Duende

by Jason Webster

  More than anything, though, there was something in his poetry:

  Oye, hijo mío, el silencio.

  Es un silencio ondulado,

  un silencio,

  donde resbalan valles y ecos

  y que inclina las frentes

  hacia el suelo.

  Listen, my son, to the silence.

  It is a silence of waves,

  a silence

  where valleys and echoes slip past,

  which turns faces

  towards the ground.

  And then there was something about the Alhambra. The Red Palace, a jewel above the city, cloaked in the deep green of cypress trees, set against the snowy mountains of the Sierra Nevada and the intense blue Andalusian sky. They said it had even inspired the Taj Mahal. Pedro had talked of it with a lilt in his voice, as though remembering a lover: it seemed to have that effect on people. In my own mind, it had become a unique concentration point, an axis between Europe and Africa, western Christianity and Islam; an artistic powerhouse where two worlds were pressed into one. Beautiful, but almost suffocating at times. Lorca had complained of feeling stifled by Granada. And I knew, almost as soon as I arrived, that my time here would be short. A few months maybe, not more. It felt like being in a pressure cooker.

  I climbed the hill – the Cuesta de Gomérez – past austere guitar-makers and bright T-shirt shops, through the Pomegranate Gate and up the steep, green avenue to the palace, feet slipping on the loose gravel path. Young Germans with fluff-moustaches and broad shoulders powered past me as I struggled my way up, unfit after months of doing little but sitting around. Professional guitarists, I often noticed, had strangely atrophied bodies, usually slightly pear-shaped or knock-kneed from dedicated practice. In the hotel, I’d caught sight of my profile in the mirror; head low, tight neck, hips rocking forwards, arched back. I swore to reverse it and pushed myself harder up the slope.

  The Nasrid Palace, with its Patio of Myrtles and the Patio of Lions, was exquisite, and made me realise that I had been living blind. Here was colour, form, balance; a labyrinth of designs and geometric patterns. The sound of water everywhere; row upon row of fine, needle-like columns; wooden ceilings like star-speckled, upturned boats.

  Something was bothering me, though. It was different to the palace I had seen in picture books. Something about the intricate design work itself. I had imagined it to be made of stone, but crafted so finely as to look like paper, or lace. This was not stone that ran beneath my fingers, however, it was stucco, and had the look of a cheap modern replica. Surely, I thought entering the Patio del Mexuar, the original had been replaced. But no, this was the original, as I discovered the same effect throughout the royal palace. It was clumsy, thick, and lacked the grace I had expected from the photos.

  I sat down at the far end of the Patio of Myrtles in one of the throne-like leather chairs, looking across to the Hall of the Ambassadors and an arcade of seven ornate arches perched on fine white columns. The circular marble fountains were silent and the image was clearly and calmly reflected in the pool of water stretching out ahead of me like a sheet of glass, peppered every once in a while by sparrows breaking out from the cover of the bushes and speeding into the sky. It was beautiful, one of the most beautiful buildings I had ever seen. But it was a joy tinged with disappointment. Or perhaps it was just my melancholy speaking. I glanced up, and saw a design I had often seen repeated around the building. Arabic writing, the motto of the Nasrids: Wa la ghalib illa Allah, no conqueror but God. It was everywhere, like the refrain of a poem. Pedro had once said the Alhambra was the largest book of poetry in the world. I missed him now. His cheerful, romantic slant on life would have been welcome.

  I ran the words through my head again and again. They felt comfortable, comforting. ‘No conqueror but God, no conqueror but God’, a rhythmic phrase that seemed to calm something in me. And gradually, as the tourist groups passed by like schools of fish, I began to understand something. The stucco work, which seemed temporary or makeshift, had been deliberately crafted that way. The decorations had the power to take you somewhere else, even make you forget the physical world. Yet one day this would all crumble and disappear. The builders had wanted us to remember that. Nothing was permanent, not this place, nor its beauty, nor the people gazing at it. For a few minutes I allowed myself to explore the thought. Everything I had started since coming to Spain seemed to have come to a sudden and unexpected ending. The relationship with Lola, and now the group. I was incapable of building anything, always seeming to take the wrong path as I sought understanding and meaning. Duende, whatever it might be, was as elusive now as it had ever been.

  Everything would come to an end, even, one day, my interest in flamenco. At first I was shocked at the thought. But for a moment, it was strangely clear, as if a space had opened within me. Flamenco had become an obsession, a way of defining myself by what I did. It gave me identity. Perhaps it was time for another approach.

  * * *

  The next day I decided to return with my guitar. The still, serene beauty of the Alhambra had acted upon me like a balm and the surroundings might give me inspiration.

  I found a secluded stone bench in the Generalife – jannat al-arif, the gardens of knowing. Irises, marigolds and roses, vibrant and powerful even now in autumn, splashed bright colours amid the fountains and myrtle bushes. Opposite, on the other side of the River Darro, stood the Albaicín, all white and green with terracotta roofs. I took the guitar out of the case and looked around to see if anyone was watching. It was foolish to think I wouldn’t attract some attention – a blond foreigner playing flamenco in the gardens of the Alhambra – but I wanted to be unobserved at the beginning at least.

  I started by playing an Alegría, fingers missing the strings for a few moments before settling into the familiar rhythm. Within a few minutes I had focused on the music, and the plants, trees, late summer flowers and Albaicín began disappearing from view.

  ‘Di di di tran tran tran.’ I hummed to myself the nonsense words usually sung in an Alegría. People said they had been improvised one night by the singer Ignacio Espeleta when he forgot the lyrics he was supposed to sing, and ever since had been incorporated as a standard opening for the palo.

  A few people walked past, some hovering to hear a falseta before moving on. They were mostly foreign – Japanese, French, Germans, an English couple – but I was more concerned about one of the gardeners trying to throw me out. I wasn’t clear what their policy was about people using the place for music practice. But an hour, then two hours passed and still no-one had complained. I felt the experience begin to lift me in the way I had hoped.

  The sun was quite low, drawing long shadows across the pathway, when I packed the guitar away. The instrument had responded well to Granada, with its dry, Madrid-like air, and I was happy with my playing. Looking up, I could see the reddening light brushing the roofs of the ancient Arab town across the valley. I might go and look for a bar there later, perhaps meet some new people.

  There was a sound behind me and I realised I was not alone. A woman came forward and stood close by, looking at me, and wanting to say something. I fiddled with the guitar case hoping that she would walk on, but she waited for me to finish and eventually I looked up, beaten by her patience.

  ‘Tú. Muy bien,’ she said in a thick English accent. An old, open, round face, smiling with crooked teeth; she must have been in her seventies at least.

  ‘Gracias. Thank you.’

  ‘Of course, you’re English. I thought so.’

  It felt good to talk to another English person again. At that moment, she was a link to a home that seemed more distant than ever. And I warmed to the uncharacteristically relaxed way in which she had started speaking to me. But there was a sudden awkwardness between us, as though something was going wrong, as though it wasn’t part of the script that this should be happening. And so we fell into a strange silence for a moment, not sure what to say to one another.

  ‘
Have you been listening for long?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, for some time now. How long have you been playing flamenco?’ There was a flash in her crystal-blue eyes that betrayed a much younger spirit inside her aging body.

  ‘A couple of years.’

  ‘Oh really? As long as that?’ She laughed. ‘It looked as though the guitar was playing you,’ she added. ‘Not the other way round, if you see what I mean. Ha ha!’ And she turned away, pacing down the slope towards the palace. I stared after her in a rage. How dare she say such a thing! What did she know about playing the guitar?

  ‘But, of course, I don’t know anything about playing the guitar,’ she said suddenly, over her shoulder as she walked away. ‘Please don’t be offended.’

  I watched as she headed down the slope. A young Spanish man sitting on a wall stood up as she approached, handed her a document case, and they continued together towards the exit, hand in hand.

  I walked out of the Alhambra grounds and back into the city, annoyed and confused. What on earth had she meant? ‘The guitar was playing me’? It was a senseless thing to say, and it gnawed away at me as I thought up all kinds of witty put-downs that would have been far more useful had I been able to think of them at the time. I returned to the hotel full of anger and threw the guitar down onto the bed.

  ‘There. I’ve had enough of being played today,’ I said and walked out into the evening streets.

  The paseo, the evening stroll, was in full swing. People walking amid the low-flying bats, dressed in elegant, colourful clothes, bronzed skin showing under pinks, blues, whites, reds. Women linked arms, stopping to look at shoes in shop windows, while the men hailed one another loudly, voices echoing up the high, narrow streets into the cooling air. Groups of teenagers circled the squares on bicycles. One boy on a small moped with a high-pitched screaming engine gave rides to each girl in turn, up and down the hill, while the other boys looked on with envy. There was something earthy about the people here: thicker features, shorter bodies.

  I walked to the far end of the Plaza Nueva by the Church of Santa Ana and sat on the wall overlooking the trickling Darro, people passing to and fro. It was a crossover time. The first seats at the open air cafés and restaurants were being taken for evening drinks and Granada’s famously large tapas, tourists looking for somewhere to eat, while many locals were still leaving work and heading home.

  Lazing in the gentle sunset atmosphere of the square, I caught sight of a priest on my left. A fairly ordinary priest, I thought, dressed in the usual brown robes, with his hands clasped piously behind his back, clutching some sort of small parcel. I thought nothing of it, and let my eyes drift across the square to the other side. A young man with long, dark, greasy hair had set off walking from one of the bars at exactly the same moment as the priest, and looked as though he was about to cross his path a few feet ahead of him. But instead he slowed down, circled, and very deliberately walked in such a way as to pass inches behind the priest, only a few yards from where I sat. It seemed like odd behaviour, first to make such a detour, and secondly to do so in order to brush so closely to a man of the cloth. Perhaps he was hoping for some of the priest’s holiness to rub off, I joked to myself. But as I kept my eyes on the man, and then looked back at the priest, I noticed something: the small parcel that had previously been in the priest’s hand had been passed to the man who was nervously, if not unprofessionally, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. There could be no doubt now what the parcel was. I had seen this before, but never with a priest.

  The young man walked to the other side of the square. Fascinated, I was still watching him as he hovered by the doorway to a small building. He gave another quick glance to right and left, then caught my eye. He stopped and we looked at one another for a moment. He knew I had seen him. I tried to pretend not to notice and turned away, looking down the square at what now seemed to be dangerously thinning crowds. But it was too late, and from the corner of my eye, I could see him walking towards me. Fear streamed into my veins as I tried to work out what to do. There were fewer people at this end of the square. He could quite simply push me backwards into the river and I would never be seen again. Nobody would know. They were all too busy drinking, eyeing up the skirt, rushing home with the ingredients for dinner. I did not want to run, or even walk away. That would betray me, and I thought even now I might be able to convince him otherwise.

  He came and sat down on the wall beside me. Very close, almost touching. He smelt strongly of nicotine mixed with adrenaline, a taut, sinewy type of energy circling his skin. One blow to the neck and I would be easily and efficiently dispensed with. I began to rue my earlier decision not to run. What the hell had I been thinking? Of course I should have run. This man did not want to talk, he wanted to kill me.

  He was holding something. A knife, a lock-knife that he had produced from his trouser pocket. He opened it out with a jerk and began rasping the blade against his thumb, never looking at me, his eyes fixed on the square ahead. I was unable to move for fear, and some morbid part of my mind began imagining the sensation of the blade passing through my ribs. There was so much to do with death in this city. It was almost appropriate that I should meet my own end in such a place, now that my flamenco journey seemed to be drawing to a close. Flamenco and death. They seemed to fit well together. I could understand the bloodcurdling cry of the singer – el llanto – why it moved people so, how it seemed to come from the earth itself, and drew you back, like clay, to some sense of yourself, and the anguish of a naked inner being that has been ripped away from an unknown source. Somewhere inside me, I could feel that I was already falling, already hitting the water, already passing away. It was a calm and silent feeling.

  The man was still drawing the knife across his fingers. It would come now, I told myself.

  But in the same moment, as the thought raced across my mind, I realised that I was safe, that he wasn’t going to harm me at all. This was a threat, nothing more. I had seen La Andonda doing something similar: playing with the knife when she was annoyed just to let you know she had it there, cleaning the dirt from under her fingernails, or, like now, rasping the blade with her thumb. If this man had wanted to kill me, I would never have seen anything. He would simply have stabbed me as quickly and as silently as he could.

  ‘She says it’s all right,’ he drawled in a thick Andalusian accent. I wasn’t sure if I had heard him right and it took me a moment to work out what he had said. It didn’t make sense. But I slowly understood that my life was being spared. I kept my unseeing eyes fixed on the square ahead as he flicked the blade back inside its wooden handle, thrust the weapon into his pocket, and smoothly stood up to leave.

  I opened my mouth to say something, grateful that he had decided not to kill me, but nothing came out.

  ‘Beautiful square, beautiful city. You must cover your eyes.’

  The young man walked away. Not to the door where he had headed before, but up the hill, into the labyrinth of the Albaicín.

  I dragged myself to the nearest seat at one of the outdoor cafés, slumped down, and ordered the hardest liquor I could think of. I looked up at the Alhambra, still there. ‘No conqueror but God.’

  Half an hour later, drinking whisky with a shaky hand, I noticed a familiar face only a few tables away. It was the English woman who had spoken to me in the Generalife. She hadn’t seen me. I turned my back and continued drinking.

  Then, as I was calling the waiter back for a fourth time, I glanced over again. She was still there, sitting with a man. Not the one I had seen her with earlier, but someone else, older and more aggressive. He leaned towards her as though intent on her hearing his every word. I watched them talking for a while. They were arguing. The man seemed to want her to do something, but she refused. Then, without warning, he got up and walked away, knocking the chair over as he left.

  I decided I should go and talk to her, picking up the chair that lay on its side.

  She smiled, bright blue eyes, short w
hite hair, as I sat down beside her. She seemed completely unaffected by what had just happened.

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad you came over,’ she said before I could ask if she was all right. ‘I wanted to apologise for earlier on. It was terribly rude of me. I shouldn’t have said such a thing.’

  I paused to answer, slowed by the earlier shock and the whisky.

  ‘This afternoon, in the Generalife,’ she added, as if to clarify. ‘Have I pronounced it right? Khe-ne-ra-lee-fay. I haven’t been in Granada for very long. Is that how you say it?’ Her voice was high and chirpy.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, still trying to catch up with her. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve been getting terribly lost . . . and receiving some very strange looks. I haven’t quite got used to the ‘kh’ sound. Khuh,’ she said. ‘Can you say it for me?’

  Her pronunciation was fine, but I felt obliged.

  ‘Khuh,’ I said.

  ‘Khuh,’ she repeated, perfectly, but with emphasis, as though pretending to be a learner. ‘You see, I can’t do it as well as you. But then you’re better at languages than I am.’

  It was hard to tell whether she did this kind of thing for effect, or if she really had noticed my level of proficiency.

  ‘Have you noticed how the Spanish are obsessed with pork and ham? I can’t seem to sit down without someone offering me ham this, or ham that. See, even here on the menu, pigs’ ears. Some friends gave me some, said it was a delicacy, so of course I felt I could hardly refuse. But they were awful. Ha, ha!’ and she pulled a face, the wrinkles around her mouth and eyes creasing more deeply.