I turned round, shading my eyes against the lights. With a surge, the bile that had been lining my stomach pitched up into my throat. It was Juan.
‘You play so well together.’ Lola’s arms dropped to her side. ‘Why didn’t you let us all know, then we could have enjoyed it too.’ He stepped closer, a thin smile forming on his mouth. Lola began to back away. I stood still, hovering between attack and flight.
‘Such a beautiful performance, my friends. Such encanto, so enchanting, such duende. I was quite moved. It was almost like old times, eh, Lola? Have you brought Vicente along? Or perhaps you’ve managed to spirit him away like you used to.’ Lola was half-hiding behind me.
‘Los Novios Flamencos. Ha! Nobody ever gave us such a pretty name, did they? Only ever Juan and Lola. Never did sound right. Maybe that’s why we . . .’
‘What the hell do you want, you son of a whore!’ Lola screamed.
‘Ah, yes, the famous temper. It’s the red hair, you know. But I suppose you’ve already worked that one out, haven’t you, Jason.’
‘Look, Juan . . .’
‘Shut up, cunt.’ His mouth was beginning to tremble. ‘You know absolutely nothing. Have no idea . . . That whore . . .’ He lifted his finger and pointed it at Lola. A great torrent of words and abuse sat in his throat waiting to explode. I braced myself against the coming attack, sheltering Lola behind me in case he turned violent, staring straight into those light blue eyes.
But it never came. Whatever it was in him – the fear, shame, belief in himself as a peaceful man, or simply too many years of nurturing the pain so that now it could find no expression – whatever it was suddenly gripped him, took back control, and smothered the anger, dampening it down to the steady smoulder of his normal self. The finger dropped, the trembling left his lips, and the calm, quiet face of Juan returned.
We stood facing one another, and for a second we were teacher and pupil once again. I could almost have imagined it was all engineered as part of my training, part of the process of learning to see the essence of flamenco, the beauty that Juan always talked about, but that I never felt I could quite grasp. But it was a short-lived moment. The reality was that we had been moments away from coming to blows. And now the secret was out.
All of a sudden he smiled, like a father.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s safe with me.’ And he turned and walked away through the crowds, disappearing into the village.
Lola let out a stifled cry and pulled me away, twisting my arm as she ran from the square and down into the dark, deserted street. Sickness and violence churned in my stomach. I wanted to go back, but she pushed me to the door. I fumbled with the keys, we got inside, and upstairs.
I heard her collecting her belongings chaotically as I went and stood silently at the window, looking out at the now-invisible valley. The gap between us was immediate, inescapable, and filled the entire house. She was leaving, and we had become strangers.
My mind wandered to calm, gentle images of deserts, oases, long journeys over distant plains: a fantasy cocoon against the emotions that were battering my brain.
She came into the main room and stood behind me. I could feel her breath on my neck, but it was cold and hard. I didn’t move, but kept looking away through the window, searching for something, anything of my valley that might have escaped the veil of the night air.
‘I’m going.’
‘Yes, I know.’
We stood motionless, frozen like two of Vicente’s animals.
‘You never told me about your Moorish grandmother,’ I said.
I didn’t hear her leave.
‘You can’t stay here now, son. Believe me, you really can’t.’
‘Why the hell should I run away?’
Eduardo looked at me incredulously.
‘OK, fine, I know he’s got a shotgun. Several. But . . . I’m in love with her.’
‘Which is why you have to leave. Now.’
‘I’m not a coward. Anyway, Juan might never mention it. He said he wouldn’t.’
‘Look, son, from what you’ve told me this Juan bloke doesn’t sound like the most stable person in the world. We’re dealing with jealousy here.’
‘But why would Vicente believe him?’
‘You just don’t seem to understand, do you.’ I looked at him quizzically. ‘It’s not just your neck on the line here. What do you think he’s going to do to Lola if he finds out?’
I sank down into the chair. Of course, he was right.
‘Listen, it’s a question of damage limitation. If you leave now, there’s a much better chance nothing’s going to happen to her. Juan’s only going to be interested in breaking you two up. If he’s in love with Lola as well, chances are as soon as he’s heard you’ve packed off, he’ll leave well alone. At least that’s the best you can hope for. You understand me?’
I nodded silently.
‘And don’t go calling her up every five minutes. This has got to be a clean break. For her sake.’
‘But where can I go. I don’t want to go back . . .’
‘Go to Madrid. Look, you came here to learn about flamenco. You’ve got to go to the capital, that’s where it’s all happening. You were never going to find much here.’
I thought I had.
He wrote down some information on a piece of paper: a cheap hostel, flamenco bars I should visit.
‘You must leave tonight, you realise that. The bus is at nine.’
‘But what about . . .’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll make sure Juan finds out. And don’t worry about those jerks at the Costa Gazette, either. I’ll tell them you’ve just got a job on the Sun.’
Pedro seemed pleased when I told him I was leaving.
‘So, my dear Watson. Another adventure?’
He was annoyingly calm, ignoring the panic that was now controlling me, and wanting to tell me everything about a new posting he had in Morocco. I listened with heaving chest. There was all the business of rent and returning keys to think about.
‘These things have a way of sorting themselves out,’ was all he said.
‘Look, Pedro, I think I’m going mad.’
‘No, it’s all right, Jason,’ he said seriously. ‘You’re not going mad. Everything will be all right.’
I left some money and the keys in a brown envelope with the pied noir downstairs, then went to the bus station. It was almost a year to the day since I had arrived in Alicante. Eduardo came to see me off and handed me a tape by the guitarist Pepe Habichuela.
‘One of the great masters,’ he said. ‘If angels could play flamenco, they’d all sound like Pepe Habichuela. He’s a Gypsy, one of the best.’
I started to climb aboard.
‘They’re the people you’re going to have to start hanging out with, son. Gypsies. No more payos like this lot here. You want the real stuff.’
The doors closed and the bus set off. It was one of the loneliest moments of my life.
chapter SIX
* * *
Por Soleà
Si algún día yo te llamara
y tú no vinieras,
la muerte amarga a mí me viniera
y no la sintiera.
If one day I called you
and you didn’t come,
bitter death would come in your place
and I wouldn’t even feel it.
‘YOU LIKE THE cante, then?’
The man on the chair in front of me is the hairiest I have ever seen. Sitting here, his brightly coloured silk shirt clinging to his torso, a smell of sweat mixed with sweet, sickly aftershave, he conforms with all my previous ideas of how a Gypsy should be. Gold chains glint faintly through the thick, black mass sprouting at the top of his chest. A half-chewed cigar is twisted in the corner of his mouth as he rolls it with his tongue.
I had found him backstage at the Restaurante Alegrías, one of the more touristy flamenco venues in Madrid. The place was full of Japanese businessmen brought to this gaudy locat
ion to be entertained by Spanish hosts who knew almost as little about flamenco as their guests. ‘Typical espanish’, they called it in Spain, mimicking the Disneyfied image of the country Franco had liked to project in his struggle to attract foreign dollars. For twenty pounds a head you were given a bowl of gazpacho soup, some Serrano ham and bread, and a show. It was the kind of place you would find B- or more likely C-list performers. Which was why I was there.
‘Te gusta el cante?’ he asked again. ‘You like flamenco singing?’
‘Sí.’
The Gypsy had just come off stage with his band and I, a foreigner – a guiri – was pushing into a world where I didn’t belong.
‘Sí, sí,’ I shouted above the din next-door. ‘Me encanta! I love it!’
It was unintentional, but fortuitous. The man stared at me, puzzled that a foreigner could pun in Spanish. Then a smile crept into the corners of his mouth, opening his lips until he bellowed, his head rocking back with laughter.
‘Did you hear that?’ He turned to the other members of the band, cramped in this small, heavy room as they packed up and changed after the show. ‘I asked him if he liked the cante. Yes, he said, Me encanta! Ha ha. Me encanta! Did you hear?’
They were, to a man, unimpressed, but he laughed on.
‘Bueno. Tell me about the cante. Here, have some brandy. What do you like?’ He blew out a long, thick stream of smoke like a fluttering blue ribbon, and passed me the bottle he was drinking out of. From the corner of my eye I could see the other members of the band muttering, anxious to pack up, get paid and leave.
‘I like rough voices,’ I said. ‘La voz afillá. Like yours.’
In a shop on the Gran Vía the previous day I had read on the back of a record sleeve about the different types of male singing voice. The afillá style was named after the great nineteenth-century singer El Fillo. A wandering blacksmith, he was one of the first to have developed the coarse, typically Gypsy style of singing, later continued by Silverio Franconetti, and today favoured by performers such as El Indio Gitano, the Gypsy Indian. They said El Fillo had died in poverty, his voice ruined by so much hard drinking, still mourning the murder of his brother, the singer Juan Encueros, Naked John. An innovator with a vast knowledge of different palos, even now there were those who referred to him as the Johann Sebastian Bach of flamenco.
‘Yes. Afillá. But there are voices much better than mine. Listen to Terremoto – the Earthquake – or Manolo Caracol. Now those . . . oof!’ His lips pursed in a sign of respect.
‘But you’re just as good as they are,’ I enthused. ‘There’s real power in your voice. You’re fantastic!’
He sat back sharply and went silent, the smile gone, staring at me intensely. It seemed I’d gone too far. I had learned a little about Gypsy etiquette, and I had the feeling I’d just broken an important rule. This new, sneering expression he wore seemed to demand what on earth I, a guiri, was doing telling him what was good or bad.
‘So why did you come here? Why do you want to talk to me?’ His voice, still deep, had become hard. I saw that the other members of the band were trying to catch his eye. I had to move fast if I was to keep his attention. Time to dive straight in.
‘I play the guitar,’ I said. ‘I’ve been learning. I want to play with a group. I thought . . .’
His eyes grew darker, like a bull staring down its prey with a dull, earthy, disrespect. I was sure I’d blown it. He’ll laugh me out of here and that’ll be the end of it. Stupid even to try. Any minute now he will simply stand up and walk away.
Somewhere inside me, though, I knew I had to take up the challenge. If I backed down now, this opportunity would be lost for good. Tales my grandfather had told me about his life as a professional bare-knuckle fighter came to mind. Taking on five policemen at a time; putting his fist through solid wooden doors as training. It was time to use some inherited northern grit.
I straightened my back, drew my chin in, and looked back at the Gypsy as fiercely as I could.
‘How long have you been playing?’ he asked.
‘Two years.’
‘Here,’ he said, pulling out the guitar that was leaning against his chair, ‘play me a Fandango.’ I hesitated, then took the instrument from his hand. Some of the other band members were already walking out with their cases and bags. The door to the stage opened and the jarring echo of a hundred hysterical voices poured in.
‘. . . unspeakable, my friend. Unspeakable!’ A well-fed German was delivering his punch-line above the screaming laughter of his companions.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ something inside me was saying. ‘Just play. It doesn’t matter.’ I lifted myself, breathed deeply and played the first chords.
There was an interruption. A younger man with long, curly black hair tied back in a pony-tail – the other singer in the group – came over and spoke in a low tone, his back turned against me. I couldn’t hear what was being said – there was too much background noise and chat from the others standing at the side – but it was clear they wanted to leave.
The younger man left abruptly and the Gypsy got up.
‘I’m off,’ he said, taking the guitar back out of my hand. I stood up. He made to leave, then turned.
‘Come back tomorrow. We’ll talk about it then – if you’re as good as you say.’
The sharp, unforgiving stench of cat-piss filled my nostrils and woke me once again. I opened my eyes to the grey half-light filtering through the tall, grimy window. We were at the end of an alleyway, all direct sunlight blocked out by the buildings around us. The smell and the thick, ancient dust made breathing difficult and my chest tightened in revolt at the foul air. I looked up at the ceiling. A cockroach was negotiating the bubbles of yellow-brown mould that were forming under the plaster. As he fell, a piece of the ceiling fell away with him and he landed on my stomach, legs kicking frantically in the air.
I flicked him off and dragged myself out from under the sheet. Now it was summer again, this dark flat was pleasantly cool despite the piercing heat outside. Although God only knew how I had got through the winter. The snow had only just melted from the tips of the distant Guadarrama mountains and memories of sub-zero temperatures with little or no heating had left their imprint in my bones. Madrid air cannot blow out a candle, they said, but it can kill a man.
My flipflops dragged along the dusty floor of the corridor outside my room – sticky in places where urine had not been cleaned up – past towers of mouldering paperbacks lining both walls from floor to ceiling. A shadow moved quickly, low down ahead of me. A pause, flashing green eyes, then it vanished with a low groan of fear and frustration.
I trudged on. The bathroom was empty but the loo was blocked again and close to overflowing. The cheap, red plastic seat was already stained. Retching, I grabbed the plunger, and went to work. I was becoming an expert at this, my arms performing the necessary twisting, heaving motion mechanically. Two minutes and it was cleared.
The hot water of the shower blanketed me as I turned on the jet. A year on, and I still found Madrid to be a dry, heartless city. The change from Alicante couldn’t have been greater: people everywhere, squeezing, bumping and jarring their way up overcrowded streets full of beggars and pimps; an ever-present sense of aggression, anxiety and franticness. The area I lived in was particularly bad: a dark, labyrinthine quarter near the Calle Pez, with several whores for each street corner and hunched junkies scratching for pieces of bread in the gutter. One used to catch my eye as he’d prostrate himself half-naked on the pavement, forehead on the floor, knees pulled up, arse sticking in the air, a grubby Coke cup held in his hands above his head, pleading as loudly as he could to the passers-by for change. I had to fight a persistent desire to escape and flee back to Alicante, or even give up everything and leave for good. Even the weather was less friendly than on the coast, shifting from extreme heat to extreme cold, with no shades of autumn or spring. The people were proud and provincial, lacking the warmth I had grown used to. L
ooking at the angry, lost, concentrated faces, it seemed over 70 per cent of them were mad, unbalanced or teetering on the edge. I hated it, but saw it as city energy, something to plug in to if I could, and ride along with. After all, this was where the real flamenco scene was, as Eduardo had said. That thought alone kept me on track and held me down in the city – a reason for being there and staying in Spain when it felt as if I had lost everything.
One thing in Madrid’s favour, though, was the water – wonderfully soft rain piped straight from the mountains. I let the jet flow over my rapidly thinning body. My ribs and hip bones were quite visible now.
My landlady was sitting in the kitchen, a cigarette hanging precipitously from her mouth, a cup of weak tea in one hand, and a skinny, incontinent cat on her lap.
‘What the hell do you do in there?’ she screamed. ‘I’ve been waiting here for hours!’ She scuttled past, ash flying in all directions, burning holes in her nylon dressing-gown.
I went back to my room, dressed quickly, grabbed my guitar and walked out into the black, meaningless streets.
Carlos lived in the sprawling Madrid suburb of Vallecas: a grubby, concrete area south-east of the city centre that sat like a giant slug-like parasite on the belly of the capital. Ordinary Madrileños referred to it with awe or loathing. ‘Vallecas?’ they’d say. ‘That shit-hole?’ It was an area of cheap, redbrick tower blocks that absorbed waves of immigrants seeking work: Basques from the Sixties; North Africans wearing thin leather shoes; short Latin-Americans who spent most of their time calling home from wooden booths in grocers’ shops offering cheap international calls. And Gypsies, moved by the authorities from their shanty towns into modern flats.
‘They’re not like us. Water in buckets – when they wash – and they cook over fires on the kitchen floor,’ a balding bar-owner had told me. ‘I tell you, I haven’t got anything against them. A Gypsy comes in here and I serve him as I would anyone else. But he’s got to have respect.’
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