Cocktease at the Barre

Roser

Sant Roc de Serra is sixty kilometres from Barcelona and about ninety years. One church, one bar, a primary school that kept children until they were twelve and then put them on a bus to the institut in the valley town, forty minutes each way. In winter the cloud came down into the street and stayed there for weeks at a time, and everyone waited it out, and that was the whole of the entertainment.

Roser Puig grew there the way a plant grows in a room with one window.

Senyoreta Bosch had danced at the Liceu and now taught eleven girls in a room over a hardware shop. She had come back at twenty-six and never said why.

She became the school teacher and an important institution for the village, even after she retired thirty-five years later. Everyone under forty in Sant Roc de Serra had learned to read from her, and a good number of them still brought her their letters — the bank, the Generalitat, the insurance — and stood in the doorway while she read them out and said what to write back. Men of fifty called her Senyoreta Bosch. Not one of them could have told you her first name.

They talked about her all the same, and it came back to the same thing every time. She had never married. No husband, no children, nobody in that house but her. The light was on at two, on at three, and what does a woman do at that hour. The first Saturday of the month she took the eight o'clock bus down and the last one back, and nobody had ever found out what for; the opera, she had told Montse Ferrer once, and Montse had been repeating it ever since. At Corpus the women knelt in the street doing the flowers and Senyoreta Bosch stayed indoors, every year. Her mother died in March and she was out of black by September.

None of it had ever been said to her face.

Some of the women had another version, in their own kitchens, with the door shut. Carme Bassols had nursed her husband nine years. For thirty before that he had beaten her. At his funeral she came out with it in front of four people and did not take it back: that Senyoreta Bosch had known what she was doing.

Roser was eight when her parents sent her to ballet class, to get her out of the house for an hour. She was nine when Senyoreta Bosch started teaching her separately.

She taught her what she had been taught herself. The same exercises in the same order at the same ages. Saturdays first, then Sunday mornings, finally each day. She never took anything for it. None of the other girls got even a Saturday alone.

Roser understood what that meant before anyone said it to her. She was good.

Not all of it was work. She had the instep, the turnout, the long neck, and Senyoreta Bosch had seen all three when she was eight. The rest was Senyoreta Bosch's thumb between her shoulder blades until it hurt. It was a leg held at ninety until the other one shook and she was told to hold it anyway. It was blisters that opened and closed and opened again on the same two toes. By twelve she stood like that without knowing she was doing it. Slouching took effort now.

Her school marks held. That was what kept the dancing going: her mother had said once, early on, that it could continue as long as school did not suffer, and school did not suffer. Her father heard what Senyoreta Bosch had told the priest about his daughter, and never asked to see her dance.

By thirteen she was doing three hours a day on top of the bus, in a room that smelled of turpentine from the shop below, while the other girls did only an hour on Tuesdays. Roser could stand next to her best friend Núria Prat in front of the mirror and see the difference in the arch, in the turnout, in the way her back held a line Núria's would not hold past the second bar of the music.

She thought she knew why. She had put the hours in and Núria Prat had not, and that was all of it. She had never once counted the price of the shoes, or thought about the fact that nobody had ever needed her behind a counter. She had a woman who had danced at the Liceu teaching her for nothing, and she took it the way you take the weather. The instep she had been born with never came up at all.

The church steps were where the boys of the village sat until they were old enough to go to the bar instead. The stairs down from the ballet room came out into the street opposite them. She had been walking past since she was eight, a small girl with her hair pulled back going up to her class, and none of it had ever had anything to do with her.

One April around her fifteenth birthday one of them stopped talking in the middle of a sentence when she passed. He was a year above her and she could not have said his name. He went red from the collar up and could not find his way back into the talk. One of the others laughed at him. She gave him a confused look and went on, and at the corner she turned round and he still had his head down.

She was still the girl with her bag and her hair up. She had not done anything.

It happened again the following week, and again after that, and by the summer she could have named the ones who went quiet when she came down. People had been telling her mother for years what a beautiful daughter she had. Núria Prat was pretty too and had some admirers, but she never drew the attention Roser did. Three hours a day in the room over the hardware shop gave Roser something more: the way she stood, the way she came down those stairs without looking at her feet, the way she presented herself without a thought.

One of the older boys told everybody she was nothing special. But when she came into his father's bakery, he had to serve her at the till and couldn't get a word out.

With time she learned to spread her attention thin. Ricard Nogué carried her bag from the stop to her door most of that winter and she let him, but was the same with him whether they were alone or in the group. Jordi Camps gave her a lighter she had seen in a shop the week before and liked, and she thanked him with a big smile and a hug, but never mentioned it again.

She liked some of them well enough. Pau Riera made her laugh. Marc Vidal was easy to be around and asked for nothing back, which she noticed and thought rare. She was not working against any of them. She simply did not want what they wanted, and had found out that wanting it back was not required — that she could take the bag carried, the lighter, and give nothing in return but being pleasant about it, and the supply did not stop.

When one of them pushed, she had a way of handling it with nonchalance. Ricard asked her to hike up to Puig de la Serra. She said she couldn't that Saturday and didn't say why, and he didn't dare ask again. Jordi tried to hold her hand at the bus stop and she moved it to point at something down the road and kept talking, the same as she would have with anyone. Neither of them left thinking he'd been turned down outright.

Over the coming year a group of boys formed around Roser and stayed. She went about with them, laughed and talked, enjoyed the attention and the small gifts, and gave nothing back but her smile and whatever they chose to read into it.

Ricard Nogué had carried Marta Solé's bag until the winter he started carrying Roser's. He never gave Marta a reason. She complained to the other girls that Roser took it for granted and never thought what it did to anybody else. Jordi Camps had spent that spring at Empar Riu's side, and the village had them halfway to a couple. Empar was standing next to him in the shop when he bought the lighter, and did not ask who it was for. The following week Roser had it. In the months that followed, others found out that attention is a limited resource.

Most of the girls had decided she was arrogant and selfish, and by the summer they had stopped including her in their activities. And as she let none of the boys get any closer, she stayed on her own. It took Roser some time to notice but she decided it did not bother her. It left the afternoons free. She trained more, and her looks became a kind of work as well: the hairdresser in the town, her nails done every three weeks. Her circle of admirers was delighted, and did what they could to help it along: creams, things for her hair, once a lipstick.

Núria Prat paid no attention to the gossip and stayed her only close friend. But Roser grew distant from her too. She was uneasy in Núria's company in a way she could not account for. She kept off anything to do with what she felt. After sport she changed facing the wall, and could not have said which week she had started. She had no name for it and nobody to ask, and she waited for it to lift, the way the village waited out the cloud.

Three years later in Roser's last spring at school, the admirers had gone. They had waited about as long as boys wait, and finally went on, one at a time, on promises she had never made and never quite refused.

One time in March, Senyoreta Bosch stopped a lesson in the middle. In almost ten years this had never happened.

Senyoreta Bosch stood with one hand on the barre and spoke in one go, the way a person says something they have carried up the stairs for weeks — that she had taught Roser everything she had been taught herself, that there was nothing after it, and that she was sorry it had taken her until March to say so. She said it to the mirror, where Roser was standing. Roser stayed in fifth.

Roser had known since the autumn that the teaching would end with school. She had lain awake more than once thinking about her coming life — pondering what was waiting for her. Her father was a lawyer and the law had never been put to her as a question: the Selectivitat in June, the faculty in October, a room found through somebody he knew. She had never talked to him about her future. There was nothing, she thought, to say to a man who in ten years had never once asked to see her dance.

Then Senyoreta Bosch talked about Barcelona, the Institut del Teatre, up on Montjuïc. What the audition consisted of and what they looked at in the first minute of it. What the forms wanted and by when. What became of the ones who finished: the company in the city that took two or three a year, and the ones who went north, because Germany keeps a house in every second town and holds auditions in the spring. She said it the way she said everything, without raising her voice, and Roser stood in the middle of the floor with her heart going and said nothing at all. The auditions were held in June and so was the Selectivitat.

Neither of them raised the topic again for weeks.

Before Roser went down that afternoon Senyoreta Bosch told her her first name. Assumpta. Roser said it back once, thanked her for the class the way she did every week, and went down the stairs. She did not go home. She walked up past the church, where nobody was sitting, and out to where the road turns above the village, and stood there until it got cold.

Senyoreta Bosch continued her classes afterwards and no one else would recognise anything, but Roser knew she was being prepared for the audition. Occasionally, she asked Senyoreta Bosch something after training, about the forms, in which quarter to look for rooms.

Her parents came for the Acte de graduació. Her mother had the camera and used the film to the end of the roll, and Roser stood where she was put. Her father shook hands with the director, and with the tutor, and with the father of a boy who was going to Medicine, and stood a long while over the orla with his glasses pushed down, finding her among the others.

The car was in the street when they got back, a small white Seat four years old with the tank filled. Her mother was the one who said what it was for: so she could come up at weekends once the faculty started in October, so it would not be the bus every time. Roser thanked them both and meant it, more or less, and stood in the street with the keys in her hand.

The festa major is the sixteenth of August and it is the same every year. Two days before, the men string the lights across the square. An orchestra comes up from the coast, five of them in matching jackets, and plays pasdobles until midnight. Married men dance the first one with their wives and stand at the bar for the rest of it, and the young ones stand at the bar from the start.

Roser came into the square at half past ten.

The boys sitting at the festa bar saw her first. One by one they stopped talking, and in the quiet everybody heard her heels on the cobbles. Two years they had carried her bag. Two years they had held doors and waited at the stop and watched her crouch to do up a boot. Tonight they understood what they had lost.

Her hair fell to the small of her back, heavy, and swung with each step. Fuchsia at the crown, going lighter down the length, pale pink by the ends, the waves of it loose and spun like candyfloss. It caught the strung lights in bands as it moved, dark then bright. It brushed her bare skin as she walked.

The dress hung from a band at her nape. Nothing else held it. No seam that showed, no fastening, nothing but the band and the pull of the jersey against her. It clung to her with any movement. It opened in a V to the soft swell of her breasts, outlining her nipples through thin fabric. Behind, it was cut away down to the small dents at the base of her spine, exposing the clean line of her spine between the ridges of muscle the barre had built. Two hands laid flat would have measured her waist.

Sweat had come out along her collarbones in small bright catches. It ran into the hollow of her throat, then down following the V until the fabric took it.

Ricard Nogué said something to no one. Jordi Camps had gone wet through the back of his shirt. Quim Serra had a comment for every girl who crossed that square and had had for fifty years. Tonight his mouth was too dry for it.

The girls looked because the boys had stopped moving. They read the dress in a second. Marta Solé turned her glass by the stem, and did not drink from it, and did not look away.

Roser stopped on the cobbles. She stood straight up out of the hips the way she had stood since she was twelve, chin level, shoulders open. She looked round the square, and then past all of it, at the top of the road where it turns above the village.

Pau Riera approached her first. He asked for a dance the way he asked for everything, as a joke, so a no wouldn't cost him anything. She assumed position before he finished asking. When his hand slid an inch lower on her back, she brought it back up without missing a step, without a word. When the number ended she was already smiling past him.

Ricard Nogué got the next one. He tried to pull her in on the turn. She turned out of his hands instead and came back a half-step further than she'd left. Jordi got the one after that and asked her straight out if she wanted to walk down to the bench behind the school house when the music stopped. She laughed as if he'd told her a joke and didn't answer it.

After midnight the orchestra changed their tunes and Roser walked over to Núria Prat by the tables. She put a hand on her arm for a second and sat with her for a minute and did not say anything. Núria thought nothing of it until the next morning.

Roser placed a letter on the kitchen table of her parents' house, four lines on a page out of a school notebook, and it had taken her twenty minutes. That she was well. That they were not to worry. That she would write when she had an address. That she thanked them for the car. There was no Barcelona in it, no Institut del Teatre, no reason of any kind.

Then she went up the stairs over the hardware shop one last time, in the dark, and put eleven pages under the door. They had taken her a week and it started at the head of the first page with the name Assumpta.

She drove out past the church with the noise of the square still filling the night and the steps empty. At the top of the road, where it turns above the village, she stopped and looked in the mirror, and there was nothing in it to correct, and she went on down the other side.

Rose

The mirror reflected the pale morning light that filled the room from the high windows facing the street. Coming early, as was her habit, Roser had the place to herself. One casement stood open letting in the cool morning air, and with it came Poble Sec's wakening — the shutters rattling up on Blai, the street coming to life, the smell of coffee drifting up to the third floor, where the room was hers until Professor Andreu Callís came to run the primer curs through Dansa Clàssica. Rose, as she introduced herself to anyone, worked her feet through a slow tendu, watching herself in the light.

Roser watched the room filling slowly in the mirror while working through her routine. Mercè came shortly after her, as always, dropped her bag hard enough to announce herself, and set into an arabesque with an extension Roser envied outright; Mercè was the one girl in the room she measured herself against and came up short. The rest arrived in a loose scatter, the usual clatter of bags and laughter. Dídac came in without looking at Roser, the way he'd managed since he'd asked her, quietly, if she'd like to get dinner sometime. She'd made sure by lunch that everyone knew he'd asked her for a date. She watched him not-look at her in the glass and felt something close to satisfaction sit warm in her chest. She twisted her hair up one-handed, fuchsia fading to a pink at the tips which is called rose, and she kept it exactly that colour on purpose, worth the money and the Saturday mornings in the hairdressing chair, because nobody who saw it forgot her. The unaccustomed press of the new navel piercing sat hard against her waistband as she bent to adjust her shoes.

Andreu Callís came in at eight exactly, the register in one hand, and the room straightened without being told to. Mercè hit her plié half a beat ahead of everyone else, chin lifted, watching him watching the line — and his eyes went along it, unhurried, and stopped one place short of her, on Roser, and he wet his upper lip, a sign his wife would have known immediately, before he turned it into "Bon dia" for the room.

She left the Institut at half past one when the morning classes broke and walked the ten minutes home — not to a dormitory, but to her own flat. The lobby had a doorman who knew her name.

She had two small rooms with high ceilings and a kitchen with a view over the rooftops. A clothes rail ran the whole length of one wall. A dozen pairs of heels, each one worth two hundred euros. Blouses of sheer silk, elegant dresses, clubwear, bags. In the dresser, underwear bought for how it looked rather than for comfort. The backless dress she'd left the village in hung at the far end, cheap jersey beside the rest of it.

What paid for it was three nights a week at Sala Ónix.

She'd left the village with what was in her account and a plan built around modelling until she could pay for herself — she knew what she looked like, and Barcelona was full of agencies. She hadn't booked a single appointment yet when it started to rain on her way home and she ducked into a doorway. She picked up a paper someone had left there and glanced at the advertisement on the back: Dancers wanted. Good money. No experience necessary. She called the number still in that doorway. A man's voice, brisk, asked if she could come now and gave her an address near Diagonal she didn't recognise.

Sala Ónix gave nothing away from the street. No sign, only a black door with a buzzer and no name. Inside, empty at that hour, it looked like money: a long bar, low round tables, a stage at the back. Nacho met her at the door himself — manager, he said — and looked at her for longer than the greeting needed before he brought her to his office. He asked what she'd done before. He asked where she was from, why Barcelona, whether she had a boyfriend, whether her parents knew where she was. None of it felt like an audition. Only then did he take her through to the stage and put on some song with a slow, dragging beat, and tell her to move to it, however she wanted.

She lasted forty seconds before he cut the music. She stood there in the sudden quiet certain she'd just been told no.

He offered her a contract. Three nights a week, and the money was generous. He'd seen exactly what he needed to in those forty seconds — a girl who could hold a room on the edge of wanting something and never once let it have it, which was the whole of what Ónix sold. Touching was allowed at the tables within limits. Nothing past that, ever; a single rumour could close a place like this in an afternoon. The guests pushed, most nights, the way men always push at a beautiful woman. But she held them off and made it look like a courtesy.

He signed her off himself at the end of every shift, and within a few weeks walked her to the corner for her taxi. Then they started to have a cortado together before her shift, most days. Somewhere in the ordinary run of her shifts she worked out, with a chagrin at how long it had taken, that he had never once looked at her the way every other man in that building did. By the time she worked it out, he'd already become the person closest to a friend she had.

Tonight was a Friday, and Rose was on at Ónix.