A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  Cada vez,

  Cada vez que considero,

  Cada vez que considero

  Que me tengo que mori …

  STIFF MAN

  (stately, cool, flamenco, nothing moving but his fingers on the guitar, three dignified beats alternating with two, the Spanish signature—alone with your lover for a single measure, then watched, then left, watched, left, always denied—until the Fat Man remembers that one day he must die)

  Bum beelee um-bum dung,

  D-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e,

  D-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e,

  Bum beelee um-bum dung.

  FAT MAN

  ¡Tiendo la capa!

  (and his hand seizes the back rail of the guitarist’s chair)

  ¡Tiendo la capa en el suelo!

  (and gives it such a shake that, when the guitarist, firmly nailed to the planks of the stage, moves not an inch, the ripple reverses itself back up the Fat Man’s arm, igniting face, neck, voice, rage)

  ¡Y me jarto,

  Y me jarto de dormi!

  AUDIENCE

  (short men, tall men, men in tan safari jackets, men in once-tweed work caps, men with golden teeth, men with sunken cheeks, men with yesterday’s, today’s, tomorrow’s beard, men of twenty, thirty, forty, seventy plus, men half-asleep, comatose, dying, coughing, crossing, uncrossing their legs, arms, removing caps, replacing caps, scratching, all the time scratching. All men)

  Shout, grunt, stomp,

  spit, bang the seats

  built more for leering

  vagrants than flamenco

  aficionados, cough, clap,

  cough again, encouraging

  the damage, the scar

  tissue breeding like rot

  on the larynx of the

  singer, in order to

  communicate that, when he

  remembers that one day he

  must die, he spreads his

  cloak on the ground and

  flings himself, flings

  himself, with the weight

  of songs past and future,

  on the hard ground of the

  sierra, the pavement of

  Mariposa, the vinyl sofas

  of the Aeropuerto

  Cristóbal Colón.

  STIFF MAN

  (still stately—one-two-three, one-two, two-two, three-two—still dignified—one-two, two-two, three-two, one-two-three—a man I could love)

  Bum beelee um-bum dung,

  D-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e,

  D-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e,

  Bum beelee um-bum dung.

  AUDIENCE

  ¡Ándale, ándale!

  (Men pushing, men forcing. All men. Except for my White Rabbit, how did she get in? Standing at the back of the stalls, the light from the lobby making a halo of that wisp of hair, men standing back, men pointing, whispering. Sans steamer—I hope she was mugged until her voice box bled)

  TRANSLATION

  You’ll sing it till you sing it right.

  Ben Darling,

  When I directed “Flamenco: Gypsy Rip-off or Jewish Rite?” for WGBH’s thirteen-part Wide World of Ethnomusicology, I collected enough audiotape for thirty-five CDs and never once thought of Sammy L. and my first time in Granada.

  But this town at midnight, this odd, crumbling La Rábida, spawns odd, crumbling memories.

  Granada, fourteen years ago, running away from the strangest, half-imagined love affair of my life. I ran to Liaden, my sister, my well-upholstered, super-capable, ultra-fertile lifesaver of a sister. Normally, it would have been a five-minute hop from my nest in Hampstead to her hive in Temple Fortune. But Liaden was in the midst of an uncharacteristic loss of nerve, and had fled too much husband and too many children for the sunshine and solitude of Andalusia. So I had to express-coach the width of western Europe in search of sisterly wisdom and a cup of tea.

  I arrived in Granada with an overnight bag and a scribbled address on the inside cover of an Iris Murdoch. After an hour’s search, I located the house and rang the bell, listening hopefully for the jolly-hockey-sticks hello of my sister. What I found instead was a lanky, bearded, forty-year-old hippie, in torn cutoffs and sleeveless vest, pouring watered-down sangría for half a dozen middle-aged American women on tour from Council Bluffs, Iowa. He hadn’t the slightest idea where my sister was. But he found me a chair, poured me a glass, and told a story.

  Sammy L.—so he called himself, not Sam, not Mr. L., and certainly never Samuel—had been, among many other things, a long-distance lorry driver. He had been cruising along, popping pills and listening to Wishbone Ash at something in excess of eighty-five per, when Liaden left six semicongealed yolks on a frying pan and ran onto the North Circular Road just south of Henly’s Corner. Although he was three days late on a run from Aberdeen to Ouagadougou, with a full load of something too common in Scotland and too rare in Burkina Faso, Sammy L. pulled over and made room for my sister, who, full-breasted and wild-haired, bits of jam and cellotape clinging to her cardigan, was irresistible. In under thirty-six hours, Sammy L. forded the Channel, drove the length of France and Spain, sold the trailer to a wholesaler in Madrid, the lorry to a gypsy collective in Santa Fé, and put down a three-month deposit on a courtyard with three rooms and a cypress in the Moorish Albaicín of Granada.

  The good women of Council Bluffs applauded enthusiastically. I crawled off to a bedroom and collapsed.

  Liaden finally rang, two days later, from a public telephone in Temple Fortune, her voice conspiratorial and exhausted. After two weeks of glorious inactivity, Sammy L. had committed some crime aboard some boat in some port. Only a bribe, posted by Liaden’s husband, had saved Sammy L. from the unspeakable horror of Spanish prison. There had been a quid, of course, for the quo. Liaden returned home to children, Cheerios, and chicken pox. She was sorry she couldn’t help. She would ring again when she could. I decided not to tell her I was fifteen weeks pregnant.

  Gradually, we made accommodations, Sammy L. and I.

  He spent his days out, working “the tourist trade,” as he called it. I spent my days on the patio working Elizabeth Bowen and sunning my growing tummy. I hadn’t shared a house with a man or any other living thing since my divorce. Our occasional intersections—cups of coffee, World Service broadcasts—suited me fine. Granada suited me fine. I would wait.

  One night, it must have been May, close toward eleven p.m., Sammy L. brought my shawl to where I was sitting, legs tucked under me, very comfortable with The Little Girls or The Hotel, and announced that we were going out.

  I had walked the streets with Sammy L. before. There were rules, accommodations. He never forced me somewhere I would rather not, or away from curiosity. My feelings were short of Trust. But his business was navigation, after all. I let him guide.

  Our house was only steps up from the río Darro, lazy and quiet even in the spring rains that fill the Genil. There was a late bourgeois crowd at the tables on the Plaza S. Pedro, eating Serrano ham and drinking wine, but so enclosed by the hill of the Albaicín and the hill of the Alhambra across the river that we lost the sound of voices only steps down the road towards the Plaza Nueva. A few of the Bib-Rambla longhairs were camped out with their guitars against the newspaper kiosk. But the street up the hill to the steps of the Calle Negros shone only in the stillness of the puddles.

  La Bulería stood in a zigzag, where two bends of the alley opened out into a tiny plaza. Not a historical structure, not one to draw the attention of even the intrepid tourist—mud-caked door, wall free of all decoration, even graffiti. A charcoaled number 9 became visible only as Sammy L. drew me closer. His touch that night, hand on my elbow, was both more acquiescent and more insistent than on the other occasions when he had touched me. Encouraging. Attractive ergo frightening. Sammy L. already had four inches on my six feet, and seemed to grow another four in the dark of the Granada alley.

  The door swung. Inside, a small patio, square, paved with bricks,
surrounded by a low arcade. A long table stood to our right, a few bottles, a few glasses. All lit by fire—candles on the tables, oil lanterns hanging from the apices of the honeycombed ceiling of the arcade. The skinny boy at the door lisped a greeting to Sammy L. through missing teeth. Sammy L. scanned the room and chose a table to the left. The boy poured from a bottle without a label. Sammy L. scanned on.

  Only one other table was occupied, three men and two girls. The oldest man wore a cape and a cocked hat above white hair swept back to his shoulders, a Stephane Grappelli costume from central casting. The other two, his sons perhaps, hair receding, shirts open, designer jeans, could have been partners in an architectural firm, lawyers out for an evening, aficionados out for a juerga.

  The younger girl tried to cover nine years of baby fat with a pair of cheap designer jeans and a peasant blouse. An exposed bit of flesh above the tummy-button pinched and cramped, as her feet swung a good few inches above the paving stones. Her doughy hands toyed with a yellow-haired stick doll, but her lips sang to a far, dark corner of the patio.

  The older girl was too young to be her mother, too dark to be her sister, too still to be her cousin. I was busy taking in the candles, the waiter, the wine, Sammy L., so didn’t notice just how quiet and dark she was until she moved. What it was that made her jump and dash to that far, dark corner I couldn’t tell. I suspected it was a private word whispered by one of the men, though it could have been Sammy L. and me, the sight of me with Sammy L., or merely random gypsy motion, the unsensed bolting of a feral pony.

  “Here you have it, Holland,” Sammy L. said to my unasked question. “The final convulsions of the twentieth century. Russians, Romanians, Argentines, Anglicans … the whole bloody world is making up, wigging down, yanking together the last bits of Velcro on their new costumes. Why should the gitanos be any different?”

  “These architects are gypsies?”

  “You didn’t expect bandannas and stilettos, did you?”

  “I didn’t expect anything,” I answered. “You suggested a walk, I brought my shawl.”

  “And they brought theirs.”

  “I didn’t think they lived in houses,” I whispered to him. “I thought they were nomads, caravans, you know, the Travellers.”

  “Isn’t much in it these days, the old Romany thing,” Sammy L. said, “fixing pots and whatnot. Not much in travelling neither, what with anyone with two weeks’ vacation and the phone number of a bucket shop drinking their way off to some petroleum-drenched Mediterranean sandbar. The gitanos are diversifying, retail clothing, long-distance transport, arbitrage …”

  “Arbitrage?”

  “Bit of a gamble, isn’t it, betting on the direction of the breeze?” Sammy L. smiled. “That hasn’t changed.”

  The girl appeared, the older one. I hadn’t seen her approach, but suddenly, a plate, a fork, a knife, a steak in front of Sammy L. His left hand rose to catch the girl’s wrist, but she stopped short of the touch, half-bent, leaving but returning, and looked full at me. Dark, everything dark, black hair, black eyes, cat eyes, black turtleneck, black trousers, black look, anger, resentment, nature? A moment—and then Sammy L.’s fingers snaked around the fork. The girl was back at her chair toying with the stick doll, sister pouting.

  What had I missed? Everything. I poured myself another glass of wine, though I knew I shouldn’t, stroked my belly, and vowed to pay closer attention.

  The old man moved to the bar. The toothless waiter poured him an aguardiente. A shot down, the cape pulled closer, he left.

  As the door slammed shut, the younger girl grabbed her doll and ran to the dark corner. The older girl didn’t move. Her elbows stayed on her thighs, her hair pulled back around her far shoulder, her eyes on her empty hands.

  The architects stood and walked to the center of the courtyard. A low platform set between four tables. Two chairs, back legs set at the edge. The taller of the two reached behind a table for a guitar. They sat. The shorter gripped the back of the guitarist’s chair.

  Sammy L. finished the last of his steak, spit the last piece of gristle onto the bricks. He set his fork and knife back on either side of the plate, wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. The invisible upbeat.

  The first attack, bright, sharp, dissonant, the strings of the guitar, the sound brightening the candles from all four arcades. The first shout from the singer, the dark O of the mouth, then lips pulled back from teeth, the painful “Ay …,” the cry of San Jerónimo against an El Greco sky, the wounded Goya peasant, the bleeding Picasso bull, glowering skies, black murals, bloody Christs.

  My wineglass was empty. I couldn’t call for another drink.

  Then clapping, rhythmic, three to a bar, the older girl, still bent forward, palms sharply together, moving only from the elbows, then faster, the sound of sap popping in a pine fire, of Sten guns in old newsreels, and back to three.

  The singer looked straight at me.

  Words, only sounds in the bad Spanish of my ears, empty of meaning but full of dark imaginings—narrow alleys, stalled trains, uniforms, priests, pickpockets, knives, the screams of women, the smell of roasting flesh.

  A figure moved in the shadow. A mantilla, a comb, the head of the nine-year-old girl. She stepped onto the stage. Below the neck, a full flamenco dress. Below the dress, two women’s shoes, held on by elastic.

  The girl looked straight at me.

  Her arms moved, slowly, all dignity and age. Then her feet, in those shoes, six sizes too large. She was a menina from a painting by Velázquez. She was the dwarf-in-waiting from an oil by Picasso. She was a homuncula from a play by Goethe, from a movie by Ridley Scott. She was the six-month-old fetus inside me. She was me myself in the days not long past, when my body was galaxies away from my mind, my self, my sex. Movements, felt, not understood, too much sex, too enticing. Pudgy fingers inviting gnarled and hairy paws, naked children on marble slabs, hairless, odourless vaginas. Horrible, grotesque, horrible.

  I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the music had shifted, less painful, more coquettish. The young girl had disappeared. The older one had taken the stage. I caught my breath. She looked straight at Sammy L.

  Later, I would learn the word duende. But there, on the platform of La Bulería, the girl gave a look in a language I had yet to understand. It was a look no less perverse than that of her younger sister. But with the curves of her body drawing her over to the acceptable side of adolescence, the dark girl’s demon was dangerously attractive, confusingly provocative, deceptively approachable. She held Sammy L. with the demon of flamenco, with a look, with duende, with the spirit of the music. She danced.

  If her claps were gunshots, her feet were bombs threatening to immolate the singer, the guitarist, all in the tiny patio. Her legs pounded in her tight, dark trousers, her hands flew, her shoulders, her arching back, her dark, dark breasts pulled, stretched, whipped her hair in dark, wet streaks through the candlelight.

  “¡Faraona!” the guitarist shouted at her, filling the time with more notes, more accents. “¡Faraona del río!”

  The faster she danced, the deeper she drove me into the mud of that riverbank, the pharaoh’s daughter dancing me down beneath the bulrushes, waiting desperately to steal the swaddled manchild from me. The mud, the frogs, the locusts, the death of the firstborn. The far, dark corner moving at me, sucking me under, dragging me down. Look at me, I wanted to shout. Burn your eyes into me and mine. I had come to Granada, I had brought my baby to Granada to die.

  It was over. I looked around. Sammy L. had disappeared. The gypsies, gone.

  I stood. The cobblestone steps of the Calle Negros brought some comfort with their silence. Otherwise, groping, much as I did tonight from the airport, not understanding how, but only that I have moved.

  Back home alone, naked on my bed, belly large, the light from my courtyard seducing familiar shadows onto my ceiling. The shadows moving into breasts, legs, dark, musky hair, a slit of light up the side, like Conchita’s d
ress tonight in the Ladies’ of Colón, all dressed up and ready for a strike, a meeting, flamenco? Lying, twisted in the sheets, as unsatisfied as the fisherman’s wife, calling for the flounder to bring me the new, the impossible. I wanted to be rid of the weight that dragged me down to Spain. I wanted to be Sammy L. I wanted to be a man. I wanted to take, ravish, climb, I wanted to plunge, time and time and time, into the darkness of the dark girl of La Bulería.

  Granada, fourteen years ago. Tonight, emptiness, no dancers in La Rábida, no architects, no gyppies, no yupsies. Only two chairs in front of a half-curtain, a fat man,

  FAT MAN

  Si la Inquisición supiera

  Lo mucho que t’he querio,

  Y er mai pago que m’has dao

  Te quemaban por judío.

  a stiff man,

  STIFF MAN

  Bum beelee um-bum dung,

  D-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e,

  D-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e, d-e-e-e-e-e,

  Bum beelee um-bum dung.

  a theatreful of unwashed linen and stale semen, an endless sea of rheumy satyrs reading me, deconstructing me, queuing up to rub their baggy flies against my arse every time I stop to watch the show. Raw, dirty flamenco, empty of romance,

  If the Inquisition only knew!

  of duende,

  How much I loved you!

  of the demonic.

  And the brass farthing you paid me for my love!

  The merest, unnatural, denatured spirit

  They would have burned you!

  of music.

  Like a Jew!

  Exit Holland through Stage Door in search of a working telephone.

  HANNI—RAMBAM’S DAUGHTER

  Dear Benjamin,

  The lobby of the Cine La Rábida smells of tobacco, urine, male shoes, and reused cooking oil. False granite columns, fungal-green walls, a faded adagio of classical debutantes above the moldings, a single flickering fluorescent lighting up the ceiling, honeycombed by Moorish termites. The ticket seller is a horse-toothed gypsy with a stableful of noiseless brats. Above her cage, as on the program, the motto of La Rábida: “All men by nature desire happiness.”