‘I met a very interesting man the other day, just as I was unloading my car. You know, I could tell, there was a connection of sorts.’ She gave a knowing look. She seemed to have no trouble meeting men in this foreign place.
‘He was a middle-aged man. He told me a friend of his had done a painting of the crucifixion in a church, with people waving their hands and pleading.’ She pulled a face. ‘So I asked him, “Is your friend a very emotional man?” And he said, “Yes, I suppose he is.” But he didn’t understand what I was talking about, really.
‘He said he worked in some business, but I didn’t catch his name. Anyway, he was married, with four children,’ she added disappointedly. ‘Maybe I’ll bump into him some day.’ And she gave me a look as if to say such a thing was more than likely to happen and had often happened to her before.
‘When did you arrive in Granada?’ I asked. I assumed she was here on some sort of tour, or package deal, to see the sights of Andalusia.
‘Oh, two days ago. I drove down from Surrey.’
‘Surrey?!’
‘Yes, Surrey. It’s a perfectly respectable place you know. I almost didn’t make it. I went round a roundabout the wrong way in France – just outside Paris – and a policeman stopped me (he was very good looking). I told him in my best French that it was all very confusing, and I was terribly sorry, but I’d been in England for the past eighteen years, and had forgotten how to drive on the other side. He leaned over and said “Are you looking for your coffin, madame?” in his husky, deep voice, and waved me on. “Allez, madame”.’
‘But why did you come here? Why did you leave?’
She paused. ‘My work in England had finished. So I thought I might as well do nothing in Spain instead of idling about in England. So I brought what I could fit in the car and drove here. I never take more than a carload wherever I go; it gives you a wonderful opportunity to shed so many possessions. Don’t you find? You must have discovered that on your travels.’
Her words acted like a trigger, and in moments I found I had opened up to her, won over by her humour and eccentricity, and had begun the story of how I had come to Spain. She sat and listened silently. I told her things I had not told anyone, not even Eduardo. But she made me feel comfortable, and the words came like a stream. Flamenco, I said. Flamenco was what had really brought me here.
‘Yes, there’s nothing like an obsession to stop us from thinking about what we should really be paying attention to,’ she said. I didn’t understand, but her words found an echo with my train of thought the previous day in the Alhambra.
By the time we finished talking, it was gone midnight. We had been there for four hours, swapping stories and anecdotes. Grace – I didn’t discover her name until some three or four days later – was a master storyteller, the product of an age before television, when entertaining through tales was a normal, necessary activity.
‘I must go,’ she said at last. ‘Shall we meet here again tomorrow at the same time?’
I agreed.
She stood up, we kissed each other on the cheeks, and she walked away. As she did so, a man stood up from one of the other tables and walked over to join her. They said a few words and then walked off together, hand in hand.
It was the man with the knife.
The conversation had lifted me, but I was confused by Grace’s odd behaviour. How did she know the man with the knife? Was she dealing drugs? Perhaps it wasn’t drugs at all that had been in the parcel. Maybe the man sitting on the wall was only trying to be friendly. I wasn’t sure any more. In fact, I wasn’t sure of anything.
But in a more positive state of mind, I decided the next day to go back to Juana’s dance school, just to get back into flamenco again. I had slept well, and wanted to maintain the momentum. Playing with dancers and another guitarist would be ideal for this mild, sunny day. It was early, but I had seen the list of classes pinned on the wall. There was a two-hour morning lesson twice a week.
I walked into the hall. Emilio, the doorman, was sipping coffee in his wooden booth. He waved as I passed by, the thin grey moustache above his lip lifting and curling at the corners.
‘Buenos días,’ I called.
‘Buenos días, señor!’
Inside the school it was quiet. Only a handful of adult students, dark hair swept back in the traditional way.
‘Ay! Thank God!’ It was Juana.
‘Hello. I thought I might join you today, if that’s . . .’
‘Thank God you’re here!’
‘What?’
‘You know Guajiras?’ she asked. It was one of the ‘return ticket’ palos: songs and rhythms that had come back to Spain from Latin America and been absorbed into flamenco, like the Rumba and Colombianas. With a slow, twelve-beat rhythm that gradually got faster through the piece, Guajiras – originally from Cuba – usually had a light, lyrical feel to them and were wonderful to watch when danced well.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Then play. We need you.’
‘But what about . . . Isn’t the other guitarist coming?’
‘Luis? No he can’t come. Won’t be here for some time,’ she said pushing me towards the chair, urging me to begin.
‘Come on!’ She clapped her hands to gather the girls and start the lesson. They stood in a line in front of the mirror.
‘But what happened to him?’
‘His girlfriend kicked him down the stairs and he broke something,’ she said without turning round. ‘Put him hospital! Leche!’
‘No more questions, now,’ she ordered. ‘Play!’
chapter ELEVEN
* * *
Por Guajira
El río Guadalquivir
tiene la barba granate.
Ay dos ríos de Granada
Ay uno nieve y otro sangre.
The River Guadalquivir
has a pomegranate beard.
Two rivers in Granada
one of snow, the other of blood.
F. García Lorca
LUIS’S INJURIES WERE worse than we realised. His girlfriend was the national Tae Kwon Do champion. Multiple fractures meant he would be out of action for at least six months.
‘Whatever you do,’ he whispered in my ear when we went to visit him at the hospital, ‘take my advice: never, and I mean never, go out with a martial artist. Stick to dancers, they’re not half as dangerous, believe me.’
In Luis’s absence, I became the full-time school guitarist, playing at the two morning classes, along with evening sessions that stretched from five in the afternoon to ten at night. The students were of all ages, from girls of seven to elderly ladies just taking it up for the first time. The majority were women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Some looked like Moors; black-haired, dark-skinned. Others were blondes or red-heads; you could imagine their ancestors with helmets and shields with great crosses on them cleaning the land of heresy. Now they were all dancing together, upright, heads held high. More like a ballet class, I thought. But Juana was professional, and it felt good to be there when she was teaching. There was much for me to learn. Despite my time in Carlos’s group, I still lacked confidence playing with dancers, and the classes gave me the opportunity to hammer out the compás for each palo again and again. It was easy to become distracted or change to something else when practising on my own, but here I had to repeat monotonously, always concentrating on Juana and the dancers, speeding up with them or slowing down depending on the pace she set, watching for the signs of a coming llamada, the signal that another section of the dance was about to begin. Difficult at first, eventually it became routine, like everything.
The classes were very technical, with great emphasis placed on the zapateo, or footwork, and the position of the hands. But there was a spirit here, or flamenco quality, as well.
‘Relax your legs,’ Juana would order the students. ‘But from here,’ she drew a line at the level of her groin, ‘everything has to flow upwards, hacia arriba.’
Then she w
ould order me to stop playing for a moment and sing the palo herself as she directed the class, hammering out the beats and off-beats with her heels.
Some of the girls in the classes were very flamenca too: confident and sassy, they often made up for what they lacked technically with a playful, flirtatious look in their eye. Others were more graceful and gave the impression of being real dancers. Then there were the very middle-class ones who did it as a hobby: short bobbed hair, sweat bands and pink cardigans against the cold. Some of them danced well, but never with any love, never flamenco.
Grace and I usually met in the afternoons, or once my classes had ended in the evenings, and we would spend our time chatting and exploring the city together: buying dried herbs from the spice sellers behind the cathedral – flor de azafrán for depression and migraines, fucus for losing weight – or pretending to bargain with Moroccan traders selling tourist tack in the bazaar, walking away once we’d beaten them down to their lowest price. She talked constantly, hardly allowing me to say a word, and any questions I had about her – particularly about some of her male friends – never had any light shed on them. There were some things you just couldn’t ask a woman of her age.
We both had flats in the Realejo district – perhaps the most authentically Granadan area, with its half-broken houses, whitewashed walls and dirty, stepped streets at the foot of the Alhambra. The Albaicín, the more celebrated Moorish quarter of the city, had been taken over by Moroccan tea-houses, terrace restaurants serving heavy, oily food that you chose from pictures on a plastic card, and further on, in the Sacromonte area, Gypsy caves offering a night of sangría, gazpacho and ‘genuine flamenco shows’ – transport to and from your hotel included.
One night we went to a gig – partly out of curiosity and partly for fun. We sat in the open air listening to a cantaora who sang like she was chewing gum, and watching a twelve-year-old girl in a red and white polka-dot dress dance around a minute stage, contorting her face into a look of hate and aggression. It was clear she was being taught by a man, with graceless, masculine hand movements. At one point, a group of drunken flamencos passing in the street outside climbed up onto the railings to get a closer look, laughing and shouting abuse. ‘Viva Jerez!’ one cried. But his sarcastic reference to one of the genuine centres of flamenco went over the heads of the mainly foreign audience.
‘Anda, tomar por culo. Bugger it,’ said a bored-looking Spanish woman to her husband at the next table. ‘Let’s go back to the hotel.’ He made her wait until the end of the song, and they left.
It was impossible for flamenco to exist in such self-conscious circumstances. I remembered the story of La Niña de los Peines, who was spurred on to give the greatest performances of her life – so Lorca said – when one night a bored aficionado in the crowd shouted ‘Viva Paris!’, as though to say ‘Enough of what you sing for the tourists. Give us the real thing!’ Duende, I was beginning to realise, could not be produced on demand. It needed something else – perhaps something from outside – and could only exist in a special, fleeting moment, as though the performers were channels for some power that came from beyond themselves.
There was a lightness about Grace, something I could not quite put my finger on. It was impossible to pigeonhole her. No sooner had I thought I understood her, than she would act in completely the opposite way. Scatty one minute, then sharp and acute the next. Or friendly, then distant, although these periods would never last very long. Moody? I wasn’t sure. Sometimes she gave me the feeling there was some hidden agenda.
She would tell me folk-stories from all over the world. Or simply select interesting events from her own life. Even everyday occurrences seemed to act as a kind of launching-pad for her.
‘There were some crickets on the wall in my flat,’ she said one afternoon, knocking back her glass of Alhambra beer. ‘I kept looking up at them and there they were, always in the same place. And then about twice a day they would just start making this horrible sound, for up to an hour – a high, screaming sound, not like any crickets I’ve heard before. And then just as suddenly, they would stop. The next day, it would be the same again. I left the windows open, and tried everything, but they just wouldn’t go away – always the same thing. Anyway, I was getting quite annoyed by this point, so I called my neighbour in and I said, here, can you please help me to get rid of these crickets? They’re making such a noise. And you know what he said? He said: “Those aren’t crickets, it’s a smoke alarm. I was wondering why you never turned it off.” Well, he was quite nice about it, and switched the thing off for me. The black things were just marks on the wall, it seemed.’
‘So they’re not making the racket any more?’
‘No, no. It’s stopped. But it’s funny how we mistake one thing for another.’
Carmen came to the youngsters’ class in the early evening, when the teenage girls poured in, sucking sweets and filling the corridors with brightly coloured rucksacks and high-pitched chatter. Juana would often go easier on them than the older ones. She felt their lives were already regimented enough by school and homework, and wanted flamenco to be fun for them. But with Carmen she was different. Carmen was an intense girl. While the others treaded carefully, as though afraid of their own power, there was a surety about her footwork, a contact with the earth, as though she had roots descending beneath the floorboards and into the ground. She looked much like the other girls in the class – tied-back brown hair, brown eyes, soft, thick features – but there was something that set her apart: a playfulness and flexibility of expression, changing from happiness to surprise and despair as each movement demanded, as though she were dancing with everything she had, every part of her body and mind. It gave her a gravitas, a maturity, and a sensuality that were lacking in her classmates. The problem was her technical weaknesses. She’d started relatively late, aged fifteen, and had only been dancing at the school for just over a year. It was frustrating for her, but there was something in her movements that captured the eye, and I found myself watching her whenever I could during the lessons that she attended.
Juana did not give her more attention – if anything, it was less – but I could tell whenever she did direct a comment at her, there was a seriousness in her voice that was missing when she addressed the others.
‘Watch how I move, Carmen.’
And Carmen seemed to respond, increasing her efforts until she mastered the new technique, a faint smile forming momentarily on her mouth in triumph before she got caught up in the next sequence.
Then one night after class, when the winds seemed to come off the mountains and a chill lay on the city for the first time, Juana said she wanted to start giving Carmen special lessons, once, twice a week. It would mean working later.
‘Can you manage it?’ she asked.
‘Yes, of course. It’s a pleasure to play when she’s dancing.’
‘We have to work on that girl,’ she said.
The first class was the worst I ever attended.
‘No! Like this. Again . . . Again . . . Again. Arms up! Don’t let them drop. Fingers! Use your hands, don’t wave them at me!’
We were working on a Bulería. Too complicated and fast, I thought. The poor girl danced, and moved, and danced, and stomped the floor till she was dropping from exhaustion.
‘Hold your head up, girl! Now, come on! To the right, to the left, to the . . . No! Like this. Here, like this. Again! Softly, now. Look at me! Hands like doves. Lift your waist. Here, lift, up, more. Hands! Again. Un, dos, TRES . . .’
Her long legs began to flop onto the floor uncontrollably as the same step was repeated and repeated ten, twenty times or more. And the graceful little dancer I had seen previously began to look disjointed and artless.
‘Chin up! Arms like the wings of an eagle. Come on! Believe in what you’re doing. Separate your hips from your waist. Breasts out. More! Like bull’s horns. SIETE OCHO nueve DIEZ. Relax!’
At one point I thought Carmen was going to stop: the point when the
inevitable sense of rebellion was reached, the point when she might call out, ‘No more!’ But it passed rapidly, swamped by yet more commands, more demonstrations, more reprimands. And she simply kept going, tired, exhausted, sweating from every pore, unable now to complain or question what she was being put through.
After an hour and a half that felt much, much longer, she left, and was barely able to pick up her bag. It was late, and she left without changing.
Juana could see I was disturbed.
‘You must understand: I’m teaching her body,’ she said. ‘More than her mind, I’m teaching her body.’
Winter meant Grace and I had to look for new bars to hang out in, warming ourselves away from the icy air that blew off the Sierra Nevada. We’d often meet in old men’s drinking holes in the more hidden parts of the Albaicín, near where a deaf pensioner with jam-jar glasses used to cut my hair. They were the kind of places where the only cigarettes that were sold were black-tobacco Ducados. Or we’d have a drink at a big, barn-like bar off the Gran Vía that had Moorish arches, old, oak barrels of sherry and homemade vermouth made with vanilla and cinnamon, and enormous faded posters announcing the 1928 Corpus festival.
One day, feeling lazy, we went to one of the tourist cafés that lined the edge of the Plaza Bib-Rambla. The waiters wore stained white shirts and black bow ties, standing in the doorway when business was quiet like menacing bouncers. It was late on a Sunday afternoon after a heavy lunch at Chikito’s – Grace paid; I couldn’t afford such a high-class restaurant. We were both knocking back glasses of rum and drawing on thin, dark brown cigars. For someone in her seventies, I was amazed at how much Grace could drink. Her round face was pink with an alcoholic flush, and her short white hair, bobbing just above a pair of long silver and turquoise earrings, looked distinctly ruffled.
‘I was pausing to open the door downstairs,’ she said, ‘when I caught sight of an elderly chap behind me doing odd things in front of my car. I looked round and saw him perform a complicated hand gesture near the licence plate and then walk off. “What are you doing to my car?” I said. “Nothing, nothing,” he assured me. “I always do this to English cars for good luck.”
Duende Page 23