While they were discussing her, Imperio walked into the studio with her mother, followed by her brother Dionisio and another youth, each carrying a guitar; behind them came attendant nymphs with sisters or mothers, the inevitable chorus that keeps time with hand clapping, foot patting, and encourages the performance with cries of ollé, ollé, and andar.
The two studios had been made miraculously neat and tidy. They smelled of turpentine and beeswax. Gil and Cisera had been at work half the day preparing for the fandango. They had spread two tables in the inner studio where J. worked; one with tea and cake for us, the other with sandwiches, sliced sausages, and manzanilla, a thin, white wine, for the performers.
First we had songs; the curious long-drawn chanted wailing songs of Andalusia that have more of the East than of the West in them. To our ears they were a trifle monotonous but to the Spaniards, to the Andalusians especially they were tremendously moving. Dionisio, a strange-looking youth of eighteen, with odd slate-colored eyes and a lovely smile, threw back his head and wailed out couplet after couplet.
“This I tell to you; to see my mother, I would give the finger from my hand—but the finger I need the most to use.
“My stepmother beat me because I prayed for my mother; my father turned me out of doors. Where can I go to be a little warm?”
There was a shadow walked behind me. It was the spirit of my mother. It said to me, “to give thee life, I gave my life.”
“Ay de mi!” cried Imperio and shivered.
“I am in prison on account of a bad woman. Tell the jailer when I am dead not to unbar the door, for even dead, I would not see her.”
“Virgin!” sighed Dionisio’s mother.
Imperio repeated the words slowly to me, line by line. I can see her now! her burning green eyes fixed on mine, her face that made all the other faces seem expressionless in comparison. She was at once immortally young and immemorially old. Her face was young, the spirit that looked from those marvellous eyes was immemorially old. The grace of her wild chaste dance is world old and has come down from the ages. I despair of making any one imagine her! Small, lithe, graceful as a young tigress from the jungle, now laughing like a child, now brooding like the world spirit.