The music only stopped for our lessons, when my fumbling on the guitar demanded silence and Juan’s reluctant attention. For all his love of flamenco, he rarely seemed keen to teach me. He would rather spend the time talking – about a particular guitarist or singer, or mostly about new superfluous pieces of equipment. ‘Hey, have a look at this electronic tuner. Fantastic. Tells you exactly when you’re in tune.’
Each time it was a challenge just to get the lesson started. No longer childishly enthusiastic, he would, as I had half-suspected, become surly and moody.
‘Look, boy. You’re not even holding it properly. Concentrate.’
We started at the very beginning. In the posters on the walls the old guitarists sat mostly in the traditional posture, with the guitar resting on the left or right leg, pointing diagonally upwards to aid access for the left hand. The contemporary style was to cross the legs, right over left, and hug the guitar into the hip, tilting it away from the body, so that the fretboard was almost invisible and you relied on touch and familiarity alone. This put a strain on the muscles in the left arm at first, stretching them into a strange position, and the right hand constantly suffered from pins and needles as the forearm rested too heavily on the edge of the guitar. It took months to perfect.
‘Work on it. You’ve got it totally wrong,’ Juan barked. Then, in a rare moment of compassion, he added, ‘It’s worth it. It gives you a more relaxed feel. And more importantly’ – he lowered his voice and I leaned forward to catch his words of wisdom – ‘you look really cool.’
It was hard to feel cool while contorting my body into what seemed like the most unnatural position imaginable. Admittedly, it didn’t look that difficult – as I gazed at myself in the full-length, red-framed mirror on the wall – but the strain on my arms and wrists was excruciating. I’m going to be permanently crippled at this rate, I thought. My body felt frozen in the act of playing; even outside the class my right hand would fall into a ‘telephone’ position: little finger sticking out for balance and thumb bent back, as though resting on the bottom string, middle fingers bent into the palm slightly. I took to shaking it like a rattle to try to loosen the muscles and tendons.
‘Your hands are too stiff,’ Juan would moan. ‘Too hard. Relax that wrist. Here, feel my hand.’
It felt like a freshly killed chicken; warm, limp, not quite all there.
‘Today we’re looking at the Bulería,’ he said one afternoon when I’d finally persuaded him to teach me something. Bulería was the palo he had first pointed out the night of the party. Flamenco, I was slowly realising, was far more than simply the energetic beat of the Gypsy Kings, or ornate singing and playing. It was a world in itself, with its own lexicon and rules. There were scores of different palos, each with a unique feeling based on variations in key, rhythm and pace. Regional styles created an extra level of complication, with differences between, say, a Fandango de Málaga and a Fandango de Huelva.
‘Bulería. It comes from burlar. It means to joke around, make fun of someone. It captures something essential, the essence of flamenco. You listen to a good Bulería, and you feel like you hardly know where the rhythm is going next – they keep playing with it all the time. But they always stay religiously within the rules. It’s a type of magic. Takes years to get to that stage.’
I had listened to him playing Bulerías and they fascinated me with their manic, restless beat, impossible to follow at this early stage unless he counted out loud, helping me understand the complicated rhythm. It had a Gypsy feel to it: anarchic, unpredictable, weaving in and out as though you might never catch hold of it.
‘This is the real thing, boy: what we always play at juergas – flamenco parties,’ Juan said. ‘I suppose you expected to learn all that Gypsy Kings stuff, eh? Simple Rumbas to show off to the girls? Look, if you want to learn with me, we start with the most difficult things first. Got it?’
We sat opposite one another in the red haze. Juan was looking at me – how I sat, the positioning of the guitar. He seemed about to say something, a look of reproach on his face, but instead he checked himself and glanced down at his own guitar.
‘You already know the rhythm.’
He played, his fingers moving with great speed, and a hypnotic sound filled the room. It seemed so effortless, I simply listened in amazement, my eyes and attention wandering over the faces on the posters around us. It still surprised me sometimes that I was here in Spain having lessons with a real flamenco guitar teacher. Only a couple of weeks previously I had thought I had made a disastrous choice in coming to Alicante to begin my search, but I had suddenly landed on my feet and now things were moving faster than I could take them in.
Juan stopped with a flourish. I stared. I had no idea what he had just done. But he was glaring at me.
‘Come on!’ he growled. ‘Your turn!’
I felt a knot tightening in my guts. Do what, exactly?
‘Umm . . .’ I stammered.
‘Concentrate, boy. If you’re going to take this seriously, I expect you to watch every move I make like a hawk. I play, you watch, you learn. That’s how it goes.’
I nodded in agreement, silently wishing I were somewhere else. Sweat began to trickle down my neck.
‘Now watch! I’ll do it again. But understand that I’m being nice to you. Don’t expect me to play things twice for you in the future.’
This time I leaned forward over my guitar, straining my eyes in an attempt to follow his fingers as they danced over the strings. The problem was how to divide my attention; there was as much happening with his right hand as there was with his left, and try as I might, I couldn’t watch them both at the same time. In the end, I concentrated on the left, reasoning that at least I might be able to get the chords. The right hand would have to come later.
Juan finished the piece and then stood up.
‘OK, boy. Now you do it.’
He walked into the kitchen to light a cigarette – Marlboro, they had the reddest packets, he said – and started heating some water for coffee.
‘And work on your right hand. The left will look after itself.’
Wrong again. I hunched desperately over the guitar. My fingers formed into what looked like an approximation of what I had seen him do. The forefinger was bent in some strange position covering two strings at the same time. I felt a shot of pain as it was forced back against itself while the strings underneath cut into my skin from the pressure. Wincing, I looked up. Juan’s back was turned.
‘Come on! I can’t hear anything.’
I gritted my teeth and started strumming with my right hand. There was a horrible, dead sound. I readjusted my fingers on the fretboard, and the pain shot up my arm as the soft fingertips were sliced by the strings. Juan, now standing in the doorway, was looking at me sternly. I swallowed an urge to give up, and pressed on. There was a small improvement – sound now coming from at least three strings – but my fingers were raw and I let them drop.
‘Eh! What are you doing? Come on! Next chord.’
I placed my hands back where they had been, hoping that they would automatically remember what came next. But they let me down. I sat, flustered, my mind blank, Juan’s eyes burning into the top of my head as he stood over me. His foot was tapping, but I couldn’t tell whether it was impatience or just another rhythm working its way through his mind. My face turned red, like everything else in the flat.
‘Come on, boy.’
With my fingers slipping over the ebony board, I tried as hard as I could to remember how he had placed his hand. Like this? No, bring that finger down. One more fret. There. I struck down with my index finger and waited for the cacophony and the bark of reproach that would inevitably follow. I stopped. My head stayed bent over the guitar. There was silence for a minute, then finally Juan spoke.
‘Well?’ he said, cigarette hanging from his mouth. ‘What are you waiting for? Do it again! Come on. Compás! Rhythm! One, two, THREE, four, five . . .’
I fumbled to
catch up with his clapping, and then somehow I got it. I had caught the rhythm, even if the sound was still like a cat with a poker up its arse. But Juan was driving me on and I didn’t want to lose it.
When not teaching English, I practised the guitar. I was lucky in that the flat directly below me was empty, and the girl who lived above was either at work or out with her friends, so I could make as much noise as I liked. As this was usually fairly discordant, it was no bad thing either. I was inspired by a scratched record of La Niña de los Peines that Pedro had lent me. Her singing made me feel like that first night at the concert in the Plaza Mayor – a feeling of exposure and emotional intensity that yielded a sharper sense of reality.
Hasta los limones saben
que nos queremos los dos.
Even the lemons know
We’re in love.
I would hum along to her Moorish-sounding melodies, trying in vain to mimic her. But after a few days of singing like a foghorn on the blink I gave up, deciding it was impossible for my non-Spanish vocal chords to sing flamenco. Then I would pick up the guitar and try to copy at least the rhythm and chords of the recording. Was that a Soleá? Or perhaps a Tango? It was still a struggle to distinguish the various palos, and I would have to rely on Juan to explain.
‘As far as you’re concerned, boy, it’s a Bulería,’ he’d say. ‘It’s just that for the singer, it’s a Lorqueña – she’s singing a poem of Lorca’s. But you don’t have to worry about it. No te preocupes.’
Flamenco was one of those subjects where the more you found out, the more you realised how little you knew.
And so I sat at home, practising for hours, the skin on my fingertips slowly hardening as it grew used to the pressure of the strings.
‘You must feel as though your fingers extend into the strings, are becoming one with the strings,’ Juan told me. ‘No division between you and the guitar. You must love your guitar.’
For now it was still a foreign object in my lap, no matter how long it sat there. My fingers struggled to find the right chords, never feeling as if they belonged. I had seen footage of professional guitarists – rock, jazz, classical and flamenco – and they all looked as though the guitar had become welded to them. One day, I promised myself, I would be like that.
My progress was erratic and I would often think about giving up. I blocked these thoughts out as best I could. Discipline was crucially important. I had come to Spain for this. There was nothing else as far as I was concerned at that time. And so, I would renew my determination to prove to myself I could master something difficult and worthwhile.
* * *
If I had a guitar lesson in the evening, Juan and I would often go to the local bar for a drink afterwards. It was a grubby place, where the smell of cheap bleach mixed with the acid sweat and antiperspirant of Ginés, the overweight owner. Juan always ordered red wine. Pilar, the goggle-eyed woman from the party, would often come, along with one or two others I recognised. The most regular was Rafael, a banker from Ciudad Real, who brought a curious stamp-collecting mentality to our conversations. There were usually about three or four of us, meeting for a drink and a chat before heading off to bed at the end of the day. Lola would show up from the school every once in a while, but rationed her appearances as if for greater impact. As a meeting place for friends to talk about a common interest, it was a peculiar choice of venue. We had to shout to make ourselves heard, as the room was full of old men playing dominoes, which often led to arguments and playing pieces being thrown to the sawdust-covered floor in bouts of rage. More than once I had to pick bits of woodchipping from my beer.
We talked about anything, as long as it had a flamenco connection: the latest records, memories of great concerts, regional differences in style (fast dying out, it seemed), the power of a particular singer. But most of all, eclipsing all other topics, was the question of flamenco itself – what it was and where it was going.
The history of flamenco was a series of evolutionary cycles in which it spiralled closer to popular culture and legitimacy before being taken over and being forced to reinvent itself to avoid assimilation and disappearing for good. Every time it seemed as if flamenco was about to be absorbed, a new movement would emerge from some quarter with a different sound or simply a raw vitality that reconnected it with its counter-culture origins. It had happened with the cafés cantante of the nineteenth century, which for years gave many performers the wherewithal to perform their art. But these popular venues began to limit and dictate the form as audiences shunned the harsher, more challenging sound of the cante jondo, or deep song, which is at the heart of flamenco.
‘Back then we were saved by Lorca and Falla,’ Rafael the banker told me authoritatively. ‘They organised the Concurso del Cante Jondo contest in Granada in 1922. People came from miles around, some walking for weeks over the mountains to take part. It reignited flamenco, made it live again.’
The generation after this produced some of the greatest flamencos ever – La Niña de los Peines, the dancer Carmen Amaya. But even they began to lose momentum as Spain opened itself up and began to westernise, producing an anodyne watered-down version viewed by the authorities as acceptable for the tourists now flocking to the Costas.
Salvation came a second time round from the guitarists, who started to assert themselves at last, moving from being mere accompanists to taking centre stage. It started with Ramón Montoya, before Sabicas and El Niño Ricardo went a step further to make the guitar – the toque – as important, if not more important, than the song, the cante, and the dance, the baile. These men were the godfathers of the new sound – the nuevo flamenco we hear everywhere today.
The subject of nuevo flamenco was a common topic of conversation at the bar, with everyone stridently expressing their opinions. All except Juan, who kept quiet on the matter. From my observation of him in our lessons, he seemed to be something of an open-minded traditionalist, happy to appreciate new developments while sticking with what he knew best in his own playing. I would sometimes ask him why he didn’t try playing the more modern stuff, but he was cagey and avoided answering.
There was, I suspected, a reason. One night after Juan had left us early, Pilar lowered her voice and told us the story of the great love of his life. Nobody ever knew who she was, or if the woman was still in Alicante, but for a time he had been a different man. They had all seen it, all known the reason, but he kept it quiet and nobody ever brought it up. When the love affair ended, he shrank away from them, disappearing from their company for over a year, until a chance meeting in the street had brought him back to the group.
‘He never returned to how he was, though,’ Pilar said. ‘I used to say to the others, “Look at this guy – he’s half-destroyed.” And it was true. Whoever she was, she must have really hurt him. And now he can’t get away from it. All smiles on top, but underneath . . . oof !’
I imagined him emotionally frozen in time, playing the same record over and over again, never moving on. There was certainly no indication of anyone else in his life. But he would never give anything away, he just kept playing and talking about love, how flamenco was all about love.
Despite my growing obsession with the guitar, I was still able to spend time exploring Alicante. I found a lightness and a sense of joy there that was uplifting and colourful after the greyness of the life I had left behind.
The most interesting part of the city was the old quarter – the barrio – built on the remains of the Arabic city. Here, there was a labyrinth of monasteries, churches, strip clubs, bars, neglected squares and once brightly painted houses, all linked together by dirty, narrow lanes that smelt of piss. You could walk down the ancient high street – now paved over – and call in at a chemist’s with eighteenth-century murals of angels adorning the ceiling. Or else a working-man’s drinking hole decorated with bullfighting paraphernalia. Further on was the town hall with its spiralling baroque columns, and behind it, a tiny square with a now-defunct water-pipe and streetlam
ps that still showed the mark: London, 1832. Further on was the church of Santa María, built on the site of the old mosque, half-remembered now in the horseshoe arches. Beneath it, in the walls facing the sea, there were still bullet holes from the Civil War. Alicante had been one of the last places to fall to the Fascists, and when the promised relief boats for the Republican refugees failed to arrive, scores of people had committed suicide in the harbour.
Standing further back, towards the beach, there was the ‘Face of the Moor’: the natural formation in the castle rock that looked like the profile of a man with a hooked nose and a turban. Some parts of the old town gave you the impression that the Arabs had never left. The area of tightly knit white houses nestling just below the castle had a very Andalusian feel to it, its tiny pathways littered with a thousand plants in rich terracotta pots. From here you could see much of the coastline and the rest of the city stretching out in all directions.
It was not so much the physical city that attracted me, however, as the people who lived in it. There was a simple pleasure in the company of others; in talking, chatting, spending time observing passers-by. People-watching was easy in Spain – everyone else did it, so there was rarely the threat of violence common in England. Spaniards simply stared back at you and walked on, aware that as soon as they had passed, your attention would turn to someone else. At first this had been disconcerting. An English wariness and suspicion would kick in: surely they wanted something, were trying to trick me, pull a fast one. Yet more quickly than I might have imagined, these conditioned responses fell away as the feared attack, con, or robbery failed to materialise, and I began to be able to see things around me without fear. Engaging with others was just a part of life, a social need. And as a need, it was dealt with, without self-consciousness.
One morning I found myself walking down a street near the beach. It was a clear day, with enough warmth to entice a few bodies onto the sand. In front of me stood a large woman in the doorway of her house, doing nothing. As I approached her I smiled – not previously a normal thing for me to do, but I was quickly adopting native ways. In return she stepped out, grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me on each cheek, her face beaming with joy, then jabbered something about my blond hair. I beamed back. She grabbed me again and squeezed my arm, and I walked on with her joyful voice still ringing in my ears.
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