Duende

by Jason Webster

  ‘Carlos! The gig! We’re supposed to be there.’

  He looked up at me uncomprehending, still slouched on the floor against the chair.

  ‘The concert. Tonight.’

  The understanding came slowly back into his eyes.

  ‘Fuck! Churumbel, you’re right.’ He crawled onto his knees then lifted himself up onto his feet. He was confused for a second, unsure what to do. Was he Carlos grieving for his lost friend, or Carlos the head of this group? He looked at a clock on the wall, then decided.

  ‘Venga! Come on!’ He clapped his hands. The wailing stuttered for a moment, then stopped.

  ‘In honour of our dear compare, we are all going to Restaurante Alegrías, now. ALL OF US!’

  Like a slow, unruly army, everyone began picking themselves up, the sound of chairs pushed back, coughing, a nose being blown. The order was unquestioned, quietly conceded as the best thing, the only thing, to do.

  We left the flat: Juanito, La Andonda, Javier, Antonio, María-José, her two daughters and their friends, a couple of neighbours, all led by Carlos. We squeezed into a couple of cars, and headed over the ring-road into the centre of the city.

  It was late, and the bar was already emptying. A group of Japanese businessmen in suits were standing in the doorway on their way out.

  ‘Good job they’re going,’ Carlos said. ‘Don’t want any Chinkies around tonight.’

  We trooped in, pushing the Orientals aside, and passed into the main area. The stage was empty – the last group had finished some time ago, and the manager was waiting for us, furious.

  ‘Just where the hell have you . . .?’

  Carlos swept past him with a flick of the hand, and we took the direct route to the stage, walking through the tables and chairs where the audience were sitting rather than passing down the side. A fat German tourist proved difficult to push past, obstinately refusing to pull his chair in any further, until Carlos bent down and with both hands lifted the edge of the man’s seat and sent him flying to the floor. He then walked over the man’s glasses where they had fallen from his face. We all followed in a line as the German sprawled about like a fly on its back, unable to right itself.

  The house lights went down as we clambered up onto the platform, and just three spotlights focused on the area where we stood. Carlos called over to Antonio and spoke lightly in his ear, then we all pushed back to the edge in a semi-circle, facing the audience, leaving Carlos alone in the centre.

  Antonio began to play. We all knew at once. It was a Taranta – slow, mournful, painful. Antonio played the first chords, stroking gently on the strings, then finished, and Carlos was left to sing on his own:

  Carretera, carretera,

  llévame por caría

  a las minas del Romero,

  que acaban de asesinar

  al hermanico que mas quiero.

  For pity’s sake, road,

  show me the way to the Romero mines,

  for they have just killed

  the brother I loved most.

  We stood still around him, motionless, the song entering us and holding us down like a thick, heavy blanket of sorrow. His voice became a piercing, bloody scream, tears flowing from his eyes onto the floor. This time the expression on his face was real. My skin tingled. La Andonda was holding my hand tightly, leaning on me every few seconds as she swayed, unable to support her own weight with the grief. The audience was silent and still. Even the German had stopped his muttering. All minds were concentrated on Carlos, and the pain echoing from inside him. And it was not simply to marvel at how well he expressed his feelings – it was because he brought the same grief, the same sorrow out in every person there. His pain was their pain. And our pain.

  We left after one song. There was nothing more to be done. The manager quietly handed over the fee. I wondered if anyone had told him, but it hardly seemed necessary. He would have been able to tell anyway.

  We gathered outside for a moment in the black street, no-one knowing quite what to do. La Andonda was still holding on to me, as though ready to collapse. Carlos came over and spoke softly in my ear.

  ‘Listen, churumbel. It’s over. We’re leaving here, going to Barcelona. I’ve got a cousin there.’

  He gave me a handful of notes.

  ‘Take this. You’ll need it. But I tell you: get out of Madrid. This is a bad city, a bad city, I tell you.’

  He pressed my hand and placed his thick, hairy arm around my shoulders with a resigned grin.

  ‘It’s for the best.’

  He took La Andonda’s hand and led her away to the cars.

  ‘Wait!’ I pulled out the knife from my pocket and handed it to her. She took it, kissed me and then handed it back.

  ‘Keep it,’ she said.

  The others followed behind, dragging their feet on the tarmac. I didn’t know if they realised I was no longer amongst them, but there were no goodbyes.

  And they drove off, leaving me alone, standing in the street with my guitar, waving blindly at the red tail-lights, before I turned away and headed home.

  chapter TEN

  * * *

  Por Granaína

  Tierra que baña el Genil

  viva Graná la sultana;

  y bendita sea la mañana

  en que yo te conocí

  con tu carita tan gitana.

  Long live Granada, the Moorish queen,

  a land watered by the River Genil:

  and bless the morning I first saw you

  with your Gypsy face.

  ‘NO. TENGO GUITARRISTAS hasta aquí ! I’m up to my ears with guitarists.’

  Another rejection, at the last school but one on my list. Perhaps I was a bit ambitious calling at the Escuela Mariquilla, the best flamenco dance centre in the city, but it had been the same story everywhere. No-one needed another guitarist – the place was awash with them. Still, I pushed on. I was searching for something, and had an intuition that here, in Granada, despite the tacky image of flamenco the city pushed at the hordes of tourists, I might find what I was looking for.

  The air was thick with sweet-smelling aromatic flowers – jasmine by day and galán de noche by night. Deep blue morning glories climbed the whitewashed walls, while every street was lined with cypress and plane trees, and here and there, an old stone fountain like a wedding cake stacked three or four storeys high. The city reminded me of Pedro’s garden back in Alicante, and his prediction that one day I would come to the Alhambra and the Generalife. This was his inspiration, I could see it now: the world of the old-school Arabists, Miguel Asín Palacios and Emilio García Gómez; a slightly old-fashioned, heavy city, where manners long forgotten in the rest of democratised Spain still counted. A Granadino would either dismiss you or respect you in an instant based on hazy, universally recognised factors such as calidad – whether or not you were a person of ‘quality’.

  This was not the light, thin air of Madrid, though, despite being near the mountains. It was dry – so dry that often I had to breathe through my mouth to protect the inside of my nose – but it was dense, like blood: suffocating. The patron saint of the city was the Virgin of Distress, weeping over the body of her recently crucified son. Images of her distraught face – wrapped in powerful dark cloth, beneath a gold crown three times the size of her head – were everywhere, on posters and postcards. It was said that more people had been killed here during the Civil War than anywhere else in Spain. The dead seemed to have left something of themselves behind to torment their killers, the city that betrayed them. Even now, with a deep sense of loss and bewilderment following Jesús’s death, I always tried to keep in mind the Spanish proverb: Dios aprieta pero no ahoga – God tightens the noose but doesn’t strangle you. In Granada, despite the beauty of the city, there were people who, from the expression on their faces, seemed to be in a perpetual state of mourning, forever focused on some inexplicable pain.

  I walked down the Gran Vía, lined with its brooding, muscular, old banks. On one side the Al
baicín – the old Moorish quarter – sloped upwards to face the Alhambra across the River Darro, and on the other, spread the more modern, European city, still bearing signs of the Arab past in the winding cobbled streets that slowly straightened out the further from the old town you walked. I was looking for the last school on my list, a list scribbled down after a frustrating investigation at the tourist office. No-one seemed to understand I wanted to play, not have lessons.

  ‘Soy tocaor.’

  ‘You want guitar lessons?’

  ‘No. I’m looking for dance schools who might need a guitarist.’

  ‘Here. Try this man. He teaches at . . .’

  Finally I had extracted some names from a wad of pamphlets, most of them places catering for tourists in the Gypsy caves up in Sacromonte.

  I heard it before I saw it. The unmistakable sounds of a flamenco dance class issuing from heavily barred open windows.

  ‘Vamos! From the beginning!’

  Tak tak-a tak tak. The heels of what sounded to be up to twenty shoes were pounding a wooden floor.

  I passed through an open doorway into a dark, musty hall with a large Moroccan-style glass lantern hanging by a thick chain from the ceiling. An elderly man was sweeping the floor: white hair, balding, with loose trousers and braces hitched over his white shirt. I stopped and watched. There was something engaging about him, something about the way he was sweeping, how he held himself, was engrossed completely in his task. It took all his concentration, yet he was also absolutely aware of everything around him, as though he had eyes in the back of his head. He had poise and presence. He knew I was there. Yet he had something to complete first, and I would have to wait.

  He bent down with a dustpan, collected the grit he had been sweeping, placed it into a bin, put his broom in a little wooden booth standing against one of the walls, and then turned to me. Everything in its own good time.

  ‘Dígame Usted. What can I do for you, sir?’

  The polite form was becoming so rare in Spain I had almost forgotten what it sounded like. Even in shops, especially if the assistant was young, the tú form was normal.

  ‘I wanted to visit the school,’ I said. ‘I play the guitar . . . I thought they might want a guitarist.’

  The sense of calm and centredness about the man made me slightly self-conscious at first. He had probably guessed what I was there for, carrying the guitar over my shoulder, but he waited patiently for me to finish, neither judging nor second-guessing me.

  ‘You’ll want to speak to Juana,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

  We walked through a wooden door and up the stairs.

  ‘You’re English, aren’t you,’ he said. ‘I can tell from the accent.’

  The comment smarted a little. Despite looking very foreign, I always tried to speak Spanish as well as I could so that at least I might not sound like an outsider.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Perhaps that’s something I should work on a bit more.’

  ‘No! Absolutely not! That is you. That is who you are.’

  He walked on ahead as his words registered inside me. He was right. I had always been seeking acceptance; I might not feel so English any more, but no matter how long I stayed, or who I was with, I would never really be Spanish, or a Gypsy, or any of the things I had aspired to be. I was always something else, always on the outside. It was a hard thing to take on board, but at the same time, as I thought it through, I realised there was something liberating in this as well: an outsider might never be fully accepted, but he was free to be different, perhaps free to make something more of himself. Wasn’t that what had attracted me to flamenco, after all – the promise that it might release something in me and make me freer in some way?

  A number of girls were emerging from the main dance class, hair tied back with clips, faces shiny with exertion. The old man pointed.

  ‘That’s her,’ he said. And he left.

  I went in, squeezing past the dancers. The classroom was small, with windows on one side, a wall of mirrors, a couple of posters at the back, and an empty wooden floor, beaten and cracked from years of crashing heels. In the corner sat a man in his thirties leaning over a guitar. Juana had her back to me, a silver fish hairclip pinning her hair at the back of her head, large shoulders. I waited for them to finish talking.

  ‘Hola,’ she said, turning round. The guitarist was packing up and leaving.

  She did not look like a dancer. For one thing, she was overweight, but it was the thick, hard fat of an active middle-aged woman. Her eyes were jet-black, like her hair, and her skin was unusually pale.

  ‘Juana?’

  ‘Yes.’ She had a deep, businesslike voice.

  ‘I was speaking with the man downstairs . . .’

  ‘Señor Emilio.’

  ‘Yes. He said I should talk to you about . . .’

  ‘Oh, you’re learning the guitar. Well, you’re welcome to come and sit in. You should talk with Luis.’ She pointed to the door and the guitarist who was just leaving.

  ‘Actually, I was thinking more of playing for the classes.’

  ‘We don’t need anyone right now,’ she said. ‘And even if we did, I couldn’t pay much. This is a small school. You should try the Escuela Mariquilla. They . . .’

  ‘I already have. They said the same thing.’

  ‘Or there are plenty of places in the Albaicín, Sacromonte, round there. You should try the tablaos. Some of them do classes for foreigners . . .’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t offer you anything. But you’re welcome, as I said, to come and play with us.’

  I thanked her and turned to leave. She thrust out a thick, heavy arm to shake my hand. It seemed unusual, but I took it, and she held my hand for a moment.

  ‘Have you been playing for long?’

  ‘I just did a tour with a group from Madrid.’

  ‘How long for?’ She was still holding my hand.

  ‘A couple of months.’

  ‘Good.’ She let go. ‘Keep it up. You’ll thank yourself one day for all the hard work.’

  I headed for the door.

  ‘Did you dance?’ she called behind me.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Did you dance, ever, when you were in Madrid?’

  ‘No. I only played.’

  ‘We’ll have to get you up on your feet, then.’ She smiled and turned her back on me, as if to show me the interview had come to an end.

  I stepped out and walked downstairs, through the hallway, with its distinctive musty smell.

  ‘See you again!’ Emilio called out from his wooden booth.

  ‘Yes. See you again,’ I said, unsure if I ever would.

  I sat in the dark of the cheap hotel room, tired and depressed. The combination of grief, loneliness and the sudden collapse of my highly stimulated life had burnt me out. I had fled Madrid in a rage. Months of living on my nerves and little sleep began to burst out in petty squabbles with station assistants, arguments with other passengers, and a general short temper with everyone.

  I knew, from the moment of Jesús’s death and our last gig, the nonchalant farewell, that I had been cast out, rejected. All my suspicions about the group began to ring true. I felt I had been some sort of joke for them, an adornment to appeal to their foreign audiences. They would never have taken me on otherwise. How else could I explain the speed of the ending? Jesús had gone and I was of no use to anyone any more. In an attempt to console myself, I imagined that the group had disbanded altogether. Carlos would probably start selling second-hand clothes on street markets again. But I was stung, disillusioned and alone once more.

  Like any foreigner I had fallen for a romanticised image of the Gypsy: free, passionate, alive, anti-establishment. But a kind of Orientalism applied to Gypsies, in much the same way as westerners had a distorted image of people from the Middle East. In my own experience Carlos and the Gypsy members of the band had been suspicious, proud, hierarchical, generous, tribal – free from some of
the concerns and worries of the payos surrounding them, perhaps, but not free in the real sense of the word. Different walls, different bars on the windows, but imprisoned, none the less.

  Even at this point, though, low as I was, I knew I would stay in Spain, at least for a little longer. I had made the choice to come and learn flamenco and this alone was enough to keep me going, despite the thick, inner turmoil that now threatened to smother me. What I needed was rest. And so I slept, seeking refuge in unconsciousness.

  The following morning I forced myself to get up and go out, breaking the routine of depression, and convinced that with some degree of effort I might see a new chink of light. This was Granada, and it was time I experienced it.

  I had arrived in a dream-state, not really knowing why I had chosen this most emblematic of Andalusian cities. I had wanted to leave Madrid – was never really happy there. I always felt it failed to be the great European capital it aspired to be, its beauty all locked away in museums while pimps ruled the streets. But where to go? The name Granada rang loudly in my mind. At first I ignored it, but when, after several days, I found the idea still haunting me – still biting me on the arse, as Eduardo would have said – I decided to follow my instincts and caught the train, still unclear as to what I would do, or what I expected to find.

  Granada has its own strong flamenco tradition. Home to the Granaína palo, and the Zambra – played by the Sacromonte Gypsies – it is also where the great experimental singer Enrique Morente lived. Known for his encyclopedic knowledge of the cante, he was vilified by conservative flamencos for his innovations, such as singing with a heavy metal band as his backing group in the masterpiece recording Omega.

  ‘This music is not a museum piece,’ he always said. ‘Flamenco can be understood, even without being inside the flamenco world, by anyone who knows how to listen.’

  I admired his free spirit – a typical flamenco quality – and his refusal to enter the political-style arguments and factional fighting amongst the aficionado grandees.

  Lorca was also a draw to Granada, the city that destroyed him. Perhaps the only person to have come close to producing in words something of the feeling of flamenco, he became its patron saint, a martyr and a hero. There were songs about him, poems of his set to music, a constant stream of dedications – as though the flamenco community was aware of what it owed him, yet remained frustrated in its attempts to repay the debt. He and Manuel de Falla had virtually revived the form in their Concurso de Cante Jondo in 1922, at a time when flamenco was passing through one of its periodic descents into popularisation and stagnation.