A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

  I turned to Chloë. I know it’s wrong to put your daughter in the middle of a serious domestic rift, but this did also concern her. Her musical education was, after all, at risk. ‘What do you think, Chloë?’ I asked — she was sitting at the table concentrating rather too closely on her schoolwork — ‘Do you think that’s fair?’

  Chloë looked distressed. She hated being placed in such a delicate diplomatic position. ‘No, Daddy,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s not? Then with her hand disguising the giggle that was about to erupt, she added: ‘Those poor, poor sheep?

  And so it was that one midwinter afternoon I strode out with my guitar and headed for Granada. I arrived in Orgiva just too late for the bus, so I walked out of town and stuck my thumb out. It was years since I’d last hitch-hiked but within three minutes I was speeding along, chatting away to a young Granadina on her way home to the city from a holiday in the Alpujarra.

  The light was fading as I slogged my way up the Cuesta del Chápiz, where the school stood at the top of a steep cobbled hill. The climb warmed me a little; as the sun dropped behind the rooftops a wicked chill had crept through the streets of the city. Behind the great wooden door of the Escuela Carmen de las Cuevas was a pretty patio with pots of aspidistras and a little stone fountain. In the patio there milled about a motley gaggle of girls and boys, weaving uncertainly among each other’s guitar-cases, wondering which language to speak.

  At forty-eight I wasn’t quite the old man of the class — that was Jean-Paul who was well into his fifties — but the rest were much younger: weekend musicians, students, drifters, a clown from Munich. They were a nice rag-bag of bohemians. However, I felt the discrepancy in age acutely. Images of Herb from my youthful years in Seville came flooding back and with them the slightly paranoid idea that my fellow students saw me as an anachronism, someone who had wandered onto the wrong stage set. Whenever anyone addressed a question or comment to me I couldn’t help but feel that there was another question lurking beneath its surface — ‘Hell, man, why bother?’

  I even thought I detected an odd sort of look from Nacho, who ran the place, when I went into the office to register. Leaning my guitar against the wall I smiled indulgently when he asked which course I intended to take. ‘Well, I’m certainly not a beginner,’ I assured him. ‘I mean I’ve been playing for almost thirty years.’

  ‘So what are you, then..?’ asked Nacho.

  A certain modesty, almost certainly misplaced, made me hesitate to put my name down for advanced class. ‘I suppose I’d better go with the intermediates,’ I said self-deprecatingly.

  ‘Right, then,’ said Nacho. ‘Ten o’clock tomorrow, you’ll be upstairs with Emilio.’

  I went off, a little hesitantly, to the flat I had been assigned and, sitting on a chair in the icy kitchen, started practising for my first encounter with Emilio. In the other room I could hear the German clown, Horst, who had signed himself up for the beginners’ class. Horst was getting a nice rounded tone from his guitar, and his tremolo was deliciously smooth.

  I started into some thumb exercises that I hadn’t done for years, and soon realised just what a slob my thumb had become. Next I did some gruelling rasgueado work, shooting each of my four fingers down hard across all the strings, making sure the little finger and the ring finger came down as strongly as their big brothers.

  It was cold and getting colder. After an hour I could feel a nasty pain setting into the tiny muscles at the top of my ring finger. A nagging pain.

  ‘Horst,’ I called out. ‘Let’s get out of here, go find something to eat…’ Horst, whose playing had been getting more sluggish and frozen by the minute, emerged stiffly from his room. We exchanged polite pleasantries about each other’s playing, and headed out into the icy night to scour the Albaicin quarter in search of sustenance.

  Horst was what the Spanish call pesado — a little ‘heavy’ or earnest — not unlike the clowns I’d known in the circus. Still, once we had found a restaurant, and a bottle of red wine was on the table, we both eased up, and soon I was hooting with laughter at his Teutonic line in scatological jokes.

  That night, however, I was troubled by strange dreams in which Emilio and the intermediate students featured. We had run into a group of the intermediates on the way back from dinner. They were Americans, apart from a cheerful chap from somewhere in the bogs of the Low Countries, with the appealing name of Ale-Jan van Donk. Among the Americans were a couple of Californians called Brent and Kirk, and a very tall man called Elin, who looked a bit like a warlock with his cloak-like overcoat and mane of shiny black hair. He looked even stranger in my dream, with long white fingers topped with plastic nails, and a hooked-back thumb — actually a not unusual deformity of flamenco guitarists. Crazy with energy, the dream Elin rapped out his rasgueados with those powerful plastic nails, with a sound like machine-gun fire.

  My own dream playing was strangely doleful. I fear the technical term for it might have been geriatric.

  It was with a certain trepidation that I pushed open the door of the classroom. The Californians were already playing and looked self-consciously cool as I entered and asked if this was Emilio’s class. ‘Yeah,’ they said in unison and got their heads back down to their playing, crisp and neat, with perfect compás — rhythm and accents in all the right places.

  Ale-Jan came in a few minutes later, grinned at me, looked a little disconcertedly at the Californians, and raised an eyebrow. And then at last the great man, Emilio, pitched into the room. A wiry gypsy with horn-rimmed glasses, long thinning hair, darting eyes and what looked like a cruel smile, he looked us over briefly, then clapped his hands to silence the guitars. ‘Right! Alegrías. You all know it. Let’s go!’

  And they were off, or at least Brent and Kirk were off, ripping into a fast staccato piece. Ale-Jan and I awkwardly fingered our instruments. I didn’t know Alegrías at all, and if I did I certainly wouldn’t be able to play it like that.

  Discreetly I slipped my guitar back in its case and sneaked cravenly out of the door before the piece had finished. Down the stairs I crept and into the cave where Nacho was putting the beginners through an alzapúa exercise — playing the string with both the downstroke and the upstroke of the thumb. He looked up at me and my thirty years of guitar playing with an amused but friendly grin and paused the class. ‘Welcome, Maestro!’ he greeted me.

  I wanted to disappear into a corner but that was impossible. The cave where the beginners did their stuff was used for dance classes and the walls were lined with mirrors. This made my humiliating entrance all the more humiliating: not only could I see all those humble beginners looking up at me, but I could see myself seeing them seeing me, as if in a simultaneous re-run.

  I took my place, though, and a few minutes later drew some comfort as Ale-Jan slunk in. I wasn’t the only pretender.

  The days of practice unfolded as we novices strived to follow Nacho’s instructions, and to pick out the sound of his own playing amid our own. This wasn’t easy since we all seemed to be playing just slightly out of sync, and as Nacho explained a finer point, there always seemed to be some silly bugger loudly practising the bit we had just learned.

  Still, when we played through a piece we were learning together in a sort of sloppy unison, it seemed we were really. quite good — an illusion that was shattered each time Nacho pointed at one of us to play alone, and it turned out that most of us really hadn’t a clue.

  The most confident-looking among the beginners was a Frenchman called Jean-Paul, who introduced himself as a professional musician. However, he refused to play on his own at all. ‘I am a very timide personne,’ he explained. ‘I know zees stuff but I need to practise before I can play wiz zeez people.’ Rather than rely on memory or observation, he chose to record the lessons on a very high-tech machine, to pore over once he got back to France. I had a listen to his recording of the first lesson — the one with my entrance — and it was hideous, the cacophony multiplied so that you couldn’t make out a single useful
phrase.

  Strangely, Jean-Paul seemed to have a contempt for flamenco method and would repeatedly bring the lesson to a halt: ‘But Nacho, zat ees a ridiculeuse way to make zat sound. Ees very more easy when you do eet like zis, non?’ Then he would propose his own inept version. He kept this up all week. ‘Wiz four fingeurs?! But zat ees clearly completely impossible, nobody can do zat wiz four fingeurs — neveure. It is bettaire to do eet wiz three, comme ça…’

  Nacho maintained an admirable patience, explaining over and over again the techniques, while Jean-Paul would release an oath and with a Gallic shrug look round the rest of the class for support. But we were all with Nacho, and over the fortnight, most of us began to make real progress.

  I certainly felt that I had improved, even though I was playing through the pain barrier, as the unaccustomed work gave me a hideous pain in the little muscles on the top of the finger, and my nails, worn thin by ceaseless playing, started to crack up.

  At the end of the course, my nails actually required superglue to keep them in place. But I’d achieved what I came for. It was time to return to El Valero and impress the womenfolk.

  WWOOFERS

  WWOOF IS AN ACRONYM FOR WORKING WEEKENDS ON ORGANIC FARMS. This concept started about thirty years ago, with the intention of helping struggling organic farmers with their labour-intensive endeavours, while also enabling city families with an interest in the countryside to get out there and into it, hoeing and weeding in the mud. The organisation has expanded and now, as Willing Workers On Organic Farms, provides a network of eccentric addresses to visit in almost any part of the globe. That’s the wwoof hosts. The willing workers, or wwoofers, are a band of peripatetic young and not so young who are happy to exchange some labour for board and lodging in a beautiful landscape.

  Part of the wwoof idea is that the farmers teach the wwoofers about organic farming but the reality is that the farmers often pick up as much as they share. Travelling from farm to farm the wwoofers are a valuable conduit of information for isolated and often uncommunicative farmers.

  El Valero had obvious wwoof potential: a beautiful farm, whose owners had no spare cash for labour. So, over the years, we have taken on a string of wwoofers, most of them wonderful, though with the odd slob thrown in.

  Gudrun and Jaime, our most recent wwoofers, were perhaps the most memorable of the lot.

  Gudrun was a country girl from somewhere up in the turnip belt to the northwest of Berlin and had written us a pleasant and articulate letter asking if she could come and work on our farm for two or three weeks, as a volunteer. Then, a few days after receiving our invitation, she rang us to say she was on the way. I was dispatched to collect her from the bus stop.

  A dozen or so people got off the bus that evening and dispersed into the dark streets, but none of them seemed to be Gudrun — not that I had any idea what she looked like. And then I spotted a lanky, blonde woman with a backpack trudging up the road. I strode after her.

  ‘Would you be Gudrun?’ I asked. She half turned and looked at me open-mouthed and baffled. We stared at one another in the gathering dark. The seconds moved towards a minute. Oh Lord, I thought. It’s a bloke and he’s not pleased to be confused with some Gudrun.

  ‘Gudrun?’ I said again weakly.

  She looked at me a little longer. ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Hi, I’m Chris, good to meet you, how was your journey?’ I said, assuming that the ‘oh’ meant she was indeed Gudrun.

  ‘Ohh,’ she said again, with a slightly different inflection.

  Maybe she’s deaf, I thought, though she hadn’t mentioned that in the letter. I took her pack and she followed me meekly down to the car.

  On the journey home I tried my best to engage Gudrun in conversation, enunciating everything with the most precise elocution. But it soon became clear that the problem wasn’t deafness at all. Gudrun spoke not a word of Spanish and barely any English — and I had a sneaking feeling that even in German she might not be a very communicative person. Not that I could tell, exactly, as my schoolboy German barely counted as human communication. ‘Heute machen wir einen Ausflug nach Boppard —Today we are going on an excursion to Boppard,’ was about all I could muster, and it got us nowhere.

  On arrival home Gudrun gave Ana a warm smile and disappeared to her room without a drink or a meal or anything. Ana and I stood looking at each other, wondering. ‘Maybe she’ll improve, suggested Ana.

  ‘Well, I certainly hope so. She’s not going to be a ball of fun unless she does!’ I said.

  Next day, after a rather morose communal breakfast, Ana somehow managed to get the idea across to Gudrun that she wanted the vegetable patch weeded. Gudrun duly disappeared for the rest of the morning, and weeded the vegetable patch like a whirlwind. She was certainly one hell of a weeder. Ana made her coffee and they drank it together and smoked cigarettes, and in some indefinable non-verbal way they began to bond.

  Perhaps as a result of Ana’s prompting, Gudrun seemed to find me an amusing specimen, and would snigger whenever I came near her. I would smile blankly back, and little by little a limited relationship was established, aided by Gudrun’s ‘Ohs’ and my occasional resurrection of the Boppard travel plans.

  It may have been the infantile speech we were reduced to, but Gudrun seemed much younger than her twenty-five years. She was tall and etiolated in the way that adolescents look after a sudden growth spurt, and she had thick blonde hair that fell on either side of her face, framing a surprisingly broad smile. Little by little we came to like Gudrun, and as she began to feel more comfortable with us, she warmed and blossomed a little, and we saw more of the smiles. So Gudrun stayed on, sleeping in a storeroom that had been turned into a bedroom, and weeding and weeding.

  Jaime was a very different kind of wwoofer: a young urban Spaniard from Madrid. When he first arrived amongst us he strode up to Manolo, who is still a long way from being modern and urban, gripped him in a firm handshake and, looking straight and clear into his eyes, said ‘Hi, I’m Jaime.’ Manolo looked forlornly at Ana for help.

  Jaime was equally direct with the rest of us, addressing anyone he met, colloquially, in their own language. He was completely fluent in English, which he spoke with a transatlantic accent, picked up from a string of English-speaking girlfriends that stretched from Goa to Marin County. He was forever expanding his vocabulary, asking us questions that seriously taxed our knowledge of our own language. His main failing was that he couldn’t bear to be wrong — and most particularly to be shown up as wrong, especially by a woman.

  One day Ana and Jaime were looking at the dog kennel, which is a sort of nondescript brownish red. ‘Tell me, Ana,’ began Jaime. ‘What’s that colour in English? In Spanish it’s granate.’

  ‘Well, it’s a sort of reddish brown, not really a colour at all,’ she answered.

  ‘Yeah, but what’s the name of it?’

  ‘Doesn’t have a name.

  ‘C’mon, you can’t be serious, man, that’s a specific colour.’

  ‘No it isn’t, it’s brownish. And if there is a name for it then I don’t know it.’ Ana was rising to the argument.

  ‘Look, man… in Spanish it’s granate. Everybody knows that. There’s not a person in the whole goddam length and breadth of Spain who doesn’t know what that colour is.’

  Jaime was beginning to get agitated and at just that moment there came a ‘meep’ sound from the chumbo and Manolo appeared with Porca on his shoulder. Porca likes Manolo.

  ‘Look, now you’ll see,’ Jaime began to shout. ‘I’ll ask Manolo what colour it is… Hey Manolo, what colour is the dog kennel?’

  Manolo looked uncertainly from Jaime to the dog kennel and back.

  ‘Go on, tell us. What colour is it?’

  ‘Well, it’s a sort of reddish brown … isn’t it?’

  ‘No, man! You know perfectly well what colour it is! C’mon man, give me a break.’

  ‘Then it’s brown.’

  ‘Jesus man! You know tha
t colour. It’s granate, isn’t it.’

  ‘Granate,’ murmured Manolo, toying with the word.

  ‘There, see, Ana, he said it. Everyone knows that word…’

  Jaime prides himself upon his disciplined state of being, so it’s always fun to see if you can get him riled up and knock him off the perch of his karma. He does a lot of work on it — tai chi and meditation, mainly — and, it has to be admitted, manages to achieve a fair degree of self-control.

  In the evenings the rest of us would tend to slouch around on the sofa with a glass of wine or cup of chocolate, languorously talking, reading and listening to music by the fire. Jaime would arrive late, having completed his gruelling spiritual and physical workout sessions, offer everyone a polite good evening, then take his brick (he carries a wooden brick around with him) and plant it on the floor in the middle of the room. Lowering himself onto his brick he’d assume a half-lotus position with back ramrod straight. He would refuse a glass of wine but accept a glass of water for later, and there he would sit, speaking when spoken to, but otherwise staring fixedly at the flames of the fire, chanting mantras — quietly so as not to upset anybody. Needless to say, it drove us to distraction.

  Sex was something that Jaime also claimed to be in control of. He was thirty-three and a very good-looking young man, with an Adonis-like physique — the result, so he told me, of rigorous physical workouts in his youth — and he had a philosophical approach to the temptations of the flesh. ‘Well, of course I’m just a human being like everyone else and once in a while I need a woman,’ he confided. ‘Who doesn’t? But you know, man, when you need a thing it very often comes along. The rest of the time I learn to live without it. If you don’t.., well, sex is a destructive force and it can throw you right out of your chosen path.’