung over their shoulders. In the market we bargained for a fat live cockerel and sent him back to the ‘House of Peace’ as a contribution to the feast.
    But we did not sleep: there was too much going on. Broody-Granada seemed to be shaking out its feathers and gathering strength for a night of riot People were hurrying from the market with wine in their pockets and carrying hens by the neck like umbrellas. By the cold coming of evening bright strings of braziers began to appear along the pavements, surrounded by squatting gypsies. With fiendish faces flickering over their fires, they were selling bombas and rattles to add to the noise of the night. The bombas were different to any others we had seen – earthenware pots, slashed bright with savage paint and sealed at the top with a drum-skin. The skin was pierced with an upright cane which gave forth hollow growls when you stroked it. The rattles were loose tins nailed to sticks, all richly coloured in reds and greens and purples. Such instruments, in the right hands, could fill the air with fine barbaric sounds, dark and devilish as any jungle. As night fell, we bought one of each, and walked through the rapidly crowding streets adding our lot to the din.
    Granada, sealed among its mountains, began to stir and glow with a special enchantment, as though it were the only city in the world to rejoice at this time. It seemed to be caught in the throes of some local miracle, some imminent wonder to be revealed only here. It was Christmas