Duende

by Jason Webster

  Just to get something moving, I decided to advertise English classes. Language schools were out of the question. I was free, a flamenco, I told myself proudly. I couldn’t work for anyone but myself. A two-line advert appeared in the local rag, Anuntis, with the phone number of the flat. Then I waited.

  Days passed without a call, not even a simple enquiry. I started to get angry with Carlota, convinced that she hadn’t been picking up the phone.

  ‘There’ve been no calls, I tell you. No calls.’

  ‘You should get an answering machine.’

  ‘Then you pay for it!’

  Finally the phone rang. Did I teach German? The old man didn’t want English lessons. His daughter had gone to live in Hamburg and he thought he might go and see her one day, maybe next year, or the year after, when his hip was better. Anyway, he thought he might start learning now, because you can’t start learning a language too soon, and he wasn’t as sharp as he was when he was young, so he might take some time, but if I could be patient with him, and he didn’t have too much money either, he was saving for the air-fare, you see. But he’d heard that English and German were very similar, so perhaps . . .

  Everything depended on me being able to make enough money to buy the guitar. Otherwise no tour, no flamenco. They would all leave and I would be stuck in a hell-hole of a flat with a mad landlady trying to disinfect cat wounds all day.

  Another call. I rushed to the phone.

  ‘Sí?’

  ‘I was calling about the English classes. I need four hours a day, intensive tuition. Is your flat very private?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Well – how do you mean?’

  ‘Will we be disturbed?’

  ‘No. We’ll have a room to ourselves.’

  ‘Good. And will anyone be able to hear us?’

  ‘Well . . . there may be some other people in the flat at the time, but they won’t mind.’

  ‘No, no. I need absolute privacy.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Good. I’m very looking forward to it. Will you provide all the necessary equipment?’

  ‘I have some text books we can work from.’

  ‘No, I mean other equipment.’ Silence. ‘You know, the other equipment.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ve got everything you need.’

  ‘Very good. Now, about payment.’

  ‘It’s 1,000 pesetas an—’

  ‘I was hoping I might do some house cleaning for you instead of payment.’

  ‘House cleaning?’

  ‘You see, I don’t have that much money. But I’m very well trained, sir.’

  ‘Look. I don’t really need—’

  ‘I can do wonders with my tongue.’

  They all thought it was very funny when I told the story later on.

  ‘Ay! Sounds like you really hit it off with him,’ Javier said.

  The laughter stopped. For a moment there was an uneasy silence, then Juanito started playing quietly from the corner, Jesús started singing, and we all took up the cue.

  Javier’s homosexuality was one of many undercurrents in the group. It was rare for him to make such a slip.

  * * *

  The solution, when it arrived, came in the form of a Japanese car.

  ‘I needed something simple,’ Jesús said. He was almost apologetic it wasn’t a BMW or another ‘luxury’ car. I began to wonder how often he did this. He seemed to view cars as other people did apples on trees.

  I drove him out to the western suburbs one night, past the illuminated Atlético stadium, over the Manzanares, and out into the character-free area of tower blocks that hugged the capital like a lifebelt. Jesús gave directions in a haphazard, strangely illogical, way. There was no grid of streets in his head, perhaps he searched for landmarks or memories. I couldn’t be sure. He was his more usual reticent self – not reeling out the mad, flowing monologue I had expected.

  ‘Stop!’ he cried. We had, quite unexpectedly, reached our destination. I saw a bar – dark, half-lit, as though just closing and in the process of cleaning up – and braked hard. We came to a sharp halt, skidded a little, and there was an almighty smash into the back of us: the car behind had been too slow to react. With a lurch, we shot forward several feet across the road and came to rest.

  I lifted my hand to my neck – a pain from the jolt rang inside my skull. Jesús was already out of the car, storming down to the driver behind us.

  The shouting began as I checked myself for any damage. Jesús, I was sure, would be inches away from murdering the other driver. But, to my surprise, as I got out I saw that the noise was coming, not from the Gypsy, but from the other man: a slight, thin-mouthed character with a moustache trimmed in bank-manager fashion.

  ‘You lot should be taken off the roads!’ he screamed. ‘You’re only fit to drive bloody donkeys!’

  Jesús stood impassive.

  ‘Me cago en tu padre! You bastards drive worse than women,’ the man went on. He turned to look at me and was confused for a moment. What was a blond foreigner doing there? But he’d found his theme and wasn’t going to change.

  ‘You’re all bloody criminals . . .’

  The door of the bar flew open with a tremendous roar. The man stopped. We all looked round. Four very wide, hairy men in vests stepped out and stood on the pavement opposite us. The leader tilted his chin up in Jesús’s direction to ask what was happening, flicking the ash from his cigar menacingly to the floor.

  ‘None of us can drive, he says.’

  The men from the bar said nothing, but stood with their arms crossed. The leader sucked hard on the stub resting between his fingers.

  ‘Well, er, yes. That’s right!’ After a moment’s hesitation, the man foolishly decided to continue. ‘None of you can drive. I mean look at this. What do you call this? You can’t just stop in the middle of the road. Something like this is bound to happen. Don’t you think? I mean, really. Surely. N-no . . .?’

  He gave up. The man with the cigar had stepped down, walked across and was now eyeballing him, the burning stub no more than an inch from the well-tended whiskers.

  ‘Get your papers,’ said the cigar-man.

  ‘Papers?’

  ‘Insurance.’

  The man said nothing, but stared, petrified, into the eyes of the fat Gypsy who seemed about to smother him with his bulk.

  ‘Papers!’ the Gypsy whined.

  ‘Listen. I haven’t really got . . .’ The payo was struggling. He looked around him for a way out, but was trapped. It was clear he wasn’t completely on the right side of the law himself.

  ‘Look, could – could we . . .’ His voice was shaking with fear as he trailed off, his sentence unfinished.

  ‘That car’s worth four hundred thousand,’ the Gypsy said. It wasn’t worth even half that, but I managed to check my look of surprise in time. We couldn’t give anything away.

  ‘Look . . .’

  The others from the bar began to pace towards the car. It was perfectly timed. Jesús placed his hands carefully into his jacket pockets.

  The payo took one more look around him. Fear seemed to rise in him like a lava flow, slowly at first, and then with a sudden explosion. He panicked, and capitulated.

  ‘Yes, all right. Christ! I’ll have to . . . I’m not carrying that much.’

  ‘Give me your wallet!’

  The man’s hand went down into his jacket automatically and fished out a leather wallet. The cigar-man took out a credit card and called to his two colleagues. ‘Take him to a cash machine.’

  They moved off, two of them as though unused to walking, the other like an empty bag. Within a couple of minutes they had returned and a wad was passed over. Nothing was said. The man got back into his car, reversed from the pile of broken glass on the road, and drove away, a screeching noise coming from somewhere underneath the bonnet.

  ‘He won’t get far in that,’ the cigar-man said. ‘The radiator’s fucked.’ And he turned to go back inside. Jesús motioned for me to stay
behind outside. I went to look at the back of our car. It was fine: the back bumper was dented, but it could still be driven.

  An hour later Jesús returned. He took the keys from me and we headed back to the centre. Slow driving, not worth trying anything in this car, but there was still the usual disregard for traffic lights, one-way streets, pavements. Again, the pulsating, hypnotic effect of the streetlights passing over my eyes like waves.

  ‘One thing,’ I asked. ‘How did he know the driver of the car didn’t have any insurance?’

  ‘He didn’t. But then no-one does. Except rich kids and Cataláns.’

  He dropped me off and I slid back inside the flat, screwing my eyes against the ammonia-filled air. I threw my jacket on the bed with a sigh, then looked down. Something had fallen out. Bending over to pick it up, I found an envelope with 150,000 pesetas stuffed inside.

  I knew exactly where to go. Juanito and Antonio had both mentioned him. Alejandro, el Mallorquín. He had a flat somewhere behind the Plaza de España.

  I walked up the narrow streets. There were chickens everywhere; strange, deformed creatures with small bodies and oversized feet. I found the house, walked in through wrought-iron gates, and up to the second floor.

  A man with narrow shoulders and a tight-fitting nylon shirt opened the door.

  ‘Alejandro?’

  He nodded.

  I had imagined an old man with bad eyesight working obsessively over minute veneer carvings. But he was young, much younger than I had expected. I went to shake hands. He took mine limply, as though just to be polite, and beckoned me in.

  We passed into a bare room. Hard wooden floors, white walls, a naked table, two chairs, and a kind of bench running down one wall. The air was filled with the most wonderful perfume of raw wood.

  ‘Would you like some tea? I have some mint tea, from Morocco.’ He passed into the kitchen and returned some minutes later with a teapot and two mugs. I hadn’t had tea made for me since living at Pedro’s.

  ‘Come about a guitar, I expect.’ His smile exposed crooked teeth.

  ‘Yes, I’m a friend of Juanito and Antonio. They both play with Carlos.’

  ‘Ah, Carlos. Is he still singing?’

  We drank the tea. It tasted like sand.

  ‘You’d better come with me, then.’

  The workshop was light, whitewashed, with guitars hanging neatly from the walls. I passed along the rows of instruments, eyes agog. It was hard to know where to start.

  ‘What sort of thing are you looking for?’ He looked at me sympathetically. I would be happy to buy a guitar from this man, I thought.

  ‘I’m looking for a negra,’ I said. ‘Rosewood back and spruce front.’

  The traditional combination for a flamenco guitar – a blanca – is a back and sides made of cypress and a spruce top, with a shallow body to give a more percussive feel. Classical guitars, on the other hand, are deeper and often made of rosewood and cedar. The negra is a hybrid, with rosewood to give richness, but a spruce soundboard to produce the harsh, bright edge needed for flamenco. And you have to pay a lot to get a good cypress back.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alejandro, ‘I have a few of those.’ He pulled out five guitars from the rack and handed them to me one at a time.

  ‘How do you like the action?’

  ‘Low,’ I said. This made it easier to play, especially the picado technique, but you often paid by losing some of the higher notes: on cheaper guitars, the strings were so close to the board they would catch on the frets at a certain distance and you would not be able to distinguish between two, possibly three notes. But this also gave a buzzing sound, more like the style of players of the past, such as Sabicas or El Niño Ricardo. The last thing I wanted was for it to sound like a classical guitar. It was a sort of inverse snobbery I had picked up since coming to Spain. Classical guitarists were seen as lightweights; flamencos were the ‘real men’. While classical guitarists played in a relaxed way, hand over the hole to create a resonant sound, we strained into an unnatural, contorted position, fingers as far behind the soundhole as possible, to give a raw, meaty feel. Some even said that classical guitarists actually envied flamencos for their right-hand technique, and that we were the secret, unsung masters of the guitar world – a bit like the anonymous blues players in the Deep South living in their wooden shacks, from whom all the rock ’n’ roll greats were said to have stolen their ideas.

  I tried the guitars, one by one. It was going to have to be a matter of feeling the right one. I remembered how Juan had always referred to the guitar as la novia – his fiancée. I now knew what he meant. In the end, I was restricted to a choice between two – the only ones in my price range. I played each guitar for half an hour. It was important to take my time, and Alejandro, to my relief, understood this. No pressure, no standing over me. He passed to and fro, smiling every so often in encouragement.

  There was little between them, but finally I selected one: the richness of its bass notes was magical, and seemed to fill the room, and resonate through my entire body.

  ‘I am happy you chose this one,’ Alejandro said. ‘I didn’t want to say, but your playing was much more meaningful and stronger with it.’

  I handed over the money.

  ‘Look after it,’ he laughed as I was leaving. ‘It’s special for me. I finished it the day my mother died. I made it for her, in her name.’

  We arrived at the villa late one night. The place had the false, man-made smell of a recently constructed building: a mixture of cement dust and paint. It was dark, and we all scrambled out of the mini-bus with cases, bags, digs in the ribs, and sore heads. It was like a school outing. Antonio, ever the organiser, went in first to scout the place out while the rest of us stretched our legs in a more carefree manner and Carlos opened a fresh bottle of brandy. I knew immediately that I didn’t like the place; there was a superficial feel to it, as though a simple puff of wind might lift it from its foundations and blow it clean away. It was a summer house, built quickly as a simple shelter from the sun, with a patio and white, bare, square-walled rooms. Not enough rooms for all of us, though. Someone was going to have to share. Me, of course. The question was, with whom? In the end, despite all his running about, Antonio was ordered to join me in a boxroom round the back. He was incensed. It wasn’t big enough for him on his own, let alone with the guiri. I didn’t know it then, but he had a clear reason in his own mind why he didn’t want to share. The tour was about more than just playing gigs. A few words from Carlos, though, and he seemed to calm down. Again, I was surprised to see how complete Carlos’s grip over the group was.

  In the bedroom, I unpacked my boots. As well as the new guitar, I had bought some camperas – Spanish cowboy boots. They were plain, flat, with only a single strip of leather running down the length of each side from the top to the heel as decoration. They were another symbol of becoming, and belonging, as far as I was concerned. I had built up an image of them as authentically Andalusian from photographs, TV, and people I’d seen walking in the street. They were heavy on my feet and I wanted them to give me a greater connection to the earth, to root me somehow. But when I tried them on, they were ridiculously uncomfortable, too narrow for my wide, Anglo-Saxon feet. I would break them in, I told myself. Spanish leather was supposedly the best in the world. A folk-singing uncle of mine had even sung a song about it – about the lady of the manor who was swept off her feet by the Gypsy Davy, and how her husband rode off to look for her and found her by a camp-fire:

  Take off, take off your buckskin gloves

  made of Spanish leather.

  Give to me your lily-white hand

  and back right home we’ll travel.

  Back right home we’ll ride.

  But she didn’t go back. The draw of the Gypsy way was too strong for her – and her husband returned to his sedentary life alone.

  Jesús arrived later that night in another car. He had a double room to himself and called me in for a line of cocaine that was carefully
drawn on a plastic table by the window. Before long, Carlos’s wife, María-José, poked her head round the door.

  ‘A jalar!’ she said. Jesús got up to go.

  I didn’t understand and as we headed out to the patio, I asked Jesús what she’d said.

  ‘Eat. It’s Caló: Gypsy language. She’s telling us to eat.’

  I had gathered that Carlos’s term for me – churumbel – was some sort of Gypsy word, but had assumed the phrases they used that I didn’t understand were simply Spanish words I had yet to learn. As it turned out, a lot of the colloquialisms I had already picked up were of Caló origin: sobar for sleep, chungo for bad, parné for money. But as I listened harder to their conversations, I discovered that all kinds of words and phrases in the flamenco songs we were listening to – particularly the more modern stuff from bands like Ketama – that previously I had been unable to understand began to make sense. Like the word camelar – to love.

  Mira si yo te camelo, te camelo de verdad.

  Every other song seemed to use it.

  Few Gypsies seemed to speak pure Caló – it was more a source for their own slang, which they would interject amongst the ordinary Spanish they spoke every day. But it was a badge, a sign of belonging, and, more importantly, of not being a payo.

  Jalar, jalar. I rolled the word over my tongue as we headed out for food on the patio.

  After the meal we rehearsed. But it was more serious this time; the last opportunity before playing in front of an unknown audience.

  ‘Churumbel!’ Carlos called me over. ‘I want you to play the Alegría with Javier on your own.’ I knew the piece. It was short, a kind of filler, and we had been playing it as a group for weeks. But I was shocked to think I was going to be put in the spotlight like this. I nodded and the rest of them filed out of the room. We were left alone to practise together.

  ‘Just you and me, eh?’ Javier said under his breath and winked. He could joke with me, but there was a sharpness to his humour.

  ‘Venga. Let’s start. I’m sure you can do it.’ He stood with his back to me, waving his arm at his side in time.

  ‘Siete ocho nueve diez un DOS.’

  I plunged in, but got no more than a few seconds into the piece.